It all comes down to “well, sure we might have plenty, but if not for capitalism how could we decide how to divide it?”

But any solution has to promote self-interest as a virtue and can’t take things away from people who currently own them, and also must conform to a bunch of myths we have about “how the world works”

My favorite is the ones where programmers are like “they wanted someone with 5 years experience with ? Guess I’m unqualified, I wrote it 3 years ago”

Because you’re on the “told how to live” side

The world bank and the imf are the ones who told most of the world that they’re poor, and the only solution is to take loans… Pulling them into our craptastic system that cuts down a forest full of food for the taking in order to harvest something that can be sold overseas

They are indeed building huge bunkers in large numbers

Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing

It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow

And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments

Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing

It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow

And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments

They made a bunch of mistakes that were callous and might’ve smothered a couple guys starting out.

But then the lack of empathy - “it was a bad product, no one should ever buy it, and so my fundamentally flawed testing is actually valid”, “yeah they asked for it back multiple times and we auctioned it, but it was for charity so it’s fine”, “we agreed to compensate them, but it’s been months and we did that real quick after we got called out, but we’re going to make it seem like we didn’t need a scandal to do the bare minimum”

It’s all excuses, it’s all justification for why “this looks worse than it is, and actually we’re still the good guys”. It’s narcissist mental gymnastics, he still just doesn’t understand what he did wrong - besides being mostly excuses, every “apology” is totally off base on what they did wrong

You sure as hell do when you put 80% of it outside your borders, outside US borders no less

This kind of thing could spark a war in different circumstances - imagine the Mexican army goes to dismantle the buoys in their borders, and one of several possible groups from Texas confronts them and it leads to a skirmish

Mexico would be entirely within their rights - it’s on their property and it’s suspected to be leading to deaths

Yes and no - prism and related programs weren’t that big a deal (besides morally and legally) - the NSA was collecting far more data than they could use at scale. It was a problem, but realistically it wouldn’t affect normal people - you’d have to catch a lot of attention first to even be searched in that system. It couldn’t be used for law enforcement or anything wide scale - the collection was there, but the analysis didn’t scale

It was a problem because of where we are now - AI advancement means not only can they now process the insane amount of data they ingest and make terrifying associations, they can use the ridiculous amount of compute they’ve been building out to actually use all this data

We’re most of the way down the slippery slope now, and still accelerating fast. The capability makes 1984 look quaint, and having the ability to flick on systems China drools over is pretty concerning

People don’t even know they’re trying to make us use id to use sites “to protect the children”. Any site that might be inappropriate (of which, social media fits under the current definitions of) would be responsible for children getting access to their services - storing driver’s licenses seems to be the popular idea for compliance. Google’s web DRM might be pushed out so fast to offer this kind of service too

Kosa has bipartisan support, the president has come out strongly supporting it, and it’s insane to me that people still don’t care