Maybe ban algorithmically-delivered content? So, for example, consider YouTube. The only way to get content would be to search for videos or to subscribe to individual channels. You can still have a user-curated experience, but that curation must be actively done by the user. This would at least prevent feed algorithms selecting for engagement and rage.

I would rather target the worst practices of social media companies in general, rather than try and keep kids from them. It’s not like adults aren’t harmed by this stuff either.

It boils down to grifting

That’s literally all of capitalism. The existence of companies at all is dependent on their ability to sell products and services for more than the inputs that go into them. Profit is literally just bullshitting people into paying more for something than it is worth.

Most of that is just Dutch Disease though.

And this is why you should always consider any bonus structure that isn’t in writing to be completely worthless. If it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen.

A willingness to work is the least important factor to success. To be successful, a motivation to work is insufficient. In fact, too much of a motivation to work is as detrimental to your career as a complete lack of motivation.

Overly hard workers don’t get rewarded, they get exploited. Too much productivity will actually block your advancement. And, let’s be honest, it’s not actually possible to get a promotion at most companies. Companies hire externally; they don’t like promoting internally as MBA schools teach this causes drama.

The key to success is to calibrate your work to your circumstance. Do you work for yourself, keep all the fruits of your labor, and actually earn more money when you take on additional clients? If you’re a self-employed consultant or something, then sure, harder work is directly rewarded. Work as much as you like. Are you a salaried employee whose company offers no formal bonus structure in writing and is completely capable of stringing you along with endless vague promises of bonuses that will never materialize? If that’s your situation, then working too hard is financially irresponsible. Even if all you care for is career advancement, then you should be doing just the bare minimum required to not get fired. Instead of working overtime that will never be paid for or recognized, use that extra time to work on your own projects or take on a side hustle.

Companies don’t promote from within. No company ever wants to agree to a firm written raise and bonus structure for their salaried workers (thus they have no accountability.) Hard work is not rewarded; it’s simply exploited. In modern office jobs, grinding is the path to failure, not the path to success. The path to success is working the minimum not to get fired, working on side projects in lieu of overtime, and job-hopping every few years to get the raises you won’t get any other way.

“Relationships fo also come wothout sexual obligations by the way, you’re not required to have sex with your partner.”

That I never got. Isn’t a relationship without any sexual activity just a friendship? Love can’t be the deciding factor, as plenty of people love their friends. There are different kinds of love, but the kinds that distinguish relationships from friendships are sexual in nature.

In my mind, a relationship without a sexual component is just a roommate or very close friend. What exactly is the difference between a close best friend and a relationship with no sexual component? To me those seem to have the exact same definition.

Try posting better resolution.

Removed by mod

That sketch was a year old when Platner got the tattoo. Think a deployed marine was watching a lot of British sketch comedy?

You’re on a memes board. You’re literally on a comedy channel for joke headlines. If you take memes at face value, you’re failing at media literacy.

Frankly, for investing, AGI shouldn’t even be on your radar. AGI can only result in three outcomes - extinction, complete totalitarianism, or some sort of communist system. Most likely any AGI would just kill us, probably by accident. But even if they manage to control it, then what? You quickly end up with one or a handful of AI companies owning literally the entire economy, producing everything. At that point capitalism is done. Either we allow the new oligarchy to exist indefinitely (totalitarianism) or we nationalize the companies and go full Star Trek.

What these AI companies miss is that true AGI is incompatible with capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t work when only 1-3 companies make all the goods and services in the economy.

Your point on 2008 is valid though. There’s a lot we just swept under the rug instead of dealing with properly.

You can’t eliminate the risk, but you can ameliorate it. Yes, sectors like retail, construction, and even healthcare will take a hit during the AI bust. After a crash, there’s much less money floating around. People are out of work. Asset prices are down. People spend less. So every sector gets hit.

But there is a difference between a hit and a collapse. If you’re invested in OpenAI, and the bubble bursts? Your investment is going to zero. The company is going to go bankrupt. Shareholders will be completely wiped out. If you’re invested in say…Home Depot, well yes, in a crash, the stock will go down. With millions laid off, people will have less money to spend on home renovations, so demand for the Depot’s products will decline. Their stock price will take a large hit.

But, if you’re smart, this won’t hurt you. Eventually things will recover, the bubble will clear out, and demand for building products will return. At that point the Home Depot stock price will recover. As long as you don’t sell during the crash, you won’t see any losses.

That is the key difference. An investment in any sector right now risks a decline and then recovery a few years down the road. An investment in the AI sector risks a complete collapse to zero.

NASDAQ is still buying. S&P500 isn’t. But it’s still a major concern if you’re holding a total market index fund or similar.

What do you think about value mutual funds like these?

https://www.schwab.com/research/mutual-funds/tools/schwab-funds/index-funds/fundamental

I’m moving most of my US stock holdings to these funds. It’s still US market exposure, so there will be some risk from the AI bubble. But the key thing is that these indices are not trying to track the Dow Jones, the NASDAQ, etc. They don’t actively manage funds - they don’t pick winners and losers. They are a passive investment blindly applying uniform rules - just like index funds. However, they don’t weight by market cap. Instead they weight stocks in the index based on fundamental values - actual sales, retained earnings, book value, etc. The actual share price of the companies isn’t factored in at all. And you can’t even get into one of these indices until your company is profitable.

The expense ratios are higher than I’m used to. The low-cost index funds I’ve traditionally used have expense ratios more like 0.01-0.02%. This is 0.25%. This is still well below the 1% most managed funds use. But that is a downside of this.

With how tightly the whole global financial system is tied together, I’m not under any illusions that moving to these funds will eliminate my exposure to the AI bubble. But I hope at least to ameliorate it.

Don’t be so smug. The intended victims of this IPO are passive investors who aren’t trying to time the market and are just long-term holding index funds for retirement. That’s exactly who Musk is planning to rob. If you’re taking the typical low-cost index fund strategy, you will be giving approximately 1% of your life savings to Elon Musk.

That worked well enough back in ye olden days, but you don’t see it much in the modern world. Winning a war isn’t just about having enough people on the front line. It’s about what kinds and what quantities of weapons and equipment you can get to people that matters. A tiny country with a small population and an advanced industrial economy will wipe the floor with a country with an army of peasant conscripts 10x as large. Keeping the people in uniform equipped and fed is even more important than actually finding people to put into a uniform.

This matters because every person you send to the front line is another that can’t be on the home front working at a munitions plant, or working on a farm, or driving a train to transport war supplies, etc.

Unless your economy already has structural mass unemployment, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Every draftee you throw away into the meat grinder is one more that can’t be supporting the war from the home front.

No. They didn’t vote lesser of two evils. You need to get out of the headspace that the only option is to vote for one of the two parties. That’s an ahistorical viewpoint. They just voted Republican until their candidate won. The Republican party was only founded after “voting for the lesser evil” failed after decades of trying. This is what I mean when I say people need to learn their history. We’ve been in this situation before, and our ancestors did not escape it by voting for the lesser evil.

We live in a two party system. We’re going to have two parties. However, the parties themselves are not eternal. We’ll always have two parties, but which parties those are can change. And often it’s easier to completely swap out parties than to reform one from within.

If you want to create a new party in the US, the only way to do so is to destroy one of the existing parties. Namely, that means making the other party completely electorally nonviable.

Imagine if the most liberal 20% of the electorate simply refused to ever vote for the Democratic Party again and switched over to the DSA. Yes, that would mean losing for a few cycles. But again, history shows that sometimes you have to put up with pain now for a better future later. Centrists will slander this as “accelerationism,” but this isn’t really that. You’re not hoping things get worse before they get better. You’re just recognizing that the only way to create a new party is to destroy an old one. Politics becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you make one of the existing parties nonviable, then a power vacuum is created, and the whole electoral alignment shifts. If leftists completely abandoned the Democrats, the Democratic party would completely collapse. It would go the way of the Whigs. When a party dies, the electoral coalitions realign. And they would realign around the old Republican Party and the new DSA or other chosen party.

I know this is hard. But really, this is just learning from history. Yes, it means you sometimes lose ground in the short term to gain ground in the long term. And that is hard. It’s painful. But compare that to what we’ve been doing instead - hoping to gain ground in the short term while losing even more in the long term. Voting for Democrats now is just voting for the lock on the ratchet. They have no real desire to change anything. At best you get a temporary reprieve from creeping fascism, while nothing changes in the circumstances that lead to the fascism.

Yeah, people seem to forget history. Often institutions become so sclerotic that the only way forward is to work outside of them. Look what it took to defeat slavery in the US. Slaveholders had co-opted both major parties. Abolitionists tried for decades to work within the existing two party system, voting “lesser evil” election after election. In the end, this strategy failed at ending slavery. It took the founding of a new party, the Republican Party, to really make progress on abolition. It ended up leading to the Civil War, but slavery would have continued for another generation at least if abolitionists had just kept voting defensively election after election.

I do. But I do it mainly to support the creators I follow. I’m not going to sign up for a bunch of patreon or channel subscriptions, but at least they can get their share of the subscription money.

Seriously. My default script when interacting with customer service folks when asked my name is to say my name and then spell out both the first and last names. Because my first name has several variants that people will misspell it with, and the surname is relatively common but still one people struggle with. It’s easier just to spell it out than to fix the inevitable input errors later.