The business of business is business.

Businesses want stability, safety, and predictability. Protests really are kind of the opposite energy. Their whole point is to shake things up and reroute the direction of the world, sometimes in big ways. They can also be unpredictable and unfortunately in some cases even unsafe. I remember seeing every store window on Telegraph Avenue broken the day after a big protest. It was sad. The family owned grocery store got it just as bad as the corporate clothing retailer.

Not long ago when the Hong Kong protests were off the hook and things were getting super tense there, some Hong Kong family visited us here in the US for the holidays. The younger generation were super informed and watching their phones and they told us all about the protests, the political actors, the demands, the rhetoric, and the energy in the streets.

Meanwhile, at dinner, the (very wealthy) grandma made a toast and said “Hong Kong needs peace! Doesn’t matter who’s in charge!” There was a super uncomfortable silence and you could see the youngs biting their lips. She has massive business interests there and just wants to keep manufacturing stuff. She doesn’t care about idealism or whatever else.

If a political candidate is really pro business, they don’t go about their agenda by staging protests. The two really just don’t mix. Businesses lobby and donate.

Another way of saying it is that some things are so expensive you don’t do them even if they could be useful one day. Do you have a second house? Your first one could burn down. You don’t? I guess you must be a greedy capitalist thinking only about short term money.

It makes a certain kind of sense to me. Making capitalism serve social goals is obviously a mix of philosophies but if capitalism is serving socialistic ends, isn’t socialism prioritized?

The essence of socialism, to me, is serving the social good as top priority. Not centrally managing the economy. Capitalism can be a “how” with socialism as the “why.”

All accurate beyond debate except for the part about his social programs ending the depression. That point is debatable, the debate being that it was actually deficit spending to industrialize for WW2 that did it.

Agreed. And with sexism, the link is even weaker.

America is only 15% black so it at least suggests that a good chunk of the other 85% were not too racist to elect Obama.

But humanity is 52% women so in theory, women could elect a woman even if every man in the country was in fact chauvinist.

Because by definition the furthest outliers have the least to say about the rest of the group.

Maybe we shouldn’t attempt to generalize about the categorizes by choosing the most grotesque extremes of both.

Safer than an explosion-powered car carrying a big tank of gasoline? A bold claim! /s

Nope, wow, wrong again, and confidently so.

You seemed to think “legal experts” shouldn’t be surprised judges hate juries. And I was saying they aren’t, they’re shocked at the lack of decorum.

Jesus Christ if I have to spell it out for you one more time I’m going to puke. Get it or dont - you’re on your own.

Yeah the reason that seems so hard to understand is because it’s a million miles away from anything I thought or said. All I said was that no one is shocked a judge feels that way about juries, they are shocked at the lack of decorum.

The judge can give idiot-level instructions to the jury, warnings to the jury, reprimands to the jury, whatever, as long as the trial is in progress. Once the verdict has been delivered, respect the process and the citizens and STFU. The shocking part is the open disrespect, not the opinion.

Then social media happened

Yeah, definitely part of the story. Another thing that happens to all user generated content sites is the following:

• they start small: some person starts a web forum or creates a cool web app
• it grows organically for a time, attracting like minds one at a time
• everything is awesome and the site’s growth picks up speed
• the site becomes harder to maintain. Software development, security, moderation, and server costs all start to get beyond what the site founders can handle as a hobby.
• they reach a size where server costs are beyond what anyone can afford as a hobby and at least one person needs to make the place their full time job
• ads are introduced because you can turn them on and get money - maybe they’re only shown to logged out users or something to control the inevitable blowback
• people will complain regardless but of course won’t donate a cent of their own to help
• ads on UGC don’t pay a lot so you need huge traffic to pay any actual salaries with them - this means SEO growth
• search engines now shower the site with traffic because it has a deep well of excellent content from its early days, and this is welcome because it drives the ad revenue
• costs also rise as traffic rises because the site’s software was never built for this scale and it needs professional attention and / or enterprise grade service. No one has the know-how for the most meaningful performance optimizations or an appropriate caching layer - though many half assed tinkerers will fiddle around thinking they know more than they do
• the shower of SEO inbound blows away any concept of organic growth, which is what made the place cool to begin with. Now you’ve got plain old anybodies joining and probably expecting instant gratification when they ask a question. Just as the operators are straining to grow the site to the next level, it rots out from under them.
• the site operators are under stress. They may have lapses where they disappear for a while
• someone starts an alternative site promising a return to the glory days of like minds gathering organically. At some point major downtime happens on the original site and drives migration to the alternative(s)
• back on the original site, the true blue mods from the old days burn out on all this and leave - probably one of them is the guy who started the alternative site. Dedicated mods with intimate and deep knowledge and judgment start to get replaced by volunteers hamfistedly applying rules-based systems and automation. That’s of course nowhere near as good and starts to erode the users experience
• heroic content creating users are now trapped between the unwashed hordes of the general public and shitty moderators, so they burn out too. The last-douchebag-standing effect takes hold, whereby the whole place is increasingly dominated by the few grittiest nutjob superusers who hold out / hang on the longest and begin acting like they own the place
• everyone wonders gee what happened to this place and they come up with highly specific explanations, but details really don’t matter - this entire progression is nigh universal and you might say inevitable from the start. The only communities that avoid this fate are the ones that have an extraordinarily easy path to monetization which they use very wisely, or the ones that close membership and dole out new accounts incredibly sparingly to handpicked individuals. But this exclusivity works against growth and feels “elitist” and the bills may still go unpaid as necrosis inevitably sets in without more robust growth. One day the site suddenly goes offline.

In addition to the many other fine comments here, I will add that when you think someone is so stupid there is often something missing. You may not understand what information they are acting on or you might be interpreting the context according to different values than theirs. As an observer, not understanding someone else’s choice can feel exactly like “damn what a stupid choice.” I try as much as I can to take these as opportunities to dig further and use my imagination to figure out what they must be thinking. Occasionally I come up with something.

This is the best answer.

Thank you for complexifying the stereotype of the mustache-twirling CEO, which most people can’t see beyond. There certainly are more people to blame than just CEOs - people with more power. The entire concept of a fiduciary seems like the seed of evil to me. Once you have a CEO beholden to pursue the interests of shareholders to the exclusion of all others, the incentives are in place for people to get hurt. The shareholders don’t really have to call a single shot (and they usually don’t). The financiers / shareholders are still guilty of participating in this system at all, of course, but surely the CEO is at least as guilty since he’s usually also a shareholder and will be the fiduciary in question to actually carry out the hurting. So I think it’s fair to hate the CEOs, actually, as much as anyone.

But I would agree that the politicians and lobbyists have to be on this list, probably at the top of it. They are the only ones who can do anything about this entire system, which, as soon as it exists, is a recipe for hurting people. The people who drive the regulatory capture that allows our system to become so shitty are surely going straight to hell.

What of the rest of us though, who don’t even run for office and give them a challenge?

You can impose that technicality if you want, but when corruption is perhaps the world’s top obstacle to funding solutions for things, I see little point except the joy of splitting hairs.

Corruption is probably the biggest thing that keeps it from working. Developed countries don’t have the slightest idea what corruption even is. We hear that word in the US and we think “oh dear, bribes!” But in many parts of the world the entire economy is basically spent on greasing every palm, high and low, to keep some regime in power. Whole generations of entire countries have basically gone up in smoke this way. It makes the army’s $400 hammer sound like an absolute bargain.

They go bad pretty fast. Mold spots within a week in my experience. I always try to use it all.

ATAB?

That’s all true. There are also risks with other forms of currency though. Cash is entirely vulnerable to theft (and destruction, and you can even lose it eg: forgetting where you hid it, just like forgetting a password). And other accounts can be hacked and stolen from as well, not always in any traceable way, else there would be no bank fraud or credit card theft. Nothing’s perfect.