It's the world that has changed. Back in the day that I assume you are remembering, it was easy to look at tech as a force for good. But soon Google and Facebook became ad machines first and foremost, consolidated untold wealth towards the top, and discarded any burned out employees they no longer had a use for, while raking in ever more profits.
Personally, I'm unsure of how to read this post as anything but representative of everything that has gone wrong, comically using charity as an example of a mistaken focal point of one of the worlds most powerful tech companies. On top of charity being obviously not a meaningful distraction anyways (its not in the same ball park as the feature factory + ad machine + poor strategy that has defined facebooks existence the last several years running).
IMO its a useful populist slogan because it solves a different problem: The power that comes with being a billionaire. E.g. its all well and good to focus on fixing democracy instead, but if (some specific) billionaires are focused on deploying their wealth to destroy democracy, then what?
I've generally come around to believe that we need to limit wealth from a purely power / control point of view.
I think it's a great system of checks and balances- billionaires are only created by dealing with a lot of people and successfully solving a lot of problems. Once they have it, it's work to hold on to the money though. Politicians don't really produce anything measurable to show if they've helped or hurt society, and so they work to devalue the meaning of the dollar.
If you get rid of wealthy people's power, what takes its place other than politicians?
Hi again. You are definitely correct on the first point. But the second point shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy works. Our economy highly favors capital over income. The only way to make billions and then lose it all is to be a complete degenerate. They will always be wealthy. The amount of money these people lose on a given day as the stock market bobs around demonstrates that once achieved, money in the hands of the wealthy operates on a level the average American really can't fathom. Over time, they will always continue to do well. Deploying capital, once earned, is not hard. If it is work, it must be one of easiest things to do in the world. It's like saying trust fund babies have to work hard. If it was hard to hold onto wealth our society would be an extremely different one. It's in fact so easy that a lot of the economics around startup investing comes from the phenomena that rich people get bored with their own money. Why settle for boglehead style returns when you can yolo millions of dollars into a potential > 10x return. How do you even spend a billion dollars? You really can't. The only way is to put it into things were again, it is far more advantaged than actual income. Yes there is some work involved in vetting and talent etc. But don't buy into all the hype. A lot of it comes down to luck and getting to the point where you have the capital to spread your bets, knowing the economics mean that even if you lose, you will still win. It's the getting there that is hard. Not the staying there.
It's very important to acknowledge this. Because this wealth is retained long after w/e the societal problem addressed that created the wealth is solved. It is an open question how to deal with that problem, which becomes a societal issue in its own right. I however also share your hesitancy to turn over said gains to politicians, who don't seem to solve any problems or produce any solutions. Unfortunately we shouldn't also forget that they are society's elected proxies. Perhaps we can strive for a system were both politicians and billionaires are weakened in furtherance of some notion of the common good. The idea of "reinvestment" need not be either a wholly public or private enterprise. Most successful societies understand the checks and balances lie somewhere in thinking less in terms of a public/private dichotomy and more like a public/private partnership. The United States used to operate more like this, before the Reagan era ushered in a time of pronounced deference to capital [1]. It would really not take much to bring things back into a more reasonable balance.
Also the rerelease of the time limit over the holiday (july 4) was unfortunate, many Americans go offline for extended weekends (ex i was out almost a week). When i originally saw the fable 5 dates i just shrugged ah well guess i wont test it for a while.
We have two new Hyunadai's. My experience is mixed. For one, I get the "consider taking a break" warning constantly - possibly my sleepy eyes? In the Sante Fe, the cruise control disengages constantly b/c it can't see my face when I drive with left hand (my default) - this does not happen in our Ioniq though. Rear view camera + warning has been helpful on one occasion, but both rear and side cameras have fully disengaged my ability to drive many (30+) times when it was safe to do so. Basically in a city where you need to pull out and weave into traffic, if you begin moving too early it'll stop the car and also prevent the gas pedal from working (even if you let off and press many times). My most favorite is it would do this in my kids school drop off (cars are close and all moving at 5mph). The traffic helper knew this would happen to me and we had many laughs about it, after the first few times of them waving me a bit aggressively (why aren't you moving yet?). "Did you forget something in backseat" alarm goes off every time I park, I suppose from kid's car seats. Lane assist is nice when helpful, but very annoying when not (~10% helpful, 90% FP). My general read on the lane assist warning is its simply too sensitive. I disable the lane assist on cruise control, otherwise the adaptive cruise control is 90% good (it only can't seem to figure out to speed up when passing a semi, and will slow down instead).
Very generally speaking, if I could disable all of the safety features I definitely would, they are almost exclusively false positives in my case and occur every time I drive. Yet its only two specific ones that are genuinely a nuisance (rather than annoying): The face detection on cruise control, and the car-disabling when I'm pulling out (which at times is out right dangerous).
Interesting. From the hyundai manual, driver attention monitoring only uses front sensor with no face recognition in the vehicle as far as I can tell. Are you sure your cruise control issue isn’t because of hand sensors?
Also, I think the issue with it stopping the car sounds like ‘collision avoidance forward safety’ which can be disabled according to the manual. I haven’t had any issues so far though.
I also disable lane assist but largely just because I prefer to have full control. The highway driving assist is really neat though.
Both Governments and industry players are, in actuality, interested in and moving in this direction, for some use cases. ex https://docs.withpersona.com/relay
Wildly unfriendly and standoffish, but also extremely unaccepting of dinguses blasting music without headphones on trains and buses. You win some, you lose some. I’ll embrace the silence and make my friends outside of transit and elevators, I think. (Bias disclaimer: PNW dweller for the past 9 years)
I have. it is work but definitely not a lot. It's more financial stress but that evaporates as your finances go up. Some people just like the control or have the asset though. Its all around a societal drain imo.
Personally, I'm unsure of how to read this post as anything but representative of everything that has gone wrong, comically using charity as an example of a mistaken focal point of one of the worlds most powerful tech companies. On top of charity being obviously not a meaningful distraction anyways (its not in the same ball park as the feature factory + ad machine + poor strategy that has defined facebooks existence the last several years running).
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