If we have to do this instead of the more satisfying guillotining, I guess it’s fine.

That capex number in the article is a big part of it. $200 billion spent to generate $1-2 billion a month in revenue is wasteful, and people at the top are feeling the pressure to justify that expense.

Wait. Where are you that a bus pass changes price based on fuel?

That’s like half of Ed Zitron’s output, although he puts more detail into identifying the specific placid and compliant reporters.

In fact, it seems to be getting worse along a number of axes.

OH!

Books on local flora that cover what is edible. Lots of shit that grows in the wild or green spaces is edible (often after some preparation like blanching or roasting.)

I can. A couple of years is plenty of time to plant a garden, learn how to cook a variety of vegetarian meals using things you can grow, and if you have the space to invest in chickens or other birds for eggs. It’s also enough time to learn other skills and meet your neighbors, build up a network of trust and mutual aid, and be actually prepared for a crisis in a way that is sustainable.

If you do well enough at the game, the reanimated corpse of Howard Hughes appears and asks you to take over operations at JFK.

In other news, Elon Musk is and always has been a fat fucking liar and fraud.

When the banks were combined prior to the Great Depression they would use deposits from the retail side to fund investments. When investments lose money, and customers come to withdraw funds, the bank is unable to cover its obligations and can fail. When you combine that with banks lending money to each other, a single bank (if it’s big enough) can start a cascading failure.

Glass-Steagall was passed in 1933. Prior to that the US had had a financial crisis every decade or so. 1933-2000 was an incredibly stable period financially speaking, there were a number of small banking scandals but nothing that threatened the whole economy. In 1999 congress repealed it and Clinton signed the repeal, and 9 years later was the 2008 financial crisis. And we’re back on track for one every decade again.

It’s extremely difficult to estimate the risk or chance, but the fact that (almost) everybody is aware, makes the risk bigger, because for some weird reason, everybody preparing for a financial crisis doesn’t make it less likely because people are prepared, but instead makes it more likely because nobody does anything when the uncertainty passes a certain threshold. And at that point the economy collapses.

It’s because everyone is primarily concerned with making sure they’ll turn out okay, or is too committed to the failing investments that they keep doubling down. Consider the story of the big short: guys who saw the crash coming said it was coming, and when no one listened they made bets on how bad it would be.

Our best case scenario is that we survive and get something like a worldwide Glass-Steagall act that prevents investment banks from also being retail banks.

Yeah, the question is framed poorly. Not all effects on one’s life are good.

Also, with the (possible) exception of kids who grow up in the foster system, I would argue your parents have the largest effect on your life, good or bad. Whether you recognize it or not.

Keep in mind, this is after a bunch of the first wave of white South African immigrants moved back because the US is a shithole.

Andrew Ti has proposed that part of the problem that the VP exemplifies is that the Bay Area is too expensive for regular people to live in, so you have tech millionaires in their little bubbles never getting input from regular people. Specifically from teenagers. If Apple had taken the VP to malls in (say) Minneapolis and Dallas and LA and Newark, the people wearing it would have been roasted by teenagers, and the designers and engineers would know there was still work to do.

Apple Vision Pro seemed doomed from the get go, but they really made it worse by not launching a cheaper headset with Air branding half a year or a year in to actually drive market share enough to make it worthwhile for developers. Could’ve given it an A series CPU since we now know it works in a laptop so why not in XR or whatever they’re calling this.

I think Vision Pro was doomed regardless. Go back and watch the iPhone announcement, then the Vision Pro announcement. Every single person in the auditorium when Jobs is presenting the iPhone is thinking of the thousand things they can do with that device. In the Vision Pro announcement, there’s none of that energy. If they released something that left zero question as to its purpose, the price could sit at $3K and they wouldn’t be able to make them fast enough. Instead we got an Oculus that won’t support most games and costs 6 times as much.

Here’s a thought: push for “publicly held”corporations to be actually public. No secrets, trade or otherwise.

If you go to house.gov they let you look up your rep by zip code. I’d point out that the data is almost certain to be subjected to a breach, which would expose way more sensitive data than usual to whoever wanted it.

I suppose another option would be to void all exclusive contracts they have with venues and artists and mandate that venues be able to sell tickets to all events held there directly without a ticket seller involved.

But the breakup I proposed would have two equally sized entities for a given region, so there would be built in competition, which would allow other ticket sellers to grow as well.

Yeah, one of many Clinton era giveaways to the (at the time) nascent oligarch class.

Seems like the most workable option would be splitting it up into eight components: 2 entities each for roughly a quarter of the country each.

Actually making that happen could take a while, though.