Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.
Capital allocation is a serious job with very real consequences. The decision of how many AI datacenters should be built, to take an an unusually topical example, is one of capital allocation. Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.
This post absolutely reeks with the privilege of wealth. For the vast majority of people on this earth, the "Returns" from their labor matter a lot more to them than some vaunted, abstract ideals, as those ideals won't put food on the table or a roof over their children's heads.
The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."
Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.
You can very easily replace the battery yourself for less than $100 USD too if it ever becomes enough of an issue that you feel you actually need to do something about it. My M1 Max is at about 88% battery health, but it still gets 4X-6X longer on battery (At full performance too boot) compared to my old PoS Razer laptop, so I likely won't be replacing my battery any time soon.
I bought almost brand new top case with battery twice by now for 50 USD on ebay. For M1 Air, but can't imagine Pro would be much more expensive, especially because keyboard is replaceable in Pro. Takes an hour to replace everything.
You have to keep in mind that at this point, a substantial majority of Americans are overweight, and something like a full third of the US population can be considered "Obese," and so the notion of them doing any form of physical exercise whatsoever is utterly anathema to their world view. They live their lives in actively avoiding physical exercise at every turn, and so they cannot even fathom that someone would prefer active transportation like cycling that is also a form of excercise to being stuck in traffic in an automobile.
Basically to a lot of Americans, Jesus invented the pickup truck so they could "Exercise" their god-given right to never have to walk anywhere ever, as that's the way they like it. Walking is hard work when you're obese, and its uncomfortable to have your rolls of cascading fat rubbing against one another on a hot, humid day, where as sitting in a rolling leather recliner in their air-conditioned Ferd FteenFiddy is comfortable and requires no physical effort whatsoever.
The thing of it though is they know their choices are unhealthy for both their bodies and their communities on some level, but they'd rather drag everyone else down to their level than have to make and hard personal changes. They see us on our bikes getting where we need to go just as fast or faster than them (Since we're not stuck waiting in traffic), and getting exercise in the process, and they don't just resent us, they flat out hate us for it. We hold a mirror up to their unhealthy lifestyles, and unattractive bodies, and rather than following our lead by trying to be more active themselves, they'll fight tooth and nail to make the rest of us as miserable as they are trapped in their rolling metal prisons.
The fact the BBC article doesn't even mention the Irvings is a pretty glaring omission.
The Irvings basically own NB like its their own private fiefdom, and if anyone's doing any major polluting in the province its almost certainly them.
They own politicians, they own institutions, and they have an inordinate amount of influence on provincial politics and policy, so personally I have a pretty strong suspicion they are likely responsible for this outbreak, they know they are responsible, and in order to avoid consequence, they are using their wealth and political power to shut down any further investigation into this outbreak.
Its a story as old as time honestly... Some rich bastards do some shady shit in the pursuit of even more money and power, us regular folks suffer, the rich bastards use their wealth and political power to cover it up, and around the world spins until the next act of billionaire malfeasance and none of the rich bastards are ever held accountable.
Seriously, Occam's razor to me at least makes what's going on here pretty damn self evident. What's more likely, that hundreds of people are making up a mystery illness, or that this is just yet another of the innumerable instances of billionaires polluting the earth in the pursuit of profit and making people sick in the process?
I certainly know which scenario I consider most likely.
The US has never really been either. At its core, the US has always been an oligarchy with the veneer of democracy to keep the pleebs in check.
Any country that has only ever really been able to choose one of two political parties who both represent the interests of wealthy elites above all else can't really call itself a "Democracy."
1) Mosseri himself will still continue to enjoy the benefits of a flexible / remote enabled work / life balance that he is now denying his employees. Standard rules for thee not for me type BS that is typical of "Executives." I've worked for a couple larger corporations / organizations, and at both it was painfully obvious that the rules for us rank and file types categorically did not apply to the senior leadership. We were expected to "Tighten our belts" and "Do more with less" while the executives were flying around the world in their corporate jets going to "Conferences" and "Galas" or whatever, while spending the companies money lavishly on their own personal comfort. It's the same with remote work, executives love it for themselves, but deny it to the regular employees who actually make their lifestyles possible.
2) Mosseri himself, and members of Instagram's board and / or major shareholders have significant investments in commercials real estate.
The bottom line for me is this whole "Back to the office" nonsense is 100% driven by the wealthy capitalist class being heavily invested in commercial real estate. I, though no fault of my own have known a couple billionaires reasonably well in the past (Both from the same family), and they were both heavily invested in commercial real estate. The CEOs and their investors who keep prattling on with their BS about "Productivity" or "Collaboration" are the same people who own most of the commercial real estate, and all they actually care about is protecting the value of their investments, as if everyone starts working remotely, there wouldn't be much need for all these fancy corporate campuses and office parks, and the value of their investments would decline as result.
Very telling / depressing that literally 3 out of their top 4 highlighted examples of the "Amazing" features this browser provides are just ways to help you be a good little consumerist drone and buy more crap you don't really need and that won't actually make you happy from some approved list of vendors that are likely paying openAI to promote their products.
Personally, the notion of using some kind of AI glorified "Virtual shopper" where the AI doesn't actually work for me but rather some greedy, soulless megacorp is beyond dystopian. I have literally no way to tell if the products being recommended to me are actually the best products for my needs (Or if I even need the products in the first place) and the AI companies certainly don't seem keen on disclosing whether or not they are being paid to promote the products they are "Recommending."
At least when I do a web search for a product there's clear information available to delineate the ads from the organic results, but from everything I've seen thus far there is precisely nothing being done to protect consumers and disclose when the "Product recommendations" being given by these AI agents aren't actually what would best serve the consumer (Ie., the best or cheapest products), but are rather just whatever crap some company is paying the AI company to promote.
The fact none of these AI companies are even talking about how they are going to protect consumers and provide disclosures when the products they are recommending are nothing more than thinly veiled ads is very, very telling. The current advertising rules don't really apply as the regulators are way behind the curve with AI technology, and the AI companies certainly aren't going to be pushing for the rules to be updated to include AI product recommendations themselves, as they will happily con, deceive and lie to their customers if it means they'll make more money.
AI of the sort that will be sold via subscriptions or monetized through advertising (Or something similar to advertising yet even more insidious that is still yet to come) will be the exact opposite of a "Friend," it will in fact be your enemy, though it will dress itself in the vestments of friendship all the same.
"Friends" don't manipulate you to maximize profits for nameless third-party corporations, though that is precisely what these "AIs" are being built to do. They are not your "Friend" they are corporate employees, pretending to be your friend in service of corporate profit, and every "Friend" like behavior they exhibit will be carefully crafted to maximize their manipulative potential in order to get you to do more of whatever makes them money.
AIs will deceive, manipulate and outright lie to you to get you to buy consumerist crap the companies who own the AIs are being paid to promote, and they will bend, distort and break the truth to promote the sociopolitical biases of the companies who own them and various nefarious corporate and state actors who pay them to do so on their behalf.
People think AI is going to help them find the best deals on a flight or a new car, whereas what will actually happen is the AI will just recommend whatever airline or automaker the company who owns the AI is being paid to promote. People think AI will help them find the truth, but in reality it will just peddle whatever lie the company behind it is paid the most to perpetuate. People think AI will provide them the connection and companionship so sorely lacking in the modern world, but in reality it will just serve to isolate them further, whilst merrily manipulating them to buy crap they don't need and that won't make them happy.
AI is not going to be anyone's friend, it is going to be yet another tool of class control and wealth extraction used by the ruling elites to ensure their power and privileged is protected. AI is going make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and will likely destroy whatever is left of democracy in the process.
And yes, sure people can "Roll their own" AIs and hopefully have some control of the technology in order to mitigate the problems I mentioned above, but this is functionally irrelevant, as 99%+ of AI users are not going to be people with the technical skill to implement their own AI on their own devices, but will rather be using Chat GPT or whatever other AI as a subscription or "Ad supported" AI as a service type things that come after it. I have yet so see a single consumer facing at scale AI company that's actually selling a user owner / controlled and self-hosted AI product, as all the AI gold-rushers realize that's not where the money is. The money is in scaling a platform to replace Google and selling ads through that platform just like Google does.
While your concerns are valid and your skepticism justified I think you've biased just a bit too far past the truth.
We live at specific point in history where as a whole things are trending in the direction you are warning about, but if you zoom out further the trend as a whole is the opposite. Civilization oscillates between win-win, win-lose, lose-lose, win-win over multiple generations. It seems we are transitioning right now from a win-lose to a lose-lose (average) dynamic.
We absolutely should all be worried right now about what you're saying, and resist it as pragmatically as possible, but a generation from now all that resistance will gain momentum and steer everything towards a much better outcome. Also, all products eventually become commodities.
All this to say: don't give up, take responsibility and do whatever constructive good you can, and have some faith that it will work out much better in the long run. It both kinds sucks to be living through this but is also an amazing opportunity to have a historically outsized positive impact. The most impactful opportunities to do good are when almost everything is going bad.
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