It doesn't mean "liberal" in the political sense. It has a well-defined meaning (from wikipedia):
> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.
That's fine, and I know that, but I have never heard of anyone doing that to publish something 'more human' on their blog. Not to say that it's never happened, but when I see some pretty basic typos in a blog post that also sounds like actual human frustration, Occam's Razor says it's fair to assume that a human made those typos.
I've seen non-tech people doing that both by hand and automatically, specifically to make the e-mails and documents look human-authored. I'm convinced this is a very common behavior.
Yeah, it's more like an accountant throwing away this "double-entry" system in favor of a single-entry spreadsheet that any Jimbob or Maryanne can use.
In The Prophet (1923), Kahlil Gibran writes On Work: "Work is love made visible." This is the kind of work you're talking about.
However, the OP question is "would you still show up to work?" This kind of work is usually for a for-profit company owned by capitalists, with their time controlled by their employer, and their effort disconnected from its impact (the alienation of the worker, per Marx).
It makes total sense that someone would stop "showing up to [someone else's] work" and start developing their own independent work ethic towards their own goals. These two types of "work" are not the same, even if we generally use the same word to describe them.
> > It makes total sense that someone would stop "showing up to [someone else's] work" and start developing their own independent work ethic towards their own goals. These two types of "work" are not the same, even if we generally use the same word to describe them.
I'd say that as far as the extraction of brain juices they become exactly the same after a while and maybe the only difference is a smirk when asked about and replying "it beats working" or "it's a tough job but someone has to do it"
One of the things about "math" is how theorems need to be proven to work for all numbers. I remember reading a thought experiment decades ago about an alien mathematics which didn't prove a theorem formally but would consider it proven if it worked for all numbers up to some really large number. Perhaps even just some large number of spot checks. And statistically maybe that's a functional approach?
And that's what it feels like now. We have the "old school" developers who consider CS to be equivalent to math, and we have these other people like you mention who are happy if the code seems to work 'enough'. "Hackers" have been around for decades but in order to get anything real done, they generally had to be smart enough to understand the code themselves. Now we're seeing the rise of the unskilled hacker, thanks to AI...is this creating the next generation of script kiddies?
It's more about the concentrated power that billionaires (shouldn't) have. I didn't care that Elon Musk had $100b+ until he started using it to buy social media platforms and influence national politics.
Of course, you were concerned about how the folks who previously ran Twitter used it to influence national politics, right? You're concerned about such influence by the folks who run each of the four major networks, the folks who run the major newspapers, etc.
What is this concentrated power you speak about? In many areas, they have exactly the same power as everyone else. They get only one vote each election day. They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else.
Now you're right that they have more money and they can spend it. Some things like hiring a lawyer to sue someone are too expensive for an average person but accessible to billionaires. Rich people can do things with taxes loopholes that aren't practical for the average schmoe.
It is true that they often have power at their company and sometimes they use it overtly or covertly. But even this can be limited because they have to work with partners and other shareholders. The CEO of a big publicly traded company can't just break the rules because they're on a power trip.
> They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else
Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.
And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.
Actually, you're the one being obtuse. The point isn't that they use Instacart to avoid the lines. The point is that everyone can use Instacart or the USPS mobile app and everyone pretty much pays the same price. The point is that there's no special level of power that's available only to people with a billion dollars.
There's this mythology built around great wealth and it's largely false. They can't just snap their fingers and make things happen as if by magic. There's no special magic power that only they get. They have to pay for what they want and just like normal humans, they can only spend the money once.
I don't know how you can't see it, but people who have gobs of wealth absolutely have more options (and more powerful options) than people who don't. For just one small example, they can purchase equity in non-public companies. If a regular person wanted to invest in OpenAI, they couldn't. But if a billionaire wants to throw down $10b, they can.
Just like how someone who has $200k can get a mortgage to buy a house, whereas someone with only $20k cannot. That's economic power that comes from having wealth to leverage.
Good riddance, I say. All these selfish pricks can take their "wealth" to Mars where they can be completely self-reliant and don't have to help anyone like they were helped.
Except if you buy, borrow, and die you don't pay taxes.
Elon Musk only paid taxes because he had stock options that were going to expire. Otherwise he just doesn't sell shares thus not triggering a taxable event and not paying taxes.
Massive numbers of jobs as billionaires by definition are building highly successful large companies. Being on the cutting edge of science and technology. Improvements to all of our lives from better goods and services.
If you hate billionaires, then stop buying any goods off Amazon or from any other billionaire owned company. My guess is your quality of life will drop precipitously.
I don't hate billionaires. They just shouldn't have that much money. NO ONE should have that much money. In fact, back in the 80s, virtually no one did. Remember when Bill Gates was the richest person in the world in 1995? And he had $13b of MSFT stock. Now the 10 richest people all have 10-20x that. That's not inflation (which is only 3x since then), that's an incredible increase of wealth concentrated in their hands, that gives them the power to light our industrial society on fire if they want. And some of them do want.
Right, so a sensible society would tax capital gains more than labor, but since we didn't do that, the lion's share went to the already wealthy. For no reason other than being wealthy.
California should tax its' most valuable asset, its land. It's immovable.
Of course, they did the exact opposite with prop 13 many decades ago, creating a land owning class with disproportionately low tax rates.
In California, if you make or do something valuable, you have to pay increasing proportions of the rewards to the government. But the longer you (and your ancestors) simply own land and do nothing, the lower your tax rate.
> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.
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