One of the many reasons to never actually care about the work you are doing if it is a for-profit endeavor, and you are not the owner. You are there to collect a paycheck so you can survive. If you want a job that you should care about then work in public service, at a non-profit, or for yourself.
The nerds you are looking for are still here. We just got pushed out of the leadership of the tech industry by evil people who are not nerds.
The reason you can’t see us anymore is because you don’t know how to look. Money and the major social platforms will never direct your eyes towards us. You must look at the independent spaces that are hiding in plain sight.
Income is money that comes from actually laboring and contributing to society. Wealth tax is tax from sitting on your ass doing nothing.
Also, taxes don’t have to be a flat percentage. Like income tax, a good wealth tax would be progressive. Only wealth beyond a certain amount would be taxed, and the percentages would scale.
This is why we should have income taxes that are as low as possible, but still progressively scaled. We should similarly have a progressive scaling wealth tax, but it should be much harsher than the income tax because we want people to work.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
To find these spaces, you have to think in reverse. You can’t look for the community first. You have to start by having a specialized interest. You can’t rely on an algorithm to tell you what you care about and how you want to spend the time in your life. That answer has to come from within. Once you have that answer, finding the community online is quite easy.
The way you find them is to search for the creators and other community leaders. For example, let’s say you are interested in a specific video game. Look for the publishers, developers, top players, live streamers, and media coverage of that game. Those people are likely to be hosting or participating in communities that you can join, even if they are closed Discord servers.
People just aren’t seeing it because they aren’t going to the fun places. Of course the major social platforms and search engines will never point the way to fun. Fun is made without any financial motivation.
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
I really wish we would get away from this line of thinking. For state and local governments, yes, your taxes are put into accounts and are then spent according to the budget.
For the federal government, no. Money that is paid in taxes is effectively eliminated. The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. When the federal government spends money, it is creating all new money. It can’t run out. It’s not your tax money that is being spent.
This isn’t that that complicated. It’s not about cognitive dissonance or standardized testing.
There are many similar human behaviors. Why do people smoke, drink alcohol, eat junk food, avoid exercise, and make all sorts of other harmful choices? Because the pleasure is immediate, and the consequences are not.
Same reason people get sunburned. If the sun burned people immediately, like a hot pan in the kitchen, everyone would use sunblock. But because it burns slowly, people walk themselves right into it.
If there is a button to avoid the pain of homework, to immediately go have fun instead, and there are no immediate consequences, all but the most disciplined, determined, and diligent students will press it. Knowing and acknowledging the future consequences makes no impact on the behavior.
It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
> "Today it's gambling advertising, tomorrow it's alcohol, then it's sugary drinks, fast food, critical minerals and who knows what else comes next," chief executive Kai Cantwell said.
We have already learned our lesson. Prohibition doesn’t work. But advertising does work. Banning advertising also works. We should allow people the freedom to participate in vice, but ban all advertising for it. Anything harmful to society should not be advertised. No ads for cars, guns, recreational drugs including alcohol, unhealthy food, fossil fuels, or gambling.
Who knows what comes next Kai? Hopefully everything.
It really depends on the speed. I went through it in the past few years, and it was too fast. One day I knew everybody in the whole organization, what their responsibilities are, and what they are working on. I turn around and there are more employees than I can ever know.
Exactly. Same as you I am just paying for search. I never used the assistant, and never will. Right now Kagi is good enough at search that it would be annoying to lose. But if I was forced to go back to Google I could survive by using adblock. I really wish Kagi would just put all their engineering efforts on search to make it so good that I couldn’t possibly live without it.
I don’t need a new browser. I don’t need a replacement for Google Maps, since Google Maps is actually good and Kagi will never even catch up to Apple Maps. I don’t need any AI trash.
Just have everybody work on the search engine to make it is faster, more reliable, and free of content farms or slop. That is the only reason I’m paying for Kagi.