Incentives and consequences mold society. The extreme rich have a near monopoly on the incentives that create government policy via their economic power. They're above the law. Using whatever means the public has to impose consequences on them is all that's left over. A rapist is the president they rallied behind. They should be afraid.
When fear mongering around the national debt occurs I feel inclined to encourage people to research modern monetary theory. I am not an economist but it's obvious that many cultural assumptions around how money works are either intentionally wrong or the residue of outdated thinking.
You can't have a functioning democracy without consequences for the bad behavior of wealthy people that mask their sociopathy in mounds of legalese, financial abstraction, bought off politicians and media PR. If the law doesn't do it, then the burden fall on the shoulders of private citizens. We've demonized people for this view but I think it's heathier that we culturally normalize it and stop pretending.
This is the same tool the right has used to destroy progressive democracy online. Dump tons of money into pro libertarian right wing bots and overwhelm the voices that call for money out of politics and universal heath care with screams of "libtard" and "woke".
All the right wingers yelling about elite conspiracies, pedo's etc. Trumpism is a group of them wallowing in plain site. Right wingers sure got quiet. It's called white identity politics and big tech sure flocked to it when the door opened. DEI for wealthy white sociopaths
Charlie Kirk was a theocrat. He hid behind freedom of speech with the intent to remove it for everyone else once in power. Freedom of speech is completely incompatible with theocracy. The reason people like Peter Thiel prop him up isn't to make people smart - it's to dumb them down and legitimize the worst in people for political gain.
I'm more concerned with the fact that billionaires have a monopoly on the incentives that create policy and can afford to fund large scale social engineering operations to get whatever they want. Charlie Kirk doesn't exist in a vacuum. Peter Thiel funded him and Thiel has said openly he wants a dictatorship. That is why Kirk was in the propagandist role he was in, and why he is now dead.
The elephant in the room is the massive transport of wealth from the poor and middle class to the extreme rich coupled with the monopoly on incentives the extreme rich have on policy enactment. All that other shit is downstream.
Most people are smart from within the narrow confines of their own interests and beyond that simply don't give a shit. People conflate "intelligence" and values all the time.
Most tech isn't "Anti worker". What determines pro/anti worker are laws and government policies that reciprocate with the cultural norms we adopt. At the moment, money in U.S. politics is the most anti-worker phenomena I can think of. The ultra wealthy have a monopoly on the incentives that create policy and how our lives are ordered. The only power working people seem to have is the ability to impose consequences via rogue guerilla acts of protest and violence (Luigi Mangion) . Hopefully, AI is a Frankenstein monster the public learns to wield to facilitate more of these "consequences" and upend the monopoly the super wealthy have on policy incentives and change the way politics is funded for good. It's a new world and a Hawaiian or New Zealand doomsday bunker isn't going make a difference.
I've been using elixir to build an app that lets an administrator add new rss feeds, render the article titles and summaries to a single page, scroll through them and push the ones they like to a landing page as a collection to read later. Many of the sites I like don't have the conventional RSS "structure" so I have to modify my main parser and adapt it to the outliers. I'm curious, how do you adapt to feeds that don't fit the conventional RSS structure? I was thinking of just using an LLM to automate it as I keep using Claude AI to expedite the process.