>> Literally no single person has produced "a billion dollars value".
How has someone like Taylor Swift not produced a billion dollars value?
Some of her tours have brought in more than 2 billion in revenue, she makes many millions a year in merchandise sales, millions selling streaming rights to her music, she has re-recorded the albums she didn't own the rights to and bought back the rights to others. She has a net worth of over 2 billion, how has she not produced "a billion dollars value"?
What does she do that you think you should be able to tell her that she can't do? And where do you think you get the right to tell her she can't do that?
If she wants to do concerts and concert goers want to go to them, who should stop her? If people want to stream her music and she gets a cut, you're going to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to sell vinyl records and I want to pay for one of them, you should be the boss that says no? Is that what you're saying?
I don't think so. A single person, Taylor Swift, has produced multiple billions of dollars of value.
This is not a problem to be solved. This is America. This is no country for everybody. It's a country for me. For people like me.
This ain't Switzerland.
I'm not saying Taylor Swift never did anything wrong. But mostly, she earned that. You're still allowed to do stuff like that in America. Sorry, not sorry.
A couple months ago I got a text in our dev channel around 4 PM on a Friday afternoon asking me to take a look at a 4,000 line AI generated PR. The guy said he was told it needed to be in production by the end of the day. So I'm supposed to look at 4,000 lines of garbage code at 4 PM on a Friday? Alright. Approved. Ship it. I'm retired now, obviously. They were giving out buyouts to old people and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
There's like this retirement advice that tells you you need to retire TO something. That hasn't been my experience. I didn't do that. I work out, I go for walks, I do self care. That takes all the time that using AI to write the AI prompts for our AI integration with our product used to take.
I don't miss it. I mostly don't remember their names. Except Kumar. Fuck you Kumar.
I don't even hate AI. I have software that I wrote that I use every single day, like personal software that I use for myself, I use AI for it. But I haven't written a single line of code since I retired. I need to, this is my software and I use it for things in my life, but I don't have time. Too busy going for walks and working in the garden.
Where I live none of the storage companies will let you pre-pay 1 year of rent let alone 5.
A major part of their business model is giving low initial rates and then raising the rent over and over knowing what a pain it will be for the renters to move to a different storage place.
The industry acronym for the strategy is "ECRIs", existing customer rate increases, and it is a profitability metric they track.
Buying something that is being sold for less than it is worth and then immediately reselling it for what it is worth is what I would call "arbitrage". So someone doing that would be an arbitrageur.
In your opinion, what is the difference between arbitrage and scalping?
> In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there
That made me curious so I looked it up: "There is historical documentation that four Pony riders were killed by Indians; one was hanged for murder after he got drunk and killed a man; one died in an unrelated accident; and two froze to death."
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
I was in elementary school when the arcade game craze happened, PacMan, Donkey Kong, etc. I would wander the streets looking for games to play. There were arcade games in every grocery store, restaurants, every convenience store (so basically just 7-11s). Home gaming consoles could not begin to match what was in the arcades at that time. I would walk the streets looking for new ones to play.
I mostly played arcade games, but I would play pinball too. One day I was walking past a place and saw a pinball game and went in and started playing. I think it was on the second quarter when someone came and asked if I was there with my parents. I said no and they told me I had to leave since minors weren't allowed in a bar. I don't think I even know what a bar was at that time.
Elementary school kid hanging out in a bar without his parents would get some CPS attention these days I guess.
The worst of times part is, if I was "free range" it wasn't because my parents had discussed the risks and benefits of allowing me to wander the streets. No kid I knew had both parents at home back then. Our moms worked. We were free range because no one gave a shit what we did as long as we weren't causing them some immediate problem. So we had freedom. It was both glorious and horrible.
I think the parent poster is correct that it depends on the water.
I have a couple ultrasonic humidifiers, if tap water is put in them it immediately sends the AQI on my air quality monitor into the "Dangerous" level. I have the monitor upstairs and it detected it when my girlfriend put tap water in the humidifier downstairs.
Purified or distilled water works fine. I bought a counter top water distiller because it was a pain lugging 15 gallons of water into the house every week all winter. You can see the residue of whatever was in the tap water at the bottom of the distiller after it runs and it doesn't look like anything I would want to be breathing.
Now I never get bored. Things have changed, but yeah, boredom used to be a real thing that people experienced no matter what their personality traits were.
How has someone like Taylor Swift not produced a billion dollars value?
Some of her tours have brought in more than 2 billion in revenue, she makes many millions a year in merchandise sales, millions selling streaming rights to her music, she has re-recorded the albums she didn't own the rights to and bought back the rights to others. She has a net worth of over 2 billion, how has she not produced "a billion dollars value"?
What does she do that you think you should be able to tell her that she can't do? And where do you think you get the right to tell her she can't do that?
If she wants to do concerts and concert goers want to go to them, who should stop her? If people want to stream her music and she gets a cut, you're going to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to sell vinyl records and I want to pay for one of them, you should be the boss that says no? Is that what you're saying?
I don't think so. A single person, Taylor Swift, has produced multiple billions of dollars of value.
This is not a problem to be solved. This is America. This is no country for everybody. It's a country for me. For people like me.
This ain't Switzerland.
I'm not saying Taylor Swift never did anything wrong. But mostly, she earned that. You're still allowed to do stuff like that in America. Sorry, not sorry.