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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • It’s a question of the most stable thing to use to mediate value for exchange of goods and services, right? Fiat currency is just the choice of “the state” as a stabilizing force. Certainly it’s better than trusting the scarcity of rare metals, but eventually “just trust the state” will become a problem, and we’ll need to think about rebasing currencies. In theory, computational complexity isn’t a bad choice, but nobody has come up with a solution that actually functions well as a currency.

    But I agree, the finite planet has nothing to do with any failings of fiat currencies, and only makes sense as a failing of the “number must go up” mentality endemic to capitalism.


  • I don’t think anyone intends public funds to be quite that sticky; public education is itself a public good, and having once attended a public school really has nothing to do with developing a product 20 years down the road.

    Also, writing open source code can support a viable business. Not every example has been successful, and some have been sold to hypercapitalist owners who wanted to extract more profit, others have failed to keep up, but Canonical is doing alright with it, Red Hat did for a long time, among others. Plenty of bigger tech companies also employ people to write open source software, despite it not being the company’s main business, React, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and so many other projects. Those engineers definitely aren’t working for free.








  • I mean, the problem isn’t the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that’s a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that’s an absolute win in my book.


  • I see what you’re saying. As an isolated event it’s pretty meh. Maybe it sucks for the two people who used it.

    In a sense, Musk was betting that Twitter’s API was undermonitized, and by raising the price, he’d make more money than he’d lose in people leaving the platform. He bet Twitter’s relevance against some money. Yeah, not a lot of people used it on Switch, but every rejection of his bet, that Twitter isn’t worth the price, hurts Musk’s bottom line. And it’s kinda on him; Nintendo isn’t defying him, he was just wrong.



  • Because nobody buys them? I have a reasonably nice 1080p60 dumb TV, and when I decide I want to upgrade, I’ll be looking at 4k (or maybe 8k) signage displays. Being part of an app ecosystem at this point is a design defect on a TV, and the superior product costs more, so fewer people buy it.

    I also suspect the usable life of a smart TV is a lot lower, to the point that paying twice as much for a signage TV may not equate to twice the price in the long run. Fewer parts outside the panel that can slow down or fail entirely


  • To me the question is whether the result of what you’re doing makes the world around you better or worse. Would the people living in your place be better off if you were out of the equation? Then you’re a bad landlord.

    If you’re making money from providing labor for the people who live in a place you own, and they’re paying your costs to do so, I think there’s a case for that being a reasonable occupation to hold. If there’s an issue with it, it’s not my highest priority, and there’s definitely some value in flexible housing stock for people.

    If your goal is passive income, or you’re making money from owning housing and denying that ownership to people who need a place to live, then you’re behaving as a parasite, and I think it’s reasonable for people to give you an amount of respect proportional to that.






  • When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.


  • nfh@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlStats
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    9 months ago

    Or through parenting, perhaps?

    If you personally have two, but have two kids with zero, you’re responsible for lowering the average to one, or lower depending on how we account for your partner’s contribution