The metrics for measuring our economic health haven’t been tied to the well being of the total population for a long time. The entire political system has been hiding behind wall-street growth for generations. Inflating that even with money magic. The moment we stepped off the gold standard we started playing a game of math and fantasy.

Our public education system.

Same here. I didn’t understand that people with power tend to find ways to make the voices they like louder, even when we all had a vote in what was popular they found a way.

And then the other thing. People tend to believe what they want to believe and outrage is often just a form of entertainment.

See, this is why I love Lemmy. The good parts are like everyone’s grey beard uncles got together and are all trying to tell the best goofball jokes.

I didn’t build it, but I was raised by it. I was so hopeful when I was younger.

I often think about Swartz, and I wonder if he did what he did because he saw where we were heading and knew that they were never going to let him near a computer to fight it. I hope that he’s at peace.

OpenSI doesn’t really roll of the tongue does it? What will they do? update to OSI? because that’s already a bunch of things…

It’s been called AI since before the technology actually existed. I’m not calling it anything else.

After my big, tired, sigh my first thought was that it was some kind of dumb ass rebranding attempt.

It’s not that complicated Ed. I got a pretty clear picture from an hour of research. Maybe if you get out of your algorithm for 20 minutes you might find something more tangible on the situation than a few chapters from a dusty religious text and the word of a bunch of rich assholes with vested interests in the region.

They want the internet to be as cable, radio, and books before it. It just took longer because of the complexity of the systems. They can’t stand that people for about 20 years had the means to educate themselves and they’ve been fighting to censor it since at least 2012. The problem is that now the tech bros are on board. Before they still had enough idealist types internally to keep them pushing back.

It was only a matter of time. having been raised in the free and open internet it really breaks my heart.

The problem is that everyone’s internet experience is very different these days. Your friends might be boring and actually have nothing in their lives that need compartmentalized/obfuscated. It’s unlikely but not impossible.

The easiest way to demonstrate the problem would be when they show you something on an unprotected device you note the ads and give them shit for it. Those ads are likely targeted, and so your jabs would be targeted and personal too. Then point out that those ads are tied to THEM. Just ask every time, “have you been looking at X? Gross dude.” It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s the point that they are uncomfortable with your guess and it’s an opening to explain that, yeah it’s not just those ads buddy.

Not entirely a scam in theory. Though we are currently in a period of unprecedented corruption that is so complicated and complete that it might as well be. Even 5 years ago, I would have attributed certain actions to protect the market as an attempt to protect everyone. The systems in place are such that if a stock company fails, it creates far-reaching market upsets across industries worldwide. Essentially, if something fails, it takes everyone down with them.

The fix would be the state taking control of those industries to allow them to stabilize. Unfortunately, most state actors are also tied economically to those systems. That is, they’re corrupt as fuck and don’t care about people, but their own money and status.

So retirement funds and entitlements weren’t entirely a scam, but they are mostly so now. I doubt I will see a dime of mine if I don’t use it soon for school, expating, or buying a house. I certainly won’t see it when I retire.

I have some basic understanding of finance (and I mean basic), so take this as an observation rather than investment advice. If your retirement plan allows you to change your asset allocation, and you have a high-conviction thesis that a significant market event is about to occur, it may be worth temporarily rotating from a growth-oriented allocation into a more conservative allocation to reduce downside exposure.

Under normal circumstances, attempting to time the market is a bad idea, and financial advisors or plan managers will usually push you away from doing so. However, there are rare situations where it’s clear as crystal what’s happening. In those cases, reducing equity exposure and increasing allocations to lower-volatility assets for a short period may be a reasonable risk-management decision.

Using the recent SpaceX-related market activity as an example, I find it difficult to believe that any fund with a genuinely conservative mandate would have maintained meaningful exposure to assets directly affected by that event. A conservative portfolio, by definition, should prioritize capital preservation over aggressive growth and generally avoid concentrated exposure to higher-risk investments.

You generally can’t tell them, “I don’t want this stock,” when dealing with index funds, but you can get yourself out of the fund entirely while it’s poisoned. Unfortunately, my company was changing providers right when the SpaceX shit was happening, and I couldn’t make the change myself.

I haven’t been keeping up with the bond market but last I heard it was it’s own shit show so I’m not really sure anything is ‘safe’ these days.