Thanks I haven’t read it but do intend to. Compared to Marx Piketty is probably a breeze to read lol. I wouldn’t be surprised if Piketty isn’t a better choice for people to read nowadays.

Presumably he means the financial success of chatgpt paid for the coterie of staff he employs to look after the child he never sees.

The mantra I was told was always ‘add value’ at your job.

When I read volume one of capital I came to understand that this was willingly giving more of my labour for free on top of the labour capital was already profiting from (after all I am only given a job earning x units/hour as long as capital, via management upwards, earns x+1/units from that labour). Thus wealth trickles upwards in capitalism. Not down.

Everyone bought the ‘add value’ line and repeated it in work as though the were doing something great - us humans tend to believe what we are told (and once those neural pathways are burned they don’t change easily), which is in large part why those without empathy are able to succeed. We need to rely on each other and they don’t give a fuck.

Another one is “always use other people’s money” (from think and grow rich, or whichever popular book it came from). If you’re Elon Musk looking to hedge risk when buying twitter then fair enough, otherwise you go cap in hand to capital, and pay it a portion of the wealth you create for the privilege of being loaned the capital to begin with. Capitalists want you to use other people’s (actually their) money in order that they can take their cut of your hard work.

Yes.

Who knows what other reasons various people in and around the government at that time had for invading Iraq, but what does seem to have been established is that it wasn’t WMD’s or anything to do with 9/11, which iirc, is what the Americans and us (well Tony Blair, who was paid handsomely for his service) said it was.

The US (Nixon) made an agreement with the Saudis that the world buy their oil in dollars in exchange for the US providing protection - thus extending the dollar’s period as global reserve currency beyond the time the US unpegged the dollar from gold. Known as the petrodollar agreement, this extended the period the US gained an unearned portion of global wealth beyond the 70’s.

America was, Americans were paid handsomely for its agreement with the Saudis. [Edit - this is a little bit reductive, but] Bretton Woods then this is why boomers were able to buy a house and live well on one wage.

I understand not every American benefited from this, and that from Reagan, and neo-liberalism onwards, all the wealth went to capital. In fact I think American capitalist ideology largely squandered this period of wealth enriching the likes Tump, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg etc. I guess ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ and ‘trickle down economics’ turned out to be big lies after all, whouldathoughtit.

Well they’ve promised so that’s that. No story here.

It’s ok America, capitalism and successive American governments decided ELON will lead America’s challenge in the new space race.

Go fast and break things, over and over again until the several billion the public ponied up runs out, at which point you cheat an election the go fast and break the agencies that might investigate you, then break NASA too!

That’ll do it, don’t worry international prestige WILL BE MAINTAINED!

If it isn’t conservative and religious people, it’s political murderers they all hate on around here. Fucking brainwashed liberals.

I tried something or other on aws. I only needed the ‘definitely free, no cost whatsoever we will suspend the account before you hit whatever limits we set - that I didn’t even hit a fraction of’ tier free trial month to do whatever it was I was doing.

At the end of the ‘totally free’ month they charged me something like £1.80. Obviously £1.80 is inconsequential, it is the fact there was any charge at all given everything I had been told - I can’t remember what I did, probably learned to set up a vpn or something simple - I didn’t even use it beyond setting it up and testing it.

I made sure I burned the account in a big firey pit and I will never go back to them for anything I am paying for (news that I doubt is keeping Jeff Bezos up at night, but it isn’t inconceivable I might have bigger projects in the future). I doubt they could figure out what the charge was for. Presumably chatgpt hallucinates their billing now which might be an improvement.

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