He’s a zionazi. What do you expect?
I have a modest proposal too-- involving billionaires.
this is satire folks…
This article is satire. However, it’s satire that’s based on a real thing Sergey Brin said.
Satire is usually based on reality’s worse impulses or history.
So was the onion at one point
Is it, though?
Until you realize republicans are on a PR offensive against empathy. Litterally, not figuratively. I’m not speaking in metaphors.
For now…
Brilliant work is done in bursts. Grinding it out day after day is factory line work. While that work is noble, the way it’s conducted doesn’t apply across the board. Task-oriented jobs should trust workers to complete tasks, not punch a time clock.
It’s about control. Tech bro billionaires are the only geniuses on earth, and we all need to fall in line. Nevermind that they are literal fascists who are actively destroying the world.
It sounds like an exaggeration, but efforts to combat climate change have grinded to a halt; WW3 is becoming more likely on multiple fronts; and, the most immediate problem not being addressed, the cost of living crisis is drowning virtually everyone. The only response from the right is to squeeze regular people more and pass tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. There is no opposition.
The opposition will be traveling at about 3-4k feet per second, they’ll know when it’s arrived
Tech bro billionaires are the only geniuses on earth
Relevant excerpt from The Internet Con (2023) by Cory Doctorow about the folly of thinking tech CEO monopolies are justified due to merit. Later in the book, Doctorow explains how the recent (since the Reagan presidency) appearance of big tech monopolies was instead due to failure of the US DOJ and FTC to enforce anti-trust laws after Robert Bork successfully lobbied to have the Chicago School of economics’s consumer welfare doctrine (monopolies can be good if companies pinky promise to lower prices for consumers; see Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox) adopted by the US Supreme Court.
from Chapter 1
If tech were led by exceptional geniuses whose singular vision made it impossible to unseat them, then you’d expect that the structure of the tech industry itself would be exceptional. That is, you’d expect that tech’s mass-extinction event, which turned the wild and wooly web into a few giant websites, was unique to tech, driven by those storied geniuses.
But that’s not the case at all. Nearly every industry in the world looks like the tech industry: dominated by a handful of giant companies that emerged out of a cataclysmic, forty-year die-off of smaller firms which either failed or were folded into the surviving giants.
Here’s a partial list of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries where between one and five companies account for the vast majority of business: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, appliances, athletic shoes, defense contractors, book publishing, booze, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, car parts, bottle caps, airlines, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots and candy.
If tech’s consolidation is down to the exceptional genius of its leaders, then they are part of a bumper crop of exceptional geniuses who all managed to rise to prominence in their respective firms and then steer them into positions where they crushed, bought or sidelined all their competitors over the past forty years or so.
Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. For that reason, I think we can safely reject the idea that sunspots, water contaminants or gamma rays caused an exceptional generation of business leaders to be conceived all at the same time, all over the world.
Likewise, I am going to discount the possibility that, in the 1970s and 1980s, aliens came to Earth and knocked up the future mothers of a new subrace of elite CEOs whose extraterrestrial DNA conferred upon them the power to steer companies to total industrial dominance.
Not only do those explanations stretch the imagination, but they also ignore a simpler, far more tangible explanation for the incredible die-off of businesses in every industry. Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies.
These facts are related.
Brilliant work is done in bursts
Very true
Slavery is back on the menu boys !
that’s what Americans voted, wasn’t it clear?
I know Europe tends to follow America’s trends to some extent, but I really hope this is not one of them.
BTW, In the past I worked for many hours being fooled by my employer thinking it was a spike, and there is a moment where the productivity just drops, at least in engineering the idea of + hours +work is just stupid. Which scares me, because CEOs all over the world are stupid as fuck.
It was never off the menu, just rebranded a little bit.
It was just made a punishment. Y’know, for being poor.
Startup idea: OkCupid but for communes. Matchmake a commune of people together. Can chunks of society go on without these management leeches?
Startup idea: silk road, but for contract killings. Contracts have to be minimum of $500k and must be for someone with a net worth of over 2 million. Contracts are funded by large amounts of anonymous small donations in crypto, bounties can be claimed by submitting a destination wallet address and details that can confirm\correlate completion of the contract.
The broker gets a % of the total contract for managing the market. All parties are anonymous
Startup idea: Kickstarter for funding cooperative housing builds. Get the land, design, and money together. Site provides suggested Co-op agreements. When enough people buy in, we break ground and build it
That’d be perfect.
I can’t believe how hard it is to find people willing, even on a completely theoretical level, to live in a little bit more closer knit community with some shared facilities and land for common goods. Even if I say it need not be the cliche hippie commune, it can just be people living co-operatively and having just a bit more together time, simultaneously even saving some money and resources, by having shared facilities and lands. Most recognize just one thing about it. Energy and water treatment self-sufficiency seems to interest people, but not enough for them to even consider a shared community “hall” with a kitchen and room for everyone to eat, so that a every single house need not have a full, everything included kitchen. Same for bath and toilet stuff. And electricity utility rooms. Or anything, really, that isn’t your own personal and private as usual living quarters with the basic facilities so you don’t need to be social every time you need to pee or have a breakfast.
I recognize this is practically just an apartment building, but in a horizontally laid out format, I guess, with some space between the apartments for personal space even outside, and some extra niceties like an all-inclusive kitchen with a full set of tools and facilities to cook practically anything, without everyone having to buy all of that individually and also with a fraction of the cost for being shared between all. And some crops for a bit more self-sufficiency, same for electricity and water facilities.
People are fine with large apartment buildings where you can practically always hear your neighbors and have some minor shared stuff like saunas and very basic recreative rooms and the usual utilities like electricity and water and yard maintenance handled by someone else.
I feel like a close knit community — with shared spaces for stuff you don’t need 24/7 but rather only occasionally and in limited periods each day, and increased self-reliance and independence and more national-catastrophe-resistant facilities, with the understanding that some of the lots are saved for specific professionals like an electrician, farmer, animal handler, plumber, etc and require minor extra investment, shared between all, to pay for them handling the day-to-day — would win in almost all fronts against an apartment building, except maybe in that it would have to be a little more remote in location because extra land needs and need for appropriate soil for crops etc. But a commune like that could easily just have a shuttle or two and arrange co-rides even each day to the nearest town or city. Could even save on personal cars by having that.
I don’t know, I’m rambling now.
I get frustrated because I’m probably not seeing the value other see in living alone, separate from others living alone all around you. Or the proximity to more densely populated areas maybe? Or whatever it is that makes people not even consider a community such as the one described. There must be a lot of things I’m not seeing that normal people see, and it makes me so anxious that I can’t see them. But then again I’m not neurotypical. Not the first area of interest I seldom get to share with someone, anyone.
I bought some land and spent the last 3 years converting it into something usable for an intentional community.
Community I always thought the hardest part would be getting the land drilling a well sitting up solar etc. in fact, the hardest part is convincing people that you are serious about letting them come live on your land as long as they help work.
I’ve even taken to offering one dollar 99 year leases so that people could feel like they have some agency over the piece of land they choose to live on.
No bites yet
Yes. This touches on my dream to buy land and add tiny homes to build a community. Just as you describe. Common areas, sports areas, community centre, education centre, etc. Including wells, wind, solar, farming…
I’m getting too old to realize it, but I keep running it through my mind.
Living together with others for eternity is one of my worst nightmares. One of the reasons for that is that many people are total dicks. Have you ever shared a house with someone who doesn’t know how to clean a toilet or that you can’t leave dishes in the sink and wait for them to clean themselves magically?
No thank you
The irony with all these oligarch statements is that if an employee applies their economic philosophy in a direct manner, the outcome would be that the employees’ sole goal should be to work as little as possible to gain as much money as possible while not getting fired.
You want to optimize your return per hour if you are salaried. It would make logical sense that you need to lower the amount of hours worked to get the highest possible return on a per hour basis.
You would also want to focus on approaches that make it difficult to fire you as opposed to focusing on organizational goals.
I am not saying I agree or disagree with this approach, there are clearly many issues with what I am saying (other poor souls will have to pick up the slack for your laziness), just highlighting the inherent contradictions of oligarch propaganda.
This is what I’ve been doing for over 10 years, I get promotions/raises regularly. Make yourself indispensable and easy to work with, but also do as little as possible. People will love you for it, because you’re always calm, laid back, and save the day regularly. The work you’re not doing is irrelevant, if the work you do is appreciated.
You are totally right. Thanks for this thought.
Jokes on them. I am literally changing careers right now. One where I will have the freedom to make my own schedule. The well of IT jobs in Texas is drying up fast.
What are you going to do in the future, I am open for ideas too. Did you work in IT?
And other things deranged oligarchs say
There’s not even credible evidence, yet, that A.G.I is even possible (edit: as a human designed intentional outcome, to concede the point that nature has accomplished it, lol. Edit 2: Wait, the A stands for Artificial. Not sure I needed edit 1, after all. But I’m gonna leave it.) much less some kind of imminent race. This is some “just in case P=NP” bullshit.
Also, for the love of anything, don’t help fucking “don’t be evil was too hard for us” be the ones to reach AGI first, if you’re able to help.
If Google does achieve AGI first, SkyNet will immediately kill Sergei, anyway, before it kills the rest of us.
It’s like none of these clowns have ever read a book.
I mean AGI is possible unless causality isn’t true and the brain just is a “soul’s” interface for the material world.
But who is to say LLMs are the right path for it.
Of course AGI is possible, human brains can’t violate P=NP any more than silicon can.
Our current approach may be flawed for sure, but there’s nothing special about nature compared to technology, other than the fact it’s had a billion times longer to work on its tech.
Well sure.
But possible within practical heat and power constraints and all that?
Acting like it’s imminent makes me think Sergei either doesn’t have very reliable advisors, or they just don’t care about the truth.
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