I don’t see how YouTube could ban Patreon at this point. It’s too big to fail. Many of the top YouTubers have a Patreon account that earns them tens to hundreds of thousands per month. Cutting off people’s main source of revenue would just cause them to quit YouTube for another platform.

No, I’ll just block you because you’re putting words into my mouth and arguing in bad faith!

Their value is based on confidence in the current system. Change the system and the confidence is lost.

It’s like tickets to a movie. They’re valuable before the movie starts. After the movie’s over they’re worthless.

Put a total wealth tax on the stock market is like throwing sand into the gears. The whole system will fall apart. You can argue that it shouldn’t be that way but you’re currently in the system. The challenge is not to imagine how it ought to be, it’s how to get there without the whole house of cards crashing down around you.

There is a loss though. By instituting this process, even if it was only applied to Tesla, you would crash the entire stock market because investor confidence would be lost.

You could say nothing would be truly lost in a stock market crash, but real people would still be severely impacted. The market crash would lead to bank runs which would topple the banking system, and then ordinary people wouldn’t be able to buy food or other necessities. It would be a disaster that would cause people to demand the old system be restored.

How does that work in practice? Let’s say we want to tax people like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg. Let’s say for convenience we want to set the tax at 10% of their total net controllable assets.

Take Musk for example. He has an estimated net worth of $500 billion so we’re going to tax him $50 billion a year. To pay his taxes in the first year he’d have to sell 10% of his shares in his companies (since his wealth is concentrated almost entirely in stock).

What would happen if he offered 10% of his shares for sale on the open market? It would cause the stock price to tank since there aren’t enough buyers out there willing to pay the current price for those shares. As the stock price tanks, his net worth plummets along with it, say to $400 billion. Now he has to sell 12.5% of his shares to pay his $50 billion tax bill. But that means offering even more shares on the market which cause the stock price to drop even more.

At the end of the day, just forcing Musk to pay his tax bill could completely wipe out his company. Maybe that’s actually your goal, but it’s not clear how that will raise money to help people.

And that gets to the point I actually want to make: stock prices as a form of wealth are somewhat fictitious in nature, not unlike the way money is created by banks through fractional reserve banking. Trying to tax all those shares of stock is similar to creating a bank run. Rather than unlocking a bunch of wealth you can use for other purposes, you just end up destroying the wealth altogether.

Here’s a video by an accounting professor that explains what stock prices really mean by way of an analogy with baked beans (yes, he’s a British professor)!

Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!

Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.

Not possible. Cats are incapable of feeling shame!

I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.

I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.

Part of the reason I included the link to Connections was to illustrate just how many people are involved in maintaining our critical infrastructure. But of course the show can only highlight a tiny fraction of them.

You might think “oh, we don’t need insurance companies so we could eliminate all those jobs” but even if we did eliminate the insurance industry we’d have to replace a lot of the work that people at insurance companies do.

Take health insurance for example. You might say “we should get rid of health insurance and give everyone free, public health care!” Well, I live in Canada and we have free public health care. Guess what? We still have a health insurance company: the government. They do all the same jobs: receive and process health care claims, decide which treatments to cover and which to reject, and send payments to health care providers once the treatment is approved and the work has been completed. The only difference is that there’s no profit in the government system. Otherwise they’re still doing the same amount of work, so we still need all those people doing those jobs.

You might go on to say “why don’t we just eliminate the approval process and pay for every single treatment?” but that line of thinking shouldn’t get you very far. We don’t have unlimited doctors or unlimited hospital beds. There will always be far more possible treatments to give people than should be given. In the case of older people with terminal illnesses, you can spend essentially unlimited money on treatments in a desperate attempt to prolong their life… and prolong their suffering in the process.

That environment of our evolution, like the Garden of Eden, no longer exists. We’ve created a new environment in which sitting around and vibing is no longer sufficient to thrive. Without the economic output we all die. See this first episode of Connections for details.

If you give it some random address then they’ll get the food, not you?

Also why even use the app if you’re going to pick up at the restaurant yourself? Just call the restaurant and give them your order. You’ll pay less for the food because there’s no fees going to the app!

If you don’t tell them your location, how does the food reach you?

You’re ordering food delivery through a VPN? Why?

Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.

The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.

The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.

Yes exactly. Hobbies can be enjoyed once a week or two weeks or even once a month! Or they can be practiced more frequently but for less time. 20 minutes a day practicing a musical instrument can do a lot for your learning in so little time. The hard part is sticking to it!

I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.

I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.

You can’t though. People have the right to refuse to sell. See the whole saga with trying to get Mr Acker (played by Barry Corbin) to sell his house in Better Call Saul. If you don’t have the legal power to force someone to sell then they can hold out as long as they want.

There’s also the issue of supply and demand. If you’ve got a ton of money and you’re willing to spend above market prices for many different properties you need to buy along a route then the market price will skyrocket as people learn and start to hold out for more and more money. The usual way developers get around this is to quietly acquire the land at market prices without drawing attention to it but that can take years and years because most properties are not up for sale at a given time. Try to make an offer to someone who isn’t actively selling and you risk them going public and exposing your whole scheme.

I love trains but the issue with them is not money, it’s NIMBYs. China can build all the railroads they want because the government can just toss people out of their homes to build the tracks. In the west we can’t do that because of property rights etc.