Ads, which are the sole reason for the attention-grabbing-at-all-costs society we find ourselves in, are, in my opinion, one of the greatest cancers to ever befall us.
Ads are information. They're made up of fact and opinion. The facts are valuable. I would like to know if there's a new pizza place that opened in my town. We all, by necessity, have to buy lots of things in life, and we should know what the options are. We're also adults who can separate the fact that a pizza place exists from their biased claim that it's the best pizza.
We don't need to go overboard with calling advertising cancer. As is usually the case, we can ignore the most extremist takes. Ads are annoying more often than useful, but you can say that about lots of things in life.
Ads are to information what propaganda is to objective reporting. Informative ads used to exist, e.g. the content of the venerable Computer Shopper magazine was mostly ads and quite informative. What changed? Well, those Computer Shopper ads mostly consisted of lists of bits and parts and widgets followed by their sales price, some contact information and that's it. Not so for the blithering idiocracy which is the 'modern' advertising industry where it is all about lifestyle and image and signalling and sex and anything else except for just saying 'buy our widget for €XX.yy a piece, 10% off when buying 3 or more'. Nope, instead of an informative list of widgets and gizmos we get a diverse couple - black man, white woman - smiling happy smiles because of ${reasons} which have nothing to do with whatever they're trying to peddle. Add some bullshit about sustainability and building better worlds together and such, drape it in a rainbow flag and done, here's your ad for those ramen noodles. Oh, you're selling cars instead of noodles? No problem, we'll ask the diverse couple to eat their noodles in a parking lot. What, no noodles? Fine, let them starve in the parking lot, smiling happy smiles because of $reasons. We'll throw in an angry fool of a white man who can be told off by the kind and wise black man, that'll sell those noodles - ehhh sorry, cars. Yes, cars, or was it bathroom slippers? Doesn't matter. Here's your ad, now pay us.
If they'd protected their knowledge from AI crawlers before it was too late, they might stand a chance, but in this climate, they're just adding nails to their coffin.
Broadly, I agree with your sentiment. As soon as some people rule over others, given enough time, things creep towards total enslavement and disenfranchisement of the others. This has been proven over and over.
The question then becomes, how do we organise society instead?
The question is why we have to work 8h a day to begin with. Or why we don't earn more.
If productivity goes up, something has to give. We either work less or we earn more.
If productivity goes up and we work the same amount of time for the same amount of money (and let's not kid ourselves, if anything we'll end up working more time for less money), the social contract has been broken.
I don't care how rich some outlier becomes, so long as it isn't at the sacrifice of our own self-actualisation. But that is exactly what is (and has been since the 70s) occurring. That trend is unlikely to reverse and it won't lead anywhere good.
This is the 'ends justify the means' argument. No matter how ruthlessly power / money was accumulated by a person, the fact that they somehow did it, justifies it.
It's undeniable that some progress happened thanks to Elon, but people like him can't stay in their lane and immediately assume they are demi-gods capable of doing anything.
They start reshaping the world according to their psychotic beliefs and ultimately make all of us worse off. Unchecked power is not and will never be a good thing.
>No matter how ruthlessly power / money was accumulated by a person, the fact that they somehow did it, justifies it.
Elon ruthlessly created reusable rockets, satellite internet and electric cars.
>It's undeniable that some progress happened thanks to Elon, but people like him can't stay in their lane and immediately assume they are demi-gods capable of doing anything.
If Elon's ego causes him to make increasingly bad investments, capitalism will automatically assign his wealth to people who can make better use of it.
>Unchecked power is not and will never be a good thing.
Elon doesn't have unchecked power in any capacity, he follows laws like everyone else. His pay package was struck down by a judge despite the shareholders wanting it.
For quite a while, I had to keep using flexbox instead of grids, because grids killed performance, funnily enough.
That seems to have been rectified with modern browsers though, funnily enough.
The question is where this will lead and what, if anything will, should or can be done to put the brakes on this wealth (re-)distribution.
It feels as though over the last few decades, all we have seen is a continuing trend of increasing amounts of wealth being amassed by a smaller and smaller circle of people.
What I find incredibly hard to judge is the point at which the current system leading to this will face violent reorganisation.
We've had feudalism, communism and fascism (and even a few attempts at egalitarian democracies long before that), but they all failed. It is tempting to say they all failed because "they could have never worked". That's easy to say with hindsight.
Once the current experiment implodes, will we all be armchair experts, scoffing at the idea that this could have ever worked also? And if so, why isn't anyone looking at the system and trying to change something?
The other systems usually ended in world wars or violent revolution. Often the ruling class became too comfortable / belligerent, just to then be replaced by the same thing (but maybe with a bit of lag. See the 2nd world war's ending. The middle class thrived up until about the 70s/80s).
Would feudalism have stayed if they'd had the levels of surveillance and AI-powered control we are currently facing? How about communism? Could a planned economy work if that is suddenly super-charged with computers and AI (and the necessary oppression to achieve it)?
Capitalism mixed with strong safeguards ensuring that there is a return for productivity for everyone feels like the best attempt we've made at a system that works for everyone until all the safeguards began being dismantled in the 70s.
Can we return to that system or is regulatory capture irreversible and therefore capitalism will always inevitably lead back to feudalism? And what can be done about it once AI and automation ensure the hegemony can't be touched anymore?
The only thing that can be done is to adjust the tax rate on the rich to the point that their wealth doesn't grow faster than the economy. Then it's going to really be "tide rises all boats".
And yes, for that you have to raise tax all investments. The exactly opposite of what we are doing where investments usually get tax breaks. Will it kill the growth? Only one way to find out. Without AI companies growth is zero already.
Right. Those are the salient questions. Or to put it another way: extreme imbalance resting on actual or strongly arguable misaligned incentives lead to revolutions. At base justice is the issue. I prefer to avoid revolutions.
So, what are bad incentives and what'd we do about it?
Capitalism in the large is fine. In the medium lens tax avoidance by corporations, and those with a litany of cpas is a problem. The idea that the only function of a corporation is to increase share price is a problem. All these derive from a perspective that all that matters is the next reporting cycle or tax return.
I don't like the Chinese goverment, but i do respect the fact that they think longer term. Show me the money; show me the money is not the America we want or need to be.
Complicated tax code is another area the rich hide behind. Another problem is there are different rules for the top 5% and those connected to politicians. Our current administration in the US is a good example of just how bad that is.
Here is the US we have over corrected from the pre-Carter era in favor of the top 5% and corporations.
> Capitalism mixed with strong safeguards ensuring that there is a return for productivity for everyone feels like the best attempt we've made at a system that works for everyone until all the safeguards began being dismantled in the 70s.
You mean when the US left the gold standard and began a 50 year period of inflationary money printing?
That same inflation is a direct transfer of wealth to the asset class, and a hidden tax on the working class.
> Can we return to that system
Not directly. There is zero chance that the US can return to the gold standard, but they could lose their position as the world currency and be replaced by something that is resistant to inflation.
It supports docker swarm, but I've never used it like that.
As I may need multi node in the future, I was asking the question to see if it would make it 'easy' to orchestrate multiple containers.
The simplicity of Dokku is hard to beat, however.
edit: Well, it would appear that the very maintainer of Dokku himself replied to the parent comment. My information is clearly outdated and I'd only look at this comment[0] to get the proper info.
Dokku is multi node. It supports docker-local (single node) and k3s (multi-node) as schedulers, with most features implemented as expected when deploying to k3s.
~7 years here. I couldn't have said it better. You summed it up perfectly. Matches my experience entirely.
I haven't yet found a working environment where things don't get marred by politics and plainly rude behaviour, especially by managers. I am sort of astounded that friendlier work environments don't seem to exist.
I've been in the business about 20 years and have seen better and worse examples. The best places I worked for got close to keeping me, but even those situations were temporary. Eventually, acquisitions happen, the direction of the business changes, the good people leave and then it's time to find yet another job.
Between that and the solo work, I have stuck with the solo work for much longer, so despite its challenges, it still seems preferable to me. But boy do you have to take care of your mental health.
