it’s like a “you break it, you buy it” policy - you charge as much as the broken thing costs

So if the thing they broke can never be whole again, we take infinite value out of the company? Leave all the shareholders with nothing, seize their personal assets, and put their pictures on a big “WALL OF SHAME - DO NOT SERVE” mural? I could get behind this.

It has to be worth, not just income. There’s too many loopholes around “I don’t have income I just have stock I use as collateral for a loan” or “I don’t have income but my LLC happens to pay for all of my daily expenses”.

But yes, all fines need to scale with the perpetrator. The more dollars you have, the less each dollar means.

A $100 ticket for parking on a crosswalk means nothing to a millionaire, but is potentially ruinous for someone living in poverty. It needs to hurt the same for everyone. The millionaire should have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. They need to feel pain.

A lot of people are really shitty and operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning. It’s just “did I get punished?”.

billionaire could pay off someone’s $500,000 mortgage, their $30,000 car, pay off $50,000, give them $100,000 in cash and forget about it the next day

They could, but they won’t, and that’s part of the problem.

If billionaires walked around clearing people’s mortgages and paying for everyone’s dinner, they’d be less hated. They’d still be a problem, but they could buy popularity.

But they don’t. Because they’re assholes.

Maybe this will scare some of them into changing the behavior. Maybe it will get some of them killed.

You all remember that “you are Jeff bezos” game, I hope: https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos

I believe it was this one : https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/169

I also got one to speed up the walk speed, since the default is glacial. I think this one: https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/2736

I got a mod to adjust the flow of time, which was nice.

I still lost interest pretty fast though. Shame, since it seems like a nice game.

Middle managers like to set targets and goals because it counts towards their bonus, and it looks less like they’ve got their dick in their hand when the boss comes calling.

It’s the same problem all over. Capitalism. You have people who don’t do work keeping the benefits from the work.

Most people aren’t going to give themselves stupid or useless metrics. Software people aren’t going to impose “tokens used” or “lines of code” metrics on themselves. They know those are stupid.

. The net result is that everyone has learned very quickly to praise executives on their visionary AI prowess, or they will be gunned down in the proverbial streets.

Once again, the people making the decisions are idiots.

Labor should keep the profits of its work. The owners just sit around and make bad decisions. Fuck them. They’d be lucky to walk away, if there was justice in this world.

I haven’t done any blogging myself, but I believe the singer from the band Worriers moved off substack to ghost and was happy: https://ghost.org/

Not sure how much a second hand rec is, but that’s all I have.

Don’t like substack as a platform but the post is pretty good.

Maybe we can work together with Gen z to overthrow the capitalist hell scape that has made a handful of people disgustingly rich while the world burns.

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism that involves attributing one’s undesirable traits, feelings, or impulses to other people.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/psychological-projection-defense-mechanism.html

This shouldn’t be allowed. We need to stop letting corporations consolidate.

That aside, I don’t think I’ve ever used either of these. I used to use seamless for restaurant delivery, but not so much anymore. Shit’s too expensive.

I hope the ultra-rich lose everything. I hope they weep.

I thought this was the onion. This is real? What’s the opposite of eating the onion? Crying?

It’s a big multiplier on incompetence. It lets someone who’s kind of bad at their job produce a lot more bad than they could before.

Mandated in office is a climate crime. Send the leadership to do climate repair and seize their wealth. /Bangs judge gavel

You can use uv to manage python versions and deps now. You shouldn’t fuck around with your system python much.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/

I hope no one reads that top-down and comes away with “Don’t vote. Delay today”. That’d be a silly way to read it.

There are two main things that change people’s minds: Peer pressure, and trauma.

We’re social creatures and we take cues from people we trust. The right wing has done an excellent (and horrifying) job of creating unified in-groups for their followers. They have fox news. They have talk radio. They have churches. They have also demonized their opposition - “ivory tower elites”, “coastal elites”, queers, commies, etc. Many people will struggle to change their mind when everyone around them hasn’t.

There was a thing I was reading about a while ago, about flat-earthers. A bunch of them got shown a lot of evidence to contradict their beliefs. They all stuck to their flat-earth nonsense, except one of them. The guy who’d started dating someone sane, and hanging out with her friends. He changed his mind. In large part because he no longer saw the flat-earth community as such a vital part of his in-group. Or so the author argued.

The other way is trauma. If something really horrific happens to someone, they might reevaluate. But if they’re still in the same social groups, they’re likely to fall back into their old ways.

In the book “Dying of Whiteness”, the author interviewed a variety of people. Among them were gun violence survivors. There was one passage where a woman said something like, yeah, easy access to guns is why her son died. Maybe he shouldn’t have been able to just go get a gun and shoot himself. But, she said, she would never say that to her peers.

So, in short: No, not really. The social groups carrying maga identity are self-reinforcing. They’re all looking at their peers, who are all still maga.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about some of the same ideas, too.