> Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen.
Whenever someone wants to point out something on my screen, I’ve already mentally prepared for the next step of having to wipe the screen, because it’s impossible to point at something without contacting the glass. Apparently.
My daughter, when she pointed something out to me on my laptop screen, ALWAYS touched the screen from the time she could walk. When she was a teenager I asked her repeatedly to please stop touching the screen when she pointed something out, but I gave up.
I don’t know, selecting a vehicle by the degree to which it offends those who aren’t in the thrall of Mr. Musk sounds far closer to a form of syndromal derangement than the what you are postulating.
Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
As soon as I personally attained a modicum of financial security I automatically started giving fewer fucks about things than I used to. I assume the number of fucks given (about people, ideas, values) asymptotically approaches zero as your wealth increases. Or at least it does if you don't work at it.
It's not yes-men. Power and money tend to convince people they are successful in every aspect of life. Our society emphatically endorses this viewpoint and even idolizes it. Look at our celebrity/businessman worship.
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
As this phenomenon is so common, do we have enough science about it to make it a base for laws, so future generations could avoid this state of collective psychosis it seems to lead to?
I think it is widely accepted that power corrupts. It is the basis of democracy, and why we would defend it so jealously. Democracy was fought for and won, and we should never forget the alternatives are much worse. This requires peaceful debate, free speech, and free and fair elections.
A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.
Likewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.
That's the thing, with this mindset you are very unlikely to become a billionaire, you either need to shed it completely, like most, or sublimate it in such a way where achieving extremely high levels of wealth accumulation becomes part of your "good cause".
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.
There's really only so much money a person even needs anyways
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
If you are the sort of person for whom some finite amount is adequate, you will probably not make billions. I mean this in a nice way. If you are a person who thinks certain things outside money and power are more important, you are unlikely to do the odious things necessary to make billions.
It doesn't mean the money they have couldn't be put to better use serving others.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
Recently the Homebrew team decided to drop support for Intel Macs. So the `brew` install ignores older but perfectly useable Macs. On those boxes, `sudo port install moreutils` should work.
Homebrew governance sucks. The only problem with that is MacPorts requires sudo, which risks the stability of the system. Maybe Nix works on Mac? Or skip shoehorning fragile patched software on a hostile system that is entirely different from production and use tools in containers more similar to production instead.
If you are building for linux, why not use linux tools, in a linux container (which runs on a linux kernel running on a hypervisor?) Apple even provides a Container tool, Containerization framework, etc.
For using Unix tools in native macOS workflows, ports systems like homebrew, macports, pkgsrc, etc. are a decent option.
nix-Darwin is great, but it doesn’t really make sense in combination with brew. You can manage brew packages in your nix-Darwin config, but I’ve found no need to as of yet
In my dreams this might breathe more life into homebrew alternatives for macOS. (I also wonder whether some of the port systems for BSD and macOS could/should be unified.)
> Boomers were not raised by principles of modern science
I’m a Boomer with twelve years of post-secondary modern science education. My spouse, also a Boomer has spent her entire life in the academy. Your claim is false.
> They’re religious nutters due to memory of their neurological makeup
I’m an atheist Boomer. I haven’t a religious bone in my body. Your claim is false.
I’m sure there are other venues that will accept your ageist, angry and patently false generalizations as truth; but by and large this is not one of them.
Boomers been in charge of politics and look and the environment and economy for youth
Your generation has been engaged in willfully ignorant ageism against next generations this entire time; oh atheist huh?
Still a child labor exploiter. Chanting "the right words" is low effort political correctness. Selfish af to self select language.
Your awareness of some language some long dead elder decided represented some ground truth is all your education is; your biology itself is still prone to ignorance and self selection at the expense of others
You made the usual mistake in logic; delusion our social abilities gives rise to an ability to be more than a squishy meat suit
This is so depressing; my parents in the late 60’s/early 70’s would be serving a life sentence for negligence according to current standards, given how utterly (but basically harmlessly) feral we were back in the day.
It is baffling to me that such a large number of Americans cannot simultaneously embrace a respect for both immigration law and human decency. If you pressed me personally to declare a binary choice of political ideology, I would say that I am of a liberal mindset. But I believe that immigration laws should be followed and enforced. There is a political process, however flawed, for changing policy. But there is no role whatsoever for the human rights abuses that this Administration has visited upon these detainees. It’s almost as if the constant language of dehumanization that the president and his ilk use with impunity has had real effect.
This lady appears to have been following the process. She got picked up when she showed up for an ICE appointment.
I do also think it’s not as simple as “they should follow the process”. A lot of those people are refugees _directly because of the US_. We backed their governments military dictatorship in the Face of a democratic coup, resulting in years of brutal reprisals by security forces, eventually leading to El Salvador being the absolute clusterfuck it currently is.
The same vague story applies to several South and Central American countries.
We owe those people. It was a terrible thing to do, and has caused decades of suffering. I’m not sure if the solution is citizenship, but I don’t think we can just tell them to go fix it themselves.
Spot on. I don't know what else to say, I've got my own position and takes, but they basically rhyme with yours.
I think it comes down to the power of propaganda, which reactionaries (previously called "conservatives") have been uncritically slurping down for decades. It's about turning off your reasoning and blindly following the party line. Hours of hate preaching on talk radio every day was merely a harmless way to blow off steam, right up until it wasn't. And now it isn't even confined to radio, but is across every avenue of "social media", where overly simplistic takes use up all the air in the room.
A 43-year study?! That would put the enrolment date starting in 1983, four years before the first clinically available statin.
The referenced study looked at cardiovascular endpoints at 3 years, not 43 years.
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