> I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:
That zinger seemed similar to how Trump deals with criticism from the media -- he tends to begin with an attack on the ratings / popularity of the speaker.
Exactly. I think everyone in the UK of a certain age would just think New Labour if they heard that song.
Also made a bit of a comeback with the Starmer govt, after it was played at the election announcement and tapped into the 90s revival with Oasis & Britpop coming back in vogue.
You can tell the message was written by committee, or by a large language model prompted to respect "both sides". No human with a soul could honestly characterize the situation as passively as this: "The recent challenges facing our state have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life."
We've had it for a few years in SF and, while it's very convenient, I haven't witnessed the revolution you speak of. Judging from the traffic, people still mostly get around in their personal vehicles. There's about as much parking as before and it's still a nightmare. But I'd like to believe.
Maybe colleges shouldn't have accepted these kids in the first place or shouldn't move them along. But I think the author is raising a different alarm -- the number of kids who "do nothing, want nothing, and try nothing" seems to have spiked significantly. Public schools, at least, have a mandate to care about this.
I think the problem of student motivation is much broader than this author's college; I've heard it echoed by so many professors lately, but never as poignantly.
It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.
Yes, "don't look at wealth inequality" boils down to an argument for shifting political power to the wealthy — which I'm sure its proponents genuinely believe is for the best.
Of course Sam Altman doesn’t want to hear about eliminating billionaires, because he’s a fucking billionaire.
Not everyone can be a billionaire, when it’s based fundamentally upon having exploited the have-nots. You’re always going to need a wage-slave class, if not a class of slaves proper. That money doesn’t come from nowhere - it’s drawn from those least able to afford it, and therefore least able to resist exploitation.
If anything, that should be all the more reason to do it.
Give the poorest more money. It’s the complete opposite of our current approach.
Capitalism ties decision power to how good you are at accumulating wealth. Other systems give decision power through birth, status, or bureaucracy. But so far none have matched capitalism at growing total wealth over time- just look at “communist” China adopting capitalist tools to get rich, and now struggling with the inequality that comes with it.
The "↑11" bucket -- which Saul labeled as "Megacorps ($300b-$3t)" -- now contains at least one individual human. How far we've come (or fallen?) in just a year.
What does that matter for, though? The people in that wealth bracket tend to borrow against their assets (or use more convoluted schemes) rather than use those assets directly, and someone with $300B is still bound to have a lot more borrowing power than someone with $3B. Just because they can't put these hundreds of billions in a pocket right now doesn't mean that the power those assets grant is any less significant. And if someone that rich wanted to sell those assets, it's not like it's impossible to do. Is there anything besides having to stretch out the selling over a longer period of time that would be an inconvenience?
