Xaris posted:

20-21 fomo frenzy bonanza was seriously the worst 'shoe-shine boy n granny-investing-tips' syndrome i've seen my whole life, permeating just not online but in real life amongst masses, even more than dotcom or early 00s "housing can only go up up up!!" wisdom

Glumwheels posted:

We are invited to a catholic baptism for a friend’s baby tomorrow.

Anyway, I was looking at the evite my friend sent and it had huge ads for “give the gift of Bitcoin!”. I’m sure that’s what every baby/couple wants, Bitcoin.

Xaris posted:

20-21 fomo frenzy bonanza was seriously the worst 'shoe-shine boy n granny-investing-tips' syndrome i've seen my whole life, permeating just not online but in real life amongst masses, even more than dotcom or early 00s "housing can only go up up up!!" wisdom

Xaris posted:

coelomate posted:

just wondering how much fun elon is having running

code:

SELECT * FROM direct_messages WHERE user1 = @realDonaldTrump OR user2 = @realDonaldTrump;

and scrolling away the nights.

must be nice to have billionaire-tier hobbies and buying billionaire-sized toys.

Sardonik posted:

The entire way people conceptualize education as a checkmark for employment is wrong. There is an intrinsic good to society to have people college educated

Rutibex posted:

lol I wonder if musk can find any billionaire or politician blackmail material scrolling through everyone's DMs. might have actually been a great power move in "the great game" if that was his goal

maxwellhill posted:

He doesn't own access to their messages just like he doesn't own the money that he supposedly has.

He's an obnoxious frontman holding onto other people's wealth, IMO. Black programs and old money. If he tried to spend too much of it himself without permission he'd get JFK'd.

Zuck too I'll bet; the money's not his. The millennial who owns 3% of millennial wealth doesn't really. Both have extensive ties to Intelligence projects, so why wouldn't their massive wealth just be more laundering of criminal deep state possessions?

maxwellhill posted:

He doesn't own access to their messages just like he doesn't own the money that he supposedly has.

He's an obnoxious frontman holding onto other people's wealth, IMO. Black programs and old money. If he tried to spend too much of it himself without permission he'd get JFK'd.

Zuck too I'll bet; the money's not his. The millennial who owns 3% of millennial wealth doesn't really. Both have extensive ties to Intelligence projects, so why wouldn't their massive wealth just be more laundering of criminal deep state possessions?

Ardennes posted:

Was the 2010s to 2021 tech bubble really an accident but simply the system working as intended as money flowed where it was desired? Lockmart was a just above 100 dollars a share in 2013, now it is 471.

maxwellhill posted:

He doesn't own access to their messages just like he doesn't own the money that he supposedly has.

He's an obnoxious frontman holding onto other people's wealth, IMO. Black programs and old money. If he tried to spend too much of it himself without permission he'd get JFK'd.

Zuck too I'll bet; the money's not his. The millennial who owns 3% of millennial wealth doesn't really. Both have extensive ties to Intelligence projects, so why wouldn't their massive wealth just be more laundering of criminal deep state possessions?

Zodium posted:

posiwid

Exodus1984 posted:

Every person who is wealthy is not part of an overarching government conspiracy, and often the answers are not thrilling, but boring.

Elon Musk is just the head of a business that, at the end of the day is a government contractor. His other business ventures serve to advance his interests and further the government contracts he seeks to obtain. He has thrived in an environment of diminishing government power, dismantling of the regulatory state, and increasing privatization.

Mark Zuckerberg became very wealthy off by using a better version of myspace/hotornot to acquire/extract personal information and sell it to whoever wanted it, sometimes the intelligence community.

While it isn't a giant reach to hold the position that the cooperation with intelligence agencies by Musk and Zuckerberg and others has allowed their respective businesses to circumvent red tape that should normally be there, everything is not a deep state plot or black program - its just people making money any way they can.

Exodus1984 posted:

Every person who is wealthy is not part of an overarching government conspiracy, and often the answers are not thrilling, but boring.

Elon Musk is just the head of a business that, at the end of the day is a government contractor. His other business ventures serve to advance his interests and further the government contracts he seeks to obtain. He has thrived in an environment of diminishing government power, dismantling of the regulatory state, and increasing privatization.

Mark Zuckerberg became very wealthy off by using a better version of myspace/hotornot to acquire/extract personal information and sell it to whoever wanted it, sometimes the intelligence community.

While it isn't a giant reach to hold the position that the cooperation with intelligence agencies by Musk and Zuckerberg and others has allowed their respective businesses to circumvent red tape that should normally be there, everything is not a deep state plot or black program - its just people making money any way they can.

Ardennes posted:

It isn't that while Facebook itself (as a company) isn't that important but it as a source (through Whatsapp/Instagram/FB itself) is very useful for information gathering. What is the chance Android or IOS don't have backdoors?

Why is there so much concern about Huawei?

Zodium posted:

capitalism is a state-level conspiracy against the working class. it's not deep. it's open and normalized to a point where we can look directly at it and say "this is boring."

Zodium posted:

the individual companies and people aren't important to the system. sousveillance society was openly pursued by capitalist states through programmes like darpa's lifelog because the stability of cybernetic capitalism is the better maintained by greater amounts of real-time feedback. it just so happened that zuckerberg and facebook et al. were the individual agents to produce a system that afforded the feedback to maximize stability, and so they, out of many possible candidates, were integrated into the governing machinery. they are concerned with huawei because they surmise or know it provides that real-time feedback to a communist system.

Exodus1984 posted:

Exactly, except that it isn’t so much a conspiracy as that’s just how capitalism works.

Zodium posted:

capitalism is a state-level conspiracy against the working class. it's not deep. it's open and normalized to a point where we can look directly at it and say "this is boring."

the individual companies and people aren't important to the system. sousveillance society was openly pursued by capitalist states through programmes like darpa's lifelog because the stability of cybernetic capitalism is the better maintained by greater amounts of real-time feedback. it just so happened that zuckerberg and facebook et al. were the individual agents to produce a system that afforded the feedback to maximize stability, and so they, out of many possible candidates, were integrated into the governing machinery. they are concerned with huawei because they surmise or know it provides that real-time feedback to a communist system.

Ardennes posted:

Or rather evolved over time. As imperialism moved from a traditional colonial relationship to a financial one, the tools needed to control access to manpower and resources needed to be refined and you needed a common source of assets to efficiently do that.

Exodus1984 posted:

Every person who is wealthy is not part of an overarching government conspiracy, and often the answers are not thrilling, but boring.

Elon Musk is just the head of a business that, at the end of the day is a government contractor. His other business ventures serve to advance his interests and further the government contracts he seeks to obtain. He has thrived in an environment of diminishing government power, dismantling of the regulatory state, and increasing privatization.

Mark Zuckerberg became very wealthy off by using a better version of myspace/hotornot to acquire/extract personal information and sell it to whoever wanted it, sometimes the intelligence community.

While it isn't a giant reach to hold the position that the cooperation with intelligence agencies by Musk and Zuckerberg and others has allowed their respective businesses to circumvent red tape that should normally be there, everything is not a deep state plot or black program - its just people making money any way they can.

quote:

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.

Rutibex posted:

lol I wonder if musk can find any billionaire or politician blackmail material scrolling through everyone's DMs. might have actually been a great power move in "the great game" if that was his goal

Ardennes posted:

Or rather Hauwei provides it to a rival system. It isn't just about capitalism, but in particular, American capitalism. One could argue that the working class is always underthreat, but the entire civilization we know now comes from one source of power and it is designed to protect it.

Or rather evolved over time. As imperialism moved from a traditional colonial relationship to a financial one, the tools needed to control access to manpower and resources needed to be refined and you needed a common source of assets to efficiently do that.

quote:

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

Zodium posted:

it is just about capitalism. the post-ww2 state, whether capitalist or communist, is in the business of maximizing stability so as to serve as a more effective attractor--in the capitalist state, to maximize production of capital, and in the socialist state, to maximize control of the means of production. thus, while america may be the origin of cybernetic capitalism, it isn't remotely american, because the national scale is not meaningful to Capital. does Capital reward americans over and above, say, germans? no. did it hesitate to brutally deindustrialize the US when Deng signaled to it a better profit to stability ratio in China? again, no. what materially anchors Capital to the US? nothing. the US is simply a very stable place defended by two oceans.

Ardennes posted:

Multi-national corporations still need a source for a monopoly of force, they can't exist without it. It is just that the US state doesn't necessarily prioritize its own borders (look at the status of Italia before Ceasar), but it is simply one more province in the imperium and capital is simply moved from one province to the other.

But that doesn't mean the empire doesn't exist. American industry moved to China becomes those in control of the US falsely assumed they had complete control over the situation and it was now apart of their domain as much as Japan. They were wrong. There are borders beyond the empire, and now the worm has turned.

All o this does matter because geopolitical movements do have very clear effects, and the might of the US can fall on the population of a capitalist state as much as a socialist one. It is also why you need more them capitalism to describe what is going on.

Zodium posted:

of course the capitalist empire exists. that is exactly my point: even though it began there, it isn't american capitalism, because the US is a province no different from any other. the US state isn't invested with any additional power over it, it can only serve or fail to serve, as any other state. american industry moved to China because it had to. it was compelled by the feedback the system received, not because the american ruling class had a choice between China or some other place and arbitrarily went with China. any member of the ruling class who resisted deindustrialization, and there were many now-forgotten capitalists too invested in their nation to serve without hesitation, were simply removed from power and replaced by Capital.

Ardennes posted:

It is American capitalism though, it isn't just about random capitalists moving back and forth but a system with a center of it. The United States functionally is a province but it isn't a province of a nebulous entity. The American state serves American capital interests...but so does the German and Japanese state.

You can clearly see it at the moment as their interests are subordinated for what is needed for American interests. The move to China wasn't about betraying the interests of the American apparatus but the wrong assumption that they still had control over the situation. The US state is invested in more power because American capitalists need it to have more influence, they need it to bully other nations, for USAID to scoop up the assets of other states etc.

Rutibex posted:

individual business owners did not do business with China because they believed they were part of a plot to expand American power. they did it because cheap labor would line their pockets. the spirit of mammon filled them and moved their hands, not the spirit of america

Rutibex posted:

individual business owners did not do business with China because they believed they were part of a plot to expand American power. they did it because cheap labor would line their pockets. the spirit of mammon filled them and moved their hands, not the spirit of america

Zodium posted:

it is precisely a province of a nebulous entity, one that's entirely driven by parameters of stability and profit. the european ruling classes aren't shooting themselves in the head. they are moving their industry out of europe not because they are subordinating themselves to america, but because america is stable and europe is not, and they have no concern for the working classes of their countries. none of them serve national interests. if they don't move, then they will be replaced, much like parts of the american ruling class was. the whole point of cybernetic capitalism is that it self-regulates; the ruling class and the states they run are Capital's foremost servants, not its controllers. as it collapses, it's going to cannibalize americans as much as it will germans.

that's right.

Ardennes posted:

It is that they are allowed to though, they weren't doing business in China during the 1970s. It is simply that went on so long that it completely undermined the system. American capitalists aren't united though, you can see during the trade wars there was rifts.

That form of capitalism can't exist without organization. Those German capitalists would much rather get cheap Russian gas for example, but they aren't because they are simply not allowed to by Americans (with some support) who did not feel it is in their interests. There is a heirarchy and it isn't random.

To be fair, American capitalists don't really care what happens to average Americans but they do need the American state to exist to enforce their will. You still need a capital province even if you don't really care what is going on with the plebians.

Zodium posted:

there is no great outcry among european capitalists to turn the gas spigot back on. as noted many times in the ukraine thread, europeans are fully on board with what's happening. that's not because america isn't "allowing" them to pursue their national material interest of turning russian gas into cars and biotech products, but because they are concerned with the stability and profit of their local-scale system (company) and the higher-scale system (Capital) it exists within, not the nation.

Xaris posted:

lets see how british people are doing... pro watch:

Ardennes posted:

It is that they are allowed to though, they weren't doing business in China during the 1970s. It is simply that went on so long that it completely undermined the system. American capitalists aren't united though, you can see during the trade wars there was rifts.

That form of capitalism can't exist without organization. Those German capitalists would much rather get cheap Russian gas for example, but they aren't because they are simply not allowed to by Americans (with some support) who did not feel it is in their interests. There is a heirarchy and it isn't random.

To be fair, American capitalists don't really care what happens to average Americans but they do need the American state to exist to enforce their will. You still need a capital province even if you don't really care what is going on with the plebians.

atelier morgan posted:

the us military were the special band of armed men who served dupont and united fruit once upon a time and are the special bands of armed men on the payroll of halliburton, lockmart, etc

the intelligence complex and state department are critical tools in smoothing out points of friction that slow the pace of exploitation

the fed and us currency serve a unique role in maintaining the petrodollar and global trade, again to avoid anything that might slow the pace of exploitation

it is a capital province in that it is extremely valuable capital on the asset sheet of the ecumenical firm that is all of this poo poo

Ardennes posted:

It is just that ecumenical firm has limits, and not all capitalists are necessarily part of it. You can very much have splits in capital even if since 1945 there was one big group in charge.

Zodium posted:

Capital is self-organized. it does not need a group of human beings providing input, join the pieces any which way you like and the system will sort itself out. in the post-ww2 mode, capitalists compete to maximize overall system stability (via cybernetics) and profit (via exploitation), and the better they do in the competition, the more resources the larger system allocates them in turn. a system of "scientific capitalism" deliberately designed to cut nations out because of WW1 and WW2 bringing the world to the brink of communism.