His description of a selling point sounds like it too was generated by AI. The whole point of art is to be challenged by the expression of someone else’s point of view. Only narcissistic tech bros would find this idea of “infinite personalized music” appealing.

TSA is a justification to violate rights. It may have started as a reaction for safety at some levels but the rules have been bent and abused to an insane degree. Now they use the special zone airport rules so they can search your devices and myriad other constitutional violations completely unrelated to stopping a 911 style attack reoccurring.

Credit cards are a trillion dollar industry. Fraud is already a massive issue and it’s only grew. More and more places are going cashless for easier accounting and lower incidence of local theft. I highly doubt it’s going anywhere. It will become more of a hassle for consumers though - no doubt.

America always finds a bogy man to justify these actions - Communism for foreign Interventionism and nuclear build up, Terrorism for violation of domestic rights and more interventionism, etc. Now China for reckless unregulated capitalism to “win” the super power race. Not surprisingly it was reckless unregulated capitalism that gave China the ability to become our competition to begin with. They sell the public over and over with these devoid of nuance narratives about the big bad other.

It’s an ouroboros. The ultra wealthy finance state actors till they become rich (insider trading,etc), then they enter the private sector and become even more filthy rich by getting executive jobs or board seats to lobby the next state actor they can corrupt. I always follow the money, because there are very few true believers actually in power.

Why do you think every other billboard on the interstate is for some lawyer suing truckers? Then trucker insurance goes up and they pass that expense on to shippers and everything gets more expensive. Businesses don’t care because everything’s is owned by the same private equities anyway - so the rich get richer.

You think we would have learned this from school. When there’s no teacher in the room to watch the testing, some kids alway cheat. The more they get away with it, the more kids decide to cheat. This seems super basic, but somehow they still convince people “self regulation” works.

Billionaires are pouring infinite money into right wing movements. They have no scruples and can pay anyone they need to get what they want done. The problem is capitalism because it creates extreme unelected power in an extremely small self interested minority. They also fund the power centers of the left to keep things from moving too far against them. Elections move on money far too much. In the end, you can’t have democracy and capitalism. Slowly capitalism always tries to swallow democracy.

Gee, I’m sure he has a completely unbiased opinion here. In other news, rapists don’t think roofies are a problem.

Name a time in history private ownership hasn’t metastasized into monopolies and imperialism. Wall Street as a financial hub didn’t even exist till 1817 and didn’t gain much hold on the world till far later. The first stock market was in 1611 in Amsterdam. British capitalism fueled British imperial rise before America even existed. Capitalism is just smaller fiefdoms under owner monarchs. It always exploits labor and slowly takes more and more power to oppress for its own gains. People are real quick to forget how awful businesses were to labor in the past. Union members died to get us the little we have they are again stripping away. Systems that centralize power with an unaccountable minority always do the same thing.

This is what capitalism does. Its endless profit growth requirement is not possible under any real market conditions. So it inevitably starts squeezing it’s own customers and degrading it’s own service to maintain these unrealistic demands for profit. The more consolidated the market becomes, the worse the outcomes. Anti-trust was always a half measure. The problem is capitalism is inherently unsustainable and can only lead to negative outcomes for it’s products and services over time. Nothing can grow infinitely and that pursuit will always collapse bringing societal pain.

I mean, Donnie boy done annihilated Iran 16 times. How much more winning you need? Pretty soon he going to be annihilating them with canon balls cause all the missiles got used up in the previous annihilations.

That’s always been the game. It’s why America toppled Iran’s democracy back in the 50s.

How many times Donnie Small-hands gonna “Annihilate Iran” ?

We’ve already annihilated, we can’t annihilate any farther.

It’s individuals versus complex organizations and systems designed by the powerful. The blitz of complex systems is designed to disconnect and distract. Tax code, investing, politics, insurance, legal - everything is so complex to advantage the powerful with the means to maneuver and manipulate the systems. I think people are drowning to keep up in the maelstrom of things competing for attention. The disconnection and distraction is by design.

To go deeper - I would say stealing labor is what the powerful have always done. They found a new way to steal it, but it’s the same old playbook. We create, they take the majority of the value generated and act like they’re doing us a favor. Power is a parasitic enterprise.

Intellectual property is a fairly recent concept and a lot of the information stolen does not impact the deceased people who created it’s lives or older work that was mostly already compensated in the past era. This makes the impact much smaller in my opinion - not to say it’s not also very impactful. Slavery has been stealing labor for all of human history.

I mean, slavery comes to mind….