Nothing to lose but your chains, you say 🤔

I know that this is the argument, and I agree in principle (no inherent worth), but people tend to forget: Money laundering, buying black market goods online, supporting illegal organisations internationally and speculating on something are technically some kind of worth. That’s why it still never crashed out to 0, imo.

As someone who was interested in Bitcoin at its very beginning (sometimes I wonder what kind of arsehole I would be now if I hadn’t lost my wallet back then long before the stuff was worth anything) - it took quite some time from its inception to cryptobros being a cultural phenomenon everywhere on the net. So the creation itself may be a bit too early.

But I think your point is still very much valid.

It really isn’t, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.

That’s one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don’t solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn’t able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.

That’s why I still think you can’t really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).

Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP’s point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It’s not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called “dead” capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.

EDIT: Another example that just came to my mind for how this can impact things - Mansa Musa and the stories surrounding his lavish spending during his Hajj, basically crashing the local economies. So, even pre-capitalist systems had to deal with these dynamics.

This is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:

Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?

I, personally, don’t think it is possible.

To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.

Something good keeps getting better, thank you all for your work!

That’s no lie, hence supplement, not replace. But the community can only grow, if people start using it more, even just a little bit in addition to YT where it works for them.

At least from what I’ve seen, a lot more videos than in the past seem to have transcripts and captions, including automatically generated captions. I recently moved all my old YT videos (mostly German YoutubePoops from the early 2010s) over to peertube.wtf and they had automatic captions generated without input on my end, in English and German both.

Have a look at peertube, it’s gotten to a point where it can definitely supplement YT.

!peertube@lemmy.world

Definitely, here’s hoping the accountability question will prevent that, but the incentive is there, especially in systems with for-profit healthcare.

Even if it were to do pattern recognition as well as or slightly worse than a human, it’s still worthwhile. As the article points out: It’s basically a non-tiring, always-ready second opinion. That alone helps a lot.

Ah, to me, it is important to consider where it comes to the US foreign policy going forward in their era of fascism. I live in the EU, and I guess that was the foremost issue on my own mind. And I am not expecting something like a Russia-US-alliance myself, because of that lack of mutual loyalty. Only cooperation of convenience.

Was there a contradiction? Point is, there is no loyalty beyond that. If the favours for Russia were to no longer serve his own, personal interests (or at least, for as long as he believes them to do so, let’s not forget he is also very much fallible), he’d not support them. There is no ideological solidarity, or alliance or higher loyalty is what I was getting at. Just his belief that the world is fundamentally strong people preying on and using the weak, and that he thinks that he can cooperate with Putin on that - conditionally.

There’s always people that need reminding, like, I am sure there’s at least some people thinking Trump has some sort of higher loyalty towards Russia besides agreeing with their new world order of every country acting as “fuck you, got mine”-imperialists.

Oh, thanks for the info, that is great to know!

As far as I know, from when this was discussed after the first Reddit exodus, only commenting and posting makes you an active user. So the number is somewhat deceivingly small, as the vast majority on platforms like this are lurkers who maybe post/comment every once in a while at most.

Nice to see! Baby steps and all that. Getting RISC-V to a consumer-level state is still a pretty gargantuan task that has a lot of catch-up to do, but it’s walking along its path steadily.

Oh, so you meant, get out of the country, not, you know… I interpreted “getting out of the timeline” differently. A lot darker, I guess.

Now, if you can get out of the country, that might indeed be the best option with things as they are. But that won’t be an option for everyone. So either way, organising and staying strong is still important.

this is the dark timeline folks…

get out while you still can.

To quote a fictional revolutionary poet: In the dark times, should the stars also go out?

Nothing matters now.

Yeah, hard disagree on that. I was always against holding a false moral high ground and for using all means available to empower the working class. And that has mattered, matters, and will continue to matter. Only, the Democrats aren’t doing that. Sure, I can sympathise with Biden and I barely even know why Hunter was so targeted, I paid little attention to it. The thing remains - it is just protecting his own family, when he could do a lot more for people outside of his close circle with his last moments in office - in theory, at least, if he wasn’t just another Milquetoast Democrat.