The usual solution from libertarian techies is to remove what little power democratic governments have and let big business be unchecked other than some “invisible hand” from a collection of individual actors who can’t scale due to psychological warfare that big companies can easily scale to.
We are now at a point that billionaires openly make unilateral decisions about foreign and defence policy with little discussion in public eyes, let alone checks and balances.
Unfortunately it's a Catch 22, because the most influential billionaires have direct ties to Establishment politicians, supporting and manipulating them freely to their liking, including brazen election interference, in which the same Establishment players all admitted to existing not long ago, while judges and district attorneys in their respective states have also been bought out by these same billionaires in an effort to squash these claims when raised by anti-Establishment players.
We need anti-Establishment players who are already willing to confront these billionaires by cutting off their influence completely, rather than taxing them more — which is useless, and conveniently replaces their contributions with tax dollars that can be used for the same manipulation strategies.
The bad news is, any criticism of these particular billionaires results in synthesized media campaigns crying wolf about anti-Semitism or anti-science, which causes the public to become distracted over manufactured culture wars, while the root issues go unchecked and the politicians willing to confront these billionaires are smeared, drawn, and quartered by the same media and voters who wouldn't dare to think outside their box.
> The bad news is, any criticism of these particular billionaires results in synthesized media campaigns crying wolf about anti-Semitism or anti-science
Who’s the billionaire you have in mind? Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.
Due to the nature of the discussion, if I mentioned their names here, I would get flagged into oblivion for daring to mention them — I'm not being hyperbolic either (I wish I was!). I neither believe it's safe nor fruitful to discuss that freely here.
I will say, I encourage anyone interested in understanding this better to spend some time researching: to who known billionaire individuals (and families) are donating funds to, or investing heavily into, whether that be corporate/legacy media companies, video game publishers, farms, as a few examples — you name it. Follow the money, and you will find power and influence causing rapid changes to policy, hiring, and public relations that all closely align to known political agendas.
I'll leave it at that. :)
>Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.
Yes, precisely. It's human nature, but even easier as someone with nearly unlimited funds and quite likely, power.
Billionaires in the USA are completely and totally beholden to the military-industrial complex, for the most part. Look how they all scrambled for JEDI, for example.
The US military alone spends the entire net worth of the richest private person in 17 weeks, wealth it took him 30-ish years to accumulate; that's not counting the rest of government spending. There's an argument that any senator is "richer" than the richest private person in the country. It's not even the same ballpark.
The banana republics aren’t all that old. President Isenhour’s administration were toppling sovereign governments and democratically elected leaders directly at the behest of Dole Foods (United Fruit) well after World War II ended.
Also there is geopolitics involved.
A war in the east and every EU regulation against US companies is seen a bit as an attack on the alliance while "we" must stand together against the east.
Also IE was the dominant browser back then, which it is not today, but windows itself is on the desktop. So I think it is abusing monopoly, but instead of trying to regulate it, EU should make a push for open source. Maybe fund it with a big fine for Microsoft. That would be EU politics I could engage with.
SourceSafe was nice with its built in tools integration when everyone else at the time was non existent. It was really meant for a 2-5 person team. Anything bigger and the thing would die on its own database updates. But if you are still using that thing today you should move away from it. It is terrible for usage today. I got to the point I was doing backups every 6 hours and keeping rotating backups on hand for when it decided to corrupt itself. Then I as subjected to clearcase and sourcesafe was amazing compared to the complexity that thing brought. I knew it was bad when they had to send out a consultant just to show us how to get it installed correctly and make branches.
ClearCase?! An enormous pile of unnecessary complexity. Where I worked they hired a fulltime person just to manage it!
I remember fondly, there was no way to back out a commit. The hired consultant told me "Just check out the previous version and check it back in over the bad change!"
So now our test group would have two(!) changes to test, instead of zero. Brilliant.
I also remember ClearCase had five (5!) views of the same database. Commands worked on one of the five view, and god help you if you got confused.
SourceSafe apparently had integration with the VBA editor in Office 2000 [1]. I've never used it, but it seems like it would have been handy when I had to work in VBA.
