Miscellaneous Chatter > General Misc.

Politics

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TaoHorror:
At risk of ruining our run of uninterrupted civil discourse of all things mind, I'm becoming a bit of a stoic in my age toward politics, more interested now in how people are political than being political, myself: the effectiveness of propaganda, the source/cause of cosmology, the parallel of increased political participation with partisanship.

This is pretty cool, you're political identity from the date you were born. If you were born 1950 - 1954, you're likely Democrat now, but before and after you're likely Republican up until 1980. The coming of age for those born in early 50's was the late 60's.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/08/upshot/how-the-year-you-were-born-influences-your-politics.html

TaoHorror:
I'm gonna check this out - something I've been mulling over for a while now - but not being a scholar of Rome, it was just idle speculation, but here's a read that might back up what I've been suspecting all along, that when a society becomes so successful ( economically, at least ) with no significant foreign threats, the citizenry turns on themselves.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lessons-decline-democracy-from-ruined-roman-republic-180970711/?fbclid=IwAR0go81fCFiB-4c7wwxVUPK_QS7J-PtNCXpm0Vl-Kpj4vgW5pgD93zZ8j88

TaoHorror:
I see some talk in Q about big tech providing shitty products, so thought I would bring that discussion here as it holds my interest.

Full disclosure: I consider myself "a Capitalist", but not a blind Libertarian type, but more of a Hamiltonian Conservative type who knows the need, indeed the desire, for a Federal Government, but one that provide torque for growth ( infrastructure spending ) over welfare programs with no mechanisms bridging people out of poverty. Self described Southern Conservative Democrat - one who values the environment and workers/middle class ( over the very poor favored by my liberal Democratic counterparts commonly found in North Eastern USA and California ).

So it appears to me our current Capitalist equation is: build a brand on providing value, then become massively successful monopoly, then cut costs eroding your product for your customers. A tangent thread to this are companies with a brand/reputation are bought by outside investors ( or not ) and then cut costs eroding their product/service into shit and then when they've lost enough customers they "we hear you" and make some changes addressing the worst/common negative reviews. Here's something you can hear: don't fuck your customers over, how's that for a marketing strategy.

I agree wholeheartedly with Sciborg2, big tech is delivering dogshit products/services. These trillion dollar companies amaze me, their code is crap. This list is a quick touch on the technological crap we're fed.

* Facebook is a shitshow ( why the fuck doesn't text search work in the comments? wtf, most basic easy part of programming, something mastered in early 90's ).
* eBay too, can't text search your order history ( that simple capability would drive repeat sales ) and the draconian process of conflict resolution is stupid - they've lost more business to forum private auctions simply because they haven't learned the "mall marketing" strategy, which is you WANT foot traffic. So what if some transactions are completed outside the site, you want the human fuss, you want all transactions to go through your site regardless if some are completed offsite. So stupid.
* Google is pure dogshit - and the now-shit search algorithms is just the beginning, the archive feature in gmail is fucking stupid.
All of these companies are begging for disruptors to come along and kick the shit out of them and so they push for legislation to protect them ( crony capitalism ).

So while, yes, I support the right to property and liberty to live our lives the way we want to, but our current capitalistic reality in the USA is a race to the bottom, a perpetual cycle of cool innovation and value matures into a monopoly who can then only increase profits by perennially cutting costs in the name of "efficiency" ( read: dogshit ). So yes, I see us living in Dogshit Capitalism. Not sure what to do about it as long as we continue to support Government-business corruption, which is not a conspiracy theory, but so common a reality we simply don't see it and accept it.

sciborg2:
Well politically and religiously I'm a Fundamentalist Agnostic Contextualist...but yeah Big Tech is due for a fall.

Sadly I think only the octopus and cockroach hybrid people (cocktopuses heh) who will replace us are going to acknowledge the wisdom of social media being our Great Filter...

In all seriousness though it seems the ability of software technology to enable tyranny/anarchy is going to outpace the contribution it could make to a functioning democracy.

H:
Well, by way of many companies, the impetus is not to deliver the best product possible, but rather to deliver the product that costs the least to make/run while still getting people to use it.  You'd have to be a moron to invest overly into the service itself, when you could instead use that money for executive compensation and stock buy-backs.

Although, one minor quibble, Ebay does have a text search for old orders, but seems to only show the last three years or so....

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