This seems backwards. Let's just assume we're always going to be willingly beholden to tech giants, and so we're going to pass a law to make our masters treat us well.
Maybe instead campaign for a law that says all publicly funded computer resources must be reliably usable for 15 years. So you either go FOSS and save money too, or you get guarantees in writing before you hand over your hand over money to the people who won't even let you see what their code is doing on your hardware.
hate to say it, but there are a number of better places to spend your life than the U.S. as it is now and will probably be for years and years to come
If only most americans knew this, it might actually self-correct!
But in a world with incredible, downright magical access to global communication and human knowledge, millions continue to choose folk wisdom and confirmation bias.
Yeah that's the unfortunate truth. We can argue all day long about what the best way forward is, but most people do not care unless they are actively being hurt right this moment. And that's ignoring the fact that there is an absurd amount of enthusiastic support for Trump among our neighbors.
I think we have a situation where what used to be "middle class" paths through life, like a high school educated father working a manufacturing job to support a wife and 2.3 kids, are now the "you can probably keep yourself alive if you keep on your employers good side" working poor that feel like indentured slaves.
Filling the actual middle class slot are the highly educated and specialized workers. Like in my case, I am a single income earner for my family and we own our single family home. But, I have three degrees (two STEM) with 20 years of experience and live in a blue collar neighborhood in a house that's older than me. And we bought the place over 15 years ago.
Then I guess the upper middle class is reserved for your medical specialists, successful business owners, and corporate drones who stumbled their way up to the c-suite.
And somehow, the government and corporations have convinced them all to punch down.
I'm sure this is not a rare thing on Lemmy, but even as an American sitting in the US I see these headlines and think "lol get fucked."
Probably 100 Million people in this country need to be shocked into global reality. I worry just how bad things will have to get before that happens, though. It would be great to have an economy that would let me retire some day, sure, but the loss of institutions and technological advancement is sad for both us and for people that don't even exist yet.
And I'm not trying to be anti entertainment / gambling / prostitution, but Vegas is pretty low on the priority list of the american institutions trump is disintegrating. It has high international visibility though.
the capitalists (Ferengi) are depicted as ruthless and conniving (oftentimes outright cartoonish) villains
And once again, reality lets out a "here we go again" sigh and says "fine... hold my beer."
That sounds like a long road
getting from there to here.
I think they are saying that our poor people already have "more money," at least relative to others who might get that food.
And the bug you describe is also a feature if you're the greedy fucker at the top trying to take advantage of desperate people.
Modern day leopard farmers canNOT understand why grain and soybean farmers forgot where their bootstraps are.
Yo dawg I heard you like talking about the epstein list
"Someday, you'll be rich" is the lie that's told to us.
I think the prerequisite lie to that one is much bigger and more fundamental.
That lie is "you should want to be rich. Rich people are happy people. Rich people are good people. Being rich is the secret to happiness."
Well, that's probably more than one lie but you get the idea.
If the united states randomly decided to hit every square kilometer of Liechtenstein with its own hydrogen bomb in the middle of the night, would you call that a war?
Were there enough progressives in the right positions of power to make that happen, though?
One advantage that centrist / establishment types have is that they are everywhere and people are used to them. And they sometimes actually coordinate when the status quo gets threatened.