Looks great! I wonder if this could be used to create some kind of podcast-based sponsorblock equivalent? I know there are issues with podcast- (providers) inserting sponsor reads and ads at random / unknown times, so, not sure how it could be done reliably.

Racist, misogynist, xenophobic, bigoted, made-up story about a company hiring women+minorities into dedicated departments which then don’t do any work

They must have a lot of departments full of white, straight men to compensate, otherwise the company would surely go under. /s

edit: before anyone thinks I actually meant this seriously…I was reacting to a ridiculously bigoted comment by some troll (I know…I shouldn’t have reacted) claiming their company had entire departments full of women+minorities not doing any work. The comment no longer exists of course. I

Yup, this aligns closely with my own impression of what needs doing. I’d only add to this that people need to be aware how billionaire wealth works. Nearly nobody receives just a billion in their bank account every year. Billionaires’ wealth is stored in investments (normally a company they’ve founded, or bought, owning loads of shares, which then blow up to create unbelievable wealth). But this isn’t liquid, accessible money. Billionaires use this wealth to borrow against, which banks happily do, knowing that it’s safe to do so, considering the billionaire’s leverage. This is one mechanism by which billionaires avoid paying taxes, for example. Here, things become tricky: How do you take this power away from the billionaire? How do you tax share ownership? There are some approaches, but I’m not sure any of them have ever been tried. If you just force the billionaire to sell 90% of their shares above 1,000,000,000 in value, the share price will plummet immediately. That doesn’t really work. You could prohibit borrowing against value held in shares, but you’d somehow need to limit this to ultra-rich people. Or you somehow devalue shares held beyond 1,000,000,000, so that this isn’t actually wealth the billionaire can use (to buy elections, or media companies). But then what’s the point of having 299 billion worth of shares just sitting there doing nothing (in Elon’s case, for example). It’s a surprisingly difficult problem to solve. You could split the shares across many people. So any shares above 1,000,000,000 in value have to be divided evenly across the workforce of your company or something.

This is all theoretical though, because most billionaires would happily murder every last human being with their bare hands before giving up 0.0000000000001% of their wealth.

While I wholeheartedly agree, we need to “solve the concentration of power in the hands of the few problem”. Even if you simply said all the stocks and shares of current billionaires can’t have money lent against them (or however you want to address this without taking half the economy with it), there will just be a new class of psychopathic narcissists to take the place of the current ones. I feel without some kind of set of laws which enforces continuous dilution of power by somehow spreading it across more people and randomising who is allowed to influence what (which can only really be done with computers or AI) these cycles will repeat themselves ad infinitum.

Haha, well, I’ve had many people tell me that I might be and I’ve had my own suspicions for a while. I am terrible in social situations (actually really good at them, on the surface. Good at pretending, but I hate it), I hate crowds, noise, flashing lights etc. But honestly, at this point I’m not sure what difference a diagnosis would make.

I perform well in areas I have interests in. Thus, by coincidence, I can appear capable in those areas. I’m also shockingly stupid in other areas. I’ve noticed a few things about how I learn: it has to be practical. Nothing theoretical will stick, unless put into practice. Thus, school was hell. I am also a devilish combination of a very slow learner who thinks differently about things. When a teacher taught things to the class, everyone got it immediately and I always somehow managed to come up with my own, weird, wrong interpretation of things. Once I have finally learned something, I am very accurate and precise, which is fairly useful in the fields I’ve worked in. I also have a flexible mind, which is great. I can usually reason outside of the confines most people think within. Which, see school, can be a blessing or a curse.

I’ve met truly intelligent people. Like, real freaks of nature types. PhDs in aerospace engineering, that sort of thing. Their universal intelligence is something else. It has shown and demonstrated to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are levels of comprehension, both in the uptake and subsequent processing of almost any information, that I will never reach.

But don’t for a minute think that these were happy people.