A billionaire is a business themselves. One person can’t even passively possess a billion dollars without tons of support staff
If you separate the direct actions of the person from the actions of the staff required to maintain and grow their wealth, you’re missing most of the reason why billionaires are so harmful to society
For me it was a mix of that, plus “great, so you’re going to close everything maybe was using, sometimes restart some of it, and everything is going to be on the wrong screen and virtual desktop. Now that I’ve spent several minutes getting back to where I was yesterday, let’s see what garbage I don’t want that you’ve added”
Linux has its own inconveniences, but I don’t regret the switch… It gets better every day while windows gets worse
Let me tell you a few secrets
First, anger uses up social energy. They get it back from your response to them… If you don’t let them read any emotion from you, they’ll tire themselves out very quickly.
You just have to control your body language, keep your tone calm, and let them talk. Make it clear you’re paying attention to them, but otherwise give them nothing
You don’t have to listen to what they say, they’re just making angry human noises. Just listen to their tone, it’ll rise and fall in energy cyclically until they run out of energy
When they stop talking, just give them a few moments of silence so they can feel embarrassed, then disregard their little temper tantrum and progress the conversation like it never happened, focusing on solutions
And that’s the second secret - you can prompt-break a human. In every interaction, humans take on roles. Customer-employee, public official-citizen, manager-worker… Humans naturally fall into roles
You can pull a human out of their role by not playing your part, and in that moment of confusion you can recontectualize the interaction
In this case, you change the conversation roles from “you being mad at me” to “I’m the expert helping you fix your problem”
Obviously, if you just say that, people will generally just get more upset. But if you pull them off balance and start acting a new role, they’ll take on the counterpart role
It’s all third path conflict resolution, it’s honestly harder to explain then it is to do it
No, they’re not people. They’re royalty
So the CEO gets less than half their salary for the year?
Sounds like a great deal for the company. Until, you know, the whole thing collapses because they laid off the workers who kept the whole thing running
Ah, but that’s the beauty of it. Why are they here? If it’s to troll, don’t give them what they want. If it’s for social interaction… Why are they venturing out of their echo chamber?
Every interaction with a community pulls you slightly closer to the group consensus. You can fight it to some extent, but we’re wired to fit in with the tribe
Social rejection is wired similar to pain in our brains - it’s far more salient, far more memorable and impactful, than normal interactions.
The highest form of this is rejection by the community - it hurts most when everyone’s attention is on you and they all reject you. Even a single person quietly reaching out afterwards is like a lifeline - it stands out to you. It takes hundreds or thousands of “normal” interactions to counteract one extreme negative one
A supportive community back home doesn’t counteract the impacts from an away game. Don’t go to their turf, let them come to ours. Do not feed them - we have better content, they’ll lose members to us, and if we do it right they’ll shrink until their echo chambers can no longer sustain themselves
I just pass the create table statements after the instructions. It does pretty good up to 2 or 3 tables, but it will start to make mistakes when things get complicated
On the plus side, it’ll generate tedious code very well - double checking it is less draining than writing it yourself. Especially because I make more typos than it does - I often use it to get a starting point, then write the business logic myself
What do you mean? It works the same way, the opinion of the community will pull you closer to the group consensus. Too much exposure will have horrible things you don’t really believe spilling out of your mouth
Don’t go there, don’t spread word about it, don’t feed it in any way. It’s like flood water - pull others out of it if you can, but minimize your exposure
As to shutting them down if you have the ability? Shutting down a cesspool is good - it fragments the echo chamber, and some members won’t make the migration. The only question is if I trust the one making that decision to remain impartial
Therapy is also about fit. It takes something like 5 tries to get a good match - both the kid and the parent need to be on board, or the whole thing will end up as a bad experience for everyone involved
On one hand, I kinda get it. Corporations do things, and if they get killed over small oversights there will be very real effects for many people
On the other hand, holy fuck, look around. Everything is going to shit, the planet is literally dying and we’re not even living it up anymore
How about the opposite? A decentralized system, avoiding concentrating power in any one place, and focusing on building platforms for coordination to act on larger scales
No, the community needs to cyber bully them off the platform. They need to feel rejection for their words, not censorship. Censorship lets them frame themselves as the victim as they seek out a smaller echo chamber on the fringes. They need to learn their words will turn the community against them
We still have to live with them. We can’t ignore them or silence them - we have to correct them
There are people basically immune to caffeine. There are extreme caffeine addicts. I can drink two pots myself, and I’m extremely sensitive to caffeine
The metaphor works because it doesn’t matter how much coffee you drink - it matters how fast you drink it. And that’s a limit set by the business - the size of the cups and how quickly they’re refilled
At this point, I feel like you’re not even trying to understand what I’m saying…
You just have to work in legal costs to anything you do. Call it an asshole tax
Like coffee. It might cost them 1¢ a pot… It might cost them $1200 up front and $60 a month for their coffee makers
I hate group chats. I engage with people one on one - I can understand one, maybe two persons…
But people? Fuck that. Persons are complex, people are insane
I find it hilarious that my personal AI, that can run on even a budget gaming PC, is far more reliable than most of these corporate ones 100x the size
Well, I think most of them are trying to get the government to split the bill, which I don’t love but I could live with. If they get small scale nuclear working, we might finally actually reduce fossil fuel usage for once
I just feel like the other shoe is about to drop. Are they going to push to run them themselves, with minimal oversight? Do billionaires want to buy privately owned nuclear reactors for their bunkers?
I don’t know how this is going to turn bad, I just have a bad feeling
Yeah… But why is this being pushed so hard? When the billionaire owned media pushes a message this hard, I can’t help but look for the terrible consequences I’m missing
But again, it’s all for their personal benefit. A human Their money is managed to grow by any means, and that has a lot of knock on effects
They generally either put their money in funds with the highest returns (which often use unethical and illegal but accepted practices, and the best ones require large minimum deposits), or they directly own large percentages of a company and use that influence when it suits them
I see where you’re coming from, but I think the line is blurry. Their direct personal actions don’t capture the full extent of their actions, but this also assumes full responsibility for their ownership, where honestly it’s impossible to know what level of emissions the companies would have if the billionaire’s wealth machine wasn’t involved
I wouldn’t say this is totally unfair to say though - at the end of the day they own what they own, and letting others do your dirty work doesn’t absolve you of responsibility
The fact that their life would barely be affected if they added emissions to their criteria for investment makes this worse - these are the figures the billionaires should be looking at to make decisions