What we all need to understand about AI in a nutshell:
There’s an algorithm that can reliably predict, from aggregate facebook posts, the onset of a manic episode in a person suffering from bipolar disorder – more reliably even, than a trained psychotherapist, who only has access to the information a patient provides them in therapy sessions.
“Won’t technology like that help people with bipolar disorder?”
Theoretically, it could. But this algorithm wasn’t designed to help people with bipolar disorder.
This algorithm was designed to sell plane tickets to Las Vegas.
some people: omg… epic nostalgia fail… right in the childhood. guess a kid can’t be a kid anymore
people who have bought a toy in the last ten years: good fucking riddance to that dump and its insane markups.
I’m in both camps. TRU’s prices were nuts at times, but it was the only outlet for a lot of stuff, and there’s something deeply sad about the death of the last of the chain toy stores.
people who actually looked into why it’s shutting down and not just smugly jerking off to their own selfishness: Toys R Us was saddled with thoroughly insurmountable debt by the exact same venture capitalists who tanked Kay-Bee Toys and numerous other retail chains. They took a company that was struggling, bought it, then leveraged that buyout almost wholly into a $5 billion debt on the company that was virtually impossible for them to cover, something that should be illegal because it’s absolutely ruining the economy by just funneling money into the coffers of the already-super-rich while destroying competition that helps keep prices all over down. TRU’s model was actually successful and under normal circumstances they’d be recovering fine, but that debt was never going to go away and sucked up pretty much any profit the company made. Needing to clean up that debt, by the way, is also a factor in TRU’s prices, as well as Walmart not needing to make a profit off of toys, making them “loss leaders” by selling them at minimal profit because they make their real money elsewhere in the store but using those loss leaders to lure people in. Also TRU accounted for roughly 15% of the sales from major toymakers like Hasbro, Mattel and Lego, and this will hurt all of them (especially because now Walmart has even MORE leverage and market share and they are notoriously vicious with how they treat suppliers, plus the scummy Amazon), and god knows what this is going to do to many smaller companies who relied on TRU’s orders and distribution for their wares that Walmart wouldn’t carry. Plus this is thousands and thousands of jobs lost in a poor economy, but hey, you sometimes might have had to pay a little bit more for a hunk of fucking plastic you didn’t fucking need so who’s the real victim here?
BTW the venture capitalists who just destroyed Toys R Us? Bain Capital, brought to you by Mitt Romney, who is looking into running for Congress.
Capitalist culture is service industry workers not being allowed to sit down for their entire shifts, no matter how dead the traffic flow gets.
Capitalist culture is service industry workers sacrificing their comfort for antagonizing and pervy customers who are “always right”.
Capitalist culture is giving students homework in order to prepare them for their future careers where they’ll inevitably need to “take work home with them” or work extra hours in order to put bread on the table.
Capitalist culture is helping physically/mentally ill people only to the extent that they’re able to generate profitable labor again.
Capitalist culture is destroying food that can’t be sold rather than distributing it to poor people according to need.
Capitalist culture is monetizing knowledge and making it artificially scarce so that owners can profit and laypeople are left in the dark.
Apple is based out of California, they generated 233.7 billon dollars in revenue last year. Yet Apple refuses to manufacture in the USA. Apple has continued to use Foxconn as their manufacturer, and America has continued to turn the other cheek.
Also, Foxconn’s response to the mass suicide risk?
So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes – people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:
Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?
This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.
Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe – that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?
This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.
Let’s buy a dozen of them – you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:
This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.
How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.
Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.
But we’re not done yet.
The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?
Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa – the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.
The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).
The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.
And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.
If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.
But we’re not done yet.
Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.
This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.
In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world – less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population – liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.
So yeah, make of that what you will.
Let this sink in next time someone tells you capitalism allocates wealth according to contribution. It’s empty ideology meant to shield billionaires from a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and power.
california anti-drought measures are always like “take shorter showers! consider brushing your teeth with the sink turned off” and never mention the fact that nestle is bottling all of our fucking water and selling it to people who live in areas with plenty of water
It’s like the Irish potato “famine” I stg
In California, residential use only accounts for 4% of total water use. Industrial use is 80%.
This is true of any resource. Yes turning your lights off will save you a but of money. But industry wastes far more electricity than you. Yes recycling your garbage is good. But companies, like the retail chain i work at produce far more garbage than you ever could and do not recycle it at all.
Turning natural resource and environmental crises into individual responsibility is form of class warfare so fucking insidious
Honestly just burn every company to the ground or cut them off from electricity and water systems
Tax them heavily for their usage Make recycling mandatory or theyre fined Oh im sorry am i stepping all over your precious free market I hope to choke it out
Word
“Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet?
Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans….People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.” – Derrick Jensen (author & environmentalist)
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