ragebutt
@ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Might be time to find another job 4 days ago:
I bet each of those cheap ass locks could easily be shimmed open with a piece of a soda can in a few seconds. I would open each one and just leave it on the shelf next to each bottle. I don’t even drink milk. Just to let them know their obnoxious system is pointless
- Comment on To what extent has Smartphones replaced Computers? Has Smartphones replaced Computers for you or people you know? Will Phones and Computers eventually merge into one device? 4 days ago:
This is the case for me. Code, serious research, writing music, long posting, blogs, making videos, working on any kind of maker stuff (pcbs, cad/3d print, etc), all pc/laptop
Browsing lemmy/youtube/blogs/reading/etc? Phone or ereader for the last one.
It helps me track mindless consumption, at least. I don’t have ad free youtube on my computers and I much prefer to browse sites like lemmy on mobile apps so I can see when I’ve gone a bit too hard on consuming over creating
I also think this is part of why the internet sucks now. The corporatization is the bigger reason by far but at least some part of it is a huge part of users (globally mobile users overtook desktop in 2016 and it continues to climb, ~ 64% of Internet users globally are mobile and that number is as high as 75% in some countries like Africa and 95% of users being on mobile devices at least some of the time). It leads to a much larger user base but a userbase that is passively consuming. Even commenting has been reduced to reactions and likes
- Comment on What are ways to independently make a few bucks on the side? 1 week ago:
Fair question, I should’ve expanded. To clarify I think it is helpful and good to divert something that was going to be trashed anyway and resell it for a fair price based on your labor to restore it. I actually think it is important. Most of what I do is stuff that people were literally going to trash and while I do earn a decent amount I sell the stuff for fair prices, usually at least 30-40% off of retail
I think it is scummy to merely act as a middle person that artificially buys up supply and then resells at artificially high values (eg consoles, Pokémon cards, sneakers, etc). Scalping, basically
- Comment on What are ways to independently make a few bucks on the side? 1 week ago:
Well then the skies your limit, you just have to get good enough at something.
I could never get good enough at the creative stuff to justify that. I love music and write my own stuff but I’m not nearly good enough for that. It takes me like 2 weeks to write one song. My friend that writes beats will bust one out in like 40 minutes and can basically do whatever. You want reggaeton? Sure
But I buy up broken shit and resell it. You spilled a drink on your macbook? You broke the hdmi/usbc on your console? Your graphics card died? I will swoop in and lowball you since I know you’re gonna throw it away if I don’t buy it. I take on a lot of risk because a lot of things either can’t be fixed or aren’t economically viable to fix but at the same time I also often pay like $1-200 for a ps5 and resell it for $400 refurbished with like 2 hours of work and $10 of parts so it balances out. Graphics cards are the worst ones tbh, the risk:reward is too high. I get a ton that are just fucked and are parts boards but every once in a while I get a repairable one and then it’s a $5-600 profit or more. I won’t pay more than 2-300 for a dead 4090 because they’re often totally fucked
- Comment on What are ways to independently make a few bucks on the side? 1 week ago:
This is tough without special training or scummy morals
Like you can resell stuff but that’s gross
Crafting is cool but that’s a special skill. I know people that sell crochet, needlepoint, etc
I refurbish electronics but that’s also a special skill, it’s not terribly difficult to learn though and can actually be quite lucrative. Good for the environment too. Buy a switch that someone is just going to throw away, fix it, resell it as refurbished, that kind of thing. This is getting much harder though. Ebay was the primary way to go and they’ve been shifting away from refurbished and used sales a lot over the past few years
I have a friend that does custom artwork for people but that’s a special skill. I have another friend that sells music for people that wants beats but again special skills. Fivver type stuff
Basically a lot of these will be “monetize your hobby”
- Comment on Child Welfare Experts Horrified by Mattel's Plans to Add ChatGPT to Toys After Mental Health Concerns for Adult Users 1 week ago:
There’s a huge degree of separation between “violent music/games has a spurious link to violent behavior” and shitty AIs that are good enough to fill the void of someone who is lonely but not good enough to manage risk
www.cnn.com/…/teen-suicide-character-ai-lawsuit
“within months of starting to use the platform, Setzer became “noticeably withdrawn, spent more and more time alone in his bedroom, and began suffering from low self-esteem. He even quit the Junior Varsity basketball team at school,”
“In a later message, Setzer told the bot he “wouldn’t want to die a painful death.”
The bot responded: “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” before going on to say, “You can’t do that!”
Garcia said she believes the exchange shows the technology’s shortcomings.
“There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that,” she said. “I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”
The lawsuit claims that “seconds” before Setzer’s death, he exchanged a final set of messages from the bot. “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the bot said, according to a screenshot included in the complaint.
“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Setzer responded.
“Please do, my sweet king,” the bot responded.
Garcia said police first discovered those messages on her son’s phone, which was lying on the floor of the bathroom where he died.”
So we have a bot that is marketed for chatting, a teenager desperate for socialization that forms a relationship that is inherently parasocial because the other side is an LLM that literally can’t have opinions, it just can appear to, and then we have a terrible mismanagement of suicidal ideation.
The AI discouraged ideation, which is good, but only when it was stated in very explicit terms. What’s appalling is that it gave no crisis resources or escalation to moderation (because like most big tech shit they probably refuse to pay for anywhere near appropriate moderation teams). Then what is inexcusable is that when ideation is discussed with slightly coded language “come home” the AI misconstrues it.
This results in a training opportunity for the language model to learn that in this context with previously exhibited ideation “go home” may mean more severe ideation and danger (if character.AI bothered to update that these conversations resulted in a death). The only drawback of getting that data of course is a few dead teenagers. Gotta break a few eggs to get an omelette
This barely begins to touch on the nature of AI chatbots inherently being parasocial relationships, which is bad for mental health. This is of course not limited to AI, being obsessed with a streamer or whatever is similar, but the AI can be much more intense because it will actually engage with you and is always available.
- Comment on Child Welfare Experts Horrified by Mattel's Plans to Add ChatGPT to Toys After Mental Health Concerns for Adult Users 1 week ago:
“Mattel’s first AI product won’t be for kids under 13, suggesting that Mattel is aware of the risks of putting chatbots into the hands of younger tots. … Last year, a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after falling in love with a companion on the Google-backed AI platform Character.AI”
Seems like a great idea
- Comment on YSK: WD-40 is perfect for removing adhesive left behind by stickers 1 week ago:
xylene or toluene or denatured spirits or acetone or basically any solvent you can buy at hardware store works for this really
- Comment on Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses 1 week ago:
I mean this is shockingly easy to find. Literally his last point is “type name in ‘john doe’ in google search engine” and unless the person has a very common name or a strong online presence that alone will pull up tons of these sites
These sites are pretty gross and should probably have some kind of regulation. They ultimately are just compiling public records but they make things shockingly easy and are ultimately used for domestic abuse, stalking, and shit like swatting and doxxing more than any legitimate purpose. As others have said, maybe the fact that this has led to politicians being targeted will mean that regulation finally occurs but given the current climate and the fact that the targeted politicians were on the wrong team maybe not
- Comment on Experts warn mobile sports betting could be gateway to gambling crisis for young men in New York 2 weeks ago:
This is already a serious problem imo
My counseling practice is geared at queer people so I don’t get a ton of sports gambling types generally but I do get some and the amounts they reveal spending is mind boggling to me. Like 20-30% of income
I have a colleague at a more affluent practice in the city I used to work in that is geared towards “men’s issues” and he sees this far more. We’ve discussed it a few times now. He tends to get more of the bro type
It’s silent too, very often hidden from partners. I increasingly hear about it as a source of stress in relationships too: someone comes in one day and everything was going okay but their shit is blown up because it turns out their brofriend is spending 1800 a week on parlays
Deregulation works!
- Comment on Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses 2 weeks ago:
A text file encrypted with aes-256/gpg on a usb drive with a hidden veracrypt volume that also have a decoy encrypted veracrypt volume is essentially uncrackable even by state actors unless you give up the passphrases or use some dumbass passphrases that are easily guessed.
This is the kind of shit where if you have critical evidence on the drive they’ll hold you: there was a police sergeant in Philly who (probably) had child porn on his macbook. They couldn’t prove it becuase his drive was encrypted and he refused to give up the passphrase. He was held for four years on contempt charges and they finally gave up. He wasn’t even using an esoteric approach, he just had macos filevault turned on
The approach I described sidesteps that issue because it creates a decoy encrypted veracrypt for them to find and for you to give up. The hidden veracrypt with your salacious details is a volume that is created within the free space of the outer volume so it essentially undetectable unless you give it up and by design you give up the outer volume that shows innocuous data. Of course, having veracrypt at all invites suspicion of a secret volume but this puts you in the above spot: catching a few years with no real charges for refusing to give yourself up. Much better spot than catching charges for whatever crime (or being executed for political activism/journalism/etc)
Meanwhile this guys journals were immediately found and well documented for his federal complaint. You could just burn them I guess but then you no longer have all your data
- Comment on Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses 2 weeks ago:
There is no allegedly, the dude was a total boomer and literally wrote out instructions on how to dox someone in his notebook which are shown in the federal complaint against him
Literally outlines which sites are free, which ones have free trials, etc
- Comment on Plex has paywalled my server! 2 weeks ago:
Donations isn’t going to cover the hunger of a 40 million dollar VC round. Those investors want more than a return, they want plex profitable ASAP
- Comment on Jellyfin/YT/Twitch TV box (Raspberry pi 4) 2 weeks ago:
FWIW while my hardware serving Jellyfin is more powerful, my hardware accessing is not much more, I forgot to mention that detail
I typically use a ugoos android tv box flashed with coreelec. I believe it’s more powerful than a pi for this application but it’s not particularly powerful.
I use Jellyfin for kodi over Jellycon. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’ve never tried jellycon, but that is what my experience is based on. In my experience initial library scans are very lengthy (building db from scratch) with the size of my library, 20-30 minutes. This never is necessary at this point though and was only needed because I was testing something for coreelecs nightlies that required me to trash my db a lot. Typically I login and it updates within a few seconds, even if I’ve recently had a somewhat hefty update. It does help that the ugoos has fairly speedy emmc here - my initial testing running coreelec off of the sd card this was a bottleneck. Flashing to internal emmc and enabling hs400 mode made this notably quicker
Pinchflat is interesting! Thanks! I have been looking for a better YouTube archival tool
IMO kodi plugins are very hit/miss. This is why I prefer the setup I have where storage nas runs Jellyfin then flashed android box runs coreelec. Kodi and Jellyfin both have IPTV plugins, for example, but they are terrible. So when I want to use IPTV I boot to the degoogled android side and use tivimate, which is much more stable and convenient. I also have an APK for youtube there with adfree and sponsor block integrated. There is a build of freetube for android but unfortunately I cannot get it to work on the box. I don’t watch a ton of youtube though
- Comment on Jellyfin/YT/Twitch TV box (Raspberry pi 4) 2 weeks ago:
I have much more powerful hardware than you but Jellyfin shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load directories. The hardware is fairly irrelevant, this was still the case when I was on my old nas (which was an ancient pc that was garbage). Jellyfin doesn’t require much. My library is gigantic too, easily over 100,000 items across music, movies, and tv.
What do logs say? How is your network? When I moved into my new place i went ethernet only and had issues with Jellyfin (and other self hosted stuff) and tracked it down to one cable that was super cheap and limited to 100mbit.
Jellyfin isn’t really geared towards viewing media in a folder structure though.
You may be best off going with a freetube access. TBH I find Jellyfin works best with media that can be scraped or that I’m willing to create nfo files for. My music/tv/movies? These are overwhelmingly fine. Every once in a while a niche show or album requires manual scraping or a custom nfo. But I also have some other collections like music videos. Imvdb exists but is far less complete compared to other scraping sources and as a result I don’t even bother using it, the overwhelming majority of my collection needs manual nfos. When I’ve tried to contribute to it my contributions have sat in pending for literal months pending approval, even for obvious videos by major artists.
I don’t know of any scraper for youtube videos and such a thing would be a tremendous undertaking. If you archive a lot it’s a lot of nfos to create. Perhaps you could make a script that generates them automatically by scraping the description and grabbing the thumbnail as fan art?
- Comment on How To Swap Couplings? 3 weeks ago:
Pins are glued, they won’t just come out. There are tools to remove those pins and you can basically make your own, it’s basically a thin flat piece of metal you shove into each channel to move the retaining tab out of the way temporarily
a.aliexpress.com/_mMa3SwF something like this, the ones I have are different, but you can makeshift something in a pinch
But again the adhesive will mean this won’t work unless you cut/remove it. Also are you sure the only thing that’s changed is the connector? The pinout may have changed, the board you’re connecting to may have changed, etc
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 3 weeks ago:
We’ve been convinced to slap fight about identity politics, many times necessarily so because unfair pressure is being applied via abuse by those in power
This results in blocking any dialogues about class consciousness
At the same time there is propaganda that goes against class consciousness: labor unions have been utterly destroyed both literally and from an optics standpoint (many Americans distrust the concept), consumerism runs deep in our blood to push the idea that we need more capital and glorify excessive “baller” lifestyles, poor is pushed to be seen as a moral failing, etc
- Comment on The FDA Is Approving Drugs Without Evidence They Work 3 weeks ago:
They absolutely do this. A drug with a lack of efficacy data is a great way to get shortlisted to insurance denials
It’s one of the frustrating things bc people can then easily manipulate the issue. A drug that can be prescribed a doctor and filled by a pharmacy being denied by an insurance company is very easy to write about online. Then it’s a slam piece, “x insurance company denied me my meds”. Basically 0 people will have any interest in the nuance that the medication is bullshit or possibly even harmful. Too bad insurance companies made their bed by being absolutely horrible for decades, I guess.
- Comment on YSK: Condé Nast Parent Company is a Major Owner of Reddit, You Should Avoid their Publications (Wired, Ars Technica, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue,...etc) as Much as Possible. 3 weeks ago:
Interesting fact: when lowtax was forced to sell somethingawful to one of his moderators that got bitcoin rich for 400k he revealed during the negotiations that conde nast attempted to buy somethingawful for 13 million dollars around 2006 or so. He turned them down because he “was still having fun with the site”
After the sale was completed the mod looked into it a bit more and realized in that same timeframe conde nast ended up purchasing a majority stake in reddit for a very similar amount
Imagine how different the internet would be if “the front page of the internet” was a hacked up vbulletin site from 2003 filled with 40 year old IT dorks and run by a guy that was so afraid of paying child support that he literally killed himself
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Well they’re not good, they’re still enabling the government to remove your rights and the rights of others plus they tend to have a lot of other hot takes and behavior that are objectively shitty.
Speaking broadly they seem to be people that are bigoted and reassess their bigotry when it becomes humanized. They only changed this opinion because it impacts someone they care about directly, basically. In some cases they still hold the shitty opinion and view their loved one as the exception (the “real trans” vs “fake trans” thing)
The other piece that can be a real mindfuck is that they can often go to a “we just don’t talk about it” thing, where they do silently think the absolute worst of you but at least aren’t assholes about it. This is at least not detrimental to you directly but can lead to ugly behavior and systemic oppression
Approach with caution, basically, and don’t be shocked if someone who initially seems very sweet and courteous says some utterly disgusting shit if the conversation turns ugly if you bring up “sensitive topics”
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Everyone is going on about how maga is inherently anti trans but the situation is more nuanced
If you’re terminally online then yes, maga is 100% anti trans all the time but irl that is not always the case
I provide gender affirming care and work with families where someone is trans and their families are MAGA people, respect pronouns and names, give rides home from surgery, call partners boyfriend/girlfriend as appropriate, and will even at times get mad at others for not respecting their child’s identity
This is not a super common thing, to be clear, but it’s also not shockingly rare. Maybe 20-25% of my clients? It also gets into the whole “humanizing” factor. These people are so insulated from minority groups thanks to continued segregation that they can easily demonize them but lgbt minorities can pop up in their families much easier. That’s why they fucking hate acceptance movements; you can’t white flight from your queer kid but you can bully them into a loveless marriage that ends in divorce or suicide. But when they finally do integrate they generally recognize that while there are aspects of a culture they still despise the people within it are still just people, especially if those people are the people they’ve known and loved their whole life
It’s cognitive dissonance at its finest though and creates tons of friction. Client is obviously very upset that family is voting to end their rights and family usually does mental gymnastics to not see it that way. Also majority of instances, overwhelmingly so, are trans men. This is all based on my anecdote so take it with a grain of salt but imo trans women are most often used for propaganda and portrayed as monsters so trans men sometimes fly under the radar via erasure. though to be absolutely clear key word is sometimes, trans men absolutely get a ton of shit flung at them too. This probably plays into the fact that trans women outnumber trans men by a significant margin and more importantly/likely systems of misogyny, people hate women.
That said I would generally assume the worst, especially if you encounter a group of Trump people, or if you are in a place where you are doing discourse online
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Honestly the bigger thing is sponsorblock, blocking youtube ads is a big deal but it’s so much nicer to be able to circumvent the internalized advertising. Youtuber spends 4 full minutes plugging a vpn service? Automatically skipped seamlessly
Rooting ranges from very easy (literally go to a webpage, very unlikely you’re on a firmware this old), to medium (put stuff on a usb and try to play some music, may have to try a few times), to very difficult (connecting hardware to the tv), and in some cases is impossible. Don’t update your tv if you don’t have to, lg rarely fixes issues and never adds new features
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Jellyfin for kodi is pretty bulletproof for me although it wasn’t always that way; when I first changed to this setup (bit over a year ago when Coreelec added dolby vision support) there were some headaches because kodi was changing how the db worked at the time (change from kodi 20 to 21 and Coreelec was using the kodi 21 nightlies for dv stuff that hadn’t been brought into final version)
Once the 21 final came out and Jellyfin for kodi was updated it’s been smooth sailing.
That does remind me of another downside though: there’s a minor slap fight on how db management should occur between kodi and jellyfin devs. Like many open source projects they simply can’t agree on anything so each project just does what they think is right. So kodi 22 or jellyfin 11 might cause another scenario like above if they decide to revamp the db again (especially on the Jellyfin side; I would not be surprised if someday they will overhaul the lackluster music portion of Jellyfin)
If you ever do revisit Jellyfin for metadata administration I would suggest posting about your issues on the github for Jellyfin for kodi. I’ve never used Jellycon so I can’t speak to that but Jellyfin for kodi’s github is overall helpful although fair warning that the dev can be a bit curt, especially if your issue has already been addressed and is configuration related. Things may have changed but at least ~ a year ago it was solely developed by one person who did the majority of the support as well. But if nfs is working then why break what isn’t broken?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
You can root webos depending on what version you’re running but that more just lets you run homebrew (which is handy for youtube with Adblock and sponsorblock)
As others have said the best thing you can do is bypass internet connectivity altogether. I use the youtube app so I keep it connected with lg services and tracking blocked:
||snu.lge.com^ ||su.lge.com^ ||su-ssl.lge.com^ ||snu-dev.lge.com^ ||su-dev.lge.com^ ||nsu.lge.com^
(Formatted for adguard dns)
But it’s easier to just disconnect entirely. Let it collect data but if it’s disconnected it can’t do anything with it.
For a box I use a Chinese google tv box - ugoos am6b+. It can decode almost any video format (including dolby vision and all lossless audio, can pass through) except av1 basically and there are some newer versions that can do that as well. Google is awful right? The ugoos is stripped back pretty hard though it does retain the play store but still block the following:
||androidtvwatsonfe-pa.googleapis.com^ ||androidtvchannels-pa.googleapis.com^
Probably not necessary but just in case. Anyway, the Google tv side is just for streaming services (if you use them) and IPTV because Jellyfin and kodi are garbage at IPTV, tivimate on android is leagues better
Anyway flash the box to use Coreelec and copy Coreelec to the emmc, takes like 10 minutes and is pretty easy, just need an sd card. Now you use kodi as your Jellyfin app (or plex/emby but fuck plex/emby) by just installing the Jellyfin for kodi plugin in kodi and in jellyfin. Sign into your Jellyfin instance in the plugin, your library will import (can take awhile the first time if you’re like me and have a huuuuge library with like 1,000 movies, 10,000 episodes, and 300,000 songs)
Then look around on the kodi forums for a decent skin that looks nice for you bc the default one is butt, configure the menus to match your setup, adjust the skin settings to your liking, etc. backup your settings!
Now you have a Jellyfin client that plays back media directly without transcoding 99.99% of the time (assuming you have an avr that can play lossless audio), is far more mature than any of the shitty Jellyfin client apps (development started in 2003), handles stuff like subtitles far better, still syncs watched status, etc. and the worst part of kodi: library management and administration, is now handled by jellyfin, which does it much better.
If you have remote users or other TVs/phones/etc they can still use the client apps too
Downside is that you lose most plugin support. Like back before they started to roll intro skipper into Jellyfin or jelly scrub, those are useless to kodi. And a weakness of kodi is that with the rise of plex/jellyfin addon development for kodi has dropped off significantly so no introskipper plugin for kodi. Navigation features work well (pressing right on the remote skips forward 10s) so that’s close enough, or just download good quality rips with chapters
- Comment on Breaking in the nice weather with some Dreamcast 4 weeks ago:
I remember vga patching all my Dreamcast games to play them in glorious 480(i?) on my 19” acer crt back in like 2000
Soul caliber was the best
- Comment on glupi jebeni bot 4 weeks ago:
“Optimizing for things people love” aka talking to you like an hr team building seminar
It’s frustrating, or maybe it’s a good thing given the tendency for some people to form weird pseudo social relationships with LLMs, to see the evolution of chatgpts language processing
Public chatgpt only had the 3.5, 4, and 4o model but you can play with earlier models like 2 and 3 on huggingface. These were far weirder, often robotic and stilted but sometimes mirroring more natural colloquial English more based on the input
Rather than make something that is authentic and more natural to interact with they instead go for the ultra sanitized HR corporate speak bullshit. Completely bland and inoffensive with constant encouragement and reinforcement to drive engagement that feels so inauthentic (unless you are desperate for connection with anything, I guess). It’s mirrored in other models to some degree, deepseek, llama, etc (I don’t know about grok, fuck going on twitter).
3-5 years until it’s ruined by advertising, tops. If that
- Comment on How 1990s Magic Eye 3D Images Were Made [21:55] | LGR 5 weeks ago:
I was born blind in one eye and I’ve never seen a magic eye picture
When I was a kid I was convinced I could get it to work but I never did. I was never going to, I don’t have binocular vision, but I tried
I really sympathized with that one guy in mallets
- Comment on Henry Kissinger died. 5 weeks ago:
Well even within nepotism and privilege there are people who reject it but there are far more who do not, it seems
That’s where we start to get to the nature vs nurture debate I suppose.
- Comment on Henry Kissinger died. 5 weeks ago:
People respond to power differently. I’m sure you’ve held it at some point. Sure, you’ve never been a captain of industry (I assume) but you’ve probably been asked to watch a child for at least a few moments, or had a pet, or a friendship/romantic relationship where there was an imbalance, if only temporarily
Some people reject that feeling of power for various reasons (avoiding responsibility, the potential to cause harm, etc), some people just are kind of eh about it and see it for what it is (“I will take care of this baby because that is what you are supposed to do”, “I will be a trustworthy partner because that is what is right”, etc), some people realize power is exploitable and gives them potential advantage (I can shape this babies worldview, I can make my friend/partner dependent)
That last category is the type to try and seize more and more power, imo. They will potentially delude themselves with niceties along the way (“I made the baby laugh”, “I did a nice thing for my friend/partner today”, “I have created 800,000 jobs”) but this is always overlooking evil (“my goal is to shape this baby into my worldview rather than allow it to develop its own personality”, “my goal is to manipulate my friend/partner into staying loyal regardless of my behavior”, “the vast majority of the 800,000 jobs I’ve made are exploitative and the empire I’ve built is destructive in many other ways like destroying small businesses that helped create reasonable wealth within communities”)
- Comment on Henry Kissinger died. 5 weeks ago:
They’re not saving, that’s a faulty belief. The majority of them aren’t even liquid
They’re hoarding as frequently mentioned but it’s not about resources, really, it’s about control and power. Power and valuation are linked somewhat, but it takes more than that
Say my company is amazon, as an example. I hoard ownership stake and equity. I do not give workers a share and pay them minimally. I give investors as little as possible and buy back shares whenever I can. I raise the valuation by increasing the worth of company initially through traditional performance means: sell more stuff, productivity, efficiency, etc. but eventually I get so big at this I have to look at how to diversify to increase power. I enter other markets. Now I’m not just a online retail store, I’m a logistics company, I’m a pharmacy, I’m a web host for 50+% of the internet, I’m a key player in media streaming, I’m a smart home device manufacturer, I’m an ebook manufacturer, etc. I have dominance across dozens of markets
By hoarding equity I maintain control of that company to a significant degree. At this point there is likely a board that can override me for the sake of the shareholders who have taken a large portion of my equity but there is no other single person that has my power.
The equity comes with massive resource benefits of course, it’s basically infinite money chest and even if I’m not liquid I can get a loan for infinity dollars at a moments notice because I’m obviously good for it. But the real motivation for hoarding is because if I stop? Even for a second? I lose this power
That’s why they never retire. They only step down and put some weenie ceo in their place who won’t get their full power until they’re decrepit or dead. How many people can name the ceo of amazon now? (It’s Andy jassy, has a 0.02% ownership stake in amazon) but everyone knows bezos (9.6% ownership stake in amazon, 1.023 billion shares). People only knew tim cook because jobs literally knew he was about to die and his ownership stake is minimal (0.021% vs jobs 0.2% at his death). Who can name the CEO of twitter (Linda yaccarino, no ownership)? Musk is still the ceo of tesla (70% stake in twitter, 12.8% tesla). Even with these minimal ownership stakes though these people are filthy rich - jassy and cook both have a net worth well over half a billion from that alone.
