upboundspiral

"In the pharmaceutical sector, at first I thought researchers and doctors were admirable; then there were the executives, who sometimes did bad things. The worst, I thought, were the sales reps: they drank and even slept with doctors to get them to do the wrong thing. In the end, I completely reversed that moral hierarchy.

Almost all industry whistleblowers were sales reps. They earn less and have the least education, but the greatest moral fibre."

Supposedly is pulling extreme weight. Can't remember the source but I remember reading a case where the city council thought there was one data agreement and Flock implementing broad sharing across all government agencies.

Ah, so this one of the reasons why in 2026 every single app / software suite / et al takes 2+ seconds to load, is slow and buggy, and overall a pain to use.

Since software is in some ways information + machine a near infinite amount can be created. I'm not sure I want to live in that world.

Laws are laughable in the face of capital. The only reason we have electric cars in the first place is because persons and countries with capital massively invested in new technology.

Laws are the end of the political process, not the beginning.

Case in point, gas taxes just make people grumble and not necessarily switch to electric cars.

You know what doesn't make people grumble? Cheap solar panels / cheap cars that are the result of planned investment on a continent scale, funded by the government through both research and investment grants.

Money is power, and power is political. Passing laws without changing economic policies is how a country goes to irrelevance.

In the modern age one needs a long term investment plan. Without it, the entrenched powers (big oil, etc) exert their enormous influence to keep a country backwards. You need to fight capital power with capital power.

You need a planned economy. It is ironic that in the West we no longer have any competition, just monopolies, thanks to the free hand of the market.

You need a government willing to invest and spend trillions on their policy agendas (clean energy, etc). You need a government that recognizes the enormous power that capital and finance have, and moves to curtail them.

FDR did this, and Wall Street hated him. Post WW2, during Bretton Woods, the conference that would decide the economic fate of the world for 2-3 decades, no banker was allowed to attend.

People have forgotten but Bretton Woods was a planned economy. Fixed exchange rates, fatories told what not to and what to produce. The government intervening to keep the costs of goods to a certain level.

The post war boom was a highly controlled experiment by New Dealers that had lived through the Great Depression and wanted to avoid such a scenario at all costs.

the DNC sabotaged Bernie in 2016 with all their might.

Even if Biden's strategy was serve the super rich, while minimally "throwing the dog a bone" (the average person), not much changed. Sure, he appointed Lina Kahn, but per usual she was also sabotaged within the FTC and outside of it had no support.

The comparison to FDR, who was supremely hated by Wall street, who banned any bankers from attending Bretton Woods, who oversaw the New Deal, etc, etc is laughable.

Republicans and Democrats in terms of their cultural values are completely different.

Where they are not so different is in terms of the economic policies they create. One often notices that a few years later, Democrats extend and expand the Republican's policies.

Who started a class war and financial deregulation in the 1980s? Raegan.

Who enabled total deregulation? Clinton the in 90s with help and council from the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Page. By unshackling the banks from any rules, the Washington bureaucracy would enable the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.

And who does Obama appoint to oversee the 2008 financial crash? Larry Page.

Both parties have totally betrayed the American people in favor of the American oligarchs in terms of economic policy.

Who benefits from deregulation and offshoring? Not the now bankrupt rust belt states. Who benefits from bailouts for the banks but no bailouts for the average person? The Wall Street insiders.

There is billions in overt corruption, and you're right, that's wrong. But trillions that have been stolen from the average person via quantitative easing and given to big business to buy back their own shares.

The nation state has never been weaker because it has been defeated by financialization (except in China).

Economics has always played a massive role in our politics.

How did we escape kings and feudalism? International markets opening through technological innovation enabled capital to generate enormous sums of wealth that challenged the old older.

What enabled postwar democracy? The ruling empire, the American, was "democratic", coupled with the destruction of all the wealth of Europe, meaning all the old oligarchs lost a substantial amount of power. Turns out royalists have less power when they don't have the finances to enforce their views.

Political power has also always depended on economic power. And later on, post 1970s, financial power (the private bank's ability to print money for free, something that used to belong solely to the state).

Financial and economic power has totally taken over government power, in many cases in an unholy marriage (as in America). The DMCA, the US forcing its laws down other nation's throats through treaties, etc, were the economic ruling class using the American government to enact their policy decisions for their own benefit.

And now with the internet we are regressing towards feudalism. Apple and Google extract 30% rents from every single mobile software purchase. The lords of old can only dream of such wealth generation through no productive effort of their own. Amazon likewise extracts insane rents from its sellers. Sure, in small pockets, there is resistance, but on a societal scale the commons, the average person, has absolutely been beaten back.

You simply engineer your services to not need contractors... Would it take a ton of capital, intellectual, and cultural investment over the long term? Sure.

But that's the price you pay for security.

I quite like the idea to include quantitative risk.

I think a useful addendum is that I think the government should be in charge of testing very common combinations (ie the bread example).

It would get expensive real quick for everyone otherwise.

It's unfortunate that its a bit fragmented but there are Android / iOS complements as well - respectively keepassDX and keepassium.