There is not a lot of money to be made in Spotify plays for anyone except for the owners of Spotify.

The music industry trades in celebrity. You don't listen to crappy pop music because it's good you listen to it because you're excited by the celebrity.

If you take that away all you're left with is the music which is just background noise to most people. That's not enough to sustain the industry at the profit levels that publicly traded companies require. They'll get eating alive by their shareholders.

Profit comes first doesn't mean you keep the business open. Plenty of businesses can be plenty profitable but it's never enough.

Profit comes before human lives. Humans are disposable shareholder value is not. That's because shareholder value serves the ruling class.

And as a dedicated nation of 12-year-olds America refuses to acknowledge the existence of their ruling class.

He's trying to avoid arguing any of the actual points that I raised about how younger generations have it harder factually. So he's trying to get you into a weeds argument over the differences between the two.

When it comes to old farts with bad ideas they can never actually argue their points so they try to change the subject. It's all they can do.

Did you somehow not know what the fuck survival bias is?

Yes the entire human civilization has not completely collapsed and we aren't cracking our skulls open and eating the goo inside. Good for you.

I fucking hate this. I hate the way you guys like you act like just because somebody blundered into a decent life that luck doesn't exist. We have hard numbers that clearly show that everything is harder for the younger generations. That is just a fact and that is why you aren't addressing any of the points I raised.

None of you old farts have a leg to stand on. You know you're leaving a worse world and you know that a better world was given to you and so instead of stopping and thinking about it and making the world better you double down. It's gross and it angers me.

You can't win the argument so you retreated to a easier argument. It's a variation on the straw man argument. You know damn well I never said everybody is going to fail.

What I said is that older generations had it easier than younger generations because of the world older generations created.

You wanna tried disputing literally any of the points I made? You're going to find they're all quite true. And I didn't even bring up climate change. The droughts caused from that have caused the price of beef to skyrocket. When I was a kid we had 99 cent large hamburgers. You could get an entire value meal large sized for less than $4. The same thing today is going to cost you 12 to 15.

Hell kids don't even have cheap video games anymore. The Nintendo switch 2 is the most expensive console Nintendo has ever released adjusted for inflation. I used to be able to buy a good mid-range to video card for around $200 and now I can't get that for less than $450. Those are all inflation-adjusted dollars.

Kids pay more and work harder and get less and that's the world we left them and we don't like that and we don't like thinking about that so we do the Socrates thing.

You sound like you're making excuses.

So I can list out all the things against your nephew. The fact that when you went to college the government paid 70% of your tuition versus 20% of his. The fact that housing was heavily subsidized when you were coming up and there was still decent land to build houses on widely available. The fact that antitrust law was still just a little bit enforced as you were coming up so you had more competition and more opportunities as a result. The fact that automation has taken 70% of middle class jobs since the 1980s. On and on and on and on and on.

None of that matters because you have what's called a world view. You grew up in a world a certain way and hit the age of 12 and Dad-gummit that's the way the world is always going to be and nothing is ever going to change.

Face it I old people played the game on easy mode. Then we left a burnt out hellscape to our kids full of techno feudalism.

But nobody wants to acknowledge that because it acknowledges the failure on our part to make the world better for the next generation. We're the ones who screwed up but it's so much easier to blame the kids. Feels good too doesn't it?

I'm really getting tired of the real world too. Doesn't make it go away.

I briefly was a history major before I realized it wasn't for me, so I took a few more history courses and read more books than most folks.

There was absolutely widespread technological unemployment during the two industrial revolutions. We don't like to talk about it. And it didn't just go away it lasted right up until the early 1900s where coincidentally we started two world wars.

It seems disingenuous to just tell the parents to raise their kids better when you have a systemic problem. Parents can only do so much.

Don't get me wrong I am all for not raising your kids the way you were raised. My parents were useless and insane respectively. And I was careful not to impart generational trauma as best I could, although I'm still pretty sure I ended up with a little bit passed over whether I liked it or not.

But we have solid studies it shows 70% of the middle class jobs in the last 40 years got taken by robots and automation and process improvement.

Those were mostly good paying factory jobs although it was plenty of other work in there. I remember when I first started doing more advanced IT support and developers support we needed six guys on a team and when I moved on to another job we had two.

That was because we switched from complex desktop software that depended on a lot of libraries to a web-based application that didn't need nearly as much support because it didn't have to constantly be rejiggered to work on a broken computer.

It's just one example but there's lots more and llms are going to devour workers. Every CEO is privately telling anyone who will listen, up to and including investors, that they will be replacing workers with AI. If course I press releases they deny that but I don't care what you tell the press I care what you tell you're investors because those guys are backed by the SEC.

Are just going to be useless. The skills that they gravitate towards are going to be replaced by machines and software. And we are just not going to have any place for them in society.

In a competitive society where we all have to constantly justify our right to live this means we are going to have tens of millions of people who do not have the right to live.

We could of course convert from a competitive society to a cooperative one... I'll wait for the laughter to die down.

So eventually what's going to happen is the same thing that happened the last time we had massive amounts of technological unemployment. World wars.

You can draw a pretty good through line from the two industrial revolutions and leading up to massive amounts of unemployable young men and then finally putting them in trenches to shoot each other and dropping bombs on their cities until we have killed enough people and broken up Windows to get us back to full employment.

but there is no way in hell that the people who still need to work are going to tolerate the people who don't have any purpose in life sitting around enjoying life without putting in there at 40 to 60 hours a week of misery and pain.

I'm sure it's fine though. We can all be HVAC welding plumbers. And I'm sure that having a massive number of people who we have trained to be blue collar guys won't backfire when there isn't enough White collar guys you don't know how to do blue collar stuff to hire them and there isn't enough government spending to drive the economy and employ them all.

I mean it's not like China didn't just spend the last 15 years building empty cities to keep themselves in full employment right? And it's not like that's not just a temporary solution.

The important thing is that the world never has to change and it can be exactly the way it was when you were 12.

Their games aren't fun they're addictive. The only person who matters at that company or the psychologists that designed the gameplay loops.

Companies like King are in the best position to abuse ai. They can absolutely regurgitate the same graphics and gameplay with subtle tweaks to get more money out of people.

So that would only work if you're going to check the NFC chip every time you bring up the website. Otherwise you just have people who fake the NFC chip, which is trivial to do. The security of the NFC comes from the short range not the chip itself.

And beyond that it's also trivial to connect data points from other databases in order to unmask someone once you have that data. Which gets us right back to the problem of gay people being outed when they're not safe.

Yeah and there are people from Saudi Arabia living in the EU. There are people living in less progressive communities of the EU who will face social pressure.

The world is a complicated place.

So it's the using it that's the problem. The government has lots of databases with your names in it. I'm American and my name is in the social security database.

But that data doesn't track my internet usage.

Just because I have an account with one company doesn't mean I should be forced to have a de facto account with all companies at once. That's getting into mark of the beast territory, even accounting for the fact that that's not what that story was about

We use North Koreans pretending to be Chinese to manage the European infrastructure.

As always big business and profit will always take precedence over safety and security.

Within the next few years you will start seeing Fringe YouTubers and Twitter users talking about how electricity and water aren't rights. That will gradually be brought into the mainstream because that's how they launder extremist ideas into the mainstream.

Within 10 years half the people on this forum who are still alive and who still have electricity and water will have come to believe that people aren't entitled to water and electricity.

We are rapidly becoming the kind of third world hell hole that so many people like to scorn.