What are you talking about lol. Jeff Bezos is doing the only thing Jeff Bezos does, stuff that’s good for Jeff Bezos. This is giant leverage that tells the Trump administration “we have big tools at our disposal if you don’t make us happy with whatever economic policies we do end up with”. He displayed that leverage, it turned into a news story, and behind closed doors, a shift occurred, likely minor, in the ever-evolving power dynamic between the two pricks.

Don’t get it twisted. These dudes and the rest like them will never help us except in the most casually incidental way.

Thanks, Ken. DOLT

Hell yeah! And another dope thing about the whole shebang, turns out the derivative < - > integral operation is wildly useful for describing…everything.

The simplest example, that I love the most, is just the very pedestrian (pun intended) relationship between a car’s position, velocity, and acceleration. It’s just enough “levels” (of diff < - > int) to have some instructional “meat”, and it’s a totally ubiquitous experience.

And then, when peered at more closely, that kind of relationship starts to crop up everywhere, suggests so much more!

Calculus is best maf

The elephant in the room is the huge violence required to bring any “simple fix” to fruition. The fascists are doing some of the violence for their own simple fixes, now, openly. They of course intend the further violence, too.

Some of us see the elephant. Most of us (almost all of us, myself included!) are just tryna get from one day to the next. That’s bad, elephant gets bigger…

To reply more in the spirit of my original comment, since I spent a lot of words (probably many more than you wanted to read lol) on your COL angle -

(and actually, I realized after I got a little ways into this, I’m just clarifying my thoughts for my own benefit at this point lol, this is basically me just saying things. I’ma post it, it’s Lemmy, why not)

The idea about “versions of life we go through, thinking they’re normal” -

That’s important to me. Going totally unreasonable here - I really believe that most people, regardless of background - if you actually exposed them to the true suffering of the very poor, and the true excess of the very rich, most people would understand that none of this is really acceptable, it only seems that way, it’s actually deeply wrong. I think most people, if they could really get even just a weeklong glimpse of life in those shoes (both extremes, and one in the middle), nearly every single one - rich, poor, or in the middle - would clamor for abrupt change. I think we can care, we just don’t see.

The opposite of the above, lacking it, is the “…thinking it’s normal” I meant.

One enormous, but strange, barrier to all of us recognizing that truth is just the simple fact of the way our lives work - through none of our doing, we wind up ensconced in the environment in which we grew up, roughly, from a socioeconomic standpoint. We live our lives in that “lane”, that “version”, and we die in the way the people in our “versions” die, too. This applies across $0 - $Inf.

The barrier I’m describing as strange is that way because it’s often very invisible, and - rich or poor - sudden realizations about one’s lived “version”, and the versions of others - those are jarring, damaging, to whomever experiences them.

We should probably do more of it, though. The jarring forced realizations. Like, a lot more. Luigi Mangione, for instance, I think that dude really understood, and the thing is - most people also understood, they thought what he did was dope. I really wish we’d all focus more on what happened there. Do more of it, even.

I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!

I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over deeper problems sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).

I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.

1. It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.

2. Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.

3. That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.

At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.

But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.

Edit: minor phrasing

Alright. I don’t really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment, because it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it’s - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don’t mean you), that they’re astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.

And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.

People live in way different fuckin worlds man, and the weird part is a lot of us just go through life thinking our “version” is normal. The folks who do this and whose friends do this and whose parents did this - it’s normal to them.

I don’t think I’m conveying this well. There are whole communities, made up of individual people, for whom this is standard, expected, because it’s what they’ve always been surrounded by, grew up practically breathing it as normal. And for these folks, the reciprocal realization to the one you made, realization that MANY people do not (can not) do this - comes as a similar level of surprise.

It’s really fucked up. And it’s something deeper and harder to fix than just pointing to one guy or class of people as The Problem (to be clear, that guy and class of people I’m referencing ARE an enormous, hideous problem).

Lotta moments like these adding up. Lotta times I myself just end up not buying a thing instead of getting it from better places, too. Between that, financial uncertainty with all the craziness lately, and folks just being broke, I have a feeling consumers are spending a lot less these days.

So, the heart of the issue is that each object’s path changes continuously, and the forces involved change in kind. Even worse, the objects interact with each other, again continuously - it’s not one-sided.

If you imagine trying to do it pre-Calculus, some kind of “just map it all out into a grid, etc.”, you can see the problems this continuous change imposes (exercise left for the reader).

By involving the Stravinsky Interpretation, it quickly becomes clear that the dimorphic superposition destabilizes. The clever reader might object “but what if you fold in all the noodly surfaces to recohere the manifold?”

And that clever reader would be right! But we didn’t know that until old Dr. Isaac “Zeke” Newton came along and made it that way.

Some say the devil himself taught him how it’s done, because no one else can read his notes! So keep your eye on old Zeke when you run into him.

Grift. It’s all scam, all the time.

Yep, this is what’s going on. As is usual with Trump, there’s no actual ideology or goal, it’s all scam all the time. When you can unilaterally announce at any moment of any day that you are about to grenade the global economy, that’s going to have a guaranteed response from the markets. Predictable as the fuckin sunrise. Especially because everyone rightly knows Trump truly doesn’t give a shit about the consequences and absolutely might just do it.

Then he says some wildly different shit a different day, with again 100% predictable market movements (even announcing on Truth Social ahead of time to buy, which is truly beyond the pale), and everyone he knows gets even richer, again. That grift will wear out and stop working and he’ll switch to something else.

And again, and again, and again. All scam, all the time. I mean, plebes like us are aware of multiple concurrent grifts the guy is using the presidency for. Imagine what we don’t know about! It’s kleptocracy of the highest order.

I mean, say what ya want (and what we deserve in most cases), but the US has a ton of diverse wildlife. A crazy amount. And even more fun, it’s super regional, including lots of pockets supporting healthy amounts of big and diverse fauna, including large predators. Many species of deer, elk, goat, we have moose, multiple kinds of bears, canines, and small numbers of various (badass and distinct) wildcats. Enough to reliably run into many of these in places, and run the risk in many more.

And that’s to say nothing of the variety of smaller life, which is again regional and diverse. Just utterly bewildering. Uhh…guess I got carried away there lol

Some areas get little quail families, running along single-file. Dangly bits on their heads and all, it’s the best!

Seems like even just the janitor (as well as all other employees) having an ownership stake in the company would be a simple and great start.

Dang, I know how that goes. Makes for a good dish for folks like us in that case, lot of it keeps for quite a while lol

That is a LOT of stuff hahaha I wanna try it!

That does make it tasty, I can stand to do a bit more of that too. Here’s my decadent unconventional (but extremely easy) sandwich topper - crunch-less, sadly, but could probably be improved with some cheese crustin.

I like to melt some butter with red miso, about 50/50 or so? You’ll know the consistency after messing around a bit. Red miso is super dense flavor wise of course and also doesn’t mix easily, so yeah. Today I put it thinly on half a bagel, cream cheese on the other half, toasted, random stuff in between. You can add brown sugar to make it sweeter, or any kind of spice, also both lol.

Don’t be defeatist. This is the shit that begins the rolling momentum that eventually causes stuff like that. Actions like you’re talking about, absent obvious popular agitation, get treated like isolated random criminals, irrelevant and unsympathetic - see Luigi Mangione. And of course too much violence too quickly will result in extremely violent gov’t response.

I understand feeling jaded but we need enthusiasm, support, action. The stuff you’re saying is the opposite of that. But on the whole, I’m with you in the sense that I’d rather see 100 LMs than 1MM protesters. I think we’re threading a tricky needle though.

Easy, teeth mash the plants into plastic 👍 makes sense if you squint real hard and have a few TBIs