Hello
neptune
Ideally robots would do all the shit jobs no one wants to do like sweep floors and tier 1 IT support. Then, hopefully, we could all get UBI and decide if we want to design and repair robots, or make bespoke jam, or do some other job robots generally can't do. Alas.
Wasn't this literally the plot of Black Panther?
Underworld
One time, and I wasn't even high, I was thinking we could build solar panels that power machines that pull CO2 from the atmosphere and build solid bricks of graphite that could be used to build buildings or whatever. Then I realized I had basically reinvented the tree.
The last handful of paragraphs:
The decline of Amazon is closely tied not just to its size but to how it has chosen to grow. Amazon is now less of a store than a mall, or maybe a sprawling bazaar. Last year, nearly 60 percent of units sold on Amazon came from third-party sellers rather than from Amazon itself. Want to set up a booth? There’s a nominal monthly fee to reserve the space. From there, though, the charges add up quickly, according to a report from the ecommerce-intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
Amazon takes a cut of every transaction, typically about 15 percent. For front-and-center placement, you’d better pay for one of those sponsored slots. According to the FTC, advertised products are 46 times more likely to get clicks. Call it another 15 percent of revenue. Oh, and if you want to qualify for Prime—and if you want any shot of making a sale, you do want to qualify for Prime—you’ll need to use Amazon to fulfill your orders. That’s another 20 to 35 percent off the top. All of a sudden, half of your revenue is in Amazon’s coffers.
Amazon itself has reported that all of those fees amount to a big business; the revenue generated from them has tripled since 2017, totaling $117.7 billion last year alone. But although it’s been great for Amazon, it hasn’t been great for consumers. When sellers are nickeled-and-dimed, not a lot of savings are left to pass on to you.
Amazon denies that it squeezes its third-party sellers at the expense of shoppers. “The FTC’s allegation that we somehow force sellers to use our optional services is simply not true,” David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel, wrote in a lengthy response to the charges. “Sellers have choices, and many succeed in our store using other logistics services or choosing not to advertise with us.”
That is technically true, but in a world where so much of online retail runs through Amazon, choice is an illusion. Dare to offer a cheaper product elsewhere online, and Amazon might bury your listing on its platform. A heavily redacted portion of the FTC suit claims that the company “deploys a sophisticated surveillance network of web crawlers that constantly monitor the internet” for such sellers. (In his response, Zapolsky says that the FTC “has it backwards” and that the company doesn’t “highlight or promote offers that are not competitively priced.”)
Of course this is where Amazon wound up. The company spent years sacrificing profit for scale, until it had so many customers that sellers couldn’t ignore it. Now that it extracts billions each month from those sellers, it can afford to ignore those customers—or at least prioritize them less. Amazon gets paid by all of its vendors, no matter which products go in our cart.
Shoppers are not privy to any of these machinations while browsing Amazon. We can’t know which third-party sellers have been banished to the shadow realm, or how tightly their margins are squeezed. Even knowing this might not get us far, considering how entrenched Amazon is now in American life. On Monday, I went ahead and bought the Linfairy Kids Child Purple Dye Wig Halloween Costume Cosplay Wave Wig, for $19.88 plus tax. My daughter liked the curls. It’ll be here by Thursday, which is no small relief. After all, it was my only option.
I'm not sure it's the SAME but if there were a system of created ethics that were able to speak to everything and do so consistently.... Wouldn't we know?
Violins
This argument, I have heard in real life, sounds A LOT like the US justification for the war in Iraq. It even comes from people who probably opposed the war in Iraq at the outset.
Consider this: what event in Texas would justify the military of Mexico sacking Houston and then making a beeline towards Washington DC? If you answered "nothing Texas could do to its own people could justify that" then good, you probably oppose the Russian Invasion. And we don't have to discuss the details of some idelogues in Crimea.
This sounds like Goedels theorem. How could a philosophy be consistent and have an opinion about every moral topic?
Judging by the glasses, this is a 2012 meme judging hipsters for inconspicuous consumption.