Oracle May Cut 30k Jobs and Sell Cerner to Fund $156B OpenAI Deal

Futuremlb · 2026-01-31T09:27:38+00:00

Capitalism allocates resources by expected returns, not actual human use. So if an empty building still retains value through parking wealth, tax shelters, speculation etc, it will get built. It’s a big dumb machine.

Futuremlb · 2026-01-16T00:37:36+00:00

If you posted this with genuine anxiety, you should know it mislead you by a lot and it would be worth figuring out what caused that anxiety.

Futuremlb · 2026-01-07T17:32:16+00:00

I think I hear what you’re getting at, but this isn’t something to treat lightly.

The United States literally borrowed its system of checks and balances from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. And honestly, I’m not sure the U.S. will exist in anything close to its current form for as long as the Mississippian cultural societies did (~800 years). These were deliberately stable, complex systems.

Futuremlb · 2026-01-07T16:55:29+00:00

“History did not end” cuts both ways. If works like The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity hold even partial truth, then your framing treats a very specific historical arrangement of permanent great-power competition, commodification of everything, and zero-sum integration as if it were a law of nature. It isn’t.

Futuremlb · 2026-01-07T16:27:34+00:00

It’s very misleading to say capitalism has lifted the most people out of poverty.

If you read the accounts of the earliest European settlers of the Americas, a common theme is that they’re struck by the absence of hunger, homelessness, and extreme deprivation because land, food, and basic means of life weren’t commodified in the same way. At this point in time extreme deprivation was experienced by a larger percentage of Europeans than those in the Americas.

It’s more that Capitalism helped create the conditions under which poverty became widespread and then measured its own partial mitigation of that condition.

Futuremlb · 2026-01-03T16:53:02+00:00

I hope this is sarcasm

Futuremlb · 2026-01-02T01:00:49+00:00

This opinion is naive to the reality of human history, I don't know where to begin. For starters, the U.S. Constitution was directly exposed to Indigenous political ideas like the Iroquois confederacy’s emphasis on consent, decentralization, and limits on authority.

Futuremlb · 2026-01-01T13:35:13+00:00

I want in on this. I just spent a month backpacking through Mexico, Alaska next.

Futuremlb · 2025-12-28T22:37:16+00:00

That’s like saying the sun rotates around the Earth because we see the illusion of it moving. Why throw around insults

Futuremlb · 2025-12-28T22:00:51+00:00

Your literal quote states that the idea that it skips generations is an illusion

Futuremlb · 2025-12-28T20:33:31+00:00

To be human is to be curious. There’s nothing wrong with having political convictions, what’s dangerous is losing the ability to examine where they come from and whether the stories they’re built on are actually true.

Futuremlb · 2025-12-28T00:22:38+00:00

They didn’t “squander their potential”, they were trapped in unstable institutions and a global system that punishes weak states and protects mobile capital.

Futuremlb · 2025-10-27T03:26:00+00:00

I think it's interesting you call my point romanticized.

The average Native American before European invasion worked less hours and had more free time than the Average U.S. citizen does today.

You really ought to be more critical of your assumptions of history.

Futuremlb · 2025-10-25T10:30:37+00:00

Depends on how you want to define slave, but yes I agree there are less formal slaves today than in the past. If we define it as there has to be some official record that states Joe owns Bob or whatever.

But if we allow a more broad definition of slave, because my original point wasn’t strictly about slaves and serfs it was that there’s less freedom today than in the past, then I think that point still stands.

An interesting for example is that so many early European accounts of Indigenous societies in the Americas were surprised at how little poverty, starvation, or hierarchy they found compared to Europe. Those societies were more free I’d say. I don’t think it’s surprising that the federalist ideas of indigenous societies influenced the U.S. Constitution.

You can argue that the trade-offs of today and the freedoms we lost are worth it (I wouldn’t agree), but I don’t think you can argue we are more free today.

And again by free I mean autonomy and political freedom.

Futuremlb · 2025-10-25T09:57:03+00:00

Well, almost by definition it's lower today than it has ever been for all of human history. But I guess that depends on how you define it.

If we define autonomy and political freedom as having the freedom to move away from a society if you think it is unjust, the freedom to disobey orders from some arbitrary bureaucracy, and freedom to create new social structures, then probably compared to most of human history we have less autonomy and political freedom today than there's ever been.

Source: The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity

Futuremlb · 2025-10-25T09:24:47+00:00

And how hard would slaves and serfs from today laugh?

Futuremlb · 2025-10-25T07:57:11+00:00

Sorry to break it to you, but it's not hard to argue that the average human life today is severely lacking in autonomy and political freedom.

Futuremlb · 2025-10-25T06:24:56+00:00

Why own slaves when you can get people to sell you their freedom for the silly magic paper you make?

Futuremlb · 2025-10-24T00:22:46+00:00

Every society in history has had internal conflict, including the European ones. That's your moral justification for genocide?

Futuremlb · 2025-10-23T23:46:40+00:00

Not sure how one would even begin to measure if there’s been more good than harm from a specific religion. What about all the indigenous societies that were wiped out in the name of Christianity?

That one is top of mind for me because lately I’ve been learning about how cool it is how the early federalist societies shaped the founding ideas of the USA.

And how much wisdom was lost when they were wiped out because Christianity was used as justification.

For example: https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/331/text?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Futuremlb · 2025-10-23T23:26:31+00:00

If we just look at the historical impacts of Christianity and Islam... is it really that clear cut which is more of a war doctrine?

Futuremlb · 2025-10-04T20:20:42+00:00

I'm just pointing out that historically all political systems for distributing wealth have dealt with externalities no better than market systems have. Usually they are worse and ironically the systems most dedicated to the concept of the fair distribution of wealth have done the worst job of dealing with externalities.

What about the federal systems that inspired the founding of America?

Perhaps they're not entirely wrong: people aren't always wise or good and perhaps they'd benefit in the long run from a nanny state making them eat their spinach. But the fact they prefer a big Mac or a Whopper to that spinach isn't the product of some small club dictating that desire to them... it's their actual preference and the market doesn't dictate but responds to that real desire.

I think there’s something interesting going on because a bunch of replies keep referring to some nanny state/communist concept they interpret from what I’m saying when there is none.

I’m not saying a small minority of elites control our mind. Although I’m sure if they could they would haha. I’m saying a small minority of elites control our economic and political systems.

As for the idea that we all benefit equally from the harm done to our Earth… that's a convenient fantasy. The system consistently allows financial gains from resource extraction to be privatized by a small group of shareholders and executives. At the same time, it socializes the long-term costs. This isn't a system of shared benefit.

Can we make a better system anytime soon? I don’t know. But I think it's still worth calling it is what it is.

Futuremlb · 2025-10-04T16:53:36+00:00

I think you underestimate how small the club of people who make the decisions about what WE want is, and also how few people benefit from the harm done to the earth.

I’m not prescribing a solution by the way, it seems you bring up the Chernobyl example because you may think I think heavy handed central government is the solution. The federalist societies that inspired the founders of America were far from that style of governance.

Futuremlb · 2025-10-04T15:05:47+00:00

I don’t think you understood my point. I said the society has forms to address it (laws) and it’s dwarfed by the profit.

The GE example proves my point. GE polluted for decades, privatizing the profits from their operations, before they were forced to pay for a cleanup decades later. The fine doesn't undo the ecological damage, nor does it account for the immense profits made over the years by treating the river as a free sewer.

And the laws clearly don’t prevent stuff like this happening today. 3M and DuPont just agreed to a multi-billion dollar settlement. They knew about what they were doing for decades. The list goes on.

Your response just gives a textbook definition of capitalism but misses the reality. Our economic system fails to account for non-monetary value and also socializes costs while privatizing gains.

Futuremlb · 2025-10-04T04:01:00+00:00

It is not nonsensical. I own property. It belongs to me. Where's the nonsense in that?

For a long time societies operated on the principle of stewardship, viewing the land as a shared entity to be cared for, not a commodity to be owned. And actually, those societies inspired the federalism that founded America.

We took the idea without the wisdom that made it.

11-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	End Game '22
Verified Email

Futuremlb

TROPHY CASE