I once worked at a place that had a fun “birthday wheel”

You got to spin it on your birthday and get a prize.

After 7 years of working 60 hour weeks I got a $5 Pete’s gift card. The same day a marketing intern won a Vespa.

It was an important lesson about how hard work does not pay

Another fun thing about tariffs. Those domestic producers that are being protected by tariffs will increase their prices as high as they can.

For example, let’s say an American company can sell a widget for $5 and a Chinese company can sell it for $4.

You slap a 100% tariff on the Chinese widget, now it costs the consumer $8.

The American company can now sell you the widget for the initial $5 and leave $2.99 on the table, or they can jack their price up to $7.99, be cheaper than the Chinese widget, and increase their profits while gesturing around vaguely at “market conditions”

End result, you pay more for the widget, more than it the foreign producer used to sell it for and more than the domestic producers used to sell it for.

Now imagine you make something that has dozens of inputs and that happens to every input.

Truly a golden age

Wait until you get denied healthcare because the AI review board decided you shouldn’t get it.

Paper pushers can absolutely fuck your life over, and AI is primed to replace a lot of those people.

It will be cold comfort to you if you’ve been wrongly classified by an AI in some way that harms you that the AI didn’t intend to harm you.

Anyone remember in 2020 when the people elected the Dems to hold the republicans accountable for their many crimes committed out in the open and they dragged their feet until “oh no, well it’s too late now”

If the Democratic Party can’t deliver things that voters want then the voters stay at home and the democrats are shocked like pikachu.

And beyond racism it is happening in blue cities.

His supporters are primed to think that cities are dangerous places already, and that a city led by liberals is in shambles, and that all the people living there are lawless liberals that deserve punishment.

They are cheering about this because they see it as sending their troops to go hurt others. Whether those people are other because of their race, their religion, their gender, their sexuality, or their political beliefs.

And when these same people find out that something about them or a loved one makes them other they will act shocked. They will protest that they aren’t an other they are in the in-group.

And then they will learn the true nature of fascism. The in-group is constantly shrinking, because there must always be an other to blame. And they will learn that lesson too late.

Better than most but at the end of the day it would have been nice to give that money to the people that built the company he sold for $1.6B.

I would think there’s a lot of talented people that worked hard to build the value of that company such that he could sell it for a huge amount of money.

Definitely better than buying a yacht, but he still got to decide what to do with the value created by others.

AppNexus employs 1000 people across 5 continents. If the ceo has an extra $1.5B kicking around he could have given every person that helped build AppNexus $1.5M, which is a truly life changing amount of money for your average person.