What would be the value of life then? I’ll save you the answer: no matter how big the number you say, someone else will say bigger. Until it becomes priceless, which is the answer.

However death and accidental death isn’t always avoidable. And when we pin the fault on someone we cannot expect to say “priceless” is what they owe the victim’s family. So we assign an amount of money or time that hurts, and call it good.

Doesn’t mean life is worth that. And saying so doesn’t help anyone.

Their wealth is almost entirely composed of equity, which topples if the world fails. All the cash they have to build these mansions is derived from this. The value of cash itself is derived from this. The only things of worth in a post-apocalyptic world are the tangible things they bought with cash while it was worth something. Shelter, food generation, defense… those are still worth something, along with more important things: physical skills and practical knowledge.

They will find themselves in their mansion-bunker, surrounded by people who they have paid to be there, in a world where the currency they use to pay them has failed. Do they not see what will happen? Even if their plan involves complete self-isolation, how do they plan on maintaining these massive properties and fixing things when they break? Perhaps they have a plan to close themselves off to some smaller, easier to maintain part of it. But then what is the whole point if all you have is solitary confinement? Even if it all works and they can survive it, they will eventually emerge into a world that has failed, where their wealth means little to nothing and the skills that built that wealth are as useful as ornamental testicles on a monster truck.

Why do they put their money toward projects like this, instead of towards ways to make the world more stable so that it doesn’t fail in the first place. If I had the immense wealth they have, which was completely contingent on the world and people that it stood upon, I would do everything I could to make sure the world would not fall apart. And if it wasn’t enough and it was failing still, I would spend even more until almost nothing was left. Building a fortress in a failing state is stupid, and history can tell you that with 5 minutes of reading.

In all their supposed intelligence, it seems they haven’t thought it through much… or I am missing something glaring.

Pretty sure those Edge numbers are from using it under duress…

Agreed. Physical ownership is the shelf of old DVD and CDROM PC and XBOX classic game boxes in my basement that take up space, collect dust, will never work again, and will only be a remembrance of nostalgia for a bygone day. Plus I’ll probably never seriously want to play them again… let’s be honest. I can watch a video of someone else playing, it scratches the same itch, and saves me the trouble.

I like digital ownership, but there needs to be protections so we can’t be screwed.

Even GDPR fines are rarely paid in full. We hear about the levied fine since that’s public, but not the actual payment deal.

As I understand it, if you were a photon this trip would be instantaneous from your perspective due to time dilation. You emit from the event, you collide with and energize some particle billions of light years away at the same exact moment.

But what if you never hit anything? Do you experience time then? Seems that no collision is likely in a mostly empty, but finite universe.

Or perhaps the universe is infinite, making it a certainty that you hit something eventually. In that case every photon hits something, almost implying a conservation of photons.

I thought that was interesting to ponder…

I used to interview all the time. I thought it was a fun, important process, so they kept giving them to me… until one day a candidate stormed out. We had a panel on one side of the table that had devolved into one-upping each other on who could ask the best brain teasers. Finally the candidate literally said, “Fuck this.” Then got up and walked out. HR asked us WTF and we shrugged and blew it off, but I knew why. We all knew.

Sometime after that I changed my tact into making interviews conversations to get to know each other instead. If I did send someone to a whiteboard, I always got off my ass and joined them up there. Made it a collaboration exercise and never asked any bullshit. Did that for maybe six months to a year and got some awesome people from that process…

At the end of that stretch, HR sat in on one and saw the process for the first time… sometime later I stopped being asked to interview. No reason was given, the invites just stopped coming in. We kept hiring people but I wasn’t a part of it anymore. Coincidence?

Backblaze here.

Just a wild guess: A video that you have to sit through on YouTube about a list of books to read. Probably is deeply unsettling to people who like the world to make sense.

Anyway that’s why I personally closed it once I realized it was a video link.

Why do we keep posting his drivel on every platform?

Already do. Used to buy new phone every year. Now it’s every three years or so. That is completely due to price and lack of compelling innovation. Don’t care if shareholders make money or not. I just like good value.

Difference is those other networks actually make content thats arguably seen as worth paying for. YouTube recycles user content and barely pays those users for it. Yes you can say that they deserve your money for servers and whatnot, but you can’t compare YouTube with those other services you mentioned and expect people to cry big crocodile tears…