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Jul 12Liked by David Z. Morris

I really like Where's Your Ed At. His blistering takes on Meta and Alphabet are spot on.

Avoiding the fruits of exploitation are hard when you yourself are likely exploited. Good luck finding a piece of land to live on that wasn't forcibly taken away from someone else at some point.

And when you, suffering the results of unethical practices of money in politics, have little other options to survive the Red Queen's race another day, then it's hard to say no to unethical options.

Any pizza you can buy with bitcoin can almost certainly be bought with trad tender.

But if you got a job where you need to do a little coding and you know you can't just ask your boss to allocate a coworker to help you, and you tried to find an online resource like a free code checker in the language and situation you need but they don't seem to exist (if I didn't think it so incredibly stupid, I'd think Google was making their results worse just so you might be forced to turn to--ideally their--AI, but Ed's explanation of ad-revenue-related growth addiction makes far more sense), and no code-checking (non-AI) plug-in in any IDE will work (assuming your work even pays for it), and you can't even properly debug it easily because it requires running the whole thing before you get an unhelpful error after a long time, and you can't really bother your programmer friends (who naturally make more money than you) for this, and you can't possibly get an upwork to do this in the time you need, and...

Then you remember you're underpaid, and you sanitize the data as best you can, and use your free personal demo account because of course you're boss won't pay for it... And how very probabilistic. You find it's basically a typo problem. But it works and you can finally get some sleep.

It would have taken hours of removing one piece of code at a time and MAYBE find it otherwise (definitely wouldn't have had sleep though).

You fill icky and realize that probably billions shouldn't be spent on something that's basically spellchecker. But no one would have spent investment capital if they knew that's likely all they were going to get because turning a spellchecker into Douglas Adams' Deep Thought will probably not be within their startups runway.

This completely hypothetical story that absolutely did not happen just two days ago has no point.

Now with crypto... I can get investment options I can't otherwise, yes. But let's just say you can understand crypto and still be an overleveraged idiot. And there aren't ever hypothetical scenarios like the aforementioned. If it's the middle of the night and I need a pizza, I can just use plastic. It's these hypothetical situations that I think happen to others as well that are the reason people aren't complaining about environment costs like they do with bitcoin. Or it could just because the bubble hasn't burst yet.

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