nerv

Giraffes are often recorded killing and maiming lions. Those orange checkered XL horses are dangerous. It should be clue the food they eat and how extreme their biology is.

A single ticket sold is already one ticket too much.

That is a very poor equivalence.

Powertools and machinery still require knowledge on how to do the work properly, account for future maintenance, test for leaks, etc.

Which is not what everyone is trying to do with “AI”. The “tool” is supposed to replace all necessity of trained and knowleadgeable workers and at some point the workers themselves.

Brave should not be recommended under any light. Telemetry, their own advertising, crypto, data mining, etc. I used it for some time and I do not recommend it.

Congratulations. Through you, we found the exception to the rule. Thank you.

Meanwhile, in my own country, what I replied is completely true and do I wish it wasn’t.

I had my grandmother in an elderly care facility, unfortunately, and I can tell you with no unease the floor workers are paid the minimum wage; if they work the night shift, they get a small increment, usually around 10%, to the base salary. While the board of directors, most of which have no true in the day to day working of the institution, earn at least double that pay, with the director of the institution earning above €3500, for a six hours day of work.

Meanwhile, on the childcare front, I have three separate institutions preying on the local public daycare, which is completely free, charging a rate based on the income of the couples or parents putting their children there, ranging from €60 to more than €200, not including transportation, which alone can be anywhere from €40 to more than €100. A couple earning both parents minimum wage can end up paying more than €300 per month. And the institution gets a stipend for each children from the state.

Although most of these institutions are non profits on paper, workers are paid minimal wage, by default, while directors get lavish pays and service vehicles, replaced yearly, while the other vehicles are run until the wheels fall off.

So, again, thank you. You showed the exception to the rule. And I am glad it exists. But it should be the rule, not the exception.

And that is why child and elderly care should never leave the public domain.

These are essential services nowadays; the wide family support that once existed is crumbling.

Private companies do not care. The company exists to make money and generate profit, at any cost.

If the accounting of one single entity was made public, it would be horrendous to read. The profit margins are huge, the salary gap between floor personel and executives gargantuan.

A Pavlovian response is an automated reaction triggered by a given event, that regardless of context, the individual can not withhold.

The classical example is about dogs being fed after the ringing of a bell. This created the association that food always followed the bell ringing. At some point, only the bell ringing made the dogs salivate, in expectation of the food.

In the real world, how can this influence people?

Imagine you get exposed to something - sight, sound, feeling - and that stimulus is followed by a reaction, be it voluntary, involuntary or even coerced. Give it enough repetitions or a very strong impression and a very hard to overcome association is made, that can stay for a life time.

Give them the AI! All of it! And then we just wait.

That might be correct in some places but not where I live.

Recurring taxes on property are calculated with the age of houses taken into consideration. This means the property value for taxation actually decreases over time, unless a given area undergoes through a serious development effort that forces property value up. This can reach such extreme cases that it is possible to get away with remodelling a house - as in a single standing building - completely, fully modernize it, and still keep its property value untouched, unless swimming pools and other value increasing additions are put in.

Property value and commercial value are separate and independent concepts. A property appraised for taxation in 100€ can sell for 100 times that value. There will be sale fees taxes applied to the transactions itself, for the buyer, and the seller may have to pay income taxes on the sale, but there are way to skirt most of these.

And then there are rents.

I pay more taxes on my work than a person for the rent they receive by renting property. It used to be a flat rate of 28%, equal to deposit interest and other values, but then someone said if the taxation on rents was to go down, the rents would go down and more housing would come into the market. Except it did not happen and instead rents shot up and opaque companies started buying homes to rent from people that could not be bothered to manage what they had and pay their taxes on a yearly basis.

Everyone loses.

The machines are better at repeating a task with no down time but even then quality will degrade. That is why quality verification exists.

Hand made cars - or anything, by extension - are so expensive because of the human attention going into it. A specialized worker, technician, engineer, etc, makes sure their job is the best because they are specialists at what they do.

Taxes are the price of civilization.

Being cynical, if you do not want to take part of a modern society, remove yourself from it and live completely on your own. You will achieve complete authonomy and have full power over your resources. But you, individually, will be fully responsible for yourself and your needs.

There was a couple of failed experiments of fully libertarian towns and all failed miserably. I’ll update this reply if I can find some articles on it.

Now, for your concern with the infamous ballroom: there should be a proper addressing of the situation, with publicly accessible and auditable proposals for the alteration, renewal or expansion of a public building and people should be able to voice their concerns about such matters. Which is not the case at hand.

The waste and innapropriate use of public funds emerges from a system - and it exists everywhere! - that allows polititians to act unconcerned of immediate consequences of their actions. If people in public offices had the threat of ousting for failling to comply with their functions, in a hasty fashion, little abuse would happen. Instead, we get “representative” democracy with its election cycles.

The system itself is wrong, not taxation. Taxation accrues funds to develop services that hold a civilization functional that otherwise would be completely off limits for an individual to access.