https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Donald_Trump_and_Jeffrey_Epstein

There’s a nice overview with over 100 citations to various sources for everything claimed.

Almost anyone else on the planet would have been locked up for a long time with only a fraction of that evidence

The conspiracy theories are still just that

The real issue has been the same since the 80s

The ultra rich are getting richer and that makes everyone else poorer.

Once they have accumulated enough wealth to price normal people out of being able to buy anything, society will be forced to reconfigure to serve only the ultra wealthy.

Then we’re all in slums with relatively few options to ever fix the situation.

We need to tax the billionaires out of existence before their simple existence breaks everything.

Everything else is a distraction.

She’s trying to position herself as successor to trump now people are going to be slapped by the reality of his presidency.

A stylophone is more of a toy than an instrument, really

If you want a small synth that you’ll actually be able to use to make music and learn, I’d say look into the Korg Volca series. They’re only around twice the price of the stylophone, and are much more powerful in terms of what they’re capable of.

There’s about 10 of them now and are very affordable for what they are, which is a combination sequencer and synth. They can also be connected together to sync up, so you could have one doing drums and another doing a bassline or something.

Look into YouTube videos about them and decide which you think would best help you make the kind of music you’re looking to make.

I know what I did

Wages basically stopped rising (compared to asset prices) a couple of decades or so ago

Funny that people without any more money, aren’t able to buy as much stuff now it’s more expensive

It’s probably an intentional or unintentional reference to this

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DagwoodSandwich

Nah I’d say it was around 2014/5 everyone started to lose their minds, the pandemic was just a catalyst.

Yeah I’ve personally never got the appeal

I think it’s that it basically has a grip on small economy

It’s a chat app yes, but it’s also Amazon, it’s also a payment provider, not just online either, you pay in shops with a WeChat QR code, I think if you’re going to a gig, your tickets are on WeChat

It’s basically all encompassing.

WeChat I guess

Something geared towards finding out what they do in their free time. Generally a quick way to find stuff in common

Nix and Snap are kind of oddly similar

Now that’s a spicy quote

Oh that’s interesting, you’ve got me curious. I looked into it and some other company has already established a similar system involving “chef hat” ratings apparently. I guess maybe they didn’t want to bother competing with it.

Apparently Michelin seems to focus on Europe, the Americas and South East Asia. Africa and the rest of Asia seem to be left out, though they seem to be expanding every year (the Philippines got their own guide this year for the first time apparently), so I guess it’s probably just a matter of time before other places are covered.

A fiver says OOP has never left their suburb

I saw an article about a cleaning robot that can climb stairs that’s just come out, it’s a quadruped thing.

Aren’t these all chiffchaffs?

Maybe bottom middle and top right are something else

The software isn’t really the hard thing about these companies, the customer and provider UIs are nothing special and they achieve their scale using fairly industry standard event driven tools and cloud compute. They all talk a lot at industry conferences, so it’s no secret really.

Ensuring a restaurant will make the food for an order, ensuring a delivery person shows up to collect it, ensuring that food makes it to its destination in the same condition it left the restaurant, ensuring everyone gets paid at the end.

Preventing any of that from going wrong and handling it when it does is where the value of these companies lies.

Who is going to step in if a restaurant starts ignoring orders, or a driver starts eating the food, or a customer does a fraudulent chargeback?

Then there’s the money issue: where does the money go when people pay? Who owns the merchant bank account? Does every driver need a merchant bank account? How is tax accounting handled?

You can’t use cash for this system as both the driver and restaurant need to be paid (and TBF, whoever is paying for hosting the back end servers), and the driver won’t necessarily go back to that restaurant

I’m in the top bracket, tax me more, the world gets better when you do

But also, frankly maybe tax wealth over work.

Work is productive to society, wealth is parasitic.

Property values (sensibly) go down with appropriate wealth tax.

They voted conservative, what did they expect?

If you want your life to get better, you vote left, if you want it to get worse, you vote right.

We’ve got the whole 20th century as evidence of this