He was a billionaire for Pete's sake. He's got extensive connections to every major bank in existence. And he's in deep with the mob, including the Russian mob.
And so what if he's a dumb buffoon. Do you think he's running the show? His cabinet is full of the same Goldman Sachs guys who have been screwing you for 30 years.
Hilary would have been bad juju, sure, but she would have been the stable bad juju. She'd have been the conservative option (real conservative, e.g. opposed to change). And we coulda had Bernie if folks showed up to the primary.
Still, Trump was _not_ the lessor of two evils. This will become apparent as his pro-corporate SCOTUS nominees gut what few consumer protection rules and Wall Street bank regulations there are left. Unless there's a massive correction to the crap he's blitheringly signed off on we're going to have a major crash in about 4-6 years. Right after he's out of office and doesn't have to shoulder the blame, funny that.
it wasn't a trick to get votes, it was a trick to get Donald Trump to remember to talk about immigration.
In other words, the president of the United States couldn't remember basic immigration talking points without a simple, 3 word chant ("Build the Wall!"). That's the scary part. It means even during the campaign Trump wasn't all there, his handlers knew it, and they knew how to hide it.
Now try to imagine the state he's in now after 2 years of pressure from the highest office in the world. Seen Obama lately? He looks like he's aged _way_ more than 8 years...
there's reports that "The Wall" was invented by his handlers in the campaign as a mnemonic to remember to hammer immigration. That's why it's almost childishly simple. It's not a policy, it's a memory trick to keep him from going too far off script. This is the level we're at now, folks.
to get folks to upgrade. G-Sync monitors start around $400 so that's a tough sell. A 2060 can't quite do 4k at gamer framerates. It can do 1440 but that isn't enough of a bump to justify an upgrade. But 1080p/144fps with adaptive sync might be worth the money if you can get a decent monitor for $200. That's what they're up to.
For my money I'll be happy when I can get a 1060 6gb for $200:). And what's with folks buying used ones off ebay for $180+shipping. Another $20-$40 bucks and you can buy them new for that.
But AMD integrated graphics can hang with a 10 year old flagship graphics card now (e.g. a $600 card from 10 years ago). On the one hand it's been 10 years. OTOH it's literally the GPU you get for "free". Plus the next gen will let them build the GPU core separately resulting in much higher yields and letting them build better GPUs. I'll stick with a standalone card, but it's still impressive what you get these days
here in America it is. And I think the reason Homeopathy is "less popular" here is that we've got the Evangelical faith healers who compete with the Homeopaths.
It's actually become a major source of irritation in the athiest community because more Americans are professing "none" for their religion (which takes them out of the running for faith healers) but then turning to pseudo science "woo" like homeopathy.
Regardless it's not about money, it's about hope. In America money gets involved because there's lots of solutions to health problems that are unobtainable w/o lots of money. Buddy of mine spent a year living with kidney stones because he couldn't come up with the money for the proper meds. I found out later or I'd have just come up with the money for it, but in the meantime he drunk magic tea that was supposed to cure him. To this day he'll tell you the tea worked because eventually the stones passed. The tea was just a placebo.
This in and of itself wouldn't piss me off if he'd also had the proper meds (he could have been done with the pain in a few months instead of a year if he had). Now, he knows damn well the tea didn't do squat (the water mighta helped though) but like I said, folks need to feel like they're doing _something_. Hope sells well.
and look at the pictures they took of the trucks doing it. Those aren't hillbilly trucks. In the first picture they were late models, MSRPs starting at $27k. The second picture it was 2 SUVs and 1 pickup with a pricey looking lift kit. Second pick somebody had the hood popped and was working on something, so it mighta just been somebody who had a breakdown, first picture looked legit though and it's probably just middle class blue collar guys pissed off at the elites they keep hearing about on Fox News or one of Sinclair media's Fox News wannabes.
but they're probably angry at technocrat elites. If they're blue collar types odds are good they listen to right wing media which is often on the warpath against silicon valley and the like. Plus if they're blue collar then odds are good they're not doing so hot economically since blue collar types got hammered in the last recession and never really recovered.
Still, I could be totally wrong. Like the author if TFA I'd love to just ask them why.
I know some folks into homeopathy and it's been because they couldn't afford real doctors and medicine. I can buy some fake cure on Amazon for $50 bucks. That won't even get me in a doc's office if I don't have insurance.
Nearly all medical go fund me's fail. It's only that there's so many of them that makes it a billion dollar industry (that and a billion dollars isn't a lot of money anymore, not globally, it's just that we humans are bad with numbers over a few thousand). I suspect that's what's going on here. Folks aren't expecting to get enough money for cancer treatment (which can be millions) so they're doing what they think they can.
Bottom line most people can't live without hope. Nerds often can, and it's one of the things that makes us nerds.
but the prices stink. If I do mange to find one for under $150 I get outbid and somehow find the same GPU online 24 hours later. The combination of numbnuts paying $180 for a $200 GPU and shill bidders makes ebay basically worthless.
they're stockpiling them to keep the market from collapsing. But it's putting them in a tough spot since they're stuck paying to house graphics cards. It's also risky since on the low to mid range AMD has caught up on everything but power consumption (I've even heard they've fixed their driver stability problems, not sure if it's true though) and they're about to put out 7nm GPUs. So if they don't sell them at the right time they might get stuck fire selling them at a loss.
to get ahead since companies don't really give raises anymore, that means you can't really live within biking distance unless you're really, really lucky. Doesn't help that people usually hate cyclists with a passion, and that's if they see them. I've been run off the road more than once by somebody completely oblivious to my existence.
And of course most cities don't have money for bike paths. No joke, there's several places in my city where there's a path going out but not coming _back_. And a lot of times the bike path has just eroded away and there's no money to restore it.
at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."!
My grandparents had a 2 story house with a ton of bedrooms (I forget how many, I was pretty young when we moved out west from them). And they were working class. They had an Atari 2600 around launch. Adjusted for inflation, at $700 bucks. Now, my Granddad died of a heart attack in his mid 50s because the tech wasn't there to fix him, but he also didn't spend $1000/mo on healthcare to survive and didn't have a medical bankrupcy, he just died.
As for the 20" TV, again, in their day they had one, and it would have been about $1000 bucks in today's money. We're talking 40 years ago, inflation's a bitch. Today I can buy a 50" TV for around $300 2018 dollars. And the PS4 launched at $400 4 years ago, almost half what the 2600 did.
Wages are down about 20% what my grandad did across all jobs except for CEO of a fortune 500. Good paying (and unionized) manufacturing jobs like what my granddad had either were automated away or shipped overseas, sending folks to low pay service sector jobs in their place and further depressing wages. Meanwhile George Bush Jr deregulated the commodities market allowing parasitic investors to buy large quantities of food without ever taking delivery of said food. So they "buy" a million hog bellies and then "sell" them, effectively skimming 10-15% off you and me and driving up the price of food. And then there's Reagan & Clinton, who allowed stock buy backs. Those used to be an illegal market manipulation. Every been fired when the stock market had a minor dip? You can thank Reagan & Clinton for that and the perverse incentive they created for short term stock gains
The entire economy is rigged against working class Americans. It's hard to come to grips with that because when we were kid's we were taught that it wasn't. That you could do anything you set your mind to thanks to the wonders of capitalism. If it's one thing the ruling class knows and understand it's "get 'em while they're young". They do it with religion and they do it with economics. Christ, there's a line about it in the bible.
Please, please start thinking these things through. Guys like you, who've drunk the kool-aid, need to come to your senses and see how you're being taken advantage of and run into the ground for nothing in return.
They'll probably settle it and waste money that could go to making better and cheaper cards. Nvidia was crystal clear that the crypto boom was temporary. With the changes to arbitration rules making it difficult or impossible to get class action status for annual consumer harm I expect to see more of these, sigh...
GM's decline came when they started making crappy, low gas mileage cars and ignored the Japanese's well built, high mileage cars. Toyota, Nissan and even Hyundai produce decent cars with lots of automation.
GM's suits don't like paying to build quality except in Trucks where the higher profit margins mean they can spend a little more (and even there they lag behind Ford & Toyota). They'd rather chase short term profits and let the Government bail them out every 10 years because they know we need their factories in case we need to ramp up for war.
And tech didn't free us from drudgery because we didn't let it. Instead of cutting our work weeks we used the improvements in productivity to lay people off, reducing the demand for labor and then using the reduction in demand to cut wages (yes folks, supply and demand work both ways). Based on productivity gains (real ones, e.g. manufacturing and farm outputs, measured productivity is kind of iffy because it includes the largely make-work service sector economy) we should be working 20-30 hours a week tops but we're pushing over 50. Stupid motherf*ing puritanicals...
females show more emotion then men, they don't necessarily _have_ more emotion. This means men have to keep it bottled up ("Stiff Upper lip and all that rot!") until they snap.
You get what you measure, and you get what you _can_ measure. It's hard to measure emotional responses from a person actively trying to hide them. Conversely it's easier to measure those responses from people encouraged to show their emotions.
I'd rather that money to go to buying more content for me then to Apple for a minor convenience service. You could license a lot of shows/movies for that and/or make more.
a buddy of mine was pretty pissed because he'd been trying to get a job driving truck at the mine for years. It (used to) pay really well. They're also using little drones to plant explosives and explore tunnels (since they can't use children anymore:) ).
I'm actually surprised there aren't more robots. I realize these aren't really AI, but from a layman's standpoint the distinction doesn't seem too important.
caused by the industrial revolution. Luddites weren't just angry conservatives (literal, not political) trying to maintain some mythical "way of life", it was a movement stated due to massive unemployment brought on by innovation in the textile industry. It became a generic insult because we're so far removed from their (very real) suffering.
There was close to 80 years of unemployment following the industrial revolution that is seldom talked about (if you took history in high school or college you got maybe a paragraph at best). This is because text book historians like to keep an upbeat tone and because school boards are often staffed by economically conservative (political now) who don't want anyone speaking ill of capitalism. Go find a book called "A People's History of the United States" if you want a sense for how screwed up American history actually is.
In your bun example the problem is that the laid off hot dog makers can't buy hot dogs anymore. So bun sales go down and there are layoffs on that side too. But since it's food any you have to eat the owner of both factories can and will raise their prices (e.g. inflation).
Normally the government steps in here to maintain the food supply, but we've been pushing a right wing, winner take all form of capitalism since Reagan. Add to that food exports and climate change and there's a very real possibility that US citizens will see food shortages. Even if there's enough food to feed us it may be shipped to other markets where folks pay higher prices.
If this happens you'll have millions of folks with guns and no options. Like I said, they'll go find themselves a strong man.
You're hinting that laissez faire capitalism is fine because the system is self correcting. We know from experience that our food supply (and our health care system while I'm on the subject) are _not_ self correcting. We know what robber barons. We know what farm subsidy programs are for and we know that penicillin for children used to be watered down.
Bottom line: When in your life has the correct solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it goes away? Because that's more or less what you're suggesting.
because they're afraid we might start taxing their robots.
Yes, your job might not be automated, but the millions who are about to lose jobs to automation (or already have) aren't just going to go quietly into that good night.
A lot of them will end up destitute. They'll start looking for somebody to solve their problems. A man. A Strong Man.
A lot of them will study and find new jobs. Your jobs. They'll flood the market with new labor and drive down your wages. This is what's meant by "race to the bottom". Some of you will join the ranks of the destitute looking for that Strong Man to save the day...
I keep saying it folks, we've got an election in two years, and it's going to be a turning point. We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried. There aren't really a lot of other solutions to automation besides a war so big it kills off 30% of the excess workforce. And I don't think that's an option anymore. The rich aren't going to let us break their stuff this time, but we might be able to use the apparatus of Democracy to pry some wealth from their hands.
Jokes aside nobody's suggestion plants are sentient, just that they seem to have behaviors that favor similar plants. That could just as easily be an evolved survival mechanism. Plants still don't have central nervous systems.
Though I do think it would be cool in a sci-fi sort of way to evolve beyond the need for consuming living organisms. That said, we ain't there, and while I eat a mostly vegetarian diet it's for health reasons, not for the sake of animals. I've got a dog for Pete's sake, and I ain't feeding her carrots.
make the best thing. It makes the most successful thing among other things, but that's not "best". Ever wonder why we get scurvy? We have a defective gene that prevents us from making Vitamin C. We compensated in other ways, but that doesn't mean we're the "best", just better than the alternatives.
Same deal here. Think of all the energy wasted out there and imagine if we didn't waste it. Look at bananas. They start out barely edible and end up as convenient as anything you'd buy in a plastic bag.
Now, there are potential downsides to a mono-culture, but then if we can tweak genes at will we don't have to have a mono-culture, do we?
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He was a billionaire for Pete's sake. He's got extensive connections to every major bank in existence. And he's in deep with the mob, including the Russian mob.
And so what if he's a dumb buffoon. Do you think he's running the show? His cabinet is full of the same Goldman Sachs guys who have been screwing you for 30 years.
Hilary would have been bad juju, sure, but she would have been the stable bad juju. She'd have been the conservative option (real conservative, e.g. opposed to change). And we coulda had Bernie if folks showed up to the primary.
Still, Trump was _not_ the lessor of two evils. This will become apparent as his pro-corporate SCOTUS nominees gut what few consumer protection rules and Wall Street bank regulations there are left. Unless there's a massive correction to the crap he's blitheringly signed off on we're going to have a major crash in about 4-6 years. Right after he's out of office and doesn't have to shoulder the blame, funny that.
it wasn't a trick to get votes, it was a trick to get Donald Trump to remember to talk about immigration.
In other words, the president of the United States couldn't remember basic immigration talking points without a simple, 3 word chant ("Build the Wall!"). That's the scary part. It means even during the campaign Trump wasn't all there, his handlers knew it, and they knew how to hide it.
Now try to imagine the state he's in now after 2 years of pressure from the highest office in the world. Seen Obama lately? He looks like he's aged _way_ more than 8 years...
there's reports that "The Wall" was invented by his handlers in the campaign as a mnemonic to remember to hammer immigration. That's why it's almost childishly simple. It's not a policy, it's a memory trick to keep him from going too far off script. This is the level we're at now, folks.
to get folks to upgrade. G-Sync monitors start around $400 so that's a tough sell. A 2060 can't quite do 4k at gamer framerates. It can do 1440 but that isn't enough of a bump to justify an upgrade. But 1080p/144fps with adaptive sync might be worth the money if you can get a decent monitor for $200. That's what they're up to.
:). And what's with folks buying used ones off ebay for $180+shipping. Another $20-$40 bucks and you can buy them new for that.
For my money I'll be happy when I can get a 1060 6gb for $200
But AMD integrated graphics can hang with a 10 year old flagship graphics card now (e.g. a $600 card from 10 years ago). On the one hand it's been 10 years. OTOH it's literally the GPU you get for "free". Plus the next gen will let them build the GPU core separately resulting in much higher yields and letting them build better GPUs. I'll stick with a standalone card, but it's still impressive what you get these days
and they seed pirated content they're going to be eaten alive in court by the RIAA & MPAA.
here in America it is. And I think the reason Homeopathy is "less popular" here is that we've got the Evangelical faith healers who compete with the Homeopaths.
It's actually become a major source of irritation in the athiest community because more Americans are professing "none" for their religion (which takes them out of the running for faith healers) but then turning to pseudo science "woo" like homeopathy.
Regardless it's not about money, it's about hope. In America money gets involved because there's lots of solutions to health problems that are unobtainable w/o lots of money. Buddy of mine spent a year living with kidney stones because he couldn't come up with the money for the proper meds. I found out later or I'd have just come up with the money for it, but in the meantime he drunk magic tea that was supposed to cure him. To this day he'll tell you the tea worked because eventually the stones passed. The tea was just a placebo.
This in and of itself wouldn't piss me off if he'd also had the proper meds (he could have been done with the pain in a few months instead of a year if he had). Now, he knows damn well the tea didn't do squat (the water mighta helped though) but like I said, folks need to feel like they're doing _something_. Hope sells well.
and look at the pictures they took of the trucks doing it. Those aren't hillbilly trucks. In the first picture they were late models, MSRPs starting at $27k. The second picture it was 2 SUVs and 1 pickup with a pricey looking lift kit. Second pick somebody had the hood popped and was working on something, so it mighta just been somebody who had a breakdown, first picture looked legit though and it's probably just middle class blue collar guys pissed off at the elites they keep hearing about on Fox News or one of Sinclair media's Fox News wannabes.
but they're probably angry at technocrat elites. If they're blue collar types odds are good they listen to right wing media which is often on the warpath against silicon valley and the like. Plus if they're blue collar then odds are good they're not doing so hot economically since blue collar types got hammered in the last recession and never really recovered.
Still, I could be totally wrong. Like the author if TFA I'd love to just ask them why.
Homeopathy scams are much, much more popular with the poor (as is faith healing in general).
Human beings will always seek out hope, and bastards will always be there to sell the false kind to them.
I know some folks into homeopathy and it's been because they couldn't afford real doctors and medicine. I can buy some fake cure on Amazon for $50 bucks. That won't even get me in a doc's office if I don't have insurance.
Nearly all medical go fund me's fail. It's only that there's so many of them that makes it a billion dollar industry (that and a billion dollars isn't a lot of money anymore, not globally, it's just that we humans are bad with numbers over a few thousand). I suspect that's what's going on here. Folks aren't expecting to get enough money for cancer treatment (which can be millions) so they're doing what they think they can.
Bottom line most people can't live without hope. Nerds often can, and it's one of the things that makes us nerds.
but the prices stink. If I do mange to find one for under $150 I get outbid and somehow find the same GPU online 24 hours later. The combination of numbnuts paying $180 for a $200 GPU and shill bidders makes ebay basically worthless.
they're stockpiling them to keep the market from collapsing. But it's putting them in a tough spot since they're stuck paying to house graphics cards. It's also risky since on the low to mid range AMD has caught up on everything but power consumption (I've even heard they've fixed their driver stability problems, not sure if it's true though) and they're about to put out 7nm GPUs. So if they don't sell them at the right time they might get stuck fire selling them at a loss.
to get ahead since companies don't really give raises anymore, that means you can't really live within biking distance unless you're really, really lucky. Doesn't help that people usually hate cyclists with a passion, and that's if they see them. I've been run off the road more than once by somebody completely oblivious to my existence.
And of course most cities don't have money for bike paths. No joke, there's several places in my city where there's a path going out but not coming _back_. And a lot of times the bike path has just eroded away and there's no money to restore it.
at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."!
My grandparents had a 2 story house with a ton of bedrooms (I forget how many, I was pretty young when we moved out west from them). And they were working class. They had an Atari 2600 around launch. Adjusted for inflation, at $700 bucks. Now, my Granddad died of a heart attack in his mid 50s because the tech wasn't there to fix him, but he also didn't spend $1000/mo on healthcare to survive and didn't have a medical bankrupcy, he just died.
As for the 20" TV, again, in their day they had one, and it would have been about $1000 bucks in today's money. We're talking 40 years ago, inflation's a bitch. Today I can buy a 50" TV for around $300 2018 dollars. And the PS4 launched at $400 4 years ago, almost half what the 2600 did.
Wages are down about 20% what my grandad did across all jobs except for CEO of a fortune 500. Good paying (and unionized) manufacturing jobs like what my granddad had either were automated away or shipped overseas, sending folks to low pay service sector jobs in their place and further depressing wages. Meanwhile George Bush Jr deregulated the commodities market allowing parasitic investors to buy large quantities of food without ever taking delivery of said food. So they "buy" a million hog bellies and then "sell" them, effectively skimming 10-15% off you and me and driving up the price of food. And then there's Reagan & Clinton, who allowed stock buy backs. Those used to be an illegal market manipulation. Every been fired when the stock market had a minor dip? You can thank Reagan & Clinton for that and the perverse incentive they created for short term stock gains
The entire economy is rigged against working class Americans. It's hard to come to grips with that because when we were kid's we were taught that it wasn't. That you could do anything you set your mind to thanks to the wonders of capitalism. If it's one thing the ruling class knows and understand it's "get 'em while they're young". They do it with religion and they do it with economics. Christ, there's a line about it in the bible.
Please, please start thinking these things through. Guys like you, who've drunk the kool-aid, need to come to your senses and see how you're being taken advantage of and run into the ground for nothing in return.
They'll probably settle it and waste money that could go to making better and cheaper cards. Nvidia was crystal clear that the crypto boom was temporary. With the changes to arbitration rules making it difficult or impossible to get class action status for annual consumer harm I expect to see more of these, sigh...
GM's decline came when they started making crappy, low gas mileage cars and ignored the Japanese's well built, high mileage cars. Toyota, Nissan and even Hyundai produce decent cars with lots of automation.
GM's suits don't like paying to build quality except in Trucks where the higher profit margins mean they can spend a little more (and even there they lag behind Ford & Toyota). They'd rather chase short term profits and let the Government bail them out every 10 years because they know we need their factories in case we need to ramp up for war.
And tech didn't free us from drudgery because we didn't let it. Instead of cutting our work weeks we used the improvements in productivity to lay people off, reducing the demand for labor and then using the reduction in demand to cut wages (yes folks, supply and demand work both ways). Based on productivity gains (real ones, e.g. manufacturing and farm outputs, measured productivity is kind of iffy because it includes the largely make-work service sector economy) we should be working 20-30 hours a week tops but we're pushing over 50. Stupid motherf*ing puritanicals...
females show more emotion then men, they don't necessarily _have_ more emotion. This means men have to keep it bottled up ("Stiff Upper lip and all that rot!") until they snap.
You get what you measure, and you get what you _can_ measure. It's hard to measure emotional responses from a person actively trying to hide them. Conversely it's easier to measure those responses from people encouraged to show their emotions.
I'd rather that money to go to buying more content for me then to Apple for a minor convenience service. You could license a lot of shows/movies for that and/or make more.
a buddy of mine was pretty pissed because he'd been trying to get a job driving truck at the mine for years. It (used to) pay really well. They're also using little drones to plant explosives and explore tunnels (since they can't use children anymore :) ).
I'm actually surprised there aren't more robots. I realize these aren't really AI, but from a layman's standpoint the distinction doesn't seem too important.
caused by the industrial revolution. Luddites weren't just angry conservatives (literal, not political) trying to maintain some mythical "way of life", it was a movement stated due to massive unemployment brought on by innovation in the textile industry. It became a generic insult because we're so far removed from their (very real) suffering.
There was close to 80 years of unemployment following the industrial revolution that is seldom talked about (if you took history in high school or college you got maybe a paragraph at best). This is because text book historians like to keep an upbeat tone and because school boards are often staffed by economically conservative (political now) who don't want anyone speaking ill of capitalism. Go find a book called "A People's History of the United States" if you want a sense for how screwed up American history actually is.
In your bun example the problem is that the laid off hot dog makers can't buy hot dogs anymore. So bun sales go down and there are layoffs on that side too. But since it's food any you have to eat the owner of both factories can and will raise their prices (e.g. inflation).
Normally the government steps in here to maintain the food supply, but we've been pushing a right wing, winner take all form of capitalism since Reagan. Add to that food exports and climate change and there's a very real possibility that US citizens will see food shortages. Even if there's enough food to feed us it may be shipped to other markets where folks pay higher prices.
If this happens you'll have millions of folks with guns and no options. Like I said, they'll go find themselves a strong man.
You're hinting that laissez faire capitalism is fine because the system is self correcting. We know from experience that our food supply (and our health care system while I'm on the subject) are _not_ self correcting. We know what robber barons. We know what farm subsidy programs are for and we know that penicillin for children used to be watered down.
Bottom line: When in your life has the correct solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it goes away? Because that's more or less what you're suggesting.
because they're afraid we might start taxing their robots.
Yes, your job might not be automated, but the millions who are about to lose jobs to automation (or already have) aren't just going to go quietly into that good night.
A lot of them will end up destitute. They'll start looking for somebody to solve their problems. A man. A Strong Man.
A lot of them will study and find new jobs. Your jobs. They'll flood the market with new labor and drive down your wages. This is what's meant by "race to the bottom". Some of you will join the ranks of the destitute looking for that Strong Man to save the day...
I keep saying it folks, we've got an election in two years, and it's going to be a turning point. We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried. There aren't really a lot of other solutions to automation besides a war so big it kills off 30% of the excess workforce. And I don't think that's an option anymore. The rich aren't going to let us break their stuff this time, but we might be able to use the apparatus of Democracy to pry some wealth from their hands.
carrot juice is murder!
Jokes aside nobody's suggestion plants are sentient, just that they seem to have behaviors that favor similar plants. That could just as easily be an evolved survival mechanism. Plants still don't have central nervous systems.
Though I do think it would be cool in a sci-fi sort of way to evolve beyond the need for consuming living organisms. That said, we ain't there, and while I eat a mostly vegetarian diet it's for health reasons, not for the sake of animals. I've got a dog for Pete's sake, and I ain't feeding her carrots.
make the best thing. It makes the most successful thing among other things, but that's not "best". Ever wonder why we get scurvy? We have a defective gene that prevents us from making Vitamin C. We compensated in other ways, but that doesn't mean we're the "best", just better than the alternatives.
Same deal here. Think of all the energy wasted out there and imagine if we didn't waste it. Look at bananas. They start out barely edible and end up as convenient as anything you'd buy in a plastic bag.
Now, there are potential downsides to a mono-culture, but then if we can tweak genes at will we don't have to have a mono-culture, do we?