Poor sap serving as the waitress is most likely powerless over the fuckups of the kitchen, but the quickest way to kill his tip is to ruin the food and then have the cook make excuses as to how they couldn't do any better. If you as the cook come and touch your cap and say sorry guv'nor you'll get the waitress her tip back even if she herself was completely lame. If you as the cook stonewall and make the waitress give some excuse because she has no other alternative, she's hosed.
I worked as a cook, cooks don't see tips as a rule. He's basically trying to personally reprimand things like huge chain restaraunts, grocery stores through punishing or rewarding the only bits he can reach, the waitress (or cashier, etc) in the belief that it'll affect them in some way.
Or, knowing that it won't, he's hanging on to the one bit of apparent control he has.
What if you donate all your wealth, make poor friends, and then you have to go ask those friends for help?
I think they'd be pretty pissed off with you (assuming you even CAN give all your wealth away and end up in a situation where you'd need to turn to others to get out of a money jam. I'm not sure it even works that way, you'd have resources still)
To some extent it is a legit problem. There might be people who'd sue your ass for attempting to give away your wealth. If they depend on that wealth and they already have leeched off enough to hire lawyers, you might have big problems. Would it still be fun and self-affirming if you got committed and judged incompetent to have your wealth because you were talking crazy talk like giving it away? Is there somebody who could swoop in and seize it if you were deemed incompetent?
You can't do this dumping, your friends become your whores. Their basic survival becomes dependent on servicing you as soon as you 'bring them up to your level' which means they have the same budget, otherwise what are you even talking about?
You can only throw money around like that among people who have roughly the same amount of money, otherwise the power dynamic changes radically and alarmingly. You've literally explained how you'd set people up to be completely dependent on you giving them money to be at 'your level', and then you're going to pass judgement on whether they like their new life or YOU better, and if they don't like you best, you 'cut them loose' and it's all good because it didn't cost you much that you couldn't easily spare.
YIKES. Are you real or is this a form of troll? You're genuinely scary, and I'm awful glad I'm no friend of yours. You're soulless.
My brother does this. He pays for meals but I find it awkward because he'll use his tip as a bludgeon. If service is bad, he'll not only refuse to tip but will sometimes refuse to ever set foot in the place again. If you're good, you might get a fifty dollar tip on a ten dollar pizza.
I don't think he's trying to impress me, or not primarily. I think it's a Darwinian thing where he's trying to improve the breed by punishing and rewarding.
Too bad this only underscores a sense that he is the puppetmaster managing and directing all his servants, passing judgement upon them because that's his duty. Put like that it sounds like the most extreme entitled assholery.
I'm poor, and I'm capable of getting bad service and thinking 'oh well, guess I'd better do some kind of tip, not like I'm special and there to throw my weight around. Maybe they were just having a crap day'. I guess if I was rich I would be more likely to assume I was there to pass out punishments and rewards.
"Rubbing it in your face" might be preferable because it implies someone posturing and doing a dominance behavior thing. This 'improving the breed' stuff, it's like dominance is already so completely assumed that the only remaining question is how you manage your slaves. And it seems to sneak into the behavior of relatively rational, non-evil people.
If they're not that guy, fuck 'em. If the system is making them hyper-privileged and it's wrecking their relationships and making it impossible to live as a human being, it's on THEM to change the system because the system is there to serve them.
They're guilty for a reason. They don't need therapy, they need reform and rehab, and they are the ones in a position to change things.
It's morally wrong to give 'em therapy and soothe their little feelings without addressing the larger problem. They're unhappy because they are BAD PEOPLE.
Well, I figured it was just another Uber-written article so I know better to take it at face value.
It's hilariously brazen at times. What gets me is why they consider Slashdot such fertile ground. Probably only because nowhere else can these guys get this kind of propaganda density, and because they're clearly targeting angry nerds. Traditionally, oil companies et al try to buy off graduate students and scientists, but this isn't a question of science, it's a question of social expectations and the way societies are structured.
And clearly Slashdotters are thought leaders and capable of swaying lots of regular people with cheeto-encrusted rants:D way of the future!
You (probably) joke, but the unsettling thing is that you're right. I think this has things to teach us about 'popularity' and 'survival of the fittest'.
Perhaps I'm just crazy, but it seems to me that if this works in practice, it disproves 'market' theory. In other words, if you reduce all friction and gatekeeping, everything becomes shit:)
This will come as a shock to many 'disruptive' startups believing they're making a better world aaah, who am I kidding? They're FINE with that as long as it makes them more money.
but with Sherpas, and limited tickets that are bid up to astronomical prices until the whole thing is Silicon Valley bread and circuses and a mockery of its original ideals.
I guess you could try to get a job as the slave or whore of one of these incredibly wealthy Silicon Valley people?
But you can't outwork a robot. We're already at the point where a total rules change is required, as even white collar intellectual jobs are getting outright replaced by technology. Your physical effort is already categorically useless compared to say a backhoe, or auto-assembly robot.
It's already a concern: we can make fantasy objects of desire with superhuman qualities, and if the realism of these things increases way beyond what real humans can offer, nobody's gonna be breeding. Male and female, we'll all be in the holodeck and extremely pleased;)
Precisely. Economies of scale can do amazing things, and when you include massive automation and robotics into that equation: technology and the industrial efficiency of the future can and will lead to a situation where a company employing like six people could EASILY replace the whole market providing food to the world. You'd have a bunch of hardworking AIs and algorithms, roboticized farms (that might not resemble Big Agra much) and simply incalculable output.
The question then becomes, do you make people compete for this oversupply of food by proving their willingness to fight and defeat each other and thus their worthiness to be fed? We could call it 'Hunger Games, the society'.
Look at the West now: no one is poor, not by any reasonable definition of the word. Barring drug addiction or mental illness, everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads, a mobile telephone, a television, and likely even a car. This would have counted as wealth 200 years ago.
The capitalist saying is very true: "a rising tide floats all boats". The problem is that no one wants to own the little boats.
Is this what they're teaching people on the Google campuses now? But then when I look closer, Bradley, this is you:
I am a professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Northwest Switzerland. If you are one of my students, you may find some of the links on the right to be of interest.
I also consult for small businesses, especially businesses interested in using an ERP system to make their business more efficient. I have written ERP systems for small businesses, managed ERP projects, and I teach this stuff too. If you are interested in an outside assessment of your needs, or looking for someone to help manage an ERP project, I would be happy to help!
Life, the universe, and everything My favorite hobbies are programming and math, when I can find the time for them. I am currently working on a new ERP system for my wife's whisky business. You can also find links to a couple of other projects on my software page.
I am also interested in political issues. Politics is too often driven by special interest groups, while the rest of us just stand by and watch the train wreck happen. We - the ordinary citizens - need to be involved. I am interested in three main areas:
Technology. Too many "green" and "eco" groups do not understand technology. They oppose everything and offer no alternatives - apparently they want to go back to squatting in caves. Technology and cheap energy are the foundation of civilization! Freedom. The free exchange of information is essential to a free society. Freedom of expression is a basic human right. Yet every western country has laws that enforce censorship and restrict your right to express your opinions. Africa. Send food, and destroy the livelihood of local farmers. Send money, and watch it be sucked up by corrupt governments. "for God's sake, please just stop!" Africa does not need aid. Africa needs long-term projects that help people help themselves.
I see that you ALREADY live in the Gene Roddenberry post-scarcity future and act as if you do. You give resources freely and share information, though you're making assumptions like 'African farmers need to be able to compete for money on the global marketplace' which seems a weird assumption in this context. I'm just going to suggest that from where you're standing (not even IN THE WEST if you take the West to mean the USA. You're in Switzerland! We'd be doing pretty good too if we were in freaking Switzerland!), you should not be saying things like 'no one is poor, everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads' etc.
Go on with your nerd self, you're beautiful. But capitalism is not worthy of your faith, and I gotta say, you being in Switzerland and relatively wealthy as a college professor and not in economically challenged areas of the USA, YOU don't get to say nobody is poor.
When every person has free time to create original artworks, every person DOES and they become valueless. This has already happened in music.
You can stick the greatest violinist in the world in a subway station and people won't give him a penny if they're too hurried and stressed. Value is always a social consensus, so it becomes a reputation economy and as a rule people only WANT one guy's original artworks, partly because it's a social consensus (see Warhol)
The trick is making it so that this is optional. If you MUST survive by being the guy with the reputation to create artworks, that gets ugly quickly.
If you're totally surviving but you want to be important, that's somewhat different and depends on what counts as important.
That's a fallacy. Any intuitive jump a human can 'miraculously' do that seems illogical can be done by the genetic algorithm on a sufficiently large dataset with a certain (not huge) amount of initial randomness and bad answers to recombine.
This is why the freemarket capitalist ideal is counterproductive. You don't want to cull all the unfit things and promptly focus on all the fittest organisms. That gets you plateaus (sometimes very modest ones) and stultification: look at, say, Comcast. Good at culling competitors, but lame even in its continental US environment.
What you want is to maintain a diverse 'soup' of organisms/answers of varying fitness, maintaining the survival of the weaklings by force if necessary, so that you can exploit all possible recombinations and bust past plateaus. It's trivial for AI to do this, especially since it's demonstrably superior and only flawed human emotion tells humans that 'cull all the weaklings and make the most of the strongest!' is a winning strategy.
In the context of the genetic algorithm that's a fallacy, and it's trivial for AI to figure that out when simple experimenting shows you the answer.
And given that sufficiently large dataset with 'bad quirky answers' to mix in, the genetic algorithm FAR out-performs human intelligence. So, no such human geniuses can exist. Best they can do is match the AI/genetic algorithm performance by luck.
If robots have done all the things, people have access to all the things that have been done (true NOW for musicians, writers and artists thanks to BitTorrent etc) and AIs are prepared to take on doing some of the toughest things, why SHOULD humans do things?
Specifically, strive and acheive, which is typically what's meant by 'drives people to do things'? If 'do things' is 'be good neighbors and care for one another' that changes the goal.
If you're thinking of human drive in some sort of John Henry way you've got to take into account the steam-drill aspect of that story. John Henry died, and the next steam drill built probably would've beaten him, so he'd have lost AND died. What good is he then?
We're all John Henry now. Within our lifetimes, there will be nothing a human can do that's not better done by a shellscript, a robot, or a corporation of mostly scripts and robots. They'll do ART better than humans (every heavily data-driven game, movie and TV show that panders to the common denominator and succeeds, driving out some creator-owned property, is evidence of this. They just can't quantify and distill 'artistic triumph' yet so they're focussing on 'Gilligan's Island', obvious pandering and trusted formulas)
People are going to have to be driven in different ways. Achievement is not going to be an option. Maybe you'll get a little prize of 'most successful human to do this'?
Yes, this. Slashdot is super hardcore in favor of the IP post-scarcity world put in place by Google, in which digitized everything is everywhere for the asking. Not to create scarcity means most creators are valueless, at more or less the valuation of a person capable of doing what you can do with a simple shell script.
Removing money creates a REPUTATION economy. It also makes creators die unless they're fed in some way (welfare, et al, or a universal basic income taken disproportionately from the biggest winners). Due to network effects from all this 'communication everywhere', the biggest winners get wildly more reputation than the run of the mill guys, to the extent that they can easily turn that into cash money in the current system. That's even true in music, barely, though you have to be Taylor Swift, who started out with money and used it to get into the pay-back position (beyond most people's abilities anymore)
You don't have to have a money economy. You can have a reputation economy, but to properly have one you have to switch off the money economy and set up a basic income removing money from the survival equation. That means covering food, housing, perhaps even basic things like means to communicate and create. Luxuries still require competing in some way to exploit whatever the economy is, and get a disproprtionate share of resources (such as being allowed to be the captain of the starship).
If it's a money economy, these things invariably go to whoever has taken the most money under whatever rules or lack of rules exist, much as the US Presidency has predictably gone to whichever candidate raised the most money in recent years (and will continue to do so) even after Citizens United which would seem to decouple it from 'one donation one vote'.
If it's a reputation economy, perhaps these things will go to whoever earned the most reputation under whatever criterion exist?
In that case (at least according to Russell Brand!) that means any Democrat will beat any Republican. We're not going to be running all the little candidates against each other, it amounts to one lump sum against another lump sum and the Democrats win.
Technically, that means it's time to get Bernie in there (he's pretty well matching Hillary, particularly with actual voter donations) because according to the piles of money, whoever's in the Dem chair will win. Demographics tell a similar story. There's no such thing as 'unelectable Democrat raising piles of money larger than the top three Republican candidates combined', and both Hillary and Bernie are in a position to say that.
The truth of it isn't interesting, to me. It's that this sort of guillotine-bait is being publicized when the 'deep state' OP cites, is specifically interested in having no such information be available.
I think it just goes to show the power of the whistleblower, and the instability of extreme injustice. When it gets this obnoxious, it's as fragile as it appears impregnable. Kind of like the USSR, which more or less imploded and balkanized.
News is the interface between the information and the act of communicating it. In this case the information is very old news to anyone who's been studying the world for a while, but the act of communicating it is strikingly different. This is off-script, and doesn't serve the interests of the 'deep state'.
'Citizens United' was fairly recent by historical standards. In the last twenty years or so there's been a LOT of deregulation and it's been thoroughly taken advantage of by big money, who paid for exactly that.
It's not like this is normal by historical standards. It's more 'gilded age', characteristic of the precursor to a crash and subsequent overhaul of the system, reinstating the rules that used to govern.
Interesting, I mentioned Enron (known for obliterating California when public services were deregulated) and according to Economix, the TPP mandates deregulation of all public services including in the US! Enron nationwide? Ugh
Slashdot Mirror
Poor sap serving as the waitress is most likely powerless over the fuckups of the kitchen, but the quickest way to kill his tip is to ruin the food and then have the cook make excuses as to how they couldn't do any better. If you as the cook come and touch your cap and say sorry guv'nor you'll get the waitress her tip back even if she herself was completely lame. If you as the cook stonewall and make the waitress give some excuse because she has no other alternative, she's hosed.
I worked as a cook, cooks don't see tips as a rule. He's basically trying to personally reprimand things like huge chain restaraunts, grocery stores through punishing or rewarding the only bits he can reach, the waitress (or cashier, etc) in the belief that it'll affect them in some way.
Or, knowing that it won't, he's hanging on to the one bit of apparent control he has.
What if you donate all your wealth, make poor friends, and then you have to go ask those friends for help?
I think they'd be pretty pissed off with you (assuming you even CAN give all your wealth away and end up in a situation where you'd need to turn to others to get out of a money jam. I'm not sure it even works that way, you'd have resources still)
To some extent it is a legit problem. There might be people who'd sue your ass for attempting to give away your wealth. If they depend on that wealth and they already have leeched off enough to hire lawyers, you might have big problems. Would it still be fun and self-affirming if you got committed and judged incompetent to have your wealth because you were talking crazy talk like giving it away? Is there somebody who could swoop in and seize it if you were deemed incompetent?
You can't do this dumping, your friends become your whores. Their basic survival becomes dependent on servicing you as soon as you 'bring them up to your level' which means they have the same budget, otherwise what are you even talking about?
You can only throw money around like that among people who have roughly the same amount of money, otherwise the power dynamic changes radically and alarmingly. You've literally explained how you'd set people up to be completely dependent on you giving them money to be at 'your level', and then you're going to pass judgement on whether they like their new life or YOU better, and if they don't like you best, you 'cut them loose' and it's all good because it didn't cost you much that you couldn't easily spare.
YIKES. Are you real or is this a form of troll? You're genuinely scary, and I'm awful glad I'm no friend of yours. You're soulless.
My brother does this. He pays for meals but I find it awkward because he'll use his tip as a bludgeon. If service is bad, he'll not only refuse to tip but will sometimes refuse to ever set foot in the place again. If you're good, you might get a fifty dollar tip on a ten dollar pizza.
I don't think he's trying to impress me, or not primarily. I think it's a Darwinian thing where he's trying to improve the breed by punishing and rewarding.
Too bad this only underscores a sense that he is the puppetmaster managing and directing all his servants, passing judgement upon them because that's his duty. Put like that it sounds like the most extreme entitled assholery.
I'm poor, and I'm capable of getting bad service and thinking 'oh well, guess I'd better do some kind of tip, not like I'm special and there to throw my weight around. Maybe they were just having a crap day'. I guess if I was rich I would be more likely to assume I was there to pass out punishments and rewards.
"Rubbing it in your face" might be preferable because it implies someone posturing and doing a dominance behavior thing. This 'improving the breed' stuff, it's like dominance is already so completely assumed that the only remaining question is how you manage your slaves. And it seems to sneak into the behavior of relatively rational, non-evil people.
If they're not this guy: http://www.politico.com/magazi...
If they're not that guy, fuck 'em. If the system is making them hyper-privileged and it's wrecking their relationships and making it impossible to live as a human being, it's on THEM to change the system because the system is there to serve them.
They're guilty for a reason. They don't need therapy, they need reform and rehab, and they are the ones in a position to change things.
It's morally wrong to give 'em therapy and soothe their little feelings without addressing the larger problem. They're unhappy because they are BAD PEOPLE.
Uber drivers are on strike right NOW.
Did you know that?
Oddly, I suggested a story on how Uber drivers are on strike right now at this very moment, and it mysteriously, inexplicably failed to go anywhere!
How could that possibly be? It's an Uber story after all :D
Well, I figured it was just another Uber-written article so I know better to take it at face value.
It's hilariously brazen at times. What gets me is why they consider Slashdot such fertile ground. Probably only because nowhere else can these guys get this kind of propaganda density, and because they're clearly targeting angry nerds. Traditionally, oil companies et al try to buy off graduate students and scientists, but this isn't a question of science, it's a question of social expectations and the way societies are structured.
And clearly Slashdotters are thought leaders and capable of swaying lots of regular people with cheeto-encrusted rants :D way of the future!
Are you kidding? I have a horrible fascination with US 'Kitchen Nightmares'. These tricks totally work on me :D
There is NO market that isn't completely destroyed by the removal of friction and gatekeepers. It's shit all the way down!
You (probably) joke, but the unsettling thing is that you're right. I think this has things to teach us about 'popularity' and 'survival of the fittest'.
Perhaps I'm just crazy, but it seems to me that if this works in practice, it disproves 'market' theory. In other words, if you reduce all friction and gatekeeping, everything becomes shit :)
This will come as a shock to many 'disruptive' startups believing they're making a better world aaah, who am I kidding? They're FINE with that as long as it makes them more money.
"New Rule: Lawrence V. Williams, Turkey Or Child -- A Good Guide"
If loving this is wrong, I don't want to be right :)
but with Sherpas, and limited tickets that are bid up to astronomical prices until the whole thing is Silicon Valley bread and circuses and a mockery of its original ideals.
I guess you could try to get a job as the slave or whore of one of these incredibly wealthy Silicon Valley people?
But you can't outwork a robot. We're already at the point where a total rules change is required, as even white collar intellectual jobs are getting outright replaced by technology. Your physical effort is already categorically useless compared to say a backhoe, or auto-assembly robot.
Holodecks.
It's already a concern: we can make fantasy objects of desire with superhuman qualities, and if the realism of these things increases way beyond what real humans can offer, nobody's gonna be breeding. Male and female, we'll all be in the holodeck and extremely pleased ;)
Precisely. Economies of scale can do amazing things, and when you include massive automation and robotics into that equation: technology and the industrial efficiency of the future can and will lead to a situation where a company employing like six people could EASILY replace the whole market providing food to the world. You'd have a bunch of hardworking AIs and algorithms, roboticized farms (that might not resemble Big Agra much) and simply incalculable output.
The question then becomes, do you make people compete for this oversupply of food by proving their willingness to fight and defeat each other and thus their worthiness to be fed? We could call it 'Hunger Games, the society'.
Look at the West now: no one is poor, not by any reasonable definition of the word. Barring drug addiction or mental illness, everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads, a mobile telephone, a television, and likely even a car. This would have counted as wealth 200 years ago.
The capitalist saying is very true: "a rising tide floats all boats". The problem is that no one wants to own the little boats.
Is this what they're teaching people on the Google campuses now? But then when I look closer, Bradley, this is you:
I am a professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Northwest Switzerland. If you are one of my students, you may find some of the links on the right to be of interest.
I also consult for small businesses, especially businesses interested in using an ERP system to make their business more efficient. I have written ERP systems for small businesses, managed ERP projects, and I teach this stuff too. If you are interested in an outside assessment of your needs, or looking for someone to help manage an ERP project, I would be happy to help!
Life, the universe, and everything
My favorite hobbies are programming and math, when I can find the time for them. I am currently working on a new ERP system for my wife's whisky business. You can also find links to a couple of other projects on my software page.
I am also interested in political issues. Politics is too often driven by special interest groups, while the rest of us just stand by and watch the train wreck happen. We - the ordinary citizens - need to be involved. I am interested in three main areas:
Technology. Too many "green" and "eco" groups do not understand technology. They oppose everything and offer no alternatives - apparently they want to go back to squatting in caves. Technology and cheap energy are the foundation of civilization!
Freedom. The free exchange of information is essential to a free society. Freedom of expression is a basic human right. Yet every western country has laws that enforce censorship and restrict your right to express your opinions.
Africa. Send food, and destroy the livelihood of local farmers. Send money, and watch it be sucked up by corrupt governments. "for God's sake, please just stop!" Africa does not need aid. Africa needs long-term projects that help people help themselves.
I see that you ALREADY live in the Gene Roddenberry post-scarcity future and act as if you do. You give resources freely and share information, though you're making assumptions like 'African farmers need to be able to compete for money on the global marketplace' which seems a weird assumption in this context. I'm just going to suggest that from where you're standing (not even IN THE WEST if you take the West to mean the USA. You're in Switzerland! We'd be doing pretty good too if we were in freaking Switzerland!), you should not be saying things like 'no one is poor, everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads' etc.
Go on with your nerd self, you're beautiful. But capitalism is not worthy of your faith, and I gotta say, you being in Switzerland and relatively wealthy as a college professor and not in economically challenged areas of the USA, YOU don't get to say nobody is poor.
When every person has free time to create original artworks, every person DOES and they become valueless. This has already happened in music.
You can stick the greatest violinist in the world in a subway station and people won't give him a penny if they're too hurried and stressed. Value is always a social consensus, so it becomes a reputation economy and as a rule people only WANT one guy's original artworks, partly because it's a social consensus (see Warhol)
The trick is making it so that this is optional. If you MUST survive by being the guy with the reputation to create artworks, that gets ugly quickly.
If you're totally surviving but you want to be important, that's somewhat different and depends on what counts as important.
That's a fallacy. Any intuitive jump a human can 'miraculously' do that seems illogical can be done by the genetic algorithm on a sufficiently large dataset with a certain (not huge) amount of initial randomness and bad answers to recombine.
This is why the freemarket capitalist ideal is counterproductive. You don't want to cull all the unfit things and promptly focus on all the fittest organisms. That gets you plateaus (sometimes very modest ones) and stultification: look at, say, Comcast. Good at culling competitors, but lame even in its continental US environment.
What you want is to maintain a diverse 'soup' of organisms/answers of varying fitness, maintaining the survival of the weaklings by force if necessary, so that you can exploit all possible recombinations and bust past plateaus. It's trivial for AI to do this, especially since it's demonstrably superior and only flawed human emotion tells humans that 'cull all the weaklings and make the most of the strongest!' is a winning strategy.
In the context of the genetic algorithm that's a fallacy, and it's trivial for AI to figure that out when simple experimenting shows you the answer.
And given that sufficiently large dataset with 'bad quirky answers' to mix in, the genetic algorithm FAR out-performs human intelligence. So, no such human geniuses can exist. Best they can do is match the AI/genetic algorithm performance by luck.
If robots have done all the things, people have access to all the things that have been done (true NOW for musicians, writers and artists thanks to BitTorrent etc) and AIs are prepared to take on doing some of the toughest things, why SHOULD humans do things?
Specifically, strive and acheive, which is typically what's meant by 'drives people to do things'? If 'do things' is 'be good neighbors and care for one another' that changes the goal.
If you're thinking of human drive in some sort of John Henry way you've got to take into account the steam-drill aspect of that story. John Henry died, and the next steam drill built probably would've beaten him, so he'd have lost AND died. What good is he then?
We're all John Henry now. Within our lifetimes, there will be nothing a human can do that's not better done by a shellscript, a robot, or a corporation of mostly scripts and robots. They'll do ART better than humans (every heavily data-driven game, movie and TV show that panders to the common denominator and succeeds, driving out some creator-owned property, is evidence of this. They just can't quantify and distill 'artistic triumph' yet so they're focussing on 'Gilligan's Island', obvious pandering and trusted formulas)
People are going to have to be driven in different ways. Achievement is not going to be an option. Maybe you'll get a little prize of 'most successful human to do this'?
Yes, this. Slashdot is super hardcore in favor of the IP post-scarcity world put in place by Google, in which digitized everything is everywhere for the asking. Not to create scarcity means most creators are valueless, at more or less the valuation of a person capable of doing what you can do with a simple shell script.
Removing money creates a REPUTATION economy. It also makes creators die unless they're fed in some way (welfare, et al, or a universal basic income taken disproportionately from the biggest winners). Due to network effects from all this 'communication everywhere', the biggest winners get wildly more reputation than the run of the mill guys, to the extent that they can easily turn that into cash money in the current system. That's even true in music, barely, though you have to be Taylor Swift, who started out with money and used it to get into the pay-back position (beyond most people's abilities anymore)
You don't have to have a money economy. You can have a reputation economy, but to properly have one you have to switch off the money economy and set up a basic income removing money from the survival equation. That means covering food, housing, perhaps even basic things like means to communicate and create. Luxuries still require competing in some way to exploit whatever the economy is, and get a disproprtionate share of resources (such as being allowed to be the captain of the starship).
If it's a money economy, these things invariably go to whoever has taken the most money under whatever rules or lack of rules exist, much as the US Presidency has predictably gone to whichever candidate raised the most money in recent years (and will continue to do so) even after Citizens United which would seem to decouple it from 'one donation one vote'.
If it's a reputation economy, perhaps these things will go to whoever earned the most reputation under whatever criterion exist?
In that case (at least according to Russell Brand!) that means any Democrat will beat any Republican. We're not going to be running all the little candidates against each other, it amounts to one lump sum against another lump sum and the Democrats win.
Technically, that means it's time to get Bernie in there (he's pretty well matching Hillary, particularly with actual voter donations) because according to the piles of money, whoever's in the Dem chair will win. Demographics tell a similar story. There's no such thing as 'unelectable Democrat raising piles of money larger than the top three Republican candidates combined', and both Hillary and Bernie are in a position to say that.
The truth of it isn't interesting, to me. It's that this sort of guillotine-bait is being publicized when the 'deep state' OP cites, is specifically interested in having no such information be available.
I think it just goes to show the power of the whistleblower, and the instability of extreme injustice. When it gets this obnoxious, it's as fragile as it appears impregnable. Kind of like the USSR, which more or less imploded and balkanized.
News is the interface between the information and the act of communicating it. In this case the information is very old news to anyone who's been studying the world for a while, but the act of communicating it is strikingly different. This is off-script, and doesn't serve the interests of the 'deep state'.
Every time things have got this bad, in fact.
'Citizens United' was fairly recent by historical standards. In the last twenty years or so there's been a LOT of deregulation and it's been thoroughly taken advantage of by big money, who paid for exactly that.
It's not like this is normal by historical standards. It's more 'gilded age', characteristic of the precursor to a crash and subsequent overhaul of the system, reinstating the rules that used to govern.
Interesting, I mentioned Enron (known for obliterating California when public services were deregulated) and according to Economix, the TPP mandates deregulation of all public services including in the US! Enron nationwide? Ugh