Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

I was in college when this happened. Absolutely nobody thought he could win until Florida was called. Trump himself seemed mildly surprised in his victory speech.

Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

• Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
• I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
• Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.

The CHIPS bill was a massive disappointment. It was cut down to 1/5th from the intended size due to house committee BS, and then the Biden administration decided to use it as a platform to enact a bunch of wholly unrelated social policies.

I’m not saying that jobs should not offer onsite daycare or have lofty environmental goals. However this was a bill designed to ensure the US maintains an advantage in a critical industry. Maybe put that stuff in another bill.

Yeah I just think it’s funny a Senator took time out of his day to be like “we need a lobster emoji”

Does anyone remember when one of Maine’s US Senators lobbied Unicode to create a lobster emoji?

Different divisions. This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it’s just not worth it from a financial perspective.

The amount of people burning their own blu rays is minimal. Even the type of people who emphasize owning their own content just use a NAS system.

Honestly if they got the cost down and figured out a better interaction mechanism than an app, I could see it being useful for older or disabled individuals.

For example, imagine someone is 55. They are still with it, and decently active for this age. However they have arthritis in their hands that makes tasks that require dexterity mildly uncomfortable. These kinds of shoes would be a pretty big boon for them in terms of staying active.

The issue is that they tried to make it some cool fashion accessory for Gen Z sneaker heads to buy.

You can tell the exec who greenlit this was a boomer because they went with IBM.

An AI drive through was always going to be difficult. IBM simply isn’t the company that can do stuff like that anymore, and they haven’t been for decades at this point.

Every single civilization with every single type of governance in human history requires most people to work. That will continue to be the case for a long time into the future.

Is the current system perfect? No. However it does allow for a greater degree of latitude than basically everything that came before it. It also has safeguards to ensure there’s some sort of safety net if you fall on hard times.

You also mentioned democracy. Assuming you live in America, you can vote in a way that introduces reform to the system.

Starting a violent revolution is a last resort sort of thing.

Be the change you want to see in the world…