Aceticon

The Haaretz is a well established Israeli Newspaper.

The minions of the wealthy hate anything that impedes them from executing the will of their masters.

I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It's totally unsuitable for gaming unless we're talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I'm using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn't exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they're about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you're starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).

In my own personal experience of doing it in London for years (nowadays I'm in a different country and just walk to work) as well as a conference I attended way back by a researcher studying exposure to polution in London, if you're doing it in a big city like that, try and find a path that minimizes your exposure to polution, since whilst you actually get a proper daily fill of exercise cycling to work, you're subject to the same risks as people who jog near roads with lots of traffic, which include such unexpected things as a higher risk of heart attack (due to soot microparticles from ICE exhaust transversing the lungs into the blood and ending up accumulating around the heart) as a well as (more expected) problems in the respiratory system because the sulfur oxides emitted by cars (especially diesel) mix with the water in your airways and lungs and turn into acid.

Mind you, it doesn't need to be that much of a detour: from models I've seen for London polution, merely being one street over from a main road massivelly decreases the polution levels one is exposed to.

Ju$tice.

Meanwhile the NYC Police will be opening an emergency phone line exclusive for CEOs who feel threatened or harassed.

That's definitely going to convince people in general that the Police "works for the community" and that they should "trust the Police".

• Don't break the Law for the company or the boss.
• Keep the company shit in company devices and your shit in your devices. That means company computer and phone for their stuff and your own for yours. If there's ever any Lawsuit or Criminal investigation on the company they won't take your stuff as evidence if you don't at all use it for company work and won't intrude in your privacy if the company stuff isn't used for your own stuff.
• Even if it's totally legal, if something that your are being ordered to do against your better advice might come back to bite you (i.e. you might get blamed for the negative outcome you predict will come from it), get that order in writing.

Even your direct lead can't be assumed to be your friend (no matter how nice: niceness is easily and commonly faked) until you've gone through some proper shit together and he or she has shown themselves to be somebody that will take the hit rater than "blame their underlings" - trusts is earned, not due.

The kind of company were Management and HR go around trying to convince employees they're like family and other similar things are simply trying to act like abusive cults.

Sound more like "abusive cult" than "family" to me.

There are two things that the aftermath of Luigi's action has made poignantly clear to pretty much everybody:

• That the vast majority of people no matter their party affiliation and political leanings is feeling the pain and hates the abuses that carry on being committed by a minority of people in our system with total impunity ... until Luigi.
• That the Ju$tice System, the Police and most of the Press, unlike what they claim work for that minority of people, not for the rest of us.

It's amazing just how certain parts of the system that are supposed to work for everybody (such as in this case the Police, and in other cases large parts of the Press with their "poor CEO" articles) are pretty much shouting loud and clear for all to hear that "we're not working for you, we work for the ones that abuse you".

Most people just discovered now with this killing of a hated CEO that what they individually felt about certain things was also felt by almost everybody, and then these bought-and-paid-for minions who for decades have been putting a lot of effort in passing themselves as "working for the community" just repeatedly and overtly signal to everybody else their true minion-of-the-rich nature.

Mind you, as a Leftie who has been skeptical of whose those elements of the current system for decades, I'm happy they're basically outing themselves and they should keep on doing it so that everybody sees them for what they really are and who they really serve,

But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people's trust in the value of money can break down.

As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it's logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the "wealth" anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.

(That said, the wealthy generally move their wealth into property - as the saying goes "Buy Land: they ain't making any more of it" - but even that is backed by people's belief and society's enforcement of property laws and the mega-wealthy wouldn't be so if they had to actually protect themselves their "rights" on all that they own: the limits to wealth, when anchored down to concrete physical things that the "owners" have to defend are far far lower that the current limits on wealth based on nation-backed tokens of value and ownership)

And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.

As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn't yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people's productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum - and that's not at the point were the people producing things are merelly surviving.

Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - under Capitalism people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, and because people in a Capitalist society live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose unlike in the outright autocratic systems, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so it all adds up to more profit for the elites.

As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of "productivity minus costs with the riff-raff" isn't the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the "riff-raff", not the elites.