Obviously this won’t be a problem once AI becomes self-aware. /s

If the labor force could opt out of the rat race because they didn’t have to work, then they gives them immense power especially considering what they have now. Of course the necessities would have to be controlled in a not-for-profit manner so that you can’t just have some land baron that adjusts the cost of rent and food upward to ensure it eats up all the UBI, same with utilities/internet/etc.

But for consumerist goods that people want because they enhance life, if people could realistically withhold their labor unless the capitalist offered equity etc in industries that produced those things, you would quickly see the power of the leaders of those industries wane significantly.

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The length of time an empire existed isn’t really important in the study of history. You need to describe the contextual existence of the empire within history, and you do that by specifying the start and end dates (in whatever calendar system you want to use). Using your example, if you say that empire existed for 101 years, why is that significant? It’s not. But if I say that empire existed in the middle east during the time of Christ and Roman occupation of Palestine, THAT provides the important historical context for why that empire was significant, and what kind of importance it may have had.

But you are missing the point,. There is no reason to ever start a calendar at year zero. The starting point can be zero, fine, but once the first day goes by, you are in the first day of year 1, not year zero and that is logical and has nothing to do with smart astronomers etc, “not understanding the number zero.”

At this point I’d say the only person who doesn’t understand zero is you.

this is absolutely wrong.

“They,” i.e. the catholic church, or whoever was tasked with coming up with a calendar, absolutely understood the concept of zero in the 1500’s. Yes, Zero took a bit longer to formalize and enter the zeitgeist of the public consciousness, but this myth of zero being some kind of unknowable thing for thousands of millennia is naive.

I’d go so far as to say that a year zero in a calendar is useless. There should be a starting point of course, but calling it yero zero instead of year 1 is dumb.

Please don’t compare the benefactor of an apartheid gem mine to an engineer. Just because a lot fo dumbasses are engineers, doesn’t mean Musk the dumbass is an engineer.

To be fair to the engineers it’s not hard to do a better job then the people paid to be make our lives miserable for the profit of a few.

Yes. It’s a basic skill you need to learn before you can even attempt to change our hellworld.

This is probably the best example of the OP’s thread topic. Ready Player One book is really bad gaming nostalgia on the order of the Brick by Brick meme novel by Bob Chapman. Just absolute consumerist trash with nothing interesting to say. The movie is still bad, but better then then the book.

I can’t think of a more perfect example.

Cultural Zeitgeist doesn’t matter since the purpose of the police is to keep the worst people in the world safe.

In the cities in which the protests took place within America, I don’t know of a single one that lowered the funding for the police from 2020 levels. Most, maybe ALL including liberal bastion NYC, gave record increases to the policing budget. So from the metric of the stated goals of the protests, “Defund the Police,” it was a massive failure and waste of time and energy.

Civ4. I still play that shit weekly, often even more. Specifically the latest iteration of the Fall From Heaven Mod, but still, great game.

Reddit isn’t a “psy-op” but it does intentionally select for the status quo. Once the decision was made to start trying to IPO, radical elements that were anti-capitalist, were purged from all the major sub-reddits. The other radical’s drew traffic and were allowed to stay. Once you get rid of anyone advocating for change, of course stagnation is the end result. That’s the goal.

Well the legal system doesn’t exist on paper. Laws are not what the legal system operates on. Allegedly, breaking a law is what allows, but doesn’t require, the legal system to be involved at all.

So to answer your question, Sam Bankman is a nobody, that no one likes, and caused a very public number of people to lose a lot of money. His case is a slam-dunk, and has no further implications. Trump is a former president who did exactly the same shit that every other former president has done since Washington. So prosecuting him for his crimes now means that the power brokers of the US empire are now potentially open to prosecution. So of course the two aren’t going to be comparable.

So there is no “official reason” because officially the judicial system is based on individual discretion.