It’s all the same shit. The patterns are so simplistic and easy to identify. That is what made me lose hope. There are just enough people desperate to blindly follow a leader, any leader, that we, as humanity, will never make progress. I don’t understand how, evolutionarily, it made sense to make a democratically significant amount of people incapable of individual thought, but this is how it has transpired and that will be the end of us.

I don’t think he thought along lines of good or bad or evil at all. He noticed that he had a knack for firing people up, first in conversations, then in speeches, etc. Like any power hungry ego maniac he simply kept doing it and kept succeeding through an endless string of insanely unlikely circumstances. I’d bet a good 30% of the population would follow the exact same path, given those circumstances / opportunities.

He wanted infinite power, because he was likely infinitely afraid of the world. He never once thought about what’s good or bad. He only thought about how to get more power and how to maintain it. The inevitable conclusion to that game is always world domination with a bunch of genocide mixed in. You can see the patterns arising everywhere at the moment.

Are you on Firefox? I use an extension called PagezoomWE or something like that. It remembers the zoom level for you.

That seems like good news. Interesting to see US drug policy being more lenient than the UK in many instances.

(Some reasons) Why people vote for right wing populists:

• billionaires are above the law
• be it a pandemic, recession, whatever, billionaires profit from all crises
• there are two strata in society: people who have to work and people who choose whether to work. So long as the latter exists and invests all their time into ensuring that the former will forever be the vast majority of society, people will protest vote
• worse, the billionaires pay millionaires to tell thousandaires what the various classes in society are and who the ‘real’ enemy is and it will always be foreigners or the gays or some BS like that (an enemy that’s always simultaneously infinitely strong and weak)
• there’s billionaires in the first place

(I’m well aware that other things can be reasons, too, like perceived loss of living standards, increased political corruption etc. But honestly, I think it’s all down to rich people fucking things up…see below for some proposed fixes)

Approaches that could fix this (good luck trying that in the arch-neoliberal EU):

• ALL wealth above X amount simply gets taken from you. I know it’s complicated with shares in companies etc. But I’m sure where there’s a will there’s a way. Cap wealth at €100mil or whatever
• inheritance tax becomes 99% above £1million
• remuneration ratios: CEOs cannot earn more / hold more shares than 10x more than the lowest earning employee in the company. This has to include subsidiaries and 3rd parties, otherwise companies will just hire other companies to get around this

The above and the fallout from it, would instantly free up money for public services, free education and healthcare and eradicate homelessnes. You wouldn’t need a UBI, if public services were good enough and well funded.

Technically I’m far more radical in my opinions and think that housing should be declared a human right and all drugs legalised and all those fancy things, but honestly, it feels we have more pressing matters at hand, namely, inequality. Until that gets fixed, we can’t really progress as a society.

My main worry here being that it can’t be done. I simply don’t see how, as a society, we will ever gain the cohesion to implement decisive action against the ruling classes. They have become untouchable and would rather burn the whole thing down than give an inch.

The article doesn’t mention longevity problems with perovskite cells. I wonder if that’s been overcome as part of this research.

Unfortunately that’s the only reasonable advice. Did it myself a few years ago and it was painful for like 3 months and now having to use corporate BS à la Apple / Microsoft seems bafflingly limiting and counter intuitive to me.