@Elric @RASIE Thoughts on the ai craze in regards to the current economy

As a topic of "doomscussion", it's gotta be among the top 5 most overblown boogeyman of the past 130 years, easily. It is nowhere near being an actual threat to anything. The potential of AI is certainly threatening, but we are many decades away from AI taking the first steps across the threshold of affecting things in any consistantly significant, material way.

On the other hand, if that threshold was actually much closer, then I would be aggressively championing total AI injection across several different job fields to accelerate the adoption of UBI policies. Even just focusing on what some may call "tedious task" office jobs and only replacing those workers, that would instantly put a historic amount of people out of work very quickly and will immediately felt across the entire world. Maybe thats too naive or hopeful, because i could easily see israel, contractors, and telecoms just deciding let hundreds of millions suffer and die from destitution for several years. But i seriously doubt they would choose to do that over the more practical choice of UBI, even if they are inherently evil cancers on the world.

While the changes in jobs is important, I'm more concerned with its connection to data centers and how much water/energy usage it takes (not to mention what percentage of these are being built for mass surveillance)

But the immediate environmental impacts are already being seen in towns across the country, peoples water pressure is down to next to nothing, as well as pollution and so on

most recently in the news is the conflict over Oleary (shark tank guy) getting one built

Thats the wild s*** to me

But also yea a lot of places are going to do layoffs and use ai as the reason, whether it was 'necessary' or not

Why learn when you can perpetuate?

Omaha Tenants United:

Thank you to everyone who participated in the recent phone zap of Ben Swan in support of The Dewey Tenants Union! Receiving dozens of calls throughout the day, the masses of Omaha and elsewhere made a strong statement showing what side they are on. This had Swan Development so shook that they feigned “closing” the office for the day.

Nonetheless, we know they remained in the office and heard our calls clogging their phone lines all day. In fact, one supporter reported to us that Ben Swan actually picked up the phone later in the day and spoke to them briefly! Mr. Swan stated to them that he allegedly does not have the money to perform any repairs due to “spending hundreds of thousands of dollars changing management companies. This is worth some a***ysis.

First things first, we applaud Ben Swan for coming up with a novel and ingenious landlord defense by basically saying “I suck at doing business despite having one of the few “jobs” that provides relatively guaranteed income every month, my bad”. This definitely sounds like someone who should be in charge of other people’s living situations!

Second of all, what did this change in management look like? Ben Swan’s properties, including the Dewey, were previously under management by Crown Property Management. In conducting our investigation into Ben Swan’s properties as we began organizing, we learned that it was not Ben, but CPM that wanted to break the relationship due to his unwillingness to authorize any repairs whatsoever, amongst other things. One can only imagine how brazen such practices had to be for a landlord to piss off someone on their own side so much.

What happened after CPM broke their arrangement? The properties were taken over by a “Trifecta Property Management”. Interestingly, Trifecta is owned by Ben Swan. We would highly doubt such a procedure would cost "hundreds of thousands of dollars". This is a classic move by landlords to eliminate even the smallest amount of oversight.

Furthermore, Ben Swan’s allegations that his financial situation is so dire that he cannot fulfill his obligations to his tenants is complicated by his other asset holdings. Per the Douglas County Assessor's site, Ben Swan's current home in Bemis Park is currently worth $459,100.00. Additionally, Swan Realty Group owns another home in the Happy Hollow neighborhood worth $307,700.00. It should be noted this is currently undergoing renovations, so that number is sure to balloon soon.

But let's assume that Ben Swan is actually in position such that he "can't afford" repairs due to lack of liquidity - we have reasons to suspect this may be partially true. First of all, we would remind readers that landlords, on average, receive $25,000 in rent from a single property each month, while conducting an average of only 4 hours of maintenance work each month. Pretty sweet gig! While this number of course varies from property to property, we know that Ben Swan owns a minimum of 12 residential properties. Thus it is hard to imagine that there is not some liquid cash coming in that that could be use for a decent chunk of repairs. If not, what is being done with this money? But in the event that he truly cannot afford to make the repairs he is obligated to under the already paper thin Nebraska Landlord-Tenant act - why is he allowed to hold these properties? Why should tenants have to turn over as much as 40% of their income to someone who provides next to nothing in return?

Regardless of his particular financial situation, it is not a question of ability, but of will. If Ben Swan truly wanted to "help" his tenants like he stated in a recent KMTV story, he would reduce his standard of living and liquidate some of his other extravagant assets. Nobody is forcing him to own two 2-story homes, have all the possessions he owns, and live a lifestyle many of us could only dream of. But such considerations do not enter into the logic of the ruling class, and they never will. The owners of capital fancy themselves as masters of all on earth - truly lords over society and even nature itself. The "risk" they take - that almighty ether they previously claimed as the source of their "right" to perpetual and ever growing profits - is suddenly deemed unfair when their bets fail. When this happens, they roll out the excuses and sob stories. If they must suffer a loss, their LLCs, shell companies, accounting tricks, and the capitalist State who represents them ensure that the brunt of this does not actually fall on them. Instead, their losses are diffused and passed on to the vast majority of society - the working class.

This is all to say that we cannot sit around and expect landlords or any other capitalist to have a "change of heart", or be forced into "doing the right thing" by public institutions. We have to TAKE what belongs to us from them. And at the end of the day, we possess the power to do so. It is US who pays their rents, its OUR labor that they exploit to get rich. WE are the ones who hold the real power. Given the working class represents the vast majority, it is not a question of whether it's possible, but of whether we can get organized and enforce our collective will over our exploiters. We have to to struggle if we want to win. All this very much so applies to Ben Swan, who is an enemy in a relatively vulnerable position. Bigger fish will be fried someday, but we have the ability to bring home a respectable catch in the meantime.

Omaha Tenants United calls on everyone who rents from Ben Swan to reach out to OTU, start talking to your neighbors, and get organized. When we fight together, we win together - and we truly have a world to win.

TODAY OUR HOMES, TOMORROW THE WORLD

IT WONT FALL UNLESS YOU HIT IT

I find it funny the US used to criticize or make fun of Soviet bloc apartments but if you look at any modern construction in capitalist America it literally looks the same with basic square box layouts made as cheaply as possible to be sold as expensive as possible

literally just modernized them lol they’re in every city