AI is an opportunity to improve true education and learning on an individual and community level based on free association without the authoritarian and violent hand of government imposing lowest common denominator uniformity on everyone to produce uniform and manageable, profitable pseudo-citizen cogs.

What you ascribe to boomers is really the fault of the most awful generation. For context, the oldest boomers were only 22 during the civil rights era and the youngest were 12. You were never told that and you never noticed it, did you?

That should worry anyone, regardless of whether you agree with them or not unless they have perpetrated some kind of violent acts to scare people in pursuit of political aims like the US government. Trump may only be able to be a Tyrant for about 31 more months at best unless he goes full tilt, but the precedent he is setting will be used against any and all civic and resistance organizations that the ruling maniacs don't like in the future too.

I do not say this lightly, but everyone should be getting serious about what their plans will be when tyranny goes full mask off in the USA and your house and your land and your stuff all the sudden is said to belong to someone else and if you oppose that, you are a terrorist whose children deserve to be shot in the head by government snipers as the try to get water so they don't die of dehydration. No one ever thinks it will affect them, but you are already in the cage, the door is just not closed yet and it's clad in a pleasant facade. What happens when the psychopathic Epstein clan is facing total loss of power because the bond market has collapsed from their evisceration of all trust in the USA and they send their police and military goons after you as you try to scrounge for food to feed your family like in Palestine/gaza? You are the Gazans of tomorrow, you just don't know it yet.

I would even advocate that in the US we require taxation to be handled that way too because you are right, most of our citizens can't do basic math, let alone in their heads, or even really care; but if the price tag had to be the taxed price and you then get a discount if you pay cash, it would be a far better situation. There has never been a better time to do this with digital price tags.

The inherent problem is that the likes of the masses are hard to organize, let alone corral and focus on a single thing and everyone thinks they are smarter than the average.

One of the most corrupting yet hidden forces in America today are the payment networks MC/Visa etc. due to their bribing and corruption of the government in order to prevent things like making payment processor fees separate/independent of the cost, i.e., similar to how taxes are added after the fact, not included in the price; and also preventing merchants from having two different prices, cash vs card.

I’m a bit surprised that HBR does not seem to even really have an accurate mental model if the matter, unless they’re making an editorial choice to speak in vernacular turns to relate it to the audience.

The problem is not really the cards, it even credit cards, it’s actually the payment processing networks that are the corrupting force.

If America has a legitimate government, there would have been a federal alternative payment processor that charges nothing as an accompaniment and based on the authority to mint the currency, which is what a payment processor today is, a digital currency mint.

To put it into perspective, when you purchase something by credit card, a merchant may have to l pay a little under 3% on a $100 purchase. When you purchase something cheaper let’s say $5, a merchant may pay 6.5%. And no, they don’t just say “awe shucks, I guess I’ll lose that money”, They increase the prices by some averaged amount.

Some may say that they can’t do that because competition, well, because there is no real competition and because the payment processor de facto monopoly/cartel has basically every single company in lockdown and you have no real alternatives, especially in places like Europe where they’ve foolishly and enthusiastically started forcing everyone into digital payment, all the merchants simply roll what is effectively a kind of organized crime/mob extortion into the prices of the goods and services the common person pays and never knows is paying.

It’s a rather diabolical form of control, democracy. “You have fake choices and you like … nay, you love what you choose”, quite literally. You have to love it, because you have to believe it’s true. And that’s where they latched onto your mind.

It’s quite ingeniou.