This is doubly non-imaginary because it's: 2, real.

Yet so many young people today will still complain while getting to live out their childhood dreams. 🇺🇸

I want a MK2 Golf

Maybe if I buy the car bed a big bumper GTI will appear in my driveway

Ha-oh. I'm sad now.

Sleep in a bed like a car
Sleep in a car like a bed

This is our world.

It's valid to complain when you see injustice and senseless suffering all around you. Most of our childhood dreams didn't specify a healthy society because we took progress for granted.

When I was a child I wanted to be a robot builder. I now build robots. But my efforts are squandered on the rich. We're automating the wrong things.

We're automating the wrong things.

Constant source of frustration in my life. We have all the tech needed to increase quality of life so damn much, and a shit ton of it is over a decade old, but every company wants to be the ruler of their own little proprietary walled garden and refuses good or even basic interoperability with anything else. Just have an open API for fucks sake!

Now we've strayed so far from open APIs that a common (if misled) usage of AI bots is to scrape unstructered data and (fail) to turn it into usable structured shit. Not just for training purposes either.

Like if everyone settled on a few standards for calendar data, location data, where they stored it on a site, then each municipality had a standard page of the things in the area... then I should be able to ask a personal assistant thing "What events are going on this weekend within 30 minutes from me?" with minimal AI slop involved.

I'd been assuming everyone wants a MK2 Golf, I also want a Rabbit, but that's more of a US thing, pretty sure it wast just the name given to the early Golf here.

I've had both a MK1 and MK2 GTI's, I found a super clean MK1 for sale at a show here in MI but the dude wanted more than I was willing to pay. Big bumper MK2 don't pop up often, the last good one I saw sold for ~30k, I paid $3500 for mine in 1996 now I wish I'd kept it.

I have project ideas if I can find the right one.

It’s a shame that so many people in the West have ruled out socialism and communism

30!?! Wow.

That was my reation too.

I left for Germany in 2005 and you could find them everywhere for virtually nothing, come back to the US in 2023 and they're nowhere and expensive.

I don't disagree, but the sort of thing I'm talking about was possible under Capitalism in the late 2000s-Mid 2010s, and it's still technically/theoretically possible even with horrid Capitalistic practices.

A good example of this is Single Sign On technology. The average person sees it with all the sites that offer "Sign in with Google/Facebook/Apple" options, but I'm talking about business software/platforms specifically.

There are around 2-3 (open) standards for SSO, and most companies use an identity provider that support them like Microsoft's Azure/Entra ID.

In my experience, about 75% of enterprise systems support SSO, and a lot charge a meager fee to enable it on their end. Then boom, configure both sides and it just works. Because both sides support the standard, you just match up the two puzzle pieces and it goes. Capitalists stay happy by charging a fee to "enable" it.

So Capitalism definitely drives the walled garden mentality, but it's even more that these people are too dumb to monetize things well. They want a little of every pie they can manage to half ass rather than trying to be the best in what they do while enabling ease of use for their data in other products that aren't actually competitors to them until they decide to half ass their way into another market/piece of functionality.