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A Forbes editorial is unconvincing. Tim Worstall is far from a dispassiinate observer; in fact, as an Adam Smith Institute fellow, it's safe to say that he has a major conflict of interest.

That reducing wealth inequality makes a more fair and prosperous world for the vast majority of people is about as much of an opinion as saying that reducing pollutant exposure reduces cancer risk.

And if you claim that those are "simply" your motives, you're not speaking in good faith.

I understand now that this line

>and Meta pays out to the affected parties

probably won't come to pass, which I agree is not nearly as good. But I was responding to that possibility, as put forward by the the parent.

Let's be accurate. We're a first-world shithole.

I'll be explicit in saying that this is because "third-world shithole" is often used as a pseudo-euphemism for "brown people reside there" - as in, this place is dysfunctional because of its brown residents. And, for the US, this is just simply not the case. We are an ethnically pluralistic society, historically and largely run by white men, and, yes, something of a shithole precisely because our government and courts exhibit a particularly Western flavor of corruption.

The point of a fine is to change behavior. It's not outsize if it's enough to do that.

>If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties, these kids could end up rewarded with thousands of dollars for just for having a Facebook or Instagram account.

Good. https://www.thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee...

These platforms are so profitable precisely because they fleece users for way more value vis a vis their data than they get back in service utility. Balancing that equation is the right thing to do.

Because environment makes culture and physics are the environment at relativistic speeds and cosmic distances.

I'll give you one thing: you're bold to try to spin a comment like this. There's not a sentence here that isn't a falsehood or working in service of one.

Ghandi was not poor. He was a trained lawyer with experience working abroad who adopted some practices in solidarity with people who were actually suffering in poverty. Just because he wasn't a millionaire doesn't mean that he hadn't accrued significant social capital, and the influence over economic capital that this represented. His capacity for good was rooted in this dual capital access; he did not necessarily have a similar capacity for evil, because social capital is not fungible in the same way that economic capital is.

But without either form of capital, one's reach is commensurately shortened, so no, such a poor person does not have the same capability to "cause a lot of suffering" as someone who is rich.

>As the number of poor persons is bigger than the number of rich people, the accumulated potential for good or evil they have, adding their individual evil or good, is probably bigger than the good or evil potential of rich people

Astonishingly, wealth inequality has ballooned to the point that the holdings of the top percent or so so dwarf that of the rest of the planet that it overcomes the population disparity.

You regulate cartelization in part by reducing their access to capital and redistributing it to non-cartel rivals, i.e., reducing wealth inequality.

>if it doesn't work don't blame capitalism, blame governments

Corporate capture is why government can't function in this regard.

>Pretending to know better than other people what that other people should choose our want - and imposing it - is tyrannical.

No one has to pretend, they can just prove it. That's not tyranny, it's reason.

You're either under the mistaken impression, or have constructed the impression as a strawman to argue against, that any of the concepts and states which we're talking about are absolute and don't exist in a state of flux. But measures of strength, intelligence, and power vary by context, and the goal is not the impossibility of absolute wealth equality (which cannot exist in an energetic economic system). Since money is a fungible asset that can be used to rent or even purchase access to higher levels of strength, intelligence, power, and other inequalities, wealth is an outsize target for reducing inequality broadly. Unless you think a world with locked-in hierarchies is better (and you argue like you do), then reducing wealth inequality clearly allows the world to become less corrupt by giving people a tool to reduce, or even upend, existing power deltas (the source of corruption).

>And you suggest that reducing wealth inequality will make the world better. I don't know, I still believe that aiming at reducing poverty is a better goal.

They're the same thing. You only refuse to see it because you expect your personal wealth to fall. You jealously guard a dysfunctional status quo for illogical and selfish reasons.

No, it doesn't, and no, they weren't. They were depicted as more comfortable and capable with the technology that they'd never known a world without. Some adults weren't able to keep up, but some (most) were. If children had really become fundamentally smarter, the hierarchy of authority would have been upended, and it clearly wasn't. Miri still had to mostly listen to her parents.

It's used correctly here. Advertising to children is a moral hazard because the money used to buy the advertised product comes from the parents, not the children (mostly). The point of advertising is to inform and influence a consumer, but in this case, you're manipulating someone who likely doesn't understand the costs involved, who in turn is meant to influence the actual consumer/purchaser, who are themselves cut out of the loop and potentially buying something they don't understand.

>we knew that apple would only release something when the user experience was right.

And, as has been the case since the iMac release, they can only get the user experience right when others have done the important work of getting it wrong, a lot. But your company knew this, which is why they weren't seriously pursuing a cohesive, robust UX. Why go to all that trouble when Apple will just killsteal? The VR space as we know it today is a result of this almost-15-year-long-impasse; not a matter of technological capability, but market strategy to avoid getting BTFO of a space that everyone agrees will eventually pull a Switch on desktops and smartphones.

As another user pointed out, AVP was only released to appease investors who had dealt with more than half-a-decade of leaks indicating that "something" was "coming soon". There's only so many times you can bait-and-switch them. The AVP was the compromise to show that they were working on something, without really giving competitors anything.

VR can be transformative, if the people who work on it decide that they want to make something transformative, rather than a walled garden that they control and that exists primarily to harvest user data. But everyone seems dead-set on the latter.

I think they weren't naive enough for either, and that they released exactly what they wanted to release. It's just that what they wanted to release was as much about preempting their rivals' strategies as it was about releasing a viavle product (or even more so). They wanted to win the market, but they were desperate not to lose it.

I don't know that that's an accurate description of the circumstances in the books. They were born into a world of ever-present and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, and heavily encouraged to string together modular black boxes to build new things. This didn't make them prodigies, it just kept them from falling behind. They lived in a world where even the physical shape of their schools wasn't stable and reliable.

When you compare to kids learning from home during the pandemic, on Chromebooks and iPads, building TikTok videos with CapCut instead of an actual local NLE application... you can start to hear the echoes.

What.

I think it's the opposite. None of the players in XR wanted to be Apple'd, least of all Apple. That is, create a base product that someone else would refine in order to drink their milkshake. Apple delayed the AVP multiple times hoping to avoid getting sniped by Meta and Google et al., each time requiring a partial rebuild as the underlying tech advanced. They would have loved to have been able to get something out when Robert Scoble was initially raving in the late 2010s, but everyone was on the same page about not wanting to sink billions into development only to have to cede the market to someone responding to your strategy. So, instead, they all dragged their feet.

If XR companies had been as "reckless" with their product strategies as mobile companies in the 90s and 2000s, AVP would have had its iPod moment 6 years ago and we'd be hurtling towards the facephone. The market suffered because of the entrenchment of incumbents with all-too-clear memories.

His read on the Apple Vision Pro (both the circumstances of its creation and its path forward) are incorrect in quite the discouraging manner for me. AVP wasn't released early (late, if anything), and it wasn't a dud because of Tim Cook's disinterest.

I also think it's irresponsible to not broach the obvious implication of "PC components becoming prohibitively expensive" + "untold amounts of compute sitting in compute warehouses with nothing to do because the AI companies that used to own them folded". You probably won't even notice when everything in Best Buy becomes a thin client.

Literally Rainbows End. Vinge was an oracle.

It's a real shame that no one ever got that book in front of Hayao Miyazaki's eyes.

Part of the (relatively) happy denouement included the Chinese coming in with the nondestructive process and everyone being quite happy with that. So yes, the Shredders were the villains.

>Dictionaries are easily available.

You should use one.

>He said, without citation. Also it seems you don't know much about poor people.

It is a structural impossibility for a poor person to be as absolutely corrupt from an extrinsic viewpoint as a rich person, as much as it is a physical impossibility for an ant to be as absolutely strong as a bear. You're conflating some measure of (subjective) inner morality with actual effects in the real world.

Happy World Cup.

>Impossible if there's competition between producers and it's at world scale.

That's a goalpost move if I've ever seen it. Maybe a No True Scotsman fallacy, too.

Geography confers varying conditions at world scale. Hence, "local" is the window. And producers create cartels unless regulated; wealth accrues to itself, capital returns more than labor. Piketty.

>Tyrannies begin with those kind of ideas.

You can't see me but I'm rolling my eyes.

>A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person. A smarter person has more power than a dumber one.

These are all examples of inequality.

>There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can use power for evil?

Rich people have greater reach to do evil commensurate with their wealth. It is a matter of such a degree that it becomes a qualitative difference.

>And it's impossible for the smarter one to lend intelligence to another, and to the stronger one to give muscles to the weaker one.

Did you think before you wrote this?

It would be better to just admit that you're wrong.

"He" being "ryandrake".

Well, no. The low-trust society comes (partly) from corporations betraying the trust of consumers, not consumers recognizing that the corporations saying, "Trust us," are probably bullshitting them.

The initial assertion that there has "always" been a social contract is inaccurate.

Need to pressure banks to achieve feature parity between their websites and native apps. I'm forced to use Paypal to remote deposit checks because my banks limit that feature to their apps, which I can't use because of my device's age. (Paypal does, too, but their app still works for now.)

>implicit social contract

Sounds worthless (in court).

>how would any alternative design prevent intended behavior?

If you're asking how something other than the sqlite database Chrome profile data is stored in would prevent the intended behavior of deleting corrupted files silently, obviously the two issues are orthogonal. But a file-based system would mean a corrupted file (the others untouched) rather than a corrupted database (everything is gone). I'm horrified at the idea of replacing my resilient, inherently modular set of files with a brittle monolithic database.

Because having a slave do whatever you say can also enable some pretty remarkable workflows, but that doesn't stop it from being too morally and economically expensive to become ubiquitous AND sustainable. LLM usage certainly doesn't involve sapient beings and so doesn't carry the same moral reprehensibility as slavery, but in real terms, it's probably even more of a financial quandary.

Louis Rossmann has a number of videos from the period when he was searching for retail space in Manhattan. He would take a laser measure and verify listing info himself. The sf on listings was almost universally not just wrong, but audaciously wrong. "Whatcha gonna do about it?" wrong.

You seem to be under the impression that any part of the average contemporary identity-and-behavioral-development stack encourages asking questions. Babysitting/teach-to-the-test schools don't, authoritarian parents and community authorities and corporate overseers don't, consensus-manufacturing politicians and media don't. (Heck, even our national soccer team doesn't.)(That was a joke.)

Worse, people who find it within themselves to ask questions anyway frequently face silence or a smackdown. The Internet's Own Boy remains no longer with us.