DFHippie

Everyone wants someone else to deal with it. It's like we have a live grenade and rather than defusing it or disposing of it we keep passing it around hoping it explodes on someone else.

> Such people are the worst of the worst of humanity.

I don't know. There's a plentiful supply of bad humans.

There's also a propaganda feedback loop. It's not like Trump's voters are innocent, though. They want to be told lies.

Your comment reminded me of this classic: https://youtu.be/EYMjvXdrZIw?si=rYpJm3SP2kcAWPs_

I got the impression that there were three motors altogether and they were integrated with the axles.

I think you also named Alabama's problems. It's one of the poorest states and seems bound and determined to stay that way.

> A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026.

Updating an old adage for the modern age:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France

The problem the Turing test was meant to solve is that we had, and still have, no means of recognizing a conscious mechanism. We lack a theory of consciousness that can be used to make a better test than "It could fool me", so the Turing test accepts that as the test.

In other words, the mechanism may be what consciousness is about, but we can't say anything useful about this as relates to consciousness.

Somebody, in a conversation of which there will be no record, told him it was a good idea, telling him it would be quick, he would be lauded as a hero, there would be vast mineral riches, etc. This person wanted to break up NATO, but this wasn't part of the sales pitch, I imagine.

What is your threshold for rich and influential? You don't have to have Musk money to have sufficient pull to escape the consequences most people would face for action X. I don't think this is a difficult or controversial observation.

If you're net worth is above $15 million or so in the US, your in the 99th percentile. There are many orders of magnitude between you and Bezos, but you're rich. And if you have a media empire that is watched by millions, you're influential.

After a few hundred years historical injustices move down the priority list. France isn't seeking reparations from Italy for the conquest of Gaul, for example.

I agree that our economic system is cold, transactional, and cruel. The problem kinder systems always face is that the people indifferent to the cruelty of capitalism, exemplified by these extortionists, are still there in the alternative system. The alternative must develop countermeasures or fail. The countermeasures replicate the cold transactional cruelty of capitalism.

This isn't to say all countries are doing equally well or poorly, just that countries that came closest to eliminating what we call businesses were not generally regarded as kind, compassionate paradises by the people who lived there.

You sound depressed. I wish you well. I wish the world were kinder to idealists. May you find a supportive community within the indifferent wider world.

That seems beside the point. The ransomware extortionists aren't doing a utilitarian calculation and transferring funds from Exxon to Oxfam. They're taking money where they can and using it to fund a lavish lifestyle and more extortion. In particular, they aren't channeling it towards transforming any society into one in which basic needs are met by something other than jobs and businesses of the familiar sort. The extortionists cause suffering. They parasitize other people's labor. Their acts have actual, identifiable victims. The escorts serving them Moët at their birthday parties funded by other people's suffering aren't doing it for fun, love, or charity. For the escorts, it's a job.

If a business is destroyed by ransomware, all its employees lose their jobs. The business's customers lose the services the business was providing. The families supported by these jobs are now all at risk.

All that money goes somewhere. Much of it goes towards clothing, feeding, and housing people. Also, in most places it's a crime to rob anyone, even selfish assholes.

So Indivisible, which planned the protest, knew the US was going to attack Iran months in advance and plotted this protest to distract from it? What strategic masterminds! What opsec! The left always seemed so fractious and disorganized, but they were just wily, biding their time. But, why?

Seriously, I'm sure you're smart enough to know this is absurd. Just sit down and think about it a bit.

Hydrocarbons are not carbohydrates.

It's not quite like that, though. 90% of their funding supported candidates that lost or opposed candidates that won -- they opposed the winning outcome. They supported the winning outcome with the remaining 10% of their funds, but here they pushed on the side of the contest which was already a lock anyway. So it isn't clear that any of the money they spent achieved anything.

Most people in Silicon valley also are not Musk, Zuck, or Andreesen.

Saying you don't think declining birth rates is the highest priority does not mean you think people should not have children.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

-- W. B. Yeats

Because the US was threatening to take over Greenland by force maybe? There's a reason Denmark rushed soldiers there.

Give Germany time. The US and Russia have forced them to rearm.

> believe in an "interior enemy" (for MAGA it's the deep state)

It's their neighbors, not the "deep state". Renee Good and Alex Pretti were the enemy within. People in inflatable costumes or pussy hats are the enemy within. Uppity kids in high school who get thrown to the drown and put in a choke hold. People filming ice on public streets. They are the enemy within to MAGA. It isn't distant and abstract. It's personal.

I'm skeptical that the nobility were ever particularly noble in the eyes of the commoners.

This. I think so much of the fascism and corruption afoot in the world comes from people who believe they deserve things they are incompetent to get. Their sense of entitlement is in conflict with their competence and unrestrained by concern for others. To soothe their ego wound they project their faults onto the person who has what they want. "It isn't my failure; it's your trickery!" Now instead of shame and impotence they feel righteous anger.

The vetting and training process for judges is a lot longer and deeper than the vetting process for juries (though voting for judges kind of throws this out the window). Presumably part of the purpose of this is to establish whether the prospective judge can judge impartially despite their private feelings.

Most of the world does without juries. In the US we don't use juries for all trials. The Supreme Court and circuit courts do without juries. If we don't use juries for our most important legal decisions, why are they better in the cases in which they are used?

I'm not a legal scholar. I'm sure untold volumes have been written about this. Just on its surface, though, it looks like nothing more than an accidental quirk we inherited from the English legal system.

This seems like a fundamental problem with juries. If everyone knows you, most people detest you, and you can only be tried by a jury which is indifferent to you, is that jury truly impartial? What sort of people could be in Hitler's jury, say, to take it to an extreme?

You want a jury with good judgment. Maybe people indifferent to the publicly known actions of the accused are that way precisely because they lack good judgment. Yes, they need to judge the case in question, not everything the accused has ever done, but perhaps indifference to those facts extraneous to the case indicates they will judge pertinent facts in a way the public at large wouldn't recognize as just.

I was sued. I was 19 years old working as a painter for a dishonest contractor that paid crap wages. I nosed out of a parking lot after work one day to see around a line of cars turning in and a big sedan ploughed into my little econobox. Several years later, as the statute of limitations was about to run out, the driver of the sedan sued me. My insurance companies first move, before doing any discovery, was to offer her $50k. She said no, so discovery began. It turned out she'd been mis-prescribed an anti-psychotic to create the symptoms she was suing me for having caused. The case was thrown out. The insurance company's legal bills ended up being much less than $50k, but the way it worked was they took a guess at the break even point, offered a bit less than that, and made an offer.

That's not to say this is how it works when Meta is on trial. I just thought it was useful perspective on the nature of settlements.

Do you think gutting the IRS is going to improve that ratio?

Not all public sector jobs are the same. Working for a defense contractor is not the same as working for the IRS. Defense gets money dumped on it year after year. The IRS gets starved year after year.