101 karma · joined January 20, 2024
Or alternatively, we can leave Ray20 alone and not force him to pay for the treatment of a 200 kg fatties with the illegal motorcycle racing and wingsuit jumping hobbies.
> companies that are net negative to society
It is fatties who are net negative to society, not companies.
It's always amazing how fatties can shift responsibility onto others. The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.
I don't think it's a matter of propaganda. We're talking about totalitarian dictatorships on both sides of the barricades, where such communication with relatives on the other side have very real risks of decades in prison or even death.
Or the exact opposite. Not every institutional experience is good and useful. Some are quite the opposite. I mean, term limits are one of the most common democratic institutions for precisely this reason. We WANT some knowledge and experience to walk out the door.
This is effective. Therefore, normalization of this plays into the workers' hands, gives them information, and gives economic advantage to honest agents.
I mean, you could compare it to any non-capitalist society, where such treatment of workers is declared unacceptable. But what does this translate into in reality? Such strategies are still effective and provide an advantage to those actors who adhere to them. But since firing workers for their relative effectiveness contradicts the proclaimed ideology, such workers are simply accused of random crimes against the country and executed.
I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.
First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.
If we demonstrate scientific honesty and begin to apply the same level of techniques that are used to obtain the result of "10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt", we can come to the conclusion that even a small accident at a small nuclear power plant can destroy life on planet Earth as a phenomenon.
I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?
In this case, we find that nuclear nuclear reactors are 2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than gas and coal power plants.
I mean, thank you, the USSR already showed this, no more is needed.
By the way, this is a good example of what happens when regulators lose to the market. By what year was initially planned the complete ban of internal combustion engine vehicles for some European countries? And where are we now?
The regulator lost, the market suffered, but survived, and many people are unhappy with the regulations.
And there are situations when the regulator wins. You know, like when the communist government came to power. And when the regulator wins, people die of hunger. All the people. Every single time.
Oh no, I think you misunderstood. I'm not saying you think this is acceptable. I'm saying the elites are ALREADY doing it. And you're expressing your extreme disapproval not of the phenomenon itself, but of the hypothetical situation in which not only the elites but also ordinary people would gain access to such tools (which, of course, would also be very illegal and unacceptable. Well, until these terms still exist).
> I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more
I think we are rather talking about an increase in the number of assassinations to a level that literally threatens the destruction of human civilization in its modern form. Purely because of the irreversible nature of this tool acquisition by society. It's just that at one point in time, society doesn't yet have access to it, and at another, it has, and now it's everywhere, for everyone, and there's no turning back. The entire planet is living in a new socio-political-economic reality.
But this does not in any way contradict the radical democratization of society.
> so then the government
Will there be a government?
Today, any bloody dictator, tyrant, or autocrat continues to kill people en masse simply because society lacks a sufficiently effective tool to guarantee the reliable transfer of funds to one of their henchmen should the issue with him be effectively resolved
You also can't simply assume that an existing solution on the market is not the best already.
I mean, who told us that smartphones with user-replaceable batteries are better than smartphones that are 0.5 mm thinner because their batteries are non-replaceable? The same people who want to ban encryption?
> Regulatory interventions in the market can then serve as an effective lever to help the market break free from that situation.
No, they can't. Regulatory processes are shaped by the same incentives as market ones. It's just that the tools for achieving goals are different. And because of this, it is always moving in the opposite direction from "help the market".
> I’m supposed to just shut up and accept that there isn’t enough demand for my quirky, special requests?
Generally speaking, yes, it is a market ideology. But what's not clear about it? People adhere to it not because they like when unqualified masses, with their consumer behavior, encourage all sorts of nasty things in mass-market products. It's simply better than when a regulatory body implements its "quirky, special requests" at the expense of everyone else.
We're not doing Electron because some popular software also using it. We're doing Electron because the ability to create truly cross-platform interfaces with the web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.
I sincerely don't understand why deportation is called a punishment in this discussion.
As in any country in the world, US immigration law operates on the principle that a foreigner is granted a PRIVILEGE to be in the US. Or this privilege is denied with no reason whatsoever. Just because it is a PRIVILEGE.
When someone is deported for participating in protests, they are still literally in a better position than the BILLIONS of people who want to be in the US but who are denied this privilege without any justification.
Why do we think this man was punished by the United States, at the same time thing that the BILLIONS of people the US arbitrarily bans from being in its territory were not punished? Compared to those billions, he rather have been granted the privilege of being on US territory (for a while).
But that's not true. The European Union and many other countries are taking extreme measures to ensure that what happened in the United States never happens with them and they are introducing a bunch of different measures to strengthen control over society, the media sphere, and other measures to ensure that no pedophile rings could be exposed.
Just out of curiosity, according to your methodology, what's Kim Jong-un's approval rating among North Koreans? 99.98%?
Yeah, and who is creating those infrastructure? Jesus? This is the same part of goods and services.
> When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.
So what? The ability to produce goods and services (and therefore general well-being) will not decrease because of that.
> It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc
By the way, a good argument against your position. Agricultural land is very cheap, but the vast majority of people who believe AI will put people out of work and worsen overall well-being are for some reason reluctant to buy this asset, which would see a catastrophic increase in value under such a scenario. So these people are either incapable of analyzing the economic processes, and their predictions are worthless, or they don’t really believe in such a scenario.
> will favour AIs over humans
Let me repeat: it does not reduce the ability to create goods and services. Under capitalism, this is the only characteristic that determines people's well-being.
> ...to the AI-run companies!
I think this is a fairly unlikely scenario. But even in this very unlikely case, people's well-being will not be reduced. Simply because of the mechanisms of creating well-being.
> Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.
Economic theory (and 20th-century economic practice) demonstrates the exact opposite. In every country that attempted to effectively implement UBI, it led to a sharp decline in production and mass starvation. Literally every single time.
Literally the same thing.
> humans will be economically obsolete and worthless
Only if we are talking about a socialist system (and they are making pretty small progress in the field of AI). A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.
A people's well-being is literally the goods and services created by that people. How can it decrease if the people's ability to produce those goods and services is not hindered in any way?
So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits. The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes, taxation out of production, and other practices that would lead to people being declared economically obsolete and mass executed to optimize their carbon footprint or something.
"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."
Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.
I mean, when you would have literally death penalty for attempt to overthrow the order, of course you will be "simply calling for reform".
Wait, isn't the US has literally the highest spending on education in the world? And it is precisely the highest spending in the world on missiles that make it possible. So less money on missiles would mean less money on education.
Poverty is a relative concept. Even among billionaires, there are poor billionaires that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
Well, I guess this means that they have successfully solved their smartphone availability problem. Otherwise, note taking tasks with a pen would be more important for them.
More like 30-50 USD, judging by the research I did in 5 minutes (or 20-30 USD if you agree to a used phone).
No, I understand that Americans love to pay several times more for their houses, healthcare, education, coffee and everything else simply on principle, pretending that there are no other options, but you can literally google the largest phone manufacturers in the world and look at the prices of their current starter models.
And yes, we are talking about full-fledged smartphones that are quite pleasant to use, with up-to-date hardware and the latest versions of the operating system. Not some outdated torture devices with zero reliability.
A typical practice for dictatorships to create a legal system capable of exerting pressure on any opponent.
> Are there not much more objectionable fetishes than this one?
The goal isn't to combat sexual perversions, but to silence anyone the dictatorial regime deems necessary.
You pass a law that's clearly unimplementable, and therefore won't cause much outrage, and then, as expected, the law doesn't work. But when you need to silence someone, a complaint emerges that someone accessed and distributed illegal content (some anonymous on some forum saw their IP-address doing that). In the public consciousness, the violation isn't serious (the law isn't actually implemented), so there's no significant outrage. Meanwhile, you conduct searches of the victim's home, confiscate their computers, laptops, smartphones and other gadgets, and open a criminal case against them.
And then you simply close the case, saying, "Yeah, nothing illegal was found, we are sorry". And the victim (and others) will think twice before going against the dictatorial regime next time. Typical practice, all dictatorships do it
Perhaps he's talking about a different kind of homogeneity (one that conventionally falls under the "racism" category)
> Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre
Do not arm him with arguments