Starlink is allowed to choose who they partner with. They will go through a lengthy process to pick partners that align with their business, including value propositions.
The goal is to hedge national security risk by giving ownership of key industries to native South Africans and especially those who have historically been denied economic opportunities by the apartheid government.
Yes, all the time, because it is a private arrangement between the foreign company and the local company. Private companies are in no meaningful sense "cronies" of the government, even if they were accredited by the formal regulating body. You cannot point to a single major case of B-BEEE favouritism, it is a legal framework that is almost always impartial.
Problem of course is that a lot of this information is junk even at scale, which is how you get people "deciding" to pollute, destroy their own health, start wars, etc.
B-BEEE exists as a kind of "national security risk insurance", that is why it is only applied to sectors like Telecomms and Mining. So my statement is not incorrect.
This is misleading, Starlink does not need to provide "30% to the state", they only have to give 30% ownership to a local company with historically disenfranchised owners providing real economic value to South Africa. This can be a private company.
Starlink is a massive national security risk, and that is one of the primary reasons it has not been allowed in South Africa.
It's also why Starlink has pushed so aggressively to establish itself in South Africa, going as far as to hold private meetings with the Democratic Alliance and even spamming their customers with emails urging them to put pressure on the government.
But you can just give computers to each of those millions of people and propagate the information, instead of having less reliable humans doing it? That's kind of what's already happening.
Unpopular to say, but the government is just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. Unfortunately most parents are just very uneducated or lacking in discipline, and no child should be punished in the name of freedom. That being said, age verification laws are obviously a bad way to do that. They should just ban specific categories of social media outright.
This is a tricky one, but it actually gives control to the government, not corporations. The government now has rules which let them define what social media is and how big its market can be.
The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.
It's just not comparable though is it? You need cloud services because it's physically impossible to use your single home computer as a server, CDN, load balancer, mass storage, security service, and distributed system.
But AI is just weights, you can run a reasonably intelligent model at home, or on a few GPUs if you're a small-medium sized company, and it doesn't require dedicated maintenance.
Putting aside that PG does not engage with AOC's point, he also doesn't engage with the much stronger argument against them: Billionaires are clearly a national security risk.
Well, no, no country on earth has an expectancy in the mid 80s, I was being generous with your wording. 40-50 countries have expectancy between 80-84, which is early 80s. Most countries are sub-80.
So they're losing out on a few dozen new units, but it is made up for by renters across the board having to pay less rent and thus having more money to put into the economy? Seems like a good trade to me?
How do you quantify "incentive"? Is a landlord really looking at 5% lower property value and deciding it's not worth investing? Is this even true in aggregate?
That doesn't seem to be true, the global expectancy is 73 and only a dozen of the wealthiest countries are mid 80s. I wouldn't be worried about dying at 70, but maybe I'm built of tougher stuff.
The distrust is not even ideological anymore, we just want our services to keep working without some guy deciding to nuke everything the next day for literally no reason.
I never said I was better than them, but I can acknowledge that some people are. Even then, only in the domain of software, not in terms of human value.
This post resonates with my situation very much, although I have not made even a tiny fraction of the contributions this person has. I think if a person like this is struggling to find work, but the donkeys who code my government's dysfunctional websites are all fully employed, it suggests the software industry is in very big trouble.
That being said, and speaking from my own experience, one can develop ego problems if they've been undervalued by society. You can start viewing other people as lesser than you for not understanding your situation. I managed to escape those toxic thought patterns by practising empathy as a deliberate activity, and forcing myself to give love and grace to others until it felt natural.
There was no implication of anything you're suggesting. It's a question of correctness (bias vs facts, predicting the sun will rise vs predicting the end of the world), whether you think it's important to be correct as a matter of reputation, and how correctness should be weighed if it is indeed important to one's reputation (a once-off comment vs a full report).
He co-authored a report, which is something more than an opinion. It may be used to inspire policy. There should be greater reputational consequences for publishing something you spent a few months studying and writing about along with several experts. Just my opinion.
FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.
I don't think you can use lindy on trends as if trends are static objects, but that's another conversation.
Depends, some systems are dynamic. There is also a gray area where obscurity can be computationally infeasible to attack, but not bound by traditional polynomial assumptions in cryptography.
As is always the case in these semantic discussions, the answer depends on your initial axioms and assumptions, which does kind of make most of these discussions pointless (but I did learn a lot from this one).