ksdale

My question is how does your platform differ from what Substack is already trying to do?

And I guess to expand on my position, I don't think this debate is stupid. The way through, in my mind, as naive as it may seem, is to be basically like substack, and acknowledge that providing a platform is a big responsibility, one they don't take lightly, that the goal is increased trust overall, and that that goal is primarily served by being as content agnostic as possible. Acting in good faith with no expectation that people will return the favor is the way to build trust.

Haha I can sense your frustration! What is the real debate, in your mind?

The silver lining of this awkward middle ground is the certainty that censorship is the wrong way to go. We may be doomed if people remain so easy to manipulate, but if you really believe that censorship is counter-productive, then education is the only path out.

I think it's far too early to pass judgment on whether it works in China. Lots of very oppressive states have lasted for decades, apparently successfully, until they implode spectacularly.

Less than a century ago, many in the West sang the praises of communism as (unkown to them) a million people died in the Gulag. Things aren't always as they appear.

I was under the impression that Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of Congress as a whole, but the individual representatives are about as popular as you'd expect.

How can you be so sure it's not regionalism that's causing you to dismiss nearly 10% of one of the largest, richest countries in the world as inconsequential?

When machines malfunction and kill people, the manufacturers pay. If it was gross negligence that killed someone, someone goes to jail, unless they're the dead one.

Every day, our homes don't catch fire despite all of the electricity running through the walls, our combustion engines don't explode, our batteries don't explode, our buildings don't collapse. The modern world is full of things that could kill us and don't.

I didn't say no one is at fault, the manufacture is at fault if they built the vehicle in a way that we deem was wrong enough to deserve fault.

And we get to decide who's liable, just because you can act like the AI is sentient doesn't mean you can't make the company who wrote the code responsible for the actions of the AI.

And if we wait until self-driving cars are 100% safe, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths will happen in the meanwhile.

I don't see how that's any different of an issue for when any machine malfunctions and kills someone. Was the design or manufacture of the machine negligent in some way? Was it a failure mode that we've decided is rare enough that no one is at fault?

Self-driving cars may be new, but deaths caused by machines are as old as machines.

I didn't take the parent to be saying that self-driving is better, just that humans are really surprisingly bad, and that's the bar we should be measuring against, not an ideal world where no one dies in traffic accidents.

This is a very underappreciated point. SO many people die from driving each year, but a lot of people treat a single death from self-driving cars as a reason to scrap the whole endeavor.

I think you're right about automation coming for office jobs, but it's not that odd that physical labor would be the focus, a couple hundred years ago, like 95% of people worked in agriculture, and automation is the reason only 1% of people do today. It's harder to suss out how many factory jobs have been automated away compared to how many are just being done elsewhere, but a lot of factory labor has been automated as well.

It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.

Exactly, people get loans for houses and cars, and the banks make damn sure you're a good credit risk. For college loans, it's literally the opposite. Since the loans are so hard to get rid of, the only incentive is to increase the number and size of the loans.

The issue is that if lenders looked at creditworthiness for college loans the way they do for mortgages, either the price of college would have to decline precipitously, or they would trust far fewer people with that amount of money.

Would you be ashamed if your child was a forklift driver? The world needs people to do useful things, and we shouldn't shame people for doing useful things.

I'm not the parent poster, but I have always found that, to an extent, the more detail you put on the invoice, the better. There are some people who seem absolutely compelled to say "but you only did x" if they only see one thing on the invoice, no matter how involved that one thing is. Next piece of advice is to fire anyone who questions the price (at least more than once maybe...)

On the other hand, I think it was common in a lot of places for a long time for families/clans to settle disputes internally - if someone was killed and everyone agreed it was justice, then it wouldn't end up reported/remarkable. This is probably the category that most intrafamily disputes would fall into.

The market goes down during the day, that isn't the same thing as everyone losing money during the day. On net, all of the market participants lose money, but this is still consistent with sophisticated financial firms making money off of trading with big actors who are less price sensitive and retail traders.

Or there's still a massive pandemic happening and supplies of everything are still very shocked.

I think the issue with this is that one person's loss is another person's gain. Lots of people lose money during the day, but it's not generally the very sophisticated hedge funds and HFT people.

And if you were to hold overnight, you'd have to sell in the morning, and the volume of overnight trading isn't high enough to support a bunch of big firms buying into overnight trading and selling at open, they'd all sell into a disaster, which would make overnight returns go away?

Exactly, the randomness of overnight would completely erase the consequences of a day full of miniscule trades.

Seems to me like an easy explanation is that a whole ton of firms wouldn't want to hold anything overnight because you can't respond to it until the next morning? So they pile in in the morning, and exit in the afternoon.

Yeah, in most of the places I've lived, I've only had one choice, and it's been quite expensive for the quality.

So no one should have nice things to protect the incomes of the few lucky enough to possess the only natural supply?

Lots of businesses have successfully kept trade secrets for decades, many very famous and gigantic company's recipes are trade secrets. Companies know that if they patent it, it will be in the public domain eventually, whereas trade secrets can stay secret indefinitely, theoretically.

As someone who knows nothing about being a professional chef, it surprises me to discover that a professional chef wouldn't be very comfortable sharpening knives!

I mean, if you don't force people to do it, then English is The One Language you're talking about. People have basically collectively decided that if they're talking to someone halfway around the world, the words for net and fish are net and fish.

I mean... we eat biomass? Mass starvation will occur when we can't grow food anywhere. We literally grow the food we eat in a year in a year. I don't think it's ridiculously optimistic to assume that if starvation was on the horizon, we'd be able to spin up food production in the places where the climate allowed it, and this stuff is going to happen on the scale of years at worst, but probably the scale of decades. I think it's a hell of a pessimistic assumption to make that half the world's population is going to starve to death.

I'm not saying that the climate isn't going to change drastically, I'm saying that as long there isn't mass death, people will adapt, and most likely will continue to have a higher standard of living than people did for most of history.

And certainly the pace of change is very alarming, but millions of years ago, when the temperature was so high, I'm pretty sure the Earth was capable of supporting just as much or more biomass.

"People have never seen anything close to what we are facing in the near term, and absolutely nothing like what awaits for us in 100 years." I keep seeing people make this claim, assuming it is self-evident that this means apocalypse. It's true that this has never happened before, and that's the only thing that's set in stone. Humans possess tremendous ingenuity and flexibility. Like I keep saying, assuming everyone doesn't starve to death, people can adapt to anything else.

This. There is such a huge chasm between mass death, and practically any other consequence of climate change. As long as mass death doesn't occur, people will adapt to what happens (and it may be rather unpleasant, to be sure...)

A huge loss of biodiversity is a massive tragedy, but as far as our grandchildren being "fine," people have lived for basically all of history in circumstances much worse than they're likely to encounter.

The song is a bit cynical for my tastes, but it seems willfully obtuse to not be able to fathom why someone would be very frustrated with many aspects of modern Christmas.