thebooktocome

Billionaires don’t seem to have trouble doing illegal things when it comes to tax evasion, securities fraud, and the like. Some random municipal zoning board would be child’s play with their resources.

The proof of this is that the rich regularly manipulate zoning laws. Look at what Google and Apple did to Palo Alto.

Here is SLC’s program, including all the community work they have to do to mollify the NIMBYs:

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/06/1134230388/village-salt-lake-...

Median rent in SLC: 1.8k/mo, 21.6k/yr

Federal prison: ~39k/yr

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/01/2021-18...

Median rent in CA: 2.9k/mo, 34.8k/yr (according to Zillow)

CA prison: 106k/yr (!)

https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

Incarcerating the homeless is not an economic decision, it’s an emotional one. Society doesn’t mind wasting endless amounts of money doing it, because the cruelty is the point.

Imprisonment is far more expensive than housing. SLC ran a pilot program years ago proving the concept.

Of course, if one is the retributive sort, nothing grinds one’s spleen more than someone worse off getting something “they don’t deserve”.

I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).

I’m glad my impression of you was accurate.

> A modern employee is in no way comparable to a slave, especially not the kind of employee likely to visit HN.

What an elitist attitude.

H1B visas are a modern form of forced labor you might be able to find some shred of empathy for, but I kind of doubt it.

> but stating a modern laborer is not getting anything out of their labor is quite false. Not as much as they want, sure, but it's not zero.

In many cases the net benefit of working a job is negative, because many places pay below the cost of living. That’s why so many people are running two or three jobs now, in the states.

Odd choice to fixate on a clause buried in a hypothetical and ignore the thrust of the sentence, but I support your hermeneutical decisions.

I do not live in Chicago and have said nothing here about it.

Agreed. I live in a city with a noticeable homeless problem, but our extensive system of libraries is perfectly safe.

Now, ten or twenty years ago, the main branch downtown was in what certain conservative commentators might have called a "no-go zone"—but really the neighborhood around the library was fine. It seemed to me that the drug gangs in the area back then had some kind of unspoken agreement that the library was neutral (dare I say sacred?) ground.

Excuse me, but I didn’t say anything like “large swaths of the country are just itching to break out the noose.” You’re being hyperbolic and oversensitive.

When I’m talking about “some corners of our country”, I’m talking about corners that I’ve personally seen myself. It’s not subtle when, e.g., the pool attendant lets me in the municipal pool without a second glance but stop the black mother behind me and pointedly demand she prove her residence.

I’m pretty sure Finland does as well, though whether it’s a national mandate or just standard operating procedure I don’t know.

Those two claims aren’t mutually exclusive.

I don't know how to tell you that there were George Floyd protests in DC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Washi....

Somehow they managed to avoid breaking into the Capitol building and rifling through the offices of Congresscritters.

You don't see it because you're not looking for it. Plenty of protest groups were extremely vigilant about minimizing property damage and rooting out violent infiltrators.

The George Floyd protests were far more policed: twenty-five protestors died; around 14k were arrested. [1]

Hard to say any 1/6er suffered a similar fate, despite their significantly more egregious apparent crimes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests

I just watched a youtube chef mangle and torture a live lobster the other day, all while claiming to be informed on how to humanely kill them.

> Petty crime has gone up everywhere.

Hm. While crime statistics are intentionally nerfed in the United States, this doesn’t seem to be true here.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191211/reported-larceny-...

COVID tended to reduce crime rates simply because fewer people were personally interacting overall.

When the LLM inevitably hallucinates a case that doesn't exist or weirdly misstates a widely-known legal principle, the supposed author of that text is going to have some explaining to do.

This happens now, by the way—there are semi-frequent instances of lawyers getting fined or otherwise punished for getting e.g. case citations wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.

> . . . I have no idea how you’d enforce that. . .

Most countries already have a professional lawyering organization that oversees ethics. Those organizations already enforce such rules by either fines, mediation, revocation of the license to practice law, or ultimately by referral to the criminal justice system.

What’s wild to me is:

1) It’s not neutral. It’s trained on a corpus including works by radicals of every bent weighted by the prevalence of their work in the corpus.

2) It’s not non-human. Separated from its human-derived training data, it does not function.

3) It doesn’t mediate between positions or propositions, it doesn’t have logic or intention. It merely regurgitates what it’s seen written before in similar contexts.

Means testing is super effective at increasing a welfare program's cost while reducing its societal impact.

I read these Borgesian lists of acceptable kinds of hardship (which can be and are routinely bike-shedded ad nauseam) as calls for pointlessly increasing government bureaucracy and expenditure. Far cheaper to simply offer blanket forgiveness at some appropriate level.

Millennial here, paid off my student loan debt with my own, hard-earned cash. My parents were already bankrupted by medical debt before I graduated high school, so no help there.

I still want my less lucky peers and the zoomers made whole after they were sold a bill of goods. Chaining the better part of a generation to an anchor isn't a winning move for any civilization.

> Looking at individual country impacts on dangerous heat levels, researchers found that current emissions from 1.2 average US citizens condemn a future human to live in extreme heat.

This is a terrible sentence that encrypts their intended point.

“Current emissions” do not have the agency implied by “condemn”. One might get the impression that the “1.2 average US citizens” are doing the condemning, but the average US citizen does not have enough agency to move the needle one way or the other.

The government (supposedly, a sovereign power concerned with its own continued existence) ought to regulate the corporations (supposedly, rational agents concerned with their own continued existence) that are contributing almost all US emissions. Those two are the ones doing the condemning.

This has nothing to do with a homespun wool contest. This isn’t a commercial setting.

As your link mentions, these sheep have been selectively bred to require shearing.

Yeah, we are—evidently—but that’s not what you’re doing in parent.

It requires too much labor for the prison-industrial complex to monitor. Digital files are far easier to automatically censor.

Good luck making that argument to the median voter. The entire conservative wing believes prisoners deserve torture (unless it’s them or their immediate family); half of the center-left is too busy projecting a “tough on crime” image to give much thought about improving conditions.

Even if you can prove a non-profit, non-funded program reduces recidivism, if it also happens to make prisoners’ lives marginally better in the process, that’s an immediate no.

Here’s another example: during the Victorian era, Alfred, Lord Tennyson revived interest in The Matter of Britain (King Arthur, Lancelot, etc.) by publishing, over several decades, what would become The Idylls of the King.

Thence T. H. White, thence Mary Stewart, thence Marion Bradley (an otherwise wretched person), thence that terrible Sam Neill vehicle, thence. . .

All of this to say there’s a flaw in your logic: financial incentives are not the only reason people create new things. Financial incentives in fact destroy other artistic incentives, and so we already lack the works that would have been created in their absence. The proof of this is the graveyard of Netflix series canceled in the second season.

(P.S.: Ah, here, in the acknowledgements to _The Mists of Avalon_: "Finally, I must express loving gratitude to my husband, Walter Breen, who said, at a crucial moment in my career, that it was time to stop playing it safe by writing potboilers, and provided financial support so that I could do so. . ." A potboiler is a book written to cater to the popular taste, so that the writer might earn a living.)

The question was, “What renaissance would occur if copyright didn’t exist?”

Here’s one that happened because the source works weren’t indefinitely protected (ironically, what Disney wanted for their own derived works.)

The Disney Renaissance, for example, was built on the back of works in the public domain (Aladdin, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, etc.)

> Without copyright, moneyed interests would be able to simply wait for promising new artists to create something that resonates with an audience, then copy that thing and aim their massive marketing budgets at dominating that audience with the new version owned by the [corporation, famous artist, etc].

Copyright doesn’t mitigate this risk, for if it did, it would do the same thing for the example you cite in the second paragraph. (Software and game assets are also protected by copyright. . .)

Edging every closer to Stross’ vision in Accelerando.