username332211

> All (good) sci fi is political. You should find a different genre if you don't want politics in it.

I think you are reaching one of the limitations of the English language here. Machiaveli's Prince and John Knox's Monstrous Regiment of Women are both "political" books, but in a very different sense. The former is an exercise in trying to understand the nature of power and society in specific circumstances (in particular, the Prince is a study of autocratic power by a committed republican). The latter is just a polemical weapon, designed to advance some political goal. When people complain about politics in literature, it's usually because they don't like reading the second sort of book. That sort of books are seldom good, whatever their genre may be.

(I'm intentionally using Renaissance examples here, to avoid any unproductive discussions on more modern books.)

Utopia in general are a pretty dystopian genre. Plato's Commonwealth clearly describes a totalitarian system (and one of the participants in Socrates' dialogue would go on to murder a rather impressive number of Athenians).

More's Utopia describes a society that's not radically different from the State of Qin - a system based on uniformity, regimentation and forced labor. The main difference is that More would prefer enslavement as the principal punishment, while Shang Yang would prescribe execution.

I think that has something to do with the inherent hubris of the whole exercise.

Doesn't the guy have another book - The Discourses on Livy, that confirms the general gist of The Prince? (i.e. autocracies are horrible, to be a successful autocrat you need to be brutal and ruthless)

The thing is, sanctions damage both the sanctioned nation and the sanctioner.

I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?

Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.

Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.

In 2013 social media was still a textual medium, right? There was Vine, but that died pretty quickly, from what I remember.

If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?

That's by design. France has a cabinet with full control over education in the entire nation. In the United States, education is in the hands of locally elected school boards and the role of the federal and state secretaries of education seems to be mostly limited to dumping money on those people. (And attaching conditions to that money in general seems to be fairly controversial, as the present discussion shows.)

There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.

(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)

The no child left behind act was enacted in 2001. If you check the article, it has a nice little chart, showing a decline that starts in 2015. Prior to 2013, the results show a clear trend of improvement (in regards to the percentage of students achieving a minimum level of proficiency).

How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?

These systems were built when the nation could build. That capability has been significantly diminished. London's equivalent to Paris' RER costs north of 1 billion pounds per mile.

Isn't the lawsuit (and the entire discussion) specifically about a search monopoly?

Also, I'm curious, how many of the things you listed would be normally used by a prolific user of Apple hardware and software? Just YouTube, right?

Really? Because the most common place I've seen this logic break down, is the bizarre habit of people to derive some sort of status and self-worth from using an unpopular product. And to then to vehemently defend that choice in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

No "artisanal" product, from food to cosmetics to clothing and furniture is ever worth it unless value-for-money (and money in general) is of no significance to you. But people buy them.

I really can't go trough every product class, but take furniture as a painfully obvious example. The amount of money you'd have to spend to get furniture of a similar quality to IKEA is mind-boggling. Trust me, I've done it. Yet I know of people in Sweden who put considerable effort in acquiring second-hand furniture because IKEA is somehow beneath them.

Again, there situations where economies of scale don't exist and situations where a business may not be interested in selling a cheaper or superior product. But they are rarer than we'd like to admit.

Not necessary. If economies of scale exist, that means that a popular product is going to be inherently superior in terms of price or quality than an unpopular one. Companies that advertise effectively can offer a better product precisely because they advertise and have large market share. (Whether they do it or not is a question of market conditions, business strategy, public policy and ultimately their own decisions.)

Surplus value isn't really that useful of a concept when it comes to understanding the world.

> Fiat privacy still has all the same problems as telling your therapist that you killed someone, or keeping your wallet keys printed out on paper in a safe.

They could take a lesson from churches. If LLM providers and their employees were willing to commit to privacy and were willing to sacrifice their wealth and liberty for the sake of their clients, society would yield.

I remember seeing a video of a certain Richard Masten, a CrimeStoppers coordinator, destroying the information he had on a confidential source right in the courtroom under the threat of a contempt charge and getting away with a slap on the wrist.

In decent societies standing up for principles does work.

Desperation is a fairly subjective thing.

Plenty of people steal because they are desperate to acquire narcotics. Or to support a gambling habit. Or because they desperately need brand-name clothes to be validated by the rotten people they hang around with. I think we can all agree that those classes of so-called desperate people are probably far bigger than the class who steals for basic necessities

It's interesting how the decent pleasures of life don't provide such motivation. Have you heard of the man who stole to support his hunting trips and his woodworking hobby? Me neither.

But a software company shouldn't really need to show even EBITDA. Amazon didn't between 2000 and 2012.

> But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years.

Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").

It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.

Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)

[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/

Can you name some examples? Virtually every major revolution or civil war I can think of, would involve intelligent achievers who've made it. In fact, the core of the rebellion would be a class that's often vital for the exercise for political power, but won't be allowed access to that same power.

English gentry, New England merchants, nobles of the robe, army officers, etc.

Only the Russian revolution would involve people who were nobodies before it, but they took charge after the disaffected elites that came to power in February spend most of 1917 undermining each other.

A ruling party having a catastrophic electoral position only for it to rapidly improve as election approaches is a fairly common phenomenon in modern democracies. Most recently, Canada was in that situation. Before that, Britain several times. There are plenty of historical examples as well, Reagan and Thatcher in their first re-elections for one.

The latter would have undoubtedly faced a revolution if Britain had no elections. Later, she'd go on to become an invincible electoral juggernaut.

Nevermind the lack of data - what even would be the limits of knowledge in such a model? If it was widely believed that society will collapse at some point in the next 30 years, how would human behavior change in response? How would that affect the original prediction?

Actually, voting is an excellent way to keep power away from the masses. A dictatorship has to constantly be aware of its approval ratings, whereas a parliament can ignore them for 3-4 years at a time.

Well, depending on the sort of other laws you've supported, that shouldn't be very surprising.

The special interest of a particular group always result in far more intense support than any law that benefits the public at large. And privacy is usually a general concern.

Also, am I the only one who finds the idea that you need to demonstrate the existence of political capital to elected politicians concerning? (As opposed to persuading them that it's the right thing to do.) I don't want to sidetrack the whole discussion, but this makes me doubt the future of western democracy in a hundred different ways.

The fact that they haven't cited any endorsement from a first-world organization or government is interesting.

I'd be curious to know, if it was because they never asked for one or because they never got one?

You can't do anything with respect to legislators. In their eyes, your privacy and the consumer's rights are less important than some grandma, who lost a large sum of money by installing malware after ignoring multiple warnings.

If you want to make a difference, try to communicate with someone from OEM companies. Google is making their phones inferior and they'll loose money and market share because of it.

After this change, "I can install NewPipe and Ad blockers" will become a major selling point for Chinese phones among large and profitable segments of the population. And that high-end manufacturers might as well give up and let Apple take that part of the market. If OEMs can be made to understand that, that's going to be the end of this initiative.

Would the same hold for other forms of communication and information retrieval, or should only LLMs be perfect in that regard? If someone is persuaded to commit suicide by the information found trough normal internet search, should Google/Bing/DDG be liable?

Do you believe a book should be suppressed and the author made liable, if a few of its readers commit suicide because of what they've read? (And, before you ask, that's not a theoretical question. Books are well known to cause suicides, the first documented case being a 1774 novel by Goethe.)

Actually, in social science you really can't test a hypothesis with data. What's true under one set of conditions won't be true under another and conditions change all the time. Famously, there's the Lucas critique - the idea that a relationship (or the lack thereof) between variables may break, if a policy that exploits the relationship is implemented.

Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.

If you treat it as a consumer choice, there's a rather uncomfortable marketing question - "What, precisely, is the value proposition of a locked down Android device?"

A few years ago "A smartphone so intuitive that grandma can understand it." used to literally be one of the arguments cited for picking iOS over Android. The UX is far more polished and you are far more likely to find an interesting iOS-exclusive app than an Android-exclusive.

Further, as a hardware manufacturer, Apple is far more likely to manage its walled garden in the consumer's interest, as compared to Google - an advertising company.

If Android gets locked up, all the high-end Android manufacturers, especially Samsung, are going to face a slow, but inevitable death.

I'm going to be buying Apple from now on. If I have no choice and I have to be in a walled garden, I'm going with the best dammed walled garden on the market.

This isn't even going to be some sort of an ideological decision. It's simply the intelligent choice.

The thing is, even if Google has a hidden motive in this case, the prevailing public morality doesn't allow you to argue against a measure designed to protect the weakest and poorest among us. Once a vulnerable group has been invoked, the public stops caring about their rights, the cost-benefit balance and most other rational concerns.

I think the phenomenon is most visible in the United Kingdom. Not just with respect to the recent age verification measures, but also with respect to the government's recent financial misadventures.

Is prospect theory still a thing? I distinctly remember reading that the main empirical result it's based on it's based on - loss aversion, didn't replicate except for large sums of money.

And for large sums of money, you don't need prospect theory to explain loss aversion. Plain old marginal utility will do.

Ehh, if a youth of digital piracy has taught me anything, it's that people will develop the necessary computer literacy to get the entertainment they want. Even if they've completely failed to develop that same skill in the pursuit of self improvement.

I feel that says something about human psychology. Probably something very unpleasant.