Yeah, saying “it’s the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me” is like saying “I don’t contribute to climate change because I don’t cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It’s the restaurant that’s destroying the environment!”
Absent Indians using AI? The AI ouroboros?
Even before that there was Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings.
That was back in an era where everyone watched the same “influencers”. The good part of that was that for the most part, these influencers were rigorously fact checked so the people who watched them agreed on the same set of facts, and those facts were more or less true.
On the other hand, there were times when these “influencers” were biased or even hid the truth. The bias was often something they even had trouble noticing. Like, they all believed communism was a big threat, or that police were trustworthy. As for hiding the truth, sometimes when a politician got in trouble the news would drop the story because of their deference to power. They’d also sometimes try to repeat whatever the government said as truth without checking it, or not investigate bad things the government was doing overseas because they saw that as being patriotic.
Overall, I think it was better when everybody agreed on most things, even if sometimes the news / “influencers” were biased. At least it meant that the government was more or less functional. At least it meant that people were relatively civil with each-other.
This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.
“Financial harm” is a loaded term. People expected to make money and then didn’t, but is that a bad thing?
What if the US president declared that it is now a legal requirement that every American subscribe to a new paid tier of Facebook, and that declaration was rubber stamped by the lawmakers. Anybody who didn’t capitulate would be doing “financial harm” to Meta, but is that really a fair way to frame that? If a bully wants your lunch money and you resist, are you doing “financial harm” to the bully?
The way I see things, the initial copyright laws were a relatively fair trade: a 14 year monopoly on something, that could be renewed for another 14 years if the author was still alive. In exchange, everything after that term became part of the public domain. So, it would encourage people to produce writing, and the public would benefit because a reasonable amount of time later what was produced would be available to everybody at no cost. Modern copyright terms are a massive give-away to Hollywood, the record labels, etc. So, while it’s true that infringing copyright does reduce the potential amount of money a copyright holder might hope to receive, morally it’s closer to fighting off a bully than it is to theft.
The 1950s economy was the result of:
The New Deal was only possible because of the Great Depression. Only that level of chaos was enough so that left-wing politicians could push through radical reforms that moved power from the elite to the workers. The reforms of the New Deal remained in place after the war, at least for a while.
The second world war saw the destruction of the industrial capacity of the UK, Germany, France and the USSR. Meanwhile the only attack on the US was an attack on military targets at a Navy base in a distant territory.
So, if you want an economy similar to the 1950s, arrange for a world war which somehow leaves the US unscathed but destroys every other similarly developed economy, then arrange for a great depression which destroys the economy to such an extent that radical reforms can be enacted to hand power to the average worker.
Yes, of course nothing bad would happen if we switched to a 20 hour work week. But, the people with the power aren’t going to just allow that to happen. The 40 hour work week only happened with a massive series of strikes that were brutally put down by the cops. The change to a 20 hour week isn’t just going to happen because some workers think it would be cool.
That’s absolute bullshit. When the 40 hour workweek was “invented”, men were working 12 hour days in factories and their wives also worked. The wives sometimes worked in factories, often worked as domestic servants for richer people, or did home-based work. Home based work was often laundry or cooking for other people, not just their family. They’d sometimes also finish goods that were produced in a factory. Both partners were working 12+ days. And, while women did most of the home cooking and cleaning, it wasn’t as though that’s all they did.
This system ended because the workers used their power and went on strike. The result was the Haymarket Affair and is the reason that most countries, other than the US, celebrate a worker’s day on May 1st. The striking workers were attacked and beaten by the cops, and then because a bomb was thrown at a cop, the leaders of an anarchist group were rounded up and hanged after show trials.
Eventually the striking workers got what they were working for: an 8 hour day. But, it took decades after the Haymarket Affair for it to happen, and it wasn’t something that happened because everyone agreed it made sense. It was a long and bloody fight where that was the compromise that reduced the bloodshed.
If you want a 20 hour work week, join a union, prepare to go on strike and prepare to be beaten by the cops.
I found the video this was taken from and he starts out very red. I don’t know if it’s bad studio lighting, a bad sunburn, or a combination, but right from the start he was very red. I guess when he got all emotional it just got that much worse.
It’s not “getting emotional about being a father figure”, whatever you mean by that.
It’s Jordan Peterson, a horrible human being. One of his main beliefs is that women should adopt traditional roles and men should lead, and he justifies that with vague things like saying that women score higher in negative emotions. So, it’s perfectly fair to dunk on him for losing control of his emotions in a video interview.
Wow, my comment was removed for just a mild hint that Chinese communism isn’t free from corruption?
Ouch. Good to know it’s possible though.
You… I like you.
You’d really have liked it if I started talking about how the winters in Ontario, CA are much more pleasant than the ones in Ontario, CA.
Recreation just switches to an early morning or post-sundown schedule.
Ah, right. I hadn’t considered that. It’s interesting that the places with the most brutal heat are the ones with a relatively early sunset. In 2023 Oslo hit 32 degrees, not that hot by international standards, but combine that with the fact it happened on June 15th and the sun never fully sets at that time of year, and it’s hard to find relief.
I usually still get 3-4 hours of sports activities on a saturday or sunday.
Do you live somewhere where the mid-day heat is 35+C? 40+C? To me, those are the only ones where it’s truly brutal and I might prefer long, harsh winters. OTOH, human culture hasn’t really found a great way to deal with brutally cold winters. There are winter solstice celebrations, but no adjustment of the schedule of life to avoid the worst of the cold. But, in places with really hot summers there’s often a tradition of mid-day naps, and I could really get on board with that lifestyle.
The Tragedy of the Commons was popularized by a man who was anti-immigrant and pro-eugenics, and it’s not good science. The good science on it was done by Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel-ish prize for fieldwork showing that various societies around the world had solved the issues of the governance of commons.
The thing is, Ostrom didn’t disprove it as a concept. She just proved that with the right norms and rules in place it doesn’t inevitably lead to collapse. IMO it’s not about capitalism or communism, it’s about population. A small number of people who all know each-other can negotiate an arrangement that everyone can agree to. But, once you have thousands or millions of people, and each user of the commons knows almost none of the other users, it’s different. At that point you need a government to set rules, and law enforcement to enforce those rules. That, of course, fails when the commons is something like the world’s atmosphere and there’s no worldwide government that can set and enforce rules.
The other thing that most people don’t focus on is how we train LLMs.
We’re basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they’ve found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.
Now, I’m not saying we’re building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we’re putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it’s intelligent. We’re not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We’re instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.
What we’re effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What’s crazy about that is that we’re not building this to fool a predator so that we’re not in danger. We’re not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We’re doing it so we can fool ourselves.
It’s like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn’t work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn’t intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.
Yeah, exactly. Winters in LA or LA might be different. But, winters in places with months and months of snow are awful. You can’t do much outside because it’s too cold. You can’t have your windows open to get some fresh air because it’s too cold. You can dress properly to do outdoor activities, but it often requires so many layers that it’s really uncomfortable. Plus, you can’t have any gaps. Your neck, wrists, ankles are often places where the cold can get in, or worse they can get wet and being cold and wet is awful.
In addition, the world is just miserable in winter. There’s almost nothing alive outside other than other humans. No grass, many trees lose all their leaves, birds migrate away, everything is shades of grey or brown. Christmas can be fun, and it’s no coincidence that it’s celebrated almost exactly on the darkest day of the year. That’s when we need a lot of pretty lights and cheer. But, Christmas is just the beginning of winter. What follows is months of gloomy grey cold.
And, while there are outdoor winter sports, you need special footwear for all of them because of the snow and ice. You can’t even walk across a field or a park without extra effort because of all the snow. Even key winter sports like skating or hockey, if played outside, require that you at a minimum spend a lot of time shovelling all the snow off the ice surface. For a good experience you also have to flood and smooth the ice periodically. So, it’s a lot of work.
Having said all that, if I had to choose between -30 and +40, I’d probably choose -30, because at least you can put on appropriate gear for that and spend some time outside doing something fun. It may be dark and it may be grey, but it’s possible to dress for the weather. When it’s too hot, you really can’t spend any time outside, without risking your life, and it certainly isn’t possible to do anything active. But if the choice is between -30 and +30, give me the +30 any day.
Ah, so you believe ICE?
There are a lot more, I just grabbed the first few.
Maybe if that happened ICE would actually start identifying themselves.
Yeah, they even show a periodic table. On that row, Uranium is just about the safest “rock”.
It’s even mostly lickable.