Populist candidates used to actually argue for higher inflation. See the free silver movement of the late 19th century. With some inflation present, the real value of all debts goes down over time, as long as you make the interest payments.
That’s just how inflation works though. Wages tend to rise slower than prices do. In economic terms, wages are “sticky.” They rise and fall slower than prices do in response to market conditions. Long periods of slow gradual inflation are fine, as people simply demand that their wages rise at a steady 2-3% to keep up with inflation, and employers expect it. But if there is a sudden spike in prices, it’s a lot harder for employees to suddenly negotiate wage increases. Instead, the slower process of labor market competition, employees leaving underpaying jobs for better paying jobs, has to take over. It’s going to take a few years for wages to catch up with the spike in prices, but it does happen with time, primarily from people switching jobs.
Something you should keep in mind is that being a monopoly is not illegal, and it never has been. If you make a great widget and, through honest competition, corner that widget market, that’s perfectly legal.
What ISN’T legal is using your market power to engage in anti-competitive behavior. It’s not illegal for Apple to dominate the phone market. It is likely illegal for Apple to use its dominance of the phone market to prohibit competing app stores from being installed on their phones. That is Apple operating in two distinct businesses - a phone manufacturer and a software retailer. Apple is using its market dominance as a phone manufacturer to gain an unfair advantage as a software retailer.
This is a pretty damning violation of federal antitrust law.
Meanwhile in Russia, Putin has ordered the parliament dissolved…in acid.
I say we sue Greece for the sum total of damages from Hurricane Helene. It’s clearly their fault.
The truth is, Israel does not and has never wanted an actual state in Gaza or the West Bank. Israel’s long-term strategy in the West Bank is to perform a slow ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population via illegal settler expansion and zoning laws. They’re literally using building permits to commit ethnic cleansing - ethnic cleansing by bureaucracy. Israeli settlers can murder Palestinians with impunity, while any reciprocal violence against Israeli settlers or soldiers results in horrific retaliatory collective punishment. Kill one Israeli settlers? They will respond by murdering a dozen innocent Palestinians.
Israel wants their ethno-state. At this point, they’ve made a Palestinian state in the West Bank completely nonviable. They’ve already seized most of the land there, and the remaining Palestinian ghettos are a disjointed Swiss cheese that can never be an effective territory. They’ve moved so many of their own population into the West Bank that at this point Israel itself likely couldn’t remove them, even if they wanted to. The Israelis living in the West Bank are the most fundamentalist of the population; they’re heavily armed, and they are willing to fight the Israeli state if there is any attempt to dislodge them.
A two state solution is now dead at this point. Israel’s long term goal is to bit by bit, shrink the available land that Palestinians can live on. At the same time, they will impose ever-harsher conditions on the Palestinians. Peaceful protests are met with bullets. Armed resistance is met with carpet bombing. The ultimate goal is to drive all the Palestinians out of the West Bank, via either emigration to Jordan or to the main Palestinian ghetto in the Gaza strip. And even the Gaza strip is being whittled away.
And this doesn’t even account for Israel’s long-term mode of border expansion. Israel has a very clear long-term method of expanding its borders:
Drive the native population out of lands you currently hold, via forced expulsion or by making conditions unlivable. This expelled population moves over the border.
The expelled population retains animosity against Israel, so occasional retaliatory attacks are inevitable.
Respond to low-level retaliatory attacks with bombing campaigns, which create a lawless zone across the border that armed militias can thrive in.
When the armed resistance across the border gets big enough, declare that ground forces need to be sent in to secure a “buffer zone.” Seize land across the border and expel any remaining native civilians.
Allow ‘settlers’ to move into the seized territory that was supposed to be a military buffer zone.
Israel civilians are now once again living right next door to enraged locals, and once again in range of retaliatory attacks.
Rinse and repeat.
Israel uses the native population it expels as means to expand its own borders. It antagonizes expelled populations until retaliatory violence is inevitable, and then it uses that violence as an excuse to further expand its borders. In many ways, Israel operates very similar to how the US slowly expelled Native Americans in its Westward expansion; the same kind of dynamic was at play. The US would make a treaty with the natives, expelling them from a chunk of land. It would then look the other way as US settlers moved into Indian lands. When the natives attacked these settlers violating the treaty, the US military would respond with overwhelming collective punishment and retaliatory violence. They would drive the natives further out, establish a “buffer zone,” and then allow settlers to move in to what was supposed to be an empty buffer zone.
Maybe it’s no surprise the US and Israel are such close allies. Israel is repeating Manifest Destiny right in front of our eyes. And they also justify it with similar religious and mythological overtones.
I say we indict Sam Altman for both securities fraud and 8 billion counts of reckless endangerment. Him and other AI boosters are running around shouting that AGI is just around the corner, OpenAI is creating it, and that there is a very good chance we won’t be able to control it and that it will kill us all. Well, the way I see it, there are only two possibilities:
He’s right. In which case, OpenAI is literally endangering all of humanity by its very operation. In that case, the logical thing to do would be for the rest of us to arrest everyone at OpenAI, shove them in deep hole and never let them see the light of day again, and burn all their research and work to ashes. When someone says, “superintelligent AI cannot be stopped!” I say, “you sure about that? Because it’s humans that are making it. And humans aren’t bullet-proof.”
He’s lying. This is much more likely. In that case, he is guilty of fraud. He’s falsely making claims his company has no ability to achieve, and he is taking in billions in investor money based on these lies.
He’s either a conman, or a man so dangerous he should literally be thrown in the darkest hole we can find for the rest of his life.
And no, I REALLY don’t buy the argument that if the tech allows it, that superintelligent AI is just some inevitable thing we can’t choose to stop. The proposed methods to create it all rely on giant data centers that consume gigawatts of energy to run. You’re not hiding that kind of infrastructure. If it turns out superintelligence really is possible, we pass a global treaty to ban it, and simply shoot anyone that attempts to create it. I’m sorry, but if you legitimately are threatening the survival of the entire species, I have zero qualms about putting you in the ground. We don’t let people build nuclear reactors in their basement. And if this tech really is that capable and that dangerous, it should be regulated as strongly as nuclear weapons. If OpenAI really is trying to build a super-AGI, they should be treated no differently than a terrorist group attempting to build their own nuclear weapon.
But anyway, I say we just indict him on both charges. Charge Sam Altman with both securities fraud and 8 billion counts of reckless endangerment. Let the courts figure out which one he is guilty of, because it’s definitely one or the other.
Meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my PC, I STILL have several thousand MP3s I downloaded from Kazaa back in the day.
Anyone who shows up to a school board meeting to complain about bathrooms should automatically have the police sent to look at their hard drive. If you’re that concerned about the bathroom habits of young children, the cops really need to look at your internet history and the contents of your hard drive.
Bezos also has a rocket company. Plus there’s Richard Branson. And others.. And then you have private jet travel, massive mega yachts, and countless other extravagances. For a certain class of billionaire, having a private rocket company is a vanity project. These rocket companies are vanity projects by rich sci fi nerds. Yes, they’ve done some really good technical work, but they’re only possible because their founders were willing to sink billions into them even without any proof they’ll make a profit.
What you are missing is that as people’s wealth increases, their resource use just keeps going up and up and up. To the point where when people are wealthy enough, they’re using orders of magnitude more energy and resources than the average citizen of even developed countries. Billionaires have enough wealth that they can fly rockets just because they think they’re cool, even if they have no real path to profitability.
And no, the hypothetical of the robot skyscrapers is not “meaningless.” You just have a poor imagination. To have that type of world we only need one thing - a robot that can build a copy of itself from raw materials, or a series of robots that can collectively reproduce themselves from raw materials gathered in the environment. Once you have self-replicating robots, it becomes very easy to scale up to that kind of consumption on a broad scale. If you have self-replicating robots, the only real limit to the total number you can have on the planet is the total amount of sunlight available to power all of them.
The real point isn’t the specific examples I gave. The point, which you are missing entirely, is that total resource use is a function of wealth and technological capability. Raw population has very little impact on it. If our automation gets a lot better, or something else makes us much wealthier, we would see vast increases in total resource use even if our population was cut in half.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
They’re both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.
They’ve already tried to send all the jobs they can to India or South America. It ultimately didn’t work. They can send some, but the language and cultural barriers, plus the difficulty of assessing quality candidates just doesn’t make it viable at scale. They’ve already tried that game and it failed. Everything that can be outsourced to India already has been outsourced to India.
You confuse cities for Cities. Take a look at this graphic Again, NYC is a universe unto itself. Nowhere else even comes close.
Yes, the vast majority of the US lives in cities, but most live in sprawling low-density suburbs, which are a type of city. And even for those who live in central cities, even those are mostly composed of low-density neighborhoods. 3/4 of Americans commute by car. And while I cite commute, realize it goes far beyond this. The vast, vast majority of Americans who live in cities live in neighborhoods that physically look nothing like the neighborhoods of NYC. Walking to work and picking up the ingredients for dinner at your local corner bodega is not a normal experience for the vast majority of Americans.
NYC is absolutely a statistical outlier when it comes to the rest of the country. It is a nation within a nation.
The real issue isn’t that being mayor of NYC isn’t a serious and respectable position; it obviously is. The real issue is that being mayor of NYC is a political dead-end, especially for a Democrat. NYC is fundamentally very different from the rest of the country; it’s unique. Nowhere else in the country is anywhere near as urban as NYC. Nowhere else in the country has a greater share of its population that commutes via walking and public transit. Nowhere else in the country has such a large share of the population living in multifamily housing.
Comparing it to entire states or other nations isn’t just about economics. It very much is a world unto itself. Its boroughs have their own unique cultures and even dialects! NYC has such a unique identity; it is a nation within a nation. If NYC broke off from the US, it could absolutely be perfectly viable as a city-state like Singapore. No other place in the country could as easily pull that off as NYC could. The lifestyle, the culture, the history, and even the language of NYC is markedly different from everywhere else in the country. It is part of America while being a part from America.
The point is that NYC is insular and unique. And to most of the country, NYC is a very alien world. The places where the vast majority of Americans live look nothing like NYC. And if you serve as the mayor of NYC, you will be forever linked to that alien place. To most Americans, NYC means the biggest of big cities, and all the political realities that entails. If you are a mayor of NYC, you will forever be seen as not really representing and understanding the way the vast majority of Americans live. You’ll be forever linked to old money, old-school big city Democratic machine politics. There’s often talk of “real America,” and NYC is the polar opposite of that. And that just is never going to be popular in the places that you need to win over in order to win the Electoral College.
The one exception to this is if you are running as a Republican. A Republican, by nature, seems to be antithetical to big-city Democratic politics. You’re not as tainted by it. This is why Giuliani actually had a not-completely ridiculous shot at being president for awhile (but even that required being mayor during 9/11.)
Being mayor of NYC is a noble thing. But in terms of national politics, it is a political dead-end. You could probably run for a US Senate seat from New York after being mayor of NYC. But if you serve as the mayor of New York, your chance of ever being president is essentially zero. NYC is simply seen as far too alien by the rest of the country to elect a mayor of that place as president.
A a politician, run for mayor of NYC if you wish. But do so knowing that if you win, you will have to forever write off the chance of being president of the United States.
9/11 era Giuliani was more coherent. The man is losing it.
Chronic alcoholism finally caught up with him.
Let’s imagine a best case scenario for Democrats. Let’s imagine Trump is defeated in a landslide in November. And instead of reforming their ways, the national Republican party instead takes the path of the Republican party in states like California - continuing to double-down on losing policies. In other words, barring election losses, here is a path I could see for Democratic candidates:
2024: Harris/Walz
2028: Harris/Walz
2032: Walz/AOC
2036: Walz/AOC
2040: AOC/?
Walz is currently 60. If he won in 2032 and 2036, he would be 76 when his second term ended in 2040. That’s a perfectly viable age to be president. And a seasoned Walz would balance nicely with a younger AOC. Meanwhile, AOC will be 50 in 2040, still quite young by presidential standards. And by then, she would have 8 years as VP to shake off the sense that she is too young and inexperienced.
This assumes Dems manage to win in 2024, 2028, 2032, and 2036. And that would be quite unusual by historical standards. However, considering the Republicans’ unprecedented efforts to destroy democracy, it’s not impossible. As long as they continue to champion destroying democracy, sane people, regardless of political beliefs, will recognize that they simply cannot be allowed into power until they reform their ways.
However, If there is a loss prior to 2040, I would just move AOC to the forefront. Does Harris/Walz win in 2024 and then lose in 2028? Assuming we still have real elections at that point, I would put AOC at the top of the ticket in 2032.
That’s what they said about Obama.
Sure. But those many works have affected the discipline of AI development. There’s an entire field of study on AI ethics and alignment. But those are affected by the combined effects of many works and authors. Planet of the Apes really is unique in that it is really the sole example anyone would bring up of why you shouldn’t experiment on apes to try to make them more intelligent.
And to my knowledge, no one has attempted to engineer apes to be more intelligent. Obviously there is simply less economic drive to do so; it’s easier to be concerned about ethics when there’s not a ready path to profitability. But if some geneticist tomorrow puts out a paper proposing that we tinker with chimp DNA to make smarter chimps, I can guarantee you every single headline will reference Planet of the Apes. It’s similar to how you can’t right an article about resurrecting the woolly mammoth without throwing in a reference to Jurassic Park. Some singular works of fiction really do have a substantial effect on how the public understands an entire field of research.
To my knowledge, no one has ever actually tried to engineer smarter chimps, though I assume there might actually be a lot to be gained in terms of scientific knowledge by doing so. We could probably learn quite a lot about the evolution of language and human evolution in general by trying to experiment with engineering smarter apes. But to my knowledge, no one has ever done so. The lack of profit is obviously a big factor, but I guarantee you, accidentally creating Planet of the Apes would be on the mind of anyone seriously contemplating that sort of scientific endeavor.
That’s why it’s c/showerthoughts on c/academiccriticcalhistoricalanalyses
Seriously. I didn’t realize President Erdogan had a lemmy accout!