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Cake day: July 14th, 2023
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12·2 days agoOh no, they might have to run a competitive business instead of relying on artificial scarcity, price-fixing, and wage suppression. How terrible!
6·7 days agoWell, for one thing, among the general public, AI is less popular than ICE.
And the economics of AI don’t add up, so it can’t last forever. And everything that can’t last forever eventually stops.
I’m not gonna pretend everything is guaranteed to be fine, but I feel like we genuinely have a lot on our side.
Emerson Green convinced me that p-zombies are plausible. So there’s no way to know if a teleporter would end your consciousness.
That efficiency is an absolute good.
The worst part is:
- By definition, we can’t austerity our way out of this.
We’re in this position because of slow productivity (lack of infrastructure investment) and extreme inequality (lack of wealth tax and lack of welfare spending).
If we simply cut — even in the areas that really need it, like military — these problems will persist and even worsen, because it’s basically saying “okay, economy’s over — winners are winners forever now”.
- Austerity will be the only viable pitch to the public.
For that reason, we should probably pitch “fossil fuel austerity”.
Fiscal conservatives like to say “the government’s spending is just like yours”, even though it’s not.
So why don’t we copy their approach and say “gas is too expensive for the government, just like it’s too expensive for you — so just like you, we’re comparison shopping and looking for a better deal… like solar!”
“Where” is a question that applies to the physical world. The dream people are constituted of something more fundamental than matter.
Graph is once again relevant:
If you’re in the bottom 90% (by income), it literally doesn’t matter what you want. Every bill has a 31% chance of passing.
If you’re in the top 10% though… it doesn’t matter what the other 90% want.
He did say he would “reign hell”.
“Descent into fascism”, “Decent ways into fascism”… easy to confuse the two.
Over-budget on the user side, sure. Gimme the numbers on the vendor side though. They’ve gotta be bleeding money at an eye-watering rate. Can we please end the subsidies so that we can all agree on the reality that this is not a sustainable practice?
Tale as old as time.
Progressive voters view progressive politicians as unreliable because they regularly abandon principles in favor of victory.
Progressive politicians view progressive voters as unreliable because they regularly abandon victory in favor of principles.
Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out to your insurer so they can raise your premiums by $10 that month to punish you for inattentive driving. Same gadget, different social arrangement.
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/
Dude already said he reigns Hell. How much more clear does he have to be?
Next Iran consulate account to get banned for trolling too successfully
Some people genuinely have a problem with it.
But I’m convinced that the majority of it is just: It’s embarrassing (and therefore costs social capital) to defend it.
So therefore: If you attach it to something else you want to attack, you just gave yourself a strategic advantage.
Yeah, inertia is baked into the legislative process here. It’s silly.
The purple line is the bottom 90% of the population by income.
So basically, public opinion does not impact policy in any statistically significant way.
