- I don’t think a monopoly requires literally every possible option to be controlled by the monopolistic entity.
Also, I only have time for so many hills on which to die. I’m not sure parking reform, while worthy, makes the cut.
- I don’t think business and rich people will use it either. The Concorde worked because you were in a black hole while you crossed the Atlantic, unable to work and unplugged from what was going on. So saving 5 hours was extremely valuable. Now, we have laptops and in-flight wifi, so you don’t miss much on the plane like you used to. Combine that with ultra luxury first class cabins that make the flight extremely comfortable, and saving some time while having to sacrifice all the amenities that come with a good first/business class cabin on a full sized airplane just doesn’t make sense.
Even private planes just don’t feel like they would make sense. Most private jets are used for regional and transcon, and the time savings would be much less significant at those distances. I feel like most wealthy individuals would rather upgrade to a larger, more comfortable, and/or longer-range jet than to sacrifice comfort, size, and range for supersonic. Only the truly ultra-wealthy seem like they might pick up a few, but that is such a vanishingly small market.
- I couldn't find any sources for widespread beatings of children to death by teachers.
>Ahn noted that prisoners detained in the punishment chambers were often crippled after three months and dead within five months. Ahn and other former guards have testified to the brutality that they were encouraged to demonstrate while punishing prisoners. Former guards have confessed that they were taught not to view prisoners as humans. However, the number of deaths from beating prisoners was so high that at one point, the guards were encouraged to be less violent. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Prisons-of-...
>One inmate recalls that as a 10-year-old he was told to lift a 30kg sack of earth (more than his own body weight) 30 times a day. If he slipped he was beaten with sticks by his teachers. Kang Cheol-hwan (former Yodok inmate. He was detained with family as a young boy). Here called: The work was too much for me or for any child of my age. But I did not dare to complain. After the first ten rounds, my legs started shaking, my body was hurting and my shoulder skin was peeling off. I was near collapse but the teachers were watching us and beating us with sticks if we stopped.”
>Kang Cheol-hwan also recalls deaths of children who were working at a work site. “The children in my class were ordered to dig and move earth to a work site 200 metres away. Twelve children dug holes with shovels and the other children carried the dirt in sacks or buckets. The dig site was a clay hill and the clay was quite soft. But we were afraid that as we dug deeper, it could collapse at any time. The teachers who were supervising us told the children to keep digging. After three days, the hill suddenly collapsed. There were six children who were on top of the hill when it collapsed. Three children were killed and the other three were badly injured. However, the teachers blamed the children for the carelessness.”
>Between the ages of 13 and 16, Shin recalled: “I was forced to undertake dangerous work and saw many children killed in work. Sometimes, four to five children were killed in a day. On one occasion, I saw eight people killed by an accident. Three men were working high up on a tall cement wall, three 15-year-old girls and two boys were helping them with mortar below. I was carrying mortar to the children when I saw the cement wall falling. Eight were buried under many tons of mortar; there was no rescue. Instead, the security officers told us not to stop work.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/asa240...
>Security officials armed with machine guns gathered together all the political prisoners at the camp to witness the hanging of the two adults and the execution by firing squad of the three children.
>“Interviews were conducted with 35 defectors who had escaped from various detention facilities in the preceding 18-month period, and 31 of them testified to having witnessed the killing of newborns.” https://web.archive.org/web/20141006072142/https://www.kinu....
- I'll give you $300 for it! With that kind of money, you can buy an ice-cold sixer and still have some walkin' around money.
- This feels like you intentionally gave this the least charitable reading. Obviously, I do not think that you could just scale to infinity. If I had said that eating a banana was healthier, I don't think it would be reasonable to say that assertion is ridiculous because that would mean eating 1,000 bananas would make someone the healthiest person. I was pointing out the difference in economic activity, where additional money to a wealthy individual mostly goes into savings/investing while additional money to low-income individuals mostly goes directly into consumption, and that the higher consumption generates more economic activity.
https://bsi-economics.org/rising-income-inequality-and-aggre...
- Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services. The companies running those services and making those goods will need to have their employees work more hours, putting more money back in poor people’s pockets in addition to the money the companies make. Those employees have a few extra dollars to spend on goods and services, etc.
Give a rich person a million dollars, and they will put it in an offshore tax shelter. That’s not exactly driving economic activity.
- The shift in the US to the idea of “job creators” being business owners is part of it. It was just a way to direct money to the already rich, as if they would hire more people with that money. When it is plainly obvious that consumers are job creators, in that if they buy more goods and services, businesses will hire more people to make or provide more of those things.
Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.
- Airlines currently don't want them (which is not even 100% accurate since airlines pulled A380s out of storage, and continue to push back plans to retire them). You started this by saying "You know you can just make the wing engines 50% more powerful, right?". You weren't talking about commercial decisions, you were talking about engineering decisions and capabilities. So, no you can't just make twin engines bigger in all situations. If airlines want large capacity aircraft again, they will be quad jets, not super powerful twin engines.
- Analogies are never the same, hence why they are analogies. Their value comes from allowing better understanding through comparison. Psychopaths don’t “feel” emotion the way normal people do. They learn what actions and words are expected in emotional situations and perform those. When I hurt my SO’s feelings, I feel bad, and that is why I tell her I’m sorry. A psychopath would just mimic that to manipulate and get a desired outcome i.e. forgiveness. When LLMs say they are sorry and they feel bad, there is no feeling behind it, they are just mimicking the training data. It isn’t the same by any means, but it can be a useful comparison.
- So you rail against "advanced" as a meaningless concept and then start talking about the "hierarchy of life". How does one rank life on this hierarchy?
- >both Boeing and Airbus have given up on quadjets.
It is possible “to make appropriate decisions” up to a certain size. They didn’t stop making new quadjets because the design doesn’t work as well as a twin engine, but because airlines don’t need/want aircraft that large. You wouldn’t build a successor to the A380 as a twin engine.
- How is using comic pictograms as one of the many ways we communicate some sort of reversion? We use different vocabularies when talking to different audiences, for instance I speak much more casually with friends than with my boss. We often specifically use vocabulary and word choice to provide context to the nature of the conversation. Like using formal and respectful wording to highlight professionalism, or using casual slang to highlight a joking or lighthearted tone.
As we have moved more informal conversations to written form (texting everyday with friends is a lot more casual than sending paper letter correspondence through the mail to friends), we have added ways to provide tonal context that is lost by not hearing someone’s voice or seeing their body language. Adding “LOL” or “haha” to indicate your statement is meant to be a joking tone, for instance. Emojis are just another way to do that and to reinforce the casual nature of the communication. Someone might use the turtle emoji when messaging their girlfriend about how long they have been waiting in line to give the message a cute playful tone, where they wouldn’t use it when talking about a production slowdown in a message to their coworkers.
Its fine not to like emojis, but it is eyerollingly pretentious to act like it is some indication of the de-evolution of society.
- I’m not sure I understand this comment. Emojis are a form of communication. Communications can and are evidence used in court. If someone drew pictures related to guns, and then was accused of a gun crime, that evidence would be used. If someone communicated non-verbally to someone by drawing their finger across their throat and then pointing at the person, who later alleged they were attacked by that person, that would be evidence. Emojis are simplified pictograms used as shorthand to communicate, like acronyms or initialisms are simplified representations of multiple words, like someone saying “RIP to you for what you did” could be a threat.
If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the court should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML code. If a WhatsApp message was sent with text bolded for emphasis, it shouldn’t be shown to the jury in plain text. So I don’t understand this derisive attitude towards "emoji evidence."
- >None of those are specifically "AI" issues. The technology used is irrelevant.
I mean, just because you could kill a million people by hand doesn't mean that a pistol, or an automatic weapon, or nuclear weapons aren't an issue, just an irrelevant technology. Guns in a home make suicide more likely simply because they are a tool that allows for a split-second action. "If someone really wants to do X, they will find a way" just doesn't map onto reality.
- It seems like the key to your argument is having more money to gamble with, like would come from family money. Like if your father owned an emerald mine, or your parents gave you a quarter million to start a business, or you started a hedge fund with a million dollars raised from “family and friends.”
- You say regulation solving problems is unprovable when we have many examples of it doing so, then you claim that without regulation, we would solve things other ways, without any examples of that ever happening, let alone on a large scale. To “pierce the corporate veil both civilly and criminally” is legislation, as laws determine what is criminal. We also had exactly that in the US, where corporations lobbied for reduced regulation, saying that lawsuits would keep them honest through monetary losses. They then immediately went about lobbying to reduce lawsuit liability, cap payouts, and launched a vast PR campaign to paint lawsuits as money grabs by unscrupulous people looking for a payout.
And why wouldn’t a company “whose only product is trust” not be incentivized to sell that trust to the highest bidder? Companies sell out all the time and continue to do good business for a decade or more on customer trust they built up or came with the brand name they bought.
The saying “regulations are written in blood” comes to mind. So where are all the examples of things getting fixed through other means when regulation isn’t written to fix something?
- In this day and age, that feels like something that is true in principle but not in reality. For food, the grocery store shelves are almost entirely stocked with brands owned by 10 companies, that have a combined revenue of $375 billion a year [1]. If you have a bad experience with DiGiorno pizza and boycott them, would you know you also needed to boycott Tombstone Pizza, California Pizza Kitchen, Cheerios, Tidy Cat, and on and on. If you wanted to actually boycott Nestle, how difficult would it be to maintain a spreadsheet of the literal thousands of brands they own [2]? Any issue with any brand is just absorbed by a thousand others. Any regional effort is absorbed by their global market. It isn't the USSR, but the idea that consumers can vote with their wallet just isn't the reality we live in anymore.
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/companies-control...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestl%C3%A9_brands
- >30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.
This was in their original comment. So, when you say they are only arguing cost, I really have no idea what you are talking about.
- >In the year in which he was born, children of citizen parents born overseas were not citizens at birth
This is completely incorrect and is not what the issue was with his citizenship. John McCain was born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone, the area around the Panama Canal that was controlled by the US. The Naturalization Act of 1855 granted birthright citizenship to foreign born children of a US citizen father [1], and was reaffirmed in 1878 [2]. The Equal Nationality Act of 1934 added that a US citizen mother could also confer citizenship to children born abroad [3].
Most interpretations considered The Canal Zone to be foreign territory for citizenship purposes. The issue was in the extremely specific wording of the Acts, which was that children of US parents born “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States” were granted citizenship. The Canal Zone was outside the limits of the US, but was technically under the jurisdiction of the US. So, depending on how you interpret the Act, children born in The Canal Zone are in a weird no man’s land, where they don’t get citizenship as a result of being born in the US, but also technically aren’t on totally foreign territory, which would give them their parent’s citizenship. In 1937 (a year after McCain’s birth, not three years), Congress passed 50 Stat. 558, explicitly making children born in The Canal Zone to a US citizen parent US citizens [4]. There was no citizenship law 3 years after McCain’s birth, but the Nationality Act of 1940 was four years after, however, its significant change was allowing children born out of wedlock to a US citizen mother to be given citizenship [5].
[1] “persons heretofore born, or hereafter to be born, out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were or shall be at the time of their birth citizens of the United States, shall be deemed and considered and are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, however, that the rights of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers never resided in the United States.” extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-10/pdf/STATUTE-1...
[2] “All children heretofore or hereafter born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were or may be at the time of their birth citizens thereof, are declared to be citizens of the United States; but the rights of citizenship shall not descend to children whose fathers never resided in the United States.” Original Statutes of 1878
[3] “Any child hereafter born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose father or mother or both at the time of the birth of such a child is a citizen of the United States, is declared to be a citizen of the United States; but the rights of citizenship shall not descend unless the citizen father or citizen mother, as the case may be, has resided in the United States previous to the birth of such child.” 8 FAM 301.5 SECTION 1993, revised statutes of 1878 extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-48/pdf/STATUTE-4...
[4] “any person born in the Canal Zone on or after February 26, 1904, and whether before or after the effective date of this Act, whose father or mother or both at the time of the birth of such person was or is a citizen of the United States, is declared to be a citizen of the United States.” extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-50/pdf/STATUTE-5...
[5] “The provisions of section 201, subsections (c), (d), (e), and (g), and section 204, subsections (a) and (b), hereof apply, as of the date of birth, to a child born out of wedlock, provided the paternity is established during minority, by legitimation, or adjudication of a competent court.” 8 U.S.C. 605; 54 Stat. 1139 https://fam.state.gov/fam/08fam/08fam030106.html
Which also goes back to car infrastructure. If you need to drive everywhere for any and all errands/activities, you won’t interact with people in nearby houses, you wont see neighbors at the local bar or small grocery store.