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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#131

Post by stephbook »

Frieren wrote: post #11

> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in? Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question. But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies. There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of…

"the answer is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights"

Egypt explicitly rejects this.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#132

Post by alansaber »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

Madness to me that a nation with a genuine need for emergency protocol spams their alert system.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#133

Post by alansaber »

xpct wrote: post #110
laughing_man wrote: post #69

It's really difficult to see what technologies will be enablers of state power. IMO, the techs ushering in 1984-levels of control are wifi, cheap cameras, and LLMs. The three technologies on their own are beneficial, but taken together they're going to make Big Brother seem impotent.

I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.

Precisely, modern multimodal LLMs are a breakthrough in ultra high volume data processing, for all their flaws

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#134

Post by alansaber »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #111
cjs_ac wrote: post #17

Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.

If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too - the only modern tech industry we've ever known has been dominated by players attempting forms of lockin to capture rents and amass enormous fortunes, of course the technology of this society isnt generally helpful to the society at large.

I would argue the individual aspirations of the companies is somewhat irrelevant- even if we weren't profit oriented we'd have the same types/groups of apps (social media, etc..

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#135

Post by protocolture »

derektank wrote: post #105
protocolture wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It takes a hegemon like the US and its allies to keep the sea lanes open Sea Lanes Opened by the USA: 0 Sea Lanes Closed by US Interventions: 1

This tally only makes sense if you believe history started 2 years ago. The US literally re-opened the Strait of Hormuz itself back in the 80s during the Tanker War, at the very least for Kuwaiti oil tankers during Operation Earnest Will. The current administration clearly does not care about freedom of navigation operations, but every other post war administration made it a major priority and they are still being co…

>Operation Earnest Will.

Its crazy to not see that as the result of more US interventions in the middle east blowing up in their face, than actually any kind of goodwill mission.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#136

Post by protocolture »

djoldman wrote: post #15

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: > Rapid sending of messages > Careful checking of the content of messages > Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area > Inability to mistakenly send a test message > Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending > Resilient enough to work after significant damage to infrastructure > That networks have the ab…

> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending

"Before Sending" is the lynchpin here.

The receiver needs to be performing verification, and have the ability to blacklist sources.

Which requires distributed infra.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#137

Post by protocolture »

HWR_14 wrote: post #23
jMyles wrote: post #8

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state. The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central…

What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?

>What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates?

Coordinated Defense pacts are already a thing. Like are you worried that these micro states wont want to join NATO?

And before you get weird, 5 + 5 + 5 is the same as 15. Theres no reason to imagine smaller militaries per capita.

>What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?

Man they might need to communicate on that one hey.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#139

Post by sellmesoap »

9x39 wrote: post #53
ryandrake wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have given up on the very concept of society. Everyone is racing to shred the Social Contract and revert society back to Do What You Can Get Away With lawlessness. We're replacing institutions with individualism. We're replacing "We're all in it together" with "We're in it for ourselves." We're replacing collective stewardship of shared resources with "I got mine, fuck everyone else!" One's Community has stopp…

Throwing something out to look at in the US at least-- Interpersonal trust might be decreasing: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on... But dwarfed by the trust decrease in institutions: https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-dee... But maybe it's overstated, because trust seems sort of stable according to this group: https://www.edelman.com/trust/25years >We no longer are ca…

Much like people being arrested for online statements in the UK, while violent crime is swept under the rug or otherwise downplayed.
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