381–390 of 918 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what's so incredibly stupid about the tariffs, immigration crackdowns, etc. Life is not a zero-sum game, and treating it like it is just makes it worse for everyone - unless you're the sort of person who really gets off on having other suffer worse than you.
What society or culture survived by taking the high road? I'm reminded of Princess Leia's quote: No! Alderaan is peaceful, we have no weapons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sickle and hammer looking real interesting now.
We (the US) had a very successful, carefully designed system that seems to have been an unstable configuration. It was neither hammer and sickle nor single megacorporation: it was balanced on a hill between both. The combination of (1) checks and balances, (2) separation of money, religion, corporation, and government, and (3) regulation in moderation worked pretty well for around 200 years. Monopolies and labor abus…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
on one hand people complain about sweatshops but on the other hand when the repetitive, soul crushing, low paid job is replaced by technology people complain as well. you can't have it both ways.
When did sweat shops get automated?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please give me an example of what happens. It’s easy to forget after 80 years of stable western democracies, but brutal equilibrium shifts do happen. There was a revolution every ~20 years in Europe between 1789 and 1917. And even during the 20th century, the history of much of the world is full of coups, revolts, and uprisings. See all the revolutions in ex-soviet republics, the Arab spring, etc. So you can pick a…
Modern police and military gear is so advanced that revolution is unrealistic.
It is all almost making richer even more richer, instead of properly hiring people for HR, AI bots. Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more. Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off mon…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sickle and hammer looking real interesting now.
We (the US) had a very successful, carefully designed system that seems to have been an unstable configuration. It was neither hammer and sickle nor single megacorporation: it was balanced on a hill between both. The combination of (1) checks and balances, (2) separation of money, religion, corporation, and government, and (3) regulation in moderation worked pretty well for around 200 years. Monopolies and labor abus…
Really? Transatlantic slavery by far the biggest labour abuse, then the company towns, then Standard Oil which was allowed to run amok for 30 years then broken up (which then consolidated into ExxonMobil and Chevron again). These are just off the top of my head.
The US from my point of view has been a puritanical, borderline genocidal, enslaving, cowardly and hypocritical, and yet nosy entity that discarded its inconvenient founding and history.
Its success I daresay has been entirely contingent on its remoteness from the rest of humanity (which fed into its exceptionalism narrative), and comparatively sparse population. By many measures the Roman and British empires were 'more successful'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> except they forget people also need money to buy their goods. Do they? Money is simply the accounting of debt. You do something for me, and when I can't immediately do something in return for you, you extend a loan to me so that I can make good on my side of the bargain later. If we record that I owe you something at some point in the future, we just created money! But if I don't need anything from you — because, s…
Direct trading kind of died out towards the end of middle age, are we supposed to go back in time?
suggest reading Debt: the first 5000 years.
I did one of these once. Once . I felt so bad afterwards that I swore them off forever. It's not like the 'interview' was terrible or anything. I knew it was AI from the start. It was just that when I got done with it, I realized that I had talked at a computer for ~45 minutes. And, yet again, I was going to be ghosted by the company (I was), and that I was never going to get those 45 minutes back. That was time I co…
Somehow i would rather stay homeless or prostitute myself than throwing my dignity away by letting an a.i. assess me over the whole job interview. Yet this is where we are heading. Being graded by openai (and co). Iris scanned by openai. Who knows what comes next..
I guess that's where we differ. If it came down to homelessness or prostitution then I would let an AI assess me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all countries are at 2.24 -- USA is at 1.62, so whether correlation or causation, many developed countries are nowhere near the replacement rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_f...
> USA is at 1.62 And Afghanistan is at 4.66 > developed countries are nowhere near the replacement rate Doesn't matter because of the immigration. Population of developed countries is growing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's where we're headed _if we let these assholes get away with it_. They have the money and guns, but we have the numbers.
The sickle and hammer looking real interesting now.