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Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

nytimes.com

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Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#661

Post by fzeroracer »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #652
fzeroracer wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing that the Americans rising to the call are employed by the state itself. ICE over Trump's tenure with a burgeoning budget has become filled with folks that were part of known white supremacist groups. The most violent believers have been state sanctioned and paid to inflict his agenda.

> Americans rising to the call are employed by the state itself This is a problem. But it’s categorically different from vigilantism. That sort of grassroots violence is basically impossible to stop once it gets started without major abrogations of rights, at least temporarily. And we have not seen organized grassroots vigilantes taking up arms to pot Trump’s enemies. Not systematically or at any scale that doesn’t j…

It's not categorically different and it requires you to really dig your head deep in the sand. The 'unite the right' rally in 2018 was filled with the sort of vigilante violence you say is a problem. The reason why these rallies dwindled is not because of any sort of advancement or government attempt to squash out the problem; it's because they've become embedded within the government.

You're attempting to find step 1 when we're already passed that and into step 2. The vigilantes are coming from inside the house, and the murders committed in Minneapolis combined with the government working overtime to shield them should be the primary signal.

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#662

Post by ETH_start »

culi wrote: post #414
dan-robertson wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much the reaction to the Brian Thompson killing also seemed ok with the violence despite it happening before the events you describe, though I guess that could be an outlier.

I think more and more Americans have what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination". We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% o…

1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting.

2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.

3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.

What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill.

Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#663

Post by gloryjulio »

randyrand wrote: post #482
jorgonda wrote: post #15

Putting millions of people out of work comes with consequences. We are going to see more and more of this.

Which jobs? Most of that is still AI hype.

Capex spending to push out employees is not hype. People are getting laid off as AI spending increases is definitely real

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#664

Post by andirk »

cleversomething wrote: post #199
classified wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in 5 years That's literally the same argument that the blockchain gurus made, and each following year it was still 5 years in the future. I'm getting strong Real Soon Now™ vibes.

Bitcoin was never actually valuable for the average person except if they got lucky by timing the speculation bubbles right, or if they were buying illegal drugs online. Lots of AI tools already add actual value and they're only getting better. Every software dev I know uses Claude at some level. Whether it will be the next trillion dollar unicorn might be overhype, but in terms of demonstrating its general utility,…

A Machine Learning + Large Language model is one popular technology. Decentralized blockchain tokens is another popular technology. Besides hype, there's not much in common with those technologies.

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#665

Post by andirk »

pixel_popping wrote: post #241
cleversomething wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin was never actually valuable for the average person except if they got lucky by timing the speculation bubbles right, or if they were buying illegal drugs online. Lots of AI tools already add actual value and they're only getting better. Every software dev I know uses Claude at some level. Whether it will be the next trillion dollar unicorn might be overhype, but in terms of demonstrating its general utility,…

It's really 2 very different things, only the "shilling" might be deja-vu.

Haha. My favorite shillings will always be NFTs and the "let's do email job pointless meetings in Second Life and call it Metaverse". Although the former is/was pure shilling, and the latter is/was a horrible pipe dream shilled as useful.

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#666

Post by andirk »

sleepybrett wrote: post #285
cleversomething wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin was never actually valuable for the average person except if they got lucky by timing the speculation bubbles right, or if they were buying illegal drugs online. Lots of AI tools already add actual value and they're only getting better. Every software dev I know uses Claude at some level. Whether it will be the next trillion dollar unicorn might be overhype, but in terms of demonstrating its general utility,…

> Every software dev I know uses Claude at some level. here is my leve:, try to get claude to properly perform some boring boilerplate for me until the tokens run out or i get super angry and then do it myself in a rage.

I find the best use of chatbots re: software engineering is more of an office hours with the professor than it is a fellow colleague; Use it for specifics. Throwing things over the fence to it often causes a reach into the bag of garbage spaghetti code that is half the internet content.

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#668

Post by MiguelX413 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #655
MiguelX413 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

> Why not? I don't wish violent ends on anyone. I'm not open to sacrificing that part of myself in a rich, historically-free society that retains peaceful means of power transfer.

Should we just let these terribly evil people who are responsible for thousands of deaths roam freely free of consequence then? It's not like they're breaking any laws in their evil acts, so we can't hope for our legal system to prosecute them, in fact we can count on it to protect them. Zuckerberg played a major role in the Rohingya genocide.

Sam Altman disagrees with you about violence being bad, he just signed a deal with the same DoD that killed a bunch of innocent schoolgirls in Iran.

The US can be counted on to protect these people, just like it protected Kissinger, rather than ever prosecuting them.

The US has even threatened to invade the Hague if it were to ever try prosecuting for the warcrimes they do execute.

There isn't a justice system we can rely on anymore.

That healthcare CEO would still be alive and completely consequence-free if Luigi hadn't killed him.

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#669

Post by culi »

ETH_start wrote: post #662
culi wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more and more Americans have what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination". We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% o…

1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. 2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime. 3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability…

> Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.

There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect.

> it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable"

There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions.

I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency.

> they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process

This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other.

I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not.

Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it

Re: Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

#670

Post by ETH_start »

culi wrote: post #669
ETH_start wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. 2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime. 3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability…

> Intent is a key element in criminal culpability. There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect. > it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable" There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crim…

Once again:

The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.

More generally, I said there is a major difference between structural harm, white-collar crime, and deliberately killing someone. Your answer was to fixate only on general claims about inequality, underpolicing, social causes, etc, which insinuates that maybe Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered while maintaining plausible deniability.

Yes, the system is unfair, but in what ways it's unfair is up to debate, unlike whether the child predator in the Jeffrey Doucet case abused a child. You are trying to connect the fact there is injustice in the world to how justifiable it is to deliberately kill someone, by using this analogy.

You can deny that you are endorsing it, but your comment still does the same thing: it takes a personal act of violence and places it inside a moral story that makes it sound less straightforwardly wrong. That is exactly the problem.

Also in no moral universe, do you shoot someone in the head in cold blood because they were negligent, let alone negligent in some abstract way related to structural social forces. That is a blanket justification for all sorts of political violence.

On democracy, you are using disappointment with democratic outcomes to erode respect for democratic process. By your standard, every single political faction would argue against respecting the democratic process.

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