Bidenomics and Its Discontents
Barry Zuckerkorn @ BarryZuckerkorn @beehaw.org Posts 2Comments 190Joined 2 yr. ago
Barry Zuckerkorn @ BarryZuckerkorn @beehaw.org
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2
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190
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2 yr. ago
I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn't good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.
Open and auditable source code is a laudable goal, and one I generally endorse.
But the more important issue is an open audit trail.
The implementations I've seen that make the most sense are electronic machines that validate and mark ballots that are both human readable and machine readable. The input validation can prevent overvotes (accidentally voting for more than one candidate) and add a verification step for undervotes (choosing to leave a particular choice blank), while the voter gets a verifiable visual feedback that their ballot has been properly created. Then they drop it in the box.
At the end of the night, the paper ballots are fed into tallying/counting systems, which should entirely distinct from the input validation systems. That way they get a machine count that night, but still have an auditable paper trail.
Given the choice between a direct voting machine that's open source, or a closed source machine that creates the paper trail in that way, I'd choose the auditable process.
If your company's secret sauce is that it employs a particular person, then your moat is whatever it takes to poach that person. If that person is willing to leave behind whatever intellectual property, un-vested equity, and relationships behind, then your company was never that valuable to begin with.
There's just not the critical mass of knowledgeable users for professions outside of programming on any Lemmy instance, from what I can tell.
I kept my reddit account for the lawyers subreddit and some of the others around the practice of law, because I like the community of people who are in the same career as I am. I also tried esq.social (mastodon, matrix, and Lemmy instance for lawyers), but basically only the matrix server gets anything close to a critical mass of user engagement.
I'm considering creating a new reddit account for sports discussion, too, because there just isn't anything like the NBA subreddit.
free association includes the freedom to not associate.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the aliens campaign for the US presidency, and can't figure out why "abortions for all" and "abortions for none" are both unpopular opinions.
In other words, it's about freedom of choice, not mandatory association.
That's the fundamental tension here.
The right to control your own posts, after posting, imposes an obligation on everyone who archives your posts to delete when you want them deleted.
For most of the internet, the balance is simply that a person who creates something doesn't get to control it after it gets distributed to the world. Search engines, archive tools, even individual users can easily save a copy, maybe host that copy for further distribution, maybe even remix and edit it (see every meme format that relies on modification of some original phrase, image, etc.).
Even private, end to end encrypted conversations are often logged by the other end. You can send me a message and I might screenshot it.
A lot of us active on the Internet in the 90's, participating in a lot of discussion around philosophical ideas like "information wants to be free" and "intellectual property is theft" and things like copyleft licenses (GPL), creative commons licensing, etc., wanted that to be the default vision for content created on the internet: freely distributed, never forgotten. Of course, that runs into tension with privacy rights (including the right to be forgotten), and possibly some appropriation concerns (independent artists not getting proper credit and attribution as something gets monetized). It's not that simple anymore, and the defaults need to be chosen with conscious decisionmaking, while anyone who chooses to go outside of those defaults should be able to do that in a way knowledgeable of what tradeoffs they're making.
It's the meme format:
"Men will literally (something) but not go to therapy"
People who use it don't necessarily endorse the original view, but are making fun of it.
I'm specifically saying that even if groceries (or rent) are up by a lot, the math of what I'm describing still works out. So when you say "this is not the case in my area," you're effectively saying that you've made zero changes in how you shop for groceries, in response to the price increases. I think that's probably not true for you in particular, and almost certainly not true for people in your area. Most people respond to prices with changed behavior.
I agree with that, as a measure of price changes over time. I think the CPI correctly ignores substitution bias month to month, so that we can get a better picture of the price changes.
In terms of household effects, though, the substitution effect tends to slightly reduce the effect of high prices on household budgets, and that's what I understood as the meaning of that particular sentence at the top of this comment chain.
And I don't think of these particular examples of inferior or superior goods. The relative cost of chicken, pork, ground beef, certain cuts of steak, lamb, lobster, etc. is different from place to place, and not necessarily a reflection of consumer preference in all places.
My point is that groceries aren't up equally, and groceries don't all cost the same. Someone on a subsistence diet of lentils and rice might not have much room to adjust their food spending in response to prices, but the broader shifts of beef to pork, pork to chicken, chicken to eggs, meat to beans, reduction in sodas/chips/candy, etc., give a typical household some room to maneuver.
Put another way, if you ask people whether their grocery purchasing behavior has been affected by rising prices, most people will say yes. That behavioral shift is how we respond to price increases, to try to blunt the effects of a price increase.
The math behind what I'm saying means that the phenomenon naturally happens regardless of which items move up or down, and even if all items move up (so long as they move up at different rates).
Eggs in February 2024 are down about 29% for the year from February 2023, down from the very high January 2023 spike. Ground beef is up about 7.4% for the year. Chicken breast is down 6%.
So a typical household that does eat animal products would likely have shifted away from beef towards chicken in the past year, even as the index weights them the same as they did before, month to month. That's the kind of thing that doesn't get captured until the relative weights index is updated.
That's not what that sentence means.
People respond to prices by changing their purchase behavior. If prices go up for some things, people tend to buy less of those things, and if prices go down for some things, then people tend to buy more of those things.
Across the entire basket of stuff that people buy (measured by a weighted percentage of how people were spending their budgets the previous year), people tend to move away from the stuff that got more expensive and towards the stuff that got less expensive, so that the current household budget shifts less than the inflation measure does. It's called the substitution effect, and the CPI intentionally pretends it doesn't happen - so that the numbers can be more meaningful as a measure of price changes, at the cost of understating how households actually experience inflation.
The Twitter deal got canceled, so the interview was posted to YouTube instead. Which, honestly, is the better service for long form video.
Plenty of historical figures had what we now recognize as different forms of neurodivergence.
Peter Roget obsessively made lists throughout his life, beginning as early as 8 years old. He also liked to solve chess puzzles and invented the log log slide rule, useful for working out exponents and roots by hand. He appears to have suffered from depression, and used list creation as a mechanism for calming himself. After he retired, he catalogued lists of synonyms and compiled it into categories, creating what would eventually be known as Roget's Thesaurus. Looking over his biography, it's pretty obvious that he would be considered neurodivergent today.
Sherlock Holmes had trademark characteristics of what we would later call Asperger's: obsessive attention to detail combined with disinterest in other humans or their emotions. He's a fictional character, but his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, almost certainly drew on his own life and a few others in his life to create that character.
But we document these historical figures through writing, so anything prehistoric would likely not show up in the same way.
As of last year, English Wikipedia, articles only, text only, was about 22GB compressed (text compresses pretty efficiently), according to the current version of this page:
As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media
Some other sources describe the uncompressed offline copies as being around 50 GB, with another 100 GB or so for images.
Wikimedia, which includes all the media types, has about 430 TB of media stored.
Well, it worked out for Google when it federated with Jabber, who first open sourced XMPP.
In my circles I hardly ever hear from it.
Same, but then again, I probably am acquainted with like 500-1000 people, which leaves about 7.8 billion people in the world who I'm not at all acquainted with. I'm starting to think that my circles aren't representative of all circles.
This is true, but it's true for many, many more places than just politics, or even messaging about politics coming from politicians. And it swings in both directions.
Social media (including the Activity Pub driven fediverse) takes off with some narratives that are just wildly inconsistent with each other and inconsistent with how a substantial number of people feel. But the nature of how we experience the world now is that our feelings are driven increasingly by little threads of online interaction that may or may not actually resemble the world we are experiencing offline.
Is Taylor Swift a good musician? Is the best cell phone an iPhone? Am I considered strong if I can bench press 220 lbs/100 kg? Do electric cars help the environment? Is it a red flag that my date refused to tip more than 20%?Your answer to these questions depend heavily on who you talk to, and the discussion around these topics can get pretty heated, even when they're ultimately low stakes issues.
The Internet has a way of catastrophizing little things, ignoring big things, and mixing it all together that it's almost inevitable that how we feel becomes disconnected with actual metrics, even the metrics within our own life. Negative feelings like anger, fear, resentment, and hopelessness can fester even with people who are thriving.
In other words, while I agree that the correlation between economic metrics and personal feelings has loosened a lot, I'm not entirely convinced that the feelings are correct while the metrics are wrong.