Or do cloning. If their own DNA is too messed up by the Phage then pick a non-Vidiian species that's particularly compatible and start running off copies to harvest. Apparently killing clones is fine by the Federation, paragons of moral virtue that they are, so this should be an acceptable solution.
What, and miss out on the delicious dopamine that comes from being part of a mob gripped by righteous anger? This is a chance to be mad at the same thing that everyone else is mad at, risk-free.
or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be when our prison system is working correctly
Opinions on whether it's "working correctly" is likely going to vary depending on whether you're running a factory that depends on prison labor. Right now I think those factory owners would agree that it's working correctly.
"You can work and spend your entire pittance on ramen noodles, or you can go stir-crazy in your cell and eat stewed cardboard" is a voluntary choice only in the most strictly pedantic sense.
Also, gosh, there sure are a lot of repeat offenders in there. What a coincidence. It's almost like prisons do the opposite of reforming the people that are sucked into the system, or like once you've got a criminal record there's a lot fewer non-crime options for you once you're back out on the street.
Which dovetails well with the famous quote from C. S. Lewis:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
A lot of Christian slaveowners "justified" themselves as helping their slaves by "saving" them, or whatever. White man's burden and all that rot.
And even if someone is in the prison system for entirely correct reasons, forcing them to work is still slavery. I don't care if they're the most guilty awful person ever, if they need to be put in prison then put them in prison. That's the purpose of prison.
Trying to get economic benefit out of holding people in prison is not a slippery slope, it's a slippery cliff. The moment you try to justify it for anyone you're opening the door to a moral disaster.
And yet it's writing poetry and painting pictures. That makes it worse, doesn't it? Turns out you don't have to be very intelligent to do those things.
It invariably comes from exploiting the efforts of others to their deteriment
But that just isn't so. Sometimes it can be true, but not invariably so. If an inventor comes up with a new invention and then sells it to people who want to buy the invention for the price that he's selling it at (due to it providing them greater utility than the price he's charging - that's basic economics), then who has suffered any detriment in any of this? The inventor made money. The customers got the thing that they wanted. Nobody lost anything, and some people gained in the process.
In order for an exchange to be positive sum, both parties need to agree to the exchange. We do not get any choice in the exchange.
Again, simply not true. I can think of all sorts of scenarios where a forced exchange could wind up with both parties benefiting. That's not to say that any arbitrary forced exchange would be beneficial, of course, obviously not. But saying that it cannot happen can be easily disproved by counterexample.
This isn't just an "agree to disagree" thing. The people raging about how ChatGPT et al somehow "stole" their Reddit shitposts and now think they're owed money are trying to shut ChatGPT et al down. Huge swaths of intellectual property are sitting fallow because the people that own the rights aren't doing anything with it but darned if they'll let anyone else do something with it instead. It's a destructive mindset, and not just for the people feeling it. It harms society as a whole.
I've seen a lot of reaction to AI that smacks of some kind of species-level narcissism, IMO. Lots of people have grown up being told how special humans were and how there were certain classes of things that were "uniquely human" that no machine could ever do, and now they're being confronted with the notion that that's just not the case. The psychological impact of AI could be just as distressing as the economic impact, it's going to be some interesting times ahead.
What happens when the VC money runs out and the price skyrockets and takes it out of your reach?
You answer that in your next paragraph. There are lots of open source models available, some of which are almost as good as the top proprietary models. That's almost exclusively what I use myself; I've got Koboldcpp and Automatic1111 installed on my computer and I mostly use those for my image and text manipulation needs.
but I am not happy making someone obscenely rich.
Which brings me right back to the comment you're responding to. Why aren't you happy making someone obscenely rich when it doesn't cost you anything in the process?
A lot of people seem to fundamentally see the world as a zero-sum game. If someone else is getting rich then they feel like that must be making them poorer somehow. But that's not how the world actually works. It's entirely possible to create value without taking it away from someone else. When people invent new ways to make valuable products from worthless raw materials those products represent an increase of value in the world as a whole, the production of those products doesn't make anyone poorer. It annoys me when people get mad that that's happening.
I don't see where capitalism came into this at all.