The Vice President is first in line to succeed an ailing or dying President. The Speaker of the House is second in line. Third in line is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate.
I argue that, in the specific problem space of Internet discussion communities, the absence of central guidance has been shown again and again to result in a race to the bottom.
That's why computer networks have struggled with the problem for literally decades, since before http was a glimmer in the mind of Tim Berners-Lee. I well remember early USENET node providers claiming "completely uncensored" access to all newsgroups, only to find within 6 months or a year that they had to dramatically scale back on that promise by restricting the newsgroup list, or cancel certain customers, due to lawbreaking behavior. The problems of discussion forum moderation gave us Section 230, which grants immunity to site moderators for good-faith actions to restrict distribution of information which is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable".
Section 230 is pretty much an acknowledgment that without moderation, forums will almost inevitably descend into threats and harassment. And if you think that surely even a non-controversial forum could survive without moderation, look at what happened to Ravelry.
Right, my point is that relying on pricing algorithms when faced with novel "black swan" conditions nearly drove major used car dealers out of business. Obviously, the algorithm didn't cause the novel conditions, but neither did they buffer the effects. Instead, they accelerated the financial effects.
If you go back and read about Carvana before the pandemic, their big selling point to investors was that their algorithms were "smarter" than the competition and would realize more consistent profits for the company and their investors. When it became clear that these "smart" algorithms went insane, investors abandoned the company and their valuation dropped from $60 billion to $7.5 billion between 2021 and 2023. Carvana has narrowly avoided bankruptcy.
Those numbers are very regional, though. $100K down payment is 20% for a $500K purchase, and lots of homes are under $500K. I just bought a new home (as in, literally just built & never lived in) here in California for less than that.
Not sure why people are downvoting your lived experience.
Investor purchases of single-family homes have spiked to 28% of home sales, and well above 30% in many high-demand localities. Market prices reflect that competition, so when one says, "the price just keeps going up so clearly people can afford it", one must also concede that many of those people are investors who are displacing buyers with less money. Those lower end buyers -- who could have afforded a house if an investor wasn't ready & waiting to flip houses or turn them into rentals -- have been frozen out of a home purchase.
He's specifically talking about the use of AI in finance, and that an algorithm that runs amok in a particular sector:
in the after action reports people will say 'Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model . . . we've relied on.' Maybe it's in the mortgage market. Maybe it's in some sector of the equity market
I'll throw out a microeconomic example. About a year into the pandemic, the price of used cars started going up... a LOT... in a short time. One of the reasons for the sudden changes in used car prices was that major used car resellers were using algorithms to set buying and selling prices for cars. While supply chain pressure on the new car market was unprecedented, and it trickled down to used cars, a facilitating cause is that the used car price-setting algorithms didn't really have any humans in the chain checking to see if the numbers they were kicking out made a lick of sense.
So you had companies like Carmax and Carvana buying used cars for $X, and then a month later 5X, then a month later 10X, because they were programmed to just up the offering price until they reached target stock levels. Sometimes they were buying 3+ year old used cars for more than the current price of NEW cars of similar trim level. Carvana's numbers got so whacked that it nearly sunk the company.
Now imagine that kind of a runaway algorithm in stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. It's 2008 all over again.
However, the statement "some white people aren’t white to racists" implies that skin color IS the defining concern. And the direct comparison of white-on-white mistreatment to white-on-nonwhite racist mistreatment is a grasp for moral equivalence.
If Irish immigrants were truly considered nonwhite, maybe they would have been hunted down and slaughtered like indigenous peoples, or separated from their children like African slaves. But these things did NOT happen, and I hold that it is inappropriate to describe the Irish as "not considered white". Of course they were white. Nobody, not now and not in US history, would describe them as nonwhite. Sure, some people didn't like the Irish, but that's a far cry from considering them to be a different race or color.
Irish and Irish-descended could vote, they could go to court to seek redress of grievances, they could marry who they wished, they were not confined to reservations, they could have children without fearing that they would be taken away. Indigenous, African, and sometimes Latino and Asian peoples in the US did not always enjoy such rights, but white people almost always did.
I brought up chattel slavery because the commenter said, "in the US", and the exemplar for white-on-nonwhite racism in the US is chattel slavery of black Africans. But if one prefers to consider the mistreatment of other nonwhite racial groups, you could certainly hold any of them up to the way Irish were treated, and I daresay that you would have a hard time finding any dimension of mistreatment in which Irish or other white minorities were treated worse than nonwhite peoples.
Fascists have always used racism as an excuse to define the enemy and back The Great Leader, even when the sides were ethnically similar. It's not like Poland and France were full of non-white barbarian infiltrators in Europe in the 30s and 40s, but plenty of people used "preservation of the white race" as a reason to back the Nazis.
You should examine that claim critically. The idea that Irish indentured servants were mistreated similarly to their their non-white counterparts in chattel slavery is historical revisionism pushed by white supremacists.
I was ready to dismiss this as hyperbole -- after all, there are INNUMERABLE ways that US equipment could make its way to Russian factories.
Then I read the words of the chairman of their board:
Hans Naumann (through interpreter):
I think that Trump, unlike many European politicians, has recognized that the white population must stand together. Americans, Europeans, Australians, they're roughly 1.5 billion people, but Asians come to six billion.
In my opinion, the world's demographics compel the two nuclear powers, that's America and Russia, to stand together.
It turns out they shipped equipment directly from their German facilities to Russian military companies, potentially in violation of the 2014 sanctions.
RickRussell_CA @ RickRussell_CA @lemmy.world Posts 8Comments 361Joined 2 yr. ago 
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