kibiz0r @ kibiz0r @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

Chat, are we cooked?

I’m not entirely sure that Biden-or-Trump inflation question shows what they think it shows.

I do blame Biden quite a bit for inflation.

Stimulus was the right move during Covid. But it was inevitably going to result in inflation if the added money wasn’t cleaned up via taxes.

Trump could’ve started the ball rolling on a tax plan before exiting. But even if he was the kind of guy who would commit political suicide during an election year for the good of the country, time was pretty tight and there were legitimately bigger fish to fry.

So it fell on Biden. Biden had four years to do it. He didn’t. The money accumulated in the hands of the ultra-wealthy.

I get that it was an unfavorable legislative environment, but you gotta make it obvious to the voters that you see the problem and are trying to fix it. Instead, we got interest rate voodoo and several months of gaslighting that the economy has never been better.

This judge helped draft the PATRIOT Act and the DMCA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_Howell

Oh word? So they’re the one behind all those “no one:” memes?

Violent

I didn’t know cars felt pain.

Obligatory Philosophy Tube

And if you put it in writing, it’ll be on the wrong letterhead.

Or you didn’t sign it.

Or you signed it with autopen.

Kinda misleading headline.

It’s not a flaw in RSA, but the lack of entropy in lightweight devices without many inputs. ECC would have basically the same problem.

Maybe “random number generation flaw” would be more accurate.

Kinda funny that he’s not rubio, but he is Rubio.

That’s some commitment. I gotta imagine that unsafely ejecting all peripherals puts the brain in a major panic.

Good point.

If you like video format: Finding The Money is a great documentary on how sovereign currency has worked historically, how it works in the US right now, why the national debt and spending deficits aren’t (necessarily, by themselves) something to worry about, and what to worry about instead: inflation, physical resources, and labor utilization.

If you prefer reading: “Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar” by Cory Doctorow is a good short read, and Stephanie Kelton has a book The Deficit Myth which I’ve heard is good too.

balanced budget amendment

Nonononono.

The federal government has achieved fiscal balance (even surpluses) in just seven periods since 1776, bringing in enough revenue to cover all of its spending during 1817-21, 1823-36, 1852-57, 1867-73, 1880-93, 1920-30 and 1998-2001. We have also experienced six depressions. They began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929.

Do you see the correlation?

The one exception occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the dot-com and housing bubbles fueled a consumption binge that delayed the harmful effects of the Clinton surpluses until the Great Recession of 2007-09.

Because:

National debt is not like individual debt.

National debt is not like individual debt.

National debt is NOT like individual debt!

But at least our most senior treasury officials must understand this, right?

Treasury.gov site:

Key Takeaways

The national debt is composed of distinct types of debt, similar to an individual whose debt may consist of a mortgage, car loan, and credit cards.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Marshals can also deputize, and they’ve already deputized Elon’s private security.

“Memes”? More like “MeMeMeMeMes”! 😶

https://midwest.social/comment/15965783

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

US Marshals, part of the executive branch. They recently deputized Elon’s security guards.

Also true. It’s scraping.

In the words of Cory Doctorow:

Web-scraping is good, actually.

Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?

I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.

1. Laws are just social constructs, to help people get along with each other. They’re not supposed to be grand universal moral frameworks, or coherent/consistent philosophies. They’re always full of contradictions. So… does it even matter if it’s “meaningfully” different or not, if it’s socially useful to treat it as different (or not)?
2. We’ve seen with digital locks, gig work, algorithmic market manipulation, and playing either side of Section 230 when convenient… that the ethos of big tech is pretty much “define what’s illegal, so I can colonize the precise border of illegality, to a fractal level of granularity”. I’m not super stoked to come with an objective quantitative framework for them to follow, cuz I know they’ll just flow around it like water and continue to find ways to do antisocial shit in ways that technically follow the rules.

What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.

“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast."

"No," says the preacher. "I have faith in the Lord. He will save me."

Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.

"Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee's gonna break any minute."

Once again, the preacher is unmoved. "I shall remain. The Lord will see me through."

After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.

"Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance."

Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.

And, predictably, he drowns.

A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, "Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn't you deliver me from that flood?"

God shakes his head. "What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter."