But I am mighty!!
merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works Posts 10Comments 2,967Joined 2 yr. ago
merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works
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And if he does step down as CEO and sell his shares, the stock will tank anyhow. The only reason it's currently about 100x over its realistic value is that people bought into the idea that Elon was this genius who was going to... well who knows. Nothing he could have done would have justified that valuation.
I don't either, but my nose isn't hairy and it would burn to a crisp outdoors.
There are lots of stories about this.
But, those are the ones we know about. Are there others we don't? I'd say it's certain.
For a serial killer, this has to be a gift from the gods. Get some gear from an army surplus store, cover your face, kidnap and kill someone, hide the body, and everyone will just assume that they were deported and lost in the system.
Florida woman arrested for posing as ICE agent to kidnap ex-boyfriend’s wife: police
Man accused of posing as ICE agent, sexually assaulting woman at motel: report
Man arrested in attempted rape after allegedly posing as ICE agent in Brooklyn
Houston police: Man impersonating ICE agent responsible for robbery
Do you mean the one from Norway? He wasn't picked up by a van, he was denied entry at the airport.
On the other hand, what bullshit is it that my stupid human body can't survive being outdoors without medicinal cream. My ancestors would be ashamed.
So, like Monopoly? A game originally designed to teach people that monopolies are bad, and pretty frustrating as a result?
Triopoly.
Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.
If YouTube weren't a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.
Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn't have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless "migrate away from YouTube" experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.
The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.
The whole thing is pretty ridiculous. You don't get to consent to being born. You don't get to consent to having who you have as parents. And, legally they get to make every important decision about your life for 18 years.
Even if you have parents who actually loved you and showed it, who aren't abusive, who did the best they could, you're still stuck in a relationship you didn't get a chance to consent to. Even "good" parents often mess up their kids by trying to live their lives through those kids. Like, parents who are failed athletes trying to push their kids into sports. Or, parents who miss having little kids around trying to guilt their kids into providing them grandkids.
And then there's the whole expectation of taking care of the parents when they get old and sick. Yes, I get it, they changed their kids' diapers when they were young. The kids are just returning the favour. But, those kids never had a choice. The parents (for the most part) chose to have kids, and chose to do that work. The kids never agreed to the terms and conditions that said they had to help out their parents when their bodies started failing.
Suicide is selfish, but ultimately, it is your life. It's unfair that other people get an opportunity to tie all kinds of strings to you before your brain has even developed enough to understand the concepts of life and death.
Then again, we're just animals. We only exist because a machine which exists to propagate its genes turned out to be effective at propagating its genes. Nature is brutal, and even if we don't always admit it, we're still part of nature. There's nothing fair about it. It just is.
You missed on one detail: he was a full on MAGA, sharing posts about enforcing US immigration laws and the unstoppable Trump Train.
I'm not even convinced that an "AI tutor" is better than nothing.
Probably better than sitting in a room staring at a blank wall. But, is it even as good as playing with lego? Playing tag with friends? Drawing with crayons? Taking a pet for a walk?
I mostly agree with you, it's just that historically governments have been really bad at producing some necessities of life.
I really wouldn't want anybody other than a government providing clean drinking water. I think they've proven they're great at that, and private industries just mess it up in various ways. OTOH, governments historically haven't been very good at producing crops. It seems like every time a government wants to fully take over farming, the result is a famine. Having said that, farming subsidies, and programs where governments are guaranteed buyers of farmed stuff is pretty great.
It really pisses me off that some of the most right-wing, most anti-government people in the US are farmers, and farmers are absolutely supported by the government. There are certainly some flaws in the system. The corn subsidy being so high is ridiculous, and results in things like high fructose corn syrup being available nearly free, and so it's in everything. OTOH, it's thanks to government intervention that the US is absolutely secure when it comes to price shocks for food items. Almost everything is made domestically. And, while there can be quirks like egg prices being high (which again is due to unregulated / badly regulated monopolies) the overall system is very stable.
Housing is another thing that is iffy if it's 100% government made. The awful apartment blocks of former soviet republics are an example of that. But, unregulated housing construction is even worse. This is one where you need to find some balance between fully capitalist and fully government run.
Mostly though, right now, the governments of the world just need to start cracking down on capitalist businesses that are harming the public. The EU is at least trying, but the results have been mixed. The US was starting to do something under Biden and then Trump took over and... wowza. I think the recent NYC election shows that the population is well to the left of the democratic party establishment, and that cracking down on big business could be a huge win in future elections.
Capitalism only works if it's regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.
Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it's regulating. You can't have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.
A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we've come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn't really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.
Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.
However, this is ultimately a matter of subjectivity, and I don't think I've referred to LotR as the greatest fantasy story.
No, I don't think you have. I just think that some people do. I think the hype around LotR makes kids go into reading it expecting it will be the best thing they ever read, and some come out of that disappointed.
I agree that Harry Potter is also massively overrated. If you ignore Rowling and her current issues, Harry Potter is a decent fantasy book for kids. But, it became this international phenomenon. I don't know why.
As for A Song of Ice and Fire, I get that one more. He did things that most other fantasy authors didn't. For example, he was willing to kill off characters in a way that almost nobody else does. That really raised the stakes because you could no longer assume the main character was untouchable. He also did something really interesting in the early books in that they were fantasy books, and there was all this talk about magic and gods and dragons... but for a long time there was nothing in the books that proved that magic really did exist. The dragons were all dead. The stark children had "dire wolves" but they weren't magical wolves, they were just really big. People believed in magic and all these interesting gods, but there was no proof that anything supernatural was happening. I was actually disappointed when the later books revealed that magic was real, and that the gods seemed to exist (or at least there was supernatural stuff associated with worshipping / believing in gods). It would have been really interesting to have a full book series that was "fantasy" without the supernatural element.
All other things being equal, it would save a lot of lives to replace every human driver with a Waymo car right now. They're already significantly better than the average driver.
But, there are a few caveats. One is that so far they've only ever driven under relatively easy conditions. They don't do any highway driving, and they've never driven in snow. Another one is that because they all share one "mind", we don't know if there are failure modes that would affect every car. Every human driver is different, but every human is more or less the same. If a human sees a 100 km/h or 60 mph speed limit on a narrow, twisty, suburban street with poor visibility, most of them are probably going to assume it was a mistake and won't actually try to drive 100 km/h. We don't know if a robo-vehicle will do that. AFAIK they haven't found any way to emulate "common sense". They might also freak out during an eclipse because they've never been trained for that kind of lighting. Or they might try to drive at normal speeds when visibility is obscured by forest fire smoke.
There's also the side effects of replacing millions of drivers with robo-cars. What will it do to people who drive for a living? Should Google/Waymo be paying most of the cost of retraining them? Paying their bills until they can find a new job? What will it do to cities? Will it mean that we no longer need parking lots because cars come and drop people off and then head off to take care of someone else? Or will it mean empty cars roaming the city causing gridlock and making it hell for pedestrians and bikers? Will people now want to live in the city because they don't need to pay for parking and can get a car easily whenever they need one? Or will people now want to live even farther out into the suburbs / rural areas because they don't need to drive and can work in the car on the way into the city?
Personally, I'm hopeful. I think they could make cities better. But, who knows. We should move slowly until we figure things out.
Ok, you're right that he didn't pretend he wasn't a cop. I guess I meant it more in the sense of he sold himself as someone who was no longer a cop, and was going hold them to account. For example:
As mayor, I'd undertake reforms such as forcing the NYPD to publish its “monitoring list” of bad cops, making it easier for whistleblowers to identify bad cops, & recruiting Black & brown officers from high-crime communities.
https://x.com/ericadamsfornyc/status/1358966542747250689
This is something cops almost never do. They never go after their own. If a former cop had actually gone after bad cops, it would have been a really newsworthy thing. Cynics never believed he would do that, because they know how cops (both former and current) care much more about other cops than they do about the public. But, I think some people believed that he was telling the truth and that he'd try to clean up the police force.
So, did he crack down on bad cops? Of course not. He backed a secret police unit filled with those same bad cops. In fact, he got special live-stream feeds from their body cameras.
I'm cynical, but I'd never vote for someone who had been a cop for 20 years, and I'd certainly never believe them if they said they were going to reform the police department. Maybe I'd believe it if someone had been kicked out of the police for being a whistle blower. But, someone who worked as a cop for 20 years then stepped down to run for political office? Nah dude, that guy is always going to side with the cops. If he's not a bad apple himself, he's definitely spoiled along with the rest of the bunch.
You're only counting how they ran, not how they performed as mayors?
Because Adams has hardly performed as a mayor the way he campaigned. He certainly didn't campaign on taking lots of bribes. And, for some reason, when he ran he managed to pretend he wasn't a former cop, but when he took office his coppiness sure came back out.
Maybe tens of thousands of years ago, but 2000ish years ago 60ish was old age. The main reason life expectancy has gone up isn't that old people didn't make it to 50, it's that young people didn't make it to 2. If a couple has 5 kids, 3 of them die as toddlers and the other two make it to 70 the average life expectancy is about 30, but that doesn't mean living past 30 is unusual.
Also, tens of thousands of years ago there was an ice age, but for the last 10k years light-skinned Europeans still had normal summers and worked in the fields.