4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
It's going to be "too soon to do so" in the anecdotal Zhou Enlai sense for a very long time, and on top of that hopelessly subjective (is "US police are now scared of casual violence towards black do-no-gooders" a benefit or not? Would "Israel occupies part of Lebanon" be? Would "US Evangelicals ecstatic because they think the Rapture has drawn closer" a benefit or not?).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Well, given that the Iran war's direct costs are already estimated to be in excess of 20 billion, a couple hundreds more in funding are being requested and this does not even include figures for random damage like US embassies and bases in the region let alone indirect costs due to more expensive fuel and what-not, I think we are some orders of magnitude past that. (We'll see about the deaths depending on whether they actually proceed with a ground invasion.)
(And no, the "military budget is just money reinvested in US companies" argument won't do much here; it's still money that means part of the economy is retargeted towards making things that explode rather than twinkies. You could make absolutely the same argument about BLM damages since presumably the damaged storefronts were also rebuilt by US companies, too. What's the qualitative difference between "fire a missile and pay for a replacement" and "shatter a window and pay for a replacement"?)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
His opposition including some stupid people who can't get their narrative straight is not a particularly strong point in his favour.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
I'll need more time to chew on the rest of your essay before I can respond cogently, but
Simulation and emulation are not magic tricks. If you encode an abacus into a computer running on the Von-Neumann architecture, and it outputs exactly what the actual abacus would for the same input, for every possible input you care to try (or can try, if you formally verify the system), then I consider it insanity to claim that you haven't got a “real” abacus or that the process is merely “faking” the work.
I think calling it insanity betrays a bit of a failure of curiosity towards this aspect of human psychology. Why is it that any people make "retro" games for retro architectures, when they could just imitate the style in a modern engine? The HN public, I imagine, would be much more excited about "I got Doom to run on a toaster" than "I got Doom to run in a VM that has the power of a toaster". Why is breaking out of Alcatraz more interesting than clearing an obstacle course that was designed to be equally difficult? If in the Paralympics, a one-legged guy was hop-racing a two-legged guy with one of his legs tied to his back, which one would we cheer for? Why do we fantasise about Robinson Crusoe scenarios when we could do like the Primitive Technology youtube guy and buy a plot of land somewhere cheap and go frolic around in it wearing rags? Why is the handmade plastic trinket more valuable than the molecule-perfect mass produced Chinese replica? Humans, I think, tend to find acts, and products, of any form of "ingenuity" more real if they sit at or near the optimum point of a real optimisation landscape that someone may realistically encounter. If the optimisation landscape is artificial, and defined by restrictions that we could really just "wish away", then optimising for it is fake and play, and the product of such an optimisation process is a toy. Perhaps it is also so with the human software: a human running under the constraints of self-replicating meat evolved in the African jungle is a precious and impressive thing, but a human running in an emulator on a piece of silicon that is powerful enough to run Culture Minds is a neat diversion that's maybe worth 10 minutes of scrolling and an upvote.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Apart from faceh's argument below, it also seems to me that if a lawmaker passes a law because it seems like a good idea at the time, the times change and now it no longer seems like a good idea, then it should be up to the lawmaker to revoke that law. If you want this to be up to the courts, you at least ought to force the lawmaker to bundle each law with some text describing the contingent circumstances that the law is meant for, rather than simply letting the court and the commenting public engage in motivated guessing ("surely they said this because there was a frontier to settle and they needed bodies, which is no longer the case"/"surely they said this because they wanted to found a country to rule and represent everyone living in its confines, which is just as applicable today").
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
Or put it this way - Trump chickened out of tariffs that would have been far less damaging to him than 10,000 American military deaths in a full or even partial invasion. Why would he TACO the former but not the latter?
Seems like a good opportunity to test the theory that Israel has a unique grip on him (directly, or indirectly by way of having a grip on his handlers/the top of the USG apparatus).
Does the one-eyed man get to be king of the properly sighted just by presenting some blind people he would be comparatively fit to lead, though?
I don't think the metaphor you chose works here. In the end, you are just trying to force the parent poster to answer for some incompatible view espoused by unrelated people who happen to agree with him on the "Trump bad" part, which we can maybe consider to not be completely invalid if you also take responsibility for the "support Israel to position the set-pieces for the Rapture" camp on your side.
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