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
1d ago
Google Ads, if I recall correctly, cost on the order of $0.01 per impression. Even if we assume advertisers were willing to pay 10 times as much per print "impression" (questionable, since those can't be targeted as well and don't have a link you can bait people into clicking), how many ads would be needed in a magazine to recoup the writing, printing and distribution costs? If this is like $10 per copy (which seems like a realistic ballpark figure given the price at which glossy ad-free magazines are sold), there would have to be about 100 ads in it.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
The big AI labs are mostly staffed by people straight out of academia, be they researchers or enthusiastic star undergrads. There is a lot of metis on locking down corporate systems that never had a chance to propagate into their operations, and the more general pattern of "SV startups fail to do something that is baseline common sense for more traditional companies" has been observed many times before.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
The realignment is totally unsurprising if you accept that the US parties represent different tribes, rather than any universal political principles or approaches to government. Whichever party represents the tribe that is on top will want to cement the advantage, conserve the circumstances that put it there, jealously guard the wealth and integrity of the state that is an extension of the winning tribe's volition, and reinforce its power to keep its enemies down. The one that represents the underdog will want the opposite of all that, to subvert the culture, overturn hierarchies, constrain and weaken the state and redistribute its assets.
As the Wheel of Fortune turns, if you are caught up in the idea that D/R mean left/right mean concrete political beliefs, you are bound to be surprised at the parties supposedly "betraying their principles" or undulating sinusoidally.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
I don't believe any law or norm or principle or logical consistency would stop the extremists on the other side from trying to denaturalize me if they thought they could get away with it.
Of course, but if you successfully denaturalize their allies, surely they will be more likely to think that they can get away with denaturalizing you.
Your argumentation is one of many that roughly has the shape of "the other party has already escalated maximally, there is nothing to lose from escalating back". I see this deployed left and right in internal culture wars, and even in real some-holds-barred wars like Ukraine/Russia. Yet, in each of those, it always turns out the other side did actually have more to escalate back with, and the cycle continues. Do you actually think/feel that you have nothing to lose, in your current situation?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
It's always fun to hypothesise about all the things you could build after cutting down a (Schelling/Chesterton) fence, but the thing with a fence is that it holds back people on both sides. Do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that will blow once "strip citizenship from someone on the enemy team" is on the political menu?
More generally, I find it kind of fascinating to see this enthusiasm, time and time again, of oppressed political fringe groups that briefly get within swinging range of power to make their first move be "empower the state to move against my opponents in unprecedented ways"; when the tide recedes, it always winds up being used against them, to much pikachu-facing and gnashing of teeth.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Yeah, it feels more correlated with Gen X anomie to me.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Seems unlikely to be the case here, though, given
The suspect was in possession of a note with several LGBTQIA+ associated businesses written on it.
unless you surmise that he had an interpersonal dispute with several such businesses, and making a list and checking it twice is within the definitional range of low level personal violence. To begin with, a Gambian Muslim is hardly a central example of a black person in the USA.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Maslow's Hierarchy? Most of the people involved with legislation in rich Western countries have no personal memory or expectation, and hardly even cultural memory, of anything below the "self-actualization" layer not being met. Therefore, on the margin, self-actualization is the only thing that drives their choices: they want to feel morally righteous and impactful. If you model them as moneymaxxing for themselves or their country, you will be surprised time and time again.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
This line of reasoning is premised on taking the Whig history understanding of democracy way too uncritically, though. If democracy were actually about letting the voters decide the course of political action, there would not be so many hurdles thrown up to restrict the choices that are available, and restrict the choices available when the menu of available choices is compiled, and so on. You (and the net welfare recipient low IQ coloured people) are not voting on whether to declare war on Iran, or on whether to send the Massachusetts woman to the electric chair, or anything; instead you are voting on the choice between approximately two menus that have been written for you by, indeed, rich, mostly white, intelligent and educated net tax payers, whether they are actual elected politicians, think-tank employees, lobbyists or lawyers who do verbal gymnastics to conjure up some argument to say that menu entries they don't like are not "constitutional" or whatever.
The real point of democracy has always been to establish common knowledge that disrupts rebellious ambitions. The weakness of monarchies and oligarchies is that at any time, some small subset of subjects can claim that they have a critical mass of support to overthrow the government, and are only hampered by coordination problems; and then if their propaganda is sufficiently good, they can actually do it (as even if the forces aligned against them are overwhelmingly more powerful, the latter might not know this - if communists are persecuted, how do you know that you are not the only real anti-communist and everyone around you is secretly on their side?) or at least cause severe disruption in a futile attempt. On the other hand, democracy, by making credible-ish declarations of support public, makes such a failure of the majority to coordinate impossible: if the communist party is on the voting roll, but gets 1%, you can be pretty confident that you will not be lined up against a wall by your secretly communist colleagues if you refuse to cooperate with the revolution.
Are you so confident that it is for the better to exempt women/the poor/minorities from this consensus-signalling mechanism, with the predictable immediate effect that "all women/poor/minorities would side with X" becomes easier to claim?
In the end, of course the Soviet guy still proposes one that just so happens to inflate the Soviet Union (I suppose Canada and Scandinavia are acceptable stowaways in this "uplift"). I would like to see a tabular comparison of all the projections by how they scale each region/power bloc, along with the origins of their proponents.
More options
Context Copy link