ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
4d ago
If we're talking funniest things, I've always thought that the funniest thing would be if the real deception was that Israel gave up on/got rid of nukes for who knows what reason, deciding that it was actually sufficiently fine, so long as everyone else believes they have them. Stay officially ambiguous, occasionally task someone with "leaking" juicy details about how awesome and secret their nukes are, and free-ride on the reputation.
Saddam went so far as to deceive his own military commanders (beyond some tiny core) into believing that they had some set of chem/bio/whatever (I can't remember the details) weapons, to the point that their battle plans on the eve of the invasion were based around getting and using them. Didn't work out for him, but ya know, high risk plays happen, I guess?
...they probably still have them, tho.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
shitty Chinese drywall that later outgassed sulfur compounds
For the purposes of my comment, it is this temporal relationship that matters. Sure, the other temporal relationship between folks realizing this temporal relationship and choosing to ban it is fine. But this one is the one that holds the conceptual link.
I'm certainly not going to defend the UAS/component ban, either, but that's not the point here. The point is that even if we assume that all of that is dumb and doesn't make sense as a Type I ban, we can still make it illegal to use a UAS to kill someone or even just make it illegal to fly a UAS into a stadium or something, and this type of ban will have particular qualities tied to the specifics.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
when anyone who wants to put together a piddly little indie game that uses player controlled image gen is going to need to spend time implementing some, easily circumvented, controls to prevent some class of images to be generated
Sorry, h-what? This is truly out of left field.
And it's not just the deep fakes, we're going to have to get used to every image or video on the internet that doesn't have verifiable provenance being suspect.
Yeah, sure, agreed. Not sure the relevance.
Do you think a kid should get expelled because he imagined what a classmate looked like nude?
I cannot possibly think of how this is remotely responsive to my comment. The answer is obviously no, but the mind is boggled.
*More than 239. The occupation page gives per-specialty mean (not median) numbers ranging from 222 to 451.
Since there are claims about numbers relative to the federal general schedule, the 2026 general schedule location with the highest locality pay tops out at 197. That is the max, not the mean or median. If all doctors were forced onto the GS, that means everyone not at the max would have to be shoved somewhere below that.
...or they'd have to make a separate "doctors are special" schedule, meaning that they wouldn't have to raise all federal employee wages alongside raising doctor wages.
It's not the kind of thing you can realistically ban.
I think this mistakes different types of bans/controls and their different purposes.
One way a ban/control may operate is to try to pre-emptively prevent certain events from occurring. When folks try to control, say, ammonium nitrate following the Oklahoma City bombing, they're often trying to prevent someone from acquiring some of the tools used to create a large bomb, ultimately in the hopes of preventing said hypothetical bomb from being used to kill people and destroy stuff. Whether or not this is practical is not the point here; the point is that this is the point of the effort. Similarly for controls on nuclear material.
Importation controls are somewhat similar in that they may be trying to prevent an event from occurring at all. The funny example I go to sometimes is the ban on Chinese drywall. The intent was to prevent it from even getting into the country, pre-emptively preventing whatever harms it may (or may not) later produce. Or see, for example, the discussion below about possible controls on UAS; I read that conversation to be primarily pondering whether controls can be put in place which pre-emptively prevent a significant number of events, to what extent such controls will be effective or not effective (how hard is it for folks to still "roll their own"?), etc.
Many other bans/controls are post-hoc controls, assigning liability/culpability after a sufficient number of steps have been taken toward an event or after the event has occurred. These are different in type. Probably the majority of controls are like this. I might even say that part of the reason why so many controls are like this is because it is not reasonable to control the inputs that are used to lead up to an event. This may be in part due to "dual use" considerations or other factors.
For a silly example, rope can be used to tie someone up when kidnapping them. Well, basically no one thinks it's reasonable to put heavy controls on possessing rope. But basically no one thinks that kidnapping is "not the kind of thing you can realistically ban", either. That people have widespread access to the tool used is sort of neither here nor there when considering post-hoc controls on the use of those tools for specific events.
What I find strange is that I've really only seen this come up for digital tools. There's this weird perspective that if someone uses specifically a digital tool that is "out there" and accessible, that the "genie is out of the bottle", then it's simply unrealistic to use any sort of law to restrict any type of use of these digital tools that one might perform. That still seems wild to me. Rope is a technology that is "out there". "The genie is out of the bottle." Even the Primitive Technology guy makes his own! ...sorrrrta think that we can still ban kidnapping.
[EDIT: I forgot to add what I had wanted to say about the UAS conversation. Suppose, after consideration, it seems infeasible to use a Type I control to prevent things like killing people with UAS. Can't even manage to stop someone from flying into, say, a crowd at an open sports stadium. I don't see any reason why someone couldn't want a Type II control, still making it illegal to fly a UAS into a stadium or to kill people with a UAS. Sure, maybe you can't prevent it, but to the extent that you have the investigative tools to prove in a court of law who is culpable for doing it, you can still prosecute them.]
Of course, once we're in a Type II ban world instead of a Type I ban world, then there is some amount of "we have to get used to the fact that this type of event will actually happen significantly more often than events that we can control with Type I bans". Frequencies and percentages will depend heavily on specifics. And maybe that's the sentiment you're going for. Sure, we're not going to be able to meaningfully pre-emptively prevent fake AI nudes from being generated, just like we can't really pre-emptively prevent rope-enabled kidnappings. But folks may still want to try a Type II control. The extent to which even a Type II control can be considered effective certainly depends extremely heavily on specifics, including an analysis of post-hoc investigation techniques, surrounding legal frameworks, resource considerations, and even the oft-debated deterrence theory of government sanctions.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
The politicians in single payer systems often stand up against paying doctors more because they know that if they do they have to pay all public sector workers more
The AMA would probably fight against most versions of single payer, and pretty heavily. If the proposal was "single payer and doctors are now going to be subject to the standard federal pay schedule", I don't think anything could prepare you for the fury that would be unleashed to prevent it from passing. Mayyyybe they could accept "...and we'll make a new, separate, special pay schedule (which can be changed separately from the standard schedule) for doctors, who are special," but there's just absolutely no way that the US government will actually have the political will to bulk force doctors to take a 3-8x pay cut.
That is quite the incredible read. Thanks!
I actually quite like the concept of the solution, but he also admits in later posts that it's just not going to work. I'd probably agree that the two biggest problems are even explaining it to people and Goodhart's law on the algo. Still, the conceptualization of the problem and the broad principles guiding our search for a solution are more spot on than most treatments I've seen.
Shame that it's buried in a gigantic cluster of a thread on yet another silly, tragic, scissor shooting. I'd almost just collapsed the whole thread a few times, but I'm glad I managed to catch this. I'm sure I'll be toying with it in my mind for quite a while to come.
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