When deciding how to react to a pandemic, one must take the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be. China knew that there were six and a half billion other people in the world spread across two hundred other countries whose governments would react in various ways to the pandemic. It was not reasonable for it adopt a set of polices that relied on the rest of the world suppressing the pandemic as well as they claim to have done.
It was a given that they would have to deal with constant incursions of the virus back into the country, with increasing evolved contagiousness, forever. It was a given that any country that wanted to control the virus indefinitely had to come up with a solution that could be made permanent.
Unless China gives up and proves that their zero Covid policy was an almost complete waste, this is just the beginning of the nightmare it has imposed on its population.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
I wonder if social media companies will relearn some of the lessons that our legal system learned a long time ago, such as the virtue of having an impartial and disinterested judge rule on a case after hearing arguments from both sides. Twitter had a mob of politically motivated employees lobby for a result, which was reached using a secretive ad hoc process.
Or maybe there is some reason that this method works better for these companies. When unimportant people are affected, most bad decisions are put down to these companies using cheap and efficient but often unfair moderation practices.
I'm not sure that applies here. In Trump's case, it seems like there were just too many people with political motivations and not enough who cared very much about the integrity and fairness of the system.
I hate it with a burning passion. (This is, unironically, what a website should look like: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) I guess they want things to look nice and clean, but for practical reasons, I want as much information to fit on the screen at one time as possible. I can understand limiting clutter, but they have gone way too far. I don't like clicking through menus, especially if I don't know where to find what I'm looking for, and I really really don't like scrolling.
For the same reason, I abhor the trend of making things too big. I really don't like that if I open YouTube on my 27" monitor, I can only see 8 videos at a time (or just 1 or 2 on my Pixel 6 XL). My bank used to have a nice website that they ruined by replacing with the design from their app. I have five accounts and only two fit on the screen because they're using 24 point font with huge chunks of white space between them. They can't fit 5 numbers on a 312 square inch screen! I'm seriously considering switching banks over it and I only hesitate because the others will probably do the same.
I have to resist going on a rant about this, so I'll just conclude by saying I also dislike the trend of replacing text with symbols that I have to decode, and by saying that if God is just, there is a special place in hell for whoever is responsible for pushing this.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
As far as I am aware, there is still no evidence they beheaded any babies.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Advocating for terrorism has been a criminal offence in Canada since 2015, but I doubt we'll see any prosecutions even though the current government supported that legislation.
The European Union has passed the Artificial Intelligence Act
The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.
...
Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.
...
Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.
This is an extremely restrictive law that will really hold the EU back economically if AI becomes an important technology. It imposes huge burdens on all uses, for both the users and developers, and outright bans many very useful applications.
The law tries to mandate transparency, while at the same time discouraging it by restricting or banning certain uses. An AI specifically made for social scoring, for example, would be illegal, while a general purpose AI would almost certainly do something like social scoring internally as part of a more general ability. For example, if you have an AI run a company in its head, so to speak, how would anyone know what it is doing? How would you know how it is selecting job applicants? It would be a black box and current attempts to figure out how large language models actually work would be the only way to find out what they're doing. But continuing that line of research would expose the developers and users of these systems to liability.
The fines are also enormous.
Fines for non-compliance can be up to 35 million Euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover.
This would be devastating for a small or low margin business. Many are just not going to do use this extremely valuable technology. Lots of online services are just not going to be available in the EU. In fact, this is already the case with Gemini and Claude, probably because of privacy laws.
I've long argued that the AI safety movement is unlikely to do anything for existential risk and will, if anything, increase it, while assuredly greatly limiting the benefits, and this is strong evidence that I'm right. The regulatory state does not have the capacity to deal with existential risk from AI, whereas it has a long history of stifling technological development.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Just to nitpick a bit, technically, there is no coalition government. Canada has never had a coalition government. The NDP is not part of a coalition with the Liberals, as no one from their caucus is in the cabinet. So they are not part of the government.
They do vote in favour of votes of confidence to keep the Liberals in power in exchange for the Liberals helping to enact legislation that they want, but that's not the same as being part of a coalition government.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
I am always wary of non-profits. It seems like a corporate structure that invites corruption. A for-profit company has an objective goal and shareholders it is accountable to. A non-profit with a self-perpetuating board does not.
The board members have a lot of power and are accountable only to each other. The incentive is for them to subvert the stated goals of the organization for their own benefit.
Benefiting monetarily may be difficult, but converting their power into less tangible benefits is not, especially when the goal of the non-profit is vaguely defined.
None of the board members' positions is secure. They can be voted out at any time by the other board members. Anyone brought in to support a faction can betray the other members of the faction. New factions can emerge. This all discourages long term goals. The incentive is to get in, use internal politics to gain power, and then exploit that power for personal or ideological benefit while it lasts.
As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away.
How is that fraud? Fraud is when you trick someone into giving you something. Disregarding government regulation is not fraud.
Anyway, the comparison is odd. Sam Bankman-Fried, as I understand, lied to his customers about risking their deposits. He effectively stole and then lost billions of dollars. Uber broke laws - artificially constraining the supply of taxis - which probably most informed intelligent people think are unjust.
Reddit moderators are kind of like Reddit employees only instead of getting paid with money, they get paid with power. Another difference is the top moderators mostly weren't hired. They just showed up and started working and then hired their friends.
The power they get is not an amount that Reddit determined they needed to give up in order to get them as employees. It's not the market wage. The moderators just lucked into their positions. Consequently, they're overpaid, and now they're trying to strike when their employer can replace them with the click of a button and they weren't their first choice as employees anyway. For every striking moderator, there are thousands of potential scabs who would leap at the opportunity, and there's also nothing like any kind of labour law that could protect them in anyway.
I think I was one of the first people to say that being outside was probably not only safe but one of the best places to be during the pandemic. I was also one of the first to argue that the lockdowns and masks would likely go on for a lot longer than most people realized. I also predicted the reversal of most remote work.
Current consensus defying beliefs:
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current efforts to fight climate change are causing more harm than good. (75%)
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congestion pricing is very good (99.5%)
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there might not be a recession within the next year (50%)
Your first link is broken.
I don't agree with your prediction. The trend over the last 50 years or so has been an increase in opposition to sexual relationships between children and adults. The age of consent has been going up. The penalties for sexually abusing minors have been increasing. The general concern over paedophilia has been increasing. Age gaps are becoming taboo. The gap in general expected behaviour between adults and children has been increasing while the age at which people are considered to be full adults is getting later and later.
The standard definition of a mental disorder is based on whether the behaviour causes harm. I don't see how paedophilia would not be considered a mental disorder in a society that considers sexual activity between a child and a much older person causes immense psychological harm.
You know why this is obviously wrong. I know why this is obviously wrong. It is not obvious from first principles why this is wrong. The reasons why it is wrong have to be learned.
Also, people vary dramatically in their exposure to information about how dating works. Some people have close knit groups of friends where it is a constant topic of conversation while others have rarely spoken about it with anyone.
I was actually in a similar situation about 20 years ago. We used to stay in the schoolyard after school to play sports or games. When I was 12, I was there with my friends preparing for a snowball fight as we usually did in the winter, when some older kids (about 13 or 14) from another school showed up and one them attacked me because I threw a snowball at him after he asked me to.
His friends pulled him off me, but not before I got a few kicks to his face and he got a few punches to mine, so when I got home, I had a few minor bruises. This led to my parents contacting the school and the vice principal pulling me out of class the next day to ask what happened.
Nothing came of it. I only knew the kid's first name. The rule that said we could do what we wanted on school property after 4:00 PM remained in place. It never would have occurred to me to think that incident meant we needed adult supervision. I was already embarrassed that the adults felt they needed to anything about it. I felt like we kids handled things pretty well.
There was another incident where some roughhousing with friends led a neighbour to call the school which led to another talking to with the vice principal. Again, I just felt embarrassment and I was confused about why the adults were overeacting and wondered, as I often did, if they didn't remember what it was like to be a kid.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Maine was not one the original thirteen colonies as it was part of Massachussetts at the time.
Glassnoser
11mo ago
Doesn't medically transitioning make your child infertile? From an evolutionary psychology perspective, isn't that similar to your child dying? It doesn't surprise me that some parents react as strongly to that as they would to their children dying.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
I'm willing to bet we'll reach 30% unemployment in five years.
I'm willing to confidently bet we won't. Do you want to put some money on this?
People can do other jobs. There is still a lot of low skilled work that GPT cannot do. People can become truck drivers, nurses, teachers, babysitters, etc.
I don't think even most office work will be eliminated, at least not without some major improvements in GPT. In many office environments, a huge amount of time is spent just communicating information. GPT could be paired with an audio interface that allows it to participate in these meetings, but in most cases, it has to be human enough that people will like talking to it. It will probably have to be able to read facial expressions and behave with realistic affect.
For mass unemployment, you need a large number of people to be unable to do any job nearly as well as an AI (even then it's not guaranteed because people will still have comparative advantages). They actually need to be so unproductive that you cannot waste other resources that they would need to be employed. The only realistic way I see this happening in the short term because of AI is if computers or electricity become obscenely expensive.
Why not get the government to throw some cash at massive infrastructure and public works projects? We could take a page out of the 1930s New Deal playbook and create a boatload of jobs in all sorts of industries.
Manual labour jobs are not going to be automated by AutoGPT. Anyone with the skillset to participate in these projects could just as easily get employment in the private sector. This would have no effect on your predicted mass unemployment and would probably be extremely wasteful.
A year ago, @Highlandclearances made some predictions. I made my own about a month later. I think I did pretty well, though I had an advantage.
@Highlandclearances' predictions are listed first, followed by mine.
Asset Markets will:
- 50%, 25% (FALSE) at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 12%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
- 25%, 15% (FALSE) at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 20%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
The Federal Reserve will:
- 80%, 95% (TRUE) raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
- 80%, 85% (TRUE) not cut interest rates before July 1st, 2023.
- 50%, 50% (TRUE) raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
The Bank of Canada will:
- 80%, 90% (TRUE) raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
- 50%, 50% (FALSE) raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
Canada will:
- 50%, 40% (FALSE) have a “moderate” recession which begins in 2023 defined as either of: (1) a cumulative decline in GDP of 2% across any number of quarters, (2) the unemployment rises to 7% at any point.
- 80%, 45% (FALSE) see detached house prices decline by 15%+ as measured by the December over December CREA national benchmark.
- 25%, 15% (FALSE) Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the Liberals will win a minority government.
- 50%, 20% (FALSE) Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the CPC will increase seats and win the most votes.
- 25%, 10% (FALSE) Have a constitutional or jurisdictional crisis over provincial / federal issues, probably related to guns, but possibly related to the Alberta Pension Plan, health care funding, or equalization. This is hard to define, but I would take any kind of Meech-Lake style conference, or Supreme Court decision on constitutional questions, the creation of the Alberta Pension Plan, or refusal by local police to enforce federal gun bans as positive evidence.
So, basically, I was correct in not thinking a big economic collapse was so likely. The stock market did very well, and while Canada's economy hasn't really recovered from the pandemic, nothing dramatic happened. The real GDP did not decline, though real GDP per capita did. Maybe the massive surge of immigration has kept the overall economy from shrinking, or maybe it's the reason real GDP per capita is falling.
I still don't know why @Highlandclearances was expecting an election. Something he did get right was the surging popularity of the Conservative Party at the expense of the Liberals, but as long as they continue to get a vote of confidence from the NDP, there doesn't need to be an election for another two years.
Any predictions for 2024?
Glassnoser
4mo ago
The Quebec daycare system that this is copied from has the exact same problem. It's $7 a day instead of $10 a day, but this is a textbook example of the consequences of a price ceiling. Why they would copy a system where people have to sign up their children for daycare when they're still in the womb, I cannot understand.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
How am I to make sense of the fact that the castes in India have been highly endogamous for the past two thousand years and that the pre-industrial world was Malthusian? Shouldn't that have resulted in the gradual replacement of the lower castes with the upper castes, or did the upper castes not actually receive any material benefit as a result of their higher status?
Gregory Clark has argued that in England, the upper classes did replace the lower classes as a result of their material advantage. But they did not form distinct endogamous castes, so most of the descendants of the upper classes fell into the lower classes and there was some limited mixing between the classes. But India, my understanding is that the Brahmins didn't become Shudras, so why didn't the Shudras go extinct?
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Viewed through that lens, the WEF is a venue for defection against one's own country. They acknowledge it! They're globalists.
They don't acknowledge it. They claim that globalism is good for their countries. That may not be true and they may not be being honest, but they are certainly not acknowledging that they are defecting against their own countries.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Almost everyone already has access to an image generator that can produce images of whatever they want. The only difference is that they can't share them with other people because they're inside their heads. Nobody worries much about this because it's normalized and because you can't show them to other people and pretend they're real. If illicit images become common enough, people will think of them the same way and they'll lose their power.
Glassnoser
10d ago
A sales tax is a tax on consumption. A capital gains tax is a tax on capital. Taxing capital is taxing savings. It is not really taxing wealth, because an equally rich person who spends his money right away avoids it. It is actually easier to just tax consumption with a sales tax and then you can tax extreme wealth but in a way that is fair and doesn't discourage saving and investing.
The capital gains tax is especially absurd (compared to other taxes on capital) because it not only penalizes saving but also penalizes frequently selling assets, and the tax is on the nominal returns, not the real returns. If you invest in government bonds, your real tax after-tax return will be negative.
Scott Sumner is excellent on this subject and has written many blog posts on it. It's hard to pick the best one, but you should read a few. Here are some:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/a-consumption-tax-is-a-wealth-tax/
https://www.econlib.org/capital-gains-nonsense/
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/income-a-meaningless-misleading-and-pernicious-concept/
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Yes. One of the crazier ones I've seen which is really popular is making it illegal to own an investment property unless it's a purpose built rental. So that's the only that renters would be allowed to live in. Another one is capping the price of food.
As a non-American, I certainly care about the US interfering in other countries by spreading disinformation. Even if it were my own government, I care about Twitter acting as a free propaganda arm of the government to give it more influence when I want it to have less influence in the world, because I don't think it is actually generally acting in my best interest when it does these things.
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