aqouta

aqouta 1d ago

If we were talking about tactics or even grander strategy this argument makes sense, but war aims? No, we're supposed to be consulted about the war aims. You can have congress agree and declare war based on confidential plans but our representatives get to see the plans and agree to them, not one man.

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aqouta 1d ago

And, if you wanna go for right makes right morality, then surely you'll be perfectly fine if one day the shoe is on the other foot and the Palestinians achieve military supremacy?

Call of hypocrisy go both ways, if this comes to pass surely you likewise would be outraged if the Palestinians expelled the jews or had a legal system that treated them differently to the Palestinians?

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aqouta 1d ago

It’s the threat against Israel

I think this is a factor, but certainly not the only factor or even the biggest factor. Western nations have been getting involved in the sandbox for centuries before Israel came into existence. It's a place with oil resources and a travel route for a preposterous amount of commerce and a geography that lends itself to sectarian conflict. If israel was established in brazil or wherever else they were considering I think we'd still be seeing conflict in that region and I expect the US as hegemon would be involved.

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aqouta 3d ago

He has now blocked me on X : /

I don't know how to put this in a way that won't be interpreted, incorrectly, as condescension but I think he's going through a rough time and hope he can get through to the other side alright. He wrote some posts that I cherish and arguing with him in long form helped me think particularly about the AI race with China even if I don't quite agree with him on the conclusion.

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aqouta 3d ago

It's Twitter that has fried his brain. Like many he has succumbed to the pattern where he spends his time quote tweeting the most deranged examples of his outgroup which the algorithm recognizes and then serves him more of. He's built a machine that serves him almost nothing but idiocy that he can happily dunk on. He's built up a heuristic where he pattern matches any argument made to something stupid he's seen on twitter posted by someone who he didn't need to use any intelligence to dismantle; his wit and charity have atrophied from disuse.

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aqouta 5d ago

It's my belief that if you grant these three things then you have to conclude that the labor theory of value is false.

Risk isn't labor
labor theory of value only counts labor input as value
Risk is an unavoidable factor in the production of things society values

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aqouta 6d ago

Sure, I think there were some downsides that weren't adequately accounted for. Although there really isn't any law of the universe that says we need to allow sports betting in particular. I'm just saying the rationalists were right on the upside promise, it's played out just about as expected.

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aqouta 6d ago

There are many products that have a risk component that we as a society value. No rational agent would ever work on something with a risk element if that wasn't represented in the final valuation of the product. Therefore a labor only theory of value that doesn't include risk doesn't actually track what society values.

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aqouta 7d ago

What if they're not interchangeable? From your model it would never make sense to work on an product that has any chance of failure, and a lot of products intrinsically do.

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aqouta 8d ago

If two products both take one hour to make from the same inputs, but one is destroyed half the time and the other one isn't then is one more valuable than the other?

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aqouta 8d ago

they'd provide market signals about how likely major events are to happen.

They do this successfully though, and I don't think rationalists ever really claimed there would never be frivolous markets, that just isn't the part they really cared about. There are relatively high liquidity markets for a lot of topics that I find more credible than any expert claims.

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aqouta 9d ago

We have more outright nazi sympathizers on this site than people who could be accurately described as supporting the extermination of the Palestinians. This is ridiculous hyperbole.

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aqouta 9d ago

I went off Israel in a big way after Oct 7 when the biggest contingent of pro-Israelis on this site started just outright saying, 'look, it's time to exterminate the Palestinians now'

This did not happen, I was there.

-4

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aqouta 9d ago

Trying to salvage LTV in any form just seems like a mistake. It's a lens that exist to glorify the worker and stoke resentment against the wealthy, it falls apart when you put any pressure on it. It can't explain scarcity as value, as put in one if its earliest critiques "Pearls are not fetched from the bottom of the sea because men have dived for them, but men dive for them because they fetch a high price." and I don't think your energy theory of value would survive much better. I think it's just cleaner to say that everyone has their own theory of value and there is no universal theory, which is a source of great surplus from the market.

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aqouta 10d ago

This is a generalized argument against all large claims, that is to say it proves way way too much. Some claims are true, some claims are false, you need to actually address each on their merits.

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aqouta 16d ago

Every dead child has a father in the fedaykin or a cousin in the deep desert resistance or a neighbor who was neutral until yesterday. The Fremen do not need to match the Sardaukar in firepower. They need the Empire to keep making their argument for them.

I'd imagine the Fremen made a few enemies with their own even less targeting bombings. This is not a sustainable path to emancipation, just the spread of chaos, a festering wound that longs to kill its host for daring to apply stinging ointment.

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aqouta 17d ago

Right, having some women who are friends is definitely useful in a number of ways. Maybe I misread the OP and they weren't suggesting it as a main strategy, but there really is a strain of thought among women that a man who would be interested in dating but not becoming friends is some kind of contradiction. "why would you date someone you wouldn't want to make your friend?". It makes a kind of sense from the perspective of the selective sex but it just isn't workable.

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aqouta 18d ago

One thing that should also be added here is that you have to be comfortable genuinely being friends with these women (not just a friends to get in your pants kind of deal.), and be comfortable with the possibility that it wont go in a romantic direction. Even if it doesn't go that way, you made a connection that's valuable in its own right, and you may be able to date other women she is in proximity with.

The proximity with this is important, I met my wife by getting set up by a friend of hers that I met on a dating app but didn't hit it off with. But the idea that single men who are serious about making a partner should settle for a friendship with women they meet is just an absurd delusion some women harbor who haven't ever seriously thought of the logistics of single men dating. I'd need to have maintained literally hundreds of female friends by the time I met my wife for this to have been a plausible strategy, it just doesn't really work. I'm sorry but if it doesn't work out you can't expect him to stay friends with you, it just doesn't scale. It's not personal, it's just that forming a strong attachment, getting stuck in the friend zone as it were, and then getting rejected in the end eviscerates a portion of your soul each time.

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aqouta 18d ago

Well, unlike the natives, you joined the society willingly with full knowledge of the deal. I'm not saying you're not entitled to wish it were otherwise or advocate for it to be so, but I am no particularly sympathetic to your complaints.

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aqouta 19d ago

No, each nft is unique so you can address it to a particular seat. Fungible tokens are not unique so you can only use them for general admission.

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aqouta 20d ago

Religions rest on dogmas which cannot be effectively interrogated. If you want to say that AI investment is predicated on a belief that AGI is possible and can't be understood without considering that part of the potential upside then I think you have a good argument. Calling it a religion is a maneuver to avoid having to actually interrogate that possibility. And really I think most of the AGI people will be happy to go about this probabilistically, you don't need AGI to have a 100% chance of coming about for these investments to become rational, as little as a 5% chance can make these investments start to make sense. The P:E and debt ratios are still relevant, they still represent a kind of lower bound if the big bet doesn't pay off merely owning a lot of a critically important commodity is a much better place to be sitting than if you got literally nothing. The Jehovah's Witness is much more certain and making a much more all or nothing bet.

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aqouta 20d ago

Can you lay out exactly what you'd expect them to be doing if they thought AI was imminent? I don't really think they'd be bothering worrying about pinching the salary of 30 employees if they thought ai was imminent. I also don't think in house lawyers really scales the way you're implying. 30 lawyers gives you what? 3 teams of lawyers? You're doing a lot of lobbying because you're a major player in new tech so one of those teams is your lobbying arm, one is working on corporate mergers and acquisitions(I'm sure they're trying to buy some kind of image model team), and one is probably cooking up stuff on what they're liable for/keep the lights on legal work. It's just not the kind of thing you scale linearly with employees.

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aqouta 20d ago

Yes, he can think about them and he in fact is viewable in many interviews and on several podcasts going on about them. But he's not the government, it isn't his role to propose specific policy.

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aqouta 20d ago

The tech people aren't actually the government and can't decide how these questions are answered. You're asking the wrong people for solutions. All they can do is warn what is coming and make suggestions. Which you guys consistently characterize as glee and hype mongering. What guarantees can Dario make about the structure of redistribution that Trump or his successor will implement? Do you not see that this is an impossible ask?

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