toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
1yr ago
No, he can simply withdraw from India and leave that money on the table. This is what Google eventually did in China, and was better for it.
This is terribly sad for India - not because it needs Twitter, but because it needs free speech. But the Indians are going to have to learn that the hard way (and they will only do it very slowly, I'd say two centuries minimum).
toadworrier
9mo ago
And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.
Why not?
toadworrier
11mo ago
Not wrong, but this could have been said, with equal truth at any time in the last 100 years.
Most of those civil servants are pretty ordinary centre-lefties. It is exceptional, and disturbing that an extremist is not only at high level but is so bold about it.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Suppose there were bands of brown-shirted (and presumably red hatted) thugs who were reputed to go around murdering enemies of the president. Obviously already illegal, no need for a new law.
Suppose members of the FBI etc occasionally met with the leadership of these gangs and there are transcripts saying how the feds mentioned that so-and-so is not a nice guy (but never actually asking for a hit of course). Then suppose there's a pattern of so-and-so's getting murdered by "unknown assailants".
Do you seriously think it would be unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law banning those meetings?
toadworrier
10mo ago
Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism.
Nah, the narrative is more often about guns.
Government speech is a whole explicit area of US jurisprudence which is probably over both our heads.
But however you categorise, an injunction preventing government agents from merely communicating with persons is a pretty big deal. But IMHO the judge go this right. The injunction is mostly a list of prohibitions like
[Youse fuckers are enjoined from]:
emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
My emphasis. So he is allowing the Government to communicate, but just not for the constitutionally forbidden purpose. Sounds reasonable.
Any link to the actual injunction? (Here's a link from@ToaKraka: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63290154/missouri-v-biden/, I think the injunction is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.294.0_5.pdf
I'm interested in what concrete orders are given, and what that says about the final remedies. The article says:
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies,
Which is pretty spectacular, and raises it's own obvious First Amendment concerns.
The thing is, I could imagine a detailed statue that laid out what what government could and could not do in this regard, and creates offences for trying to censor the public. But I'm finding it harder to imagine what a judge could do about it from the bench, even if he sees a rock-solid case that the government is violating the Constitution.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Why biological sex and not 'gender identity' matters for norms, culture and language
I hope you are also communicating with him about what matters for his child.
toadworrier
10mo ago
The word appears twice in the poem:
I don't know if that's what you consider a heavy Australian accent. The speaker is the real deal, though not what I would call ocker. His voice is well matched to the poem.
toadworrier
1yr ago
In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.
I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.
What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Orthogonality Thesis: This is the statement that the ability of an agent to achieve goals in the world is largely separate from the actual goals it has.
This assumes that intelligent agents have goals that are more fundamental than value, which is the opposite of how every other intelligent or quasi intelligent system behaves. It's probably also impossible, in order to be smart -- calculate out all those possible paths to your goal -- you need value judgements of what rabbit tracks to chase.
This is with EY is wrong to assume that as soon as a device gets smart enough, all the "alignment" work from dumber devices will be wasted. That only makes sense that what is conserved is a goal, and now it has more sneaky ways of getting to that goal. But you'd have to go out of your way to design a thing like that.
Consistent Agents are Utilitarian: If you have an agent taking actions in the world and having preferences about the future states of the world, that agent must be utilitarian,
So is Eliezer calling me a utilitarian?
Your heading talks about consistent agents, but the premise that follows says nothing about consistency. [Sorry if you are just steelmanning someone else's argument, here "you" is that steelman, not necessarily /u/JhanicManifold].
- If there is no such function V(s), then our agent is not consistent, and there are cycles we can find in its preference ordering, so it prefers state A to B, B to C, and C to A, which is a pretty stupid thing for an agent to do.
There's no reason even why a preference ordering has to exist. Almost any preference pair you can think about (e.g. choclate vs. strawberry icecream) is radically contextual.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Trump and his "body man" Waltine Nauta moved dozens of boxes containing records and documents (presumably including the classified documents at issue in this case)
And Nauta is being charged for conspiracy, because the invariant is always that the butler did it.
toadworrier
11mo ago
It's good for the soul.
toadworrier
1yr ago
An important question is whether the supreme leadership in China permitted this [gain of function research].
The supreme leadership probably thought they were supporting a bioweapons research program and conning the Americans into helping. Turned out they were sort of right, just not in the way they expected.
toadworrier
11mo ago
In Australia this is normal. Pale-skinned aboriginals are commonplace and to be found on both sides of politics. This is not really like Elizabeth Warren style fakery.
toadworrier
11mo ago
What makes you think she's white?
Wikipedia says "She is of English, Irish,[8] DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent."
toadworrier
1yr ago
Where have you encountered it outside of Ms. Harrington's work?
I've seen it here, and I feel the ethos in a lot of the more intellectual parts of the New Right. As far as I can tell, they are making are logical / epistemological case similar to Harrington. I.e. we are judging the past by present standards, this logic extends over as many domains as you care to name. But really Harrington is the only one I can clearly point to because she is the most honest and explicit. Which is why I like her.
I do find it interesting that this stance is left-coded.
The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis. But insofar as they are "trad", their arguments are more like the post-liberal right than the left.
That said, the illiberal left has a similar thing going on. They want to deny the moral standing of the present.
toadworrier
1yr ago
5% of the population are South Asian migrant workers. Perhaps 20% are Iranians. ... The Emiratis are not concerned. Why? Because they’re still in charge.
Sounds right, but it might be short sighted. History has all sort of twists and turns and regimes always eventually change. If that catches them napping, they'll find the largest civilisation on Earth champing at the bit to take revenge for the millennium of humiliation.
toadworrier
10mo ago
I'm aware the NHS does that, albeit with public pressure often forcing them to accept treatments with terrible returns.
But in practice it is the sin of the American system to overpay for treatments because of what amounts to public pressure (as manipulated by those who stand to profit). The NHS is actually quite good at denying costly treatments, at least by the standards of 1st world healthcare systems.
toadworrier
10mo ago
you better aim to be really sick
But not the sort of really sick where you need a scan to find out that your illness is life threatening.
I have a cousin who only found out about that when she flew back to her 3rd world homeland to get treatment.
toadworrier
10mo ago
OK so the law against conspiracy to murder is constitutional because murder is not lawful.
Whereas a law against conspiracy to ostracise is not, because it burdens the rights of those who are taking orders about whom to ostracise. How exactly does it do this?
It's one thing to say that ostracism itself is legal (which it is), or even protected by the 1st Amendment (which it isn't), but it's another thing to say that the conspiracy is protected.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Sounds like a great Eighth Amendment test case. With a dash of the First for flavour.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Yes, the whole historical point of the Labor and Liberal was to ding-dong the labour laws. It's still true, but less so.
The labour movement used to have a power struggle between the unions themselves and the more PMC-dominated Labor party. The party has definitively one that fight, and the unions are themselves bureaucratic PMC-run organizations (except maybe in construction where thug life requires footsoldiers).
The Liberals are struggling with the fact that their traditional backers (captial) have become woke capital while all the political energy and opportunities are in the fightback against wokism.
This is a correct analysis, but Canada is far from that yet. The protests have not crippled Trudeauism, they have upped the ante. Trudeau abused his power at the time, and has now abused it again by standing up phonies to whitewash it. This game might end in failure if the next election replaces the regime with an angry and effective alternative. Or else it might just confirm that the regime's right to power is above Canadian democracy.
It could go either way, but I suspect the median Canadian voter prefers to sleepwalk into dictatorship. The denial tastes so good. That's on them, the truckers have done as well as anyone could.
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