domain:lesswrong.com
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Cities in the sunbelt are hiring.
This isn’t arresting granny here, this is getting in a firefight while outgunned. They’re not suicidal.
faceh
5hr ago
Yeah I see your point there.
I'm just pointing out that you've got the messaging from the boosters and all the money being spent to sell people on it, and then there's the other side where there's messages from the doomsayers AND messaging on the political side and then there's the market's response to tall this, with evidence that spending related to AI development is propping up growth right now.
It is questionable what the real goal of all that is, if we take everything being said at sheer face value.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5hr ago
They're gonna instead form a human wall against it because the dem apparatchik who 6 months ago was calling for their total defunding and disbandment tells em to?
Yes, because that apparatchik and his associates control their paychecks; and even more, their pensions. Just ask the cops. It doesn't matter how Red Tribe they are, or their own personal feelings, they'll do whatever they're told to if they have to in order to protect their oh-so-precious pensions.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5hr ago
What actually happens is the police decide they’d rather live to cash their paychecks than shoot at federal troops.
And if they're told that any officer who doesn't follow orders to shoot at federal troops will no longer have paychecks to cash, nor their precious, precious pension?
Stellula
5hr ago
E-collars are extremely common for people with dogs and land, especially people with hunting dogs.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/outdoor-recreation/sporting-dog-tracking-training-devices/
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5hr ago
What I expect is more like
- Speed limit is too low -> everyone obeys the speed limit -> it becomes a non-issue, with would-be violators just sucking it up.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5hr ago
When we got a dog, and had it professionally trained, they used a shock collar. They also gave use the shock collar, and instructed us on it's use. It was really helpful training the dog to stop jumping on people, because it scared our daughter so badly she was hesitant to come out of her room if the dog was around. Later on, when we got a geofenced collar, it's also a shock collar. Basically an invisible fence collar, except it uses a GPS instead of a buried wire.
Now that I think about, everyone I knew with well trained dogs has them on shock collars. But maybe that's regional or social bubble related.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
Isn’t that just MLK-ism? The whole “unjust laws” bit, how it doesn’t challenge the legal legitimacy but rather the moral legitimacy, and despite the time worn temptation is to conflate the two they are not the same. I’d want to see more elaboration of this point than jump to that assumption. Unless you have an actual issue with MLK-ism?
Stellula
5hr ago
It's completely mainstream to use e-collars for pets, but not like this.
The typical use for an e-collar is for recall, and there are multiple levels to it.
- Noise (it beeps)
- Vibe (it vibrates)
- Shock
You use these when you issue the recall command (usually: "come!") but the dog is too fixated on something to respond. You start by doing the beeps, then the vibe, and then only if the dog is totally locked into something would you use the shock. The shock isn't a punishment, it's just there to get the dogs attention.
There are people who use the shock as punishment, but they're the minority.
Totalitarianit
5hr ago
I care less about the shock collar than I do what it is used for, which is apparently to ensure that his dog remain in a 2' x 4' space for hours on end. That doesn't seem good. I also don't need anything else to convince me of Hasan's character or what he represents. This could be a deep fake AI video, and my dislike of Hasan will remain same.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5hr ago
Every person in the church with whom I’ve discussed it has been very clear that caffeinated drinks, other than coffee and tea, are unambiguously permitted. They believe that eliminating addiction from your life is pretty much always an unalloyed good, since it allows a fuller use of your agency and self-control, but that to a certain extent the church is willing to meet people where they’re at and to allow some leeway, particularly for things like caffeine which have clear benefits alongside their drawbacks.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
The Bible is special too. But Christians don't think we should ban the Bible in order to protect it. They think we should disseminate it as widely as possible precisely because it's sacred and it brings people into contact with the sacred. (In fact they arrange regular mass public gatherings where they come together to worship that which is considered sacred. Apply the same logic to sexuality and...)
I'll take this in good faith because I think you meant it that way. Obviously, there are different "special rules" for different things. Yes, the mass and general catchesis should be spread as far as possible. No, the same shouldn't be said for explicit sexual relations. Ha.
But I don't actually want to just drop a "This is what the Catholic Church says" style response here. THat wouldn't be helpful. I mean, as far as porn goes, the Catholic response is "100% pure evil, don't engage with it at all." Which I agree with. But I also live in America and do believe in free speech so, while on a personal level I am 100% anti porn, politically I can't just shout "perma ban!" and then walk away.
How do we demarcate the sacred things that need to be disseminated from the sacred things that need to be protected? Do we have a schema outlining the different modalities in which something may be sacred?
At the risk of channeling the spirit of Helen Lovejoy, I think we should think of the children. Meaning, as a rubric, is whatever the "thing" we're talking about something we would more or less be comfortable with in giving to children? So, right off the bat, this means that porn, booze, gambling, drugs, and guns have to have my ill-defined "special rules" consideration.
When I say "children" here I do literally mean minors. More conceptually, however, we can think of "children" to mean people who don't necessarily have the fully developed character or faculties to make generative decisions for themselves. To be clear, I'm not talking about the mentally incompetent or retarded here. I mean "normal" distribution IQ folks who have glaring inabilities to manage their own life.
Another possible rubric could be on "length of time it takes to fuck your life with x." You don't get addicted to porn after a single use. Smoking one pack of cigarettes won't give you lung cancer. On the other hand, you can go down to the liquor store right now and for $50 or less buy a quantity of alcohol that will 100% lead to death. Guns ... I mean, I don't even have to spell that out. I should probably point out here that "special rules" does not mean banning. In fact, "special rules" need not even be particular onerous. For example, I am as pro-gun as they get, but I do think purchasing a gun (from a business, not privately) should require 1) valid and current identification and 2) proof of no convictions for violent felonies (perhaps with some sort of age out provision - haven't thought it all the way through).
I am always suspicious of the State and think it should be as small as possible. I wish a lot more work of social management would be done by local culture. Bring back slut shaming, but don't make laws against being a slut. Bring back social condemnation for being a drunk, but don't make purchasing limits on the amount of booze I can get. Real freedom is preserving the ability to make choices, even bad ones, so long as there isn't an oversized risk of collateral damage to others. I'm not advocating for the freedom to drink and drive, for instance.
So I don't support a State level ban on porn or impossible-to-enforce-and-also-1984-style digital age verification attempts. But I do support the return to the common idea that porn is for weirdo perverts. Trevor Wallace, a comedian I sometimes have pop up on my nonsense YouTube account, often has porn "actors" on his podcast and in his comedic clips. This does make me sad and its made me shy away from his content more because it normalizes the "everyone uses porn" meme. That isn't true. It was never true. Furthermore, on the topic of cultural memes, I think it's pretty easy to draw a line from the sexual revolution of the late 1960s to the ridiculous sexualization of society today along with all of the mental gymnastic that accompany it.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5hr ago
If popular opinion is in line with Trump, then the votes should bestow enough power onto the Republicans to formally change the regulations.
"Should," according to a civics textbook model of how our "democracy" works, but, as we can see, it clearly doesn't. Yes that's "the whole point of a democracy," which is why its absence demonstrates that our "democracy" is a sham.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
6hr ago
I have successfully given up coffee (not caffeine entirely, although I’m actively working to reduce my daily caffeine consumption and dependence)
I know a number of devout LDS members, and they're all over the place on the caffeine issue. Coffee is a clear no, but opinions diverge widely on caffeinated sodas and energy drinks. I'd say that's a lower priority than the big steps you've made in other areas.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6hr ago
This is, of course, the load-bearing item of contention. To me, and to many, peacefully breaking immigration laws is some combination of trespass, home invasion and squatting. If I come to your house, and I eat your food and I tell you I'm never leaving, and the police back me up, it's not really your house any more.
If you are a Republican voter in Alabama, I don't see how Chicago is "your house" in any morally relevant way. If you are a Reform UK voter in Lower Snoring, I insist that my house in London is not "your house" in any morally relevant way, and politely suggest that you show some gratitude to the people whose taxes fund your lifestyle rather than insinuating that our friends, neighbours, colleagues and servants are somehow "eating your food". That it is your country is legally relevant, but the only moral claim that gives rise to is the one that upholding the law is generally good. My claim that illegal immigration is morally trivial is restricted to the situations where the community the immigrants are moving to does not, in fact, object to their presence.
That's ignoring the face that lots of illegal immigrants actually turn out to be neither nice, peaceful or helpful, of course. But is it any wonder that voters react badly to breaking immigration law, or helping others break immigration law, when seen from this perspective?
Yes - there is supermajority support essentially everywhere for curtailing abuse of the humanitarian and family-based routes to immigrate to first-world countries, based on the accurate belief that the people who get in that way are, on average, bad neighbours. We should do so. But public opinion on this point is downstream of immigrant behaviour - people who have experience of well-behaved immigrants don't want to kick them out.
the direct import of specifically American racial grievances post-Floyd
I remember the pictures of the pro-Floyd march in London. I haven't seen a London crowd that close to all-white since before Blair opened the immigration floodgates, and I doubt I will ever see another one. I think it was whiter than the recent Tommy Robinson rally. Wokism isn't being pushed by immigrants or their descendants - unless you count the Milibands.
It is? I have literally never encountered anyone in real life that uses one or even talked of using one outside of joking about doing something cartoonishly evil.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
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Speed limit is too low → mayor continues to enforce speed limit → convicted speeders get angry and complain to their municipal councilors → municipal councilors change speed limit
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Speed limit is too low → mayor stops enforcing speed limit → there are no convicted speeders to get angry → no municipal councilors have any reason to care about the speed limit
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6hr ago
This is a shooting based on anti police sentiment. There’s no strong connection between that and the debate here, which is about anonymity.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6hr ago
But not, notably, targeted ambushes. A 2014 report claimed somewhat lazily that about a quarter of all ambushes had an assailant that had a prior relationship (broadly and vaguely defined) with the officer. Two thirds were spontaneous. Reading between the lines, the reasonable assumption is that it’s probably more like 1 in 8 ambushes that loosely fits your profile (ambushes themselves seem to be maybe a quarter of all “officers get shot at”). And I suspect ambushes where a very specific officer is the actual and only target is small, even there I’m not convinced their name being public is moving the margins much.
Dont get me wrong policing in general is “fucked”. I wouldn’t want to be one. In the general sense though, we do trade cop deaths for other benefits, much like we trade other deaths for other benefits all the time. It’s normal in a society. Cold as it may sound, it seems the marginal drawbacks to no-mask policy are worth the non-marginal gains in trust. And for that matter, at least naively my first assumption is that ICE agents are more, not less, safe from targeted retribution (presumably mostly gangs and cartels) because they know escalation doesn’t benefit them (stateside).
benmmurphy
6hr ago
Somehow this reminds of one of Kulak's posts on his blog about how different cultures treat animals differently. This is much more frowned upon in Western culture but maybe in other cultures this is not such a big deal.
AI (and more specifically multimodal LLMs) will radically transform the life of every man, woman and child on earth in the next decade.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a huge valuation bubble burst along the way.
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There’s extreme cross-ownership / circular dealing in the market where Nvidia is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI companies and data centers who buy its chips, pushing up their valuations, meaning they can borrow and issue more capital to make more orders for more GPUs, meaning NVIDIA can pour more money into… etc. This is and has been widely noted as a feature of all major sector-driven bubbles in the history of capitalism.
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Even if AI ends up being huge (and it will), that doesn’t mean most people are going to make money on it. The railroad bubble is the most famous example of this; between the 1840s and 1890s every major capital market on earth had multiple successive railroad bubbles (which were the ultimate cause of almost every financial crisis in this era because speculative railroad investments failing triggered bank crises / runs and subsequent failures which triggered credit crises that spiralled out in weeks to the wider market). Railroads really did change the world and drive huge improvements in commerce and communication, and therefore economic growth and productivity specifically. But most people who invested in the railroad business lost the majority of what they put in, even in cases in which construction was completed. Today, commercial railroads are relatively profitable after 130+ years of consolidation and modest valuations, and passenger railroads all lose money outside of Japan.
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Big AI companies have no moats. Competitive models are at least semi-open-sourced. Brand means nothing when most corporate and consumer platforms can be easily switched over to another foundation model in seconds, if OpenAI ekes out more margin then you switch to Anthropic or XAI or vice versa, and price-per-token gains are quickly made by all the big players; engineers jump between them far too often to maintain a real competitive edge for long. Plus, whether you’re 3% better at an arbitrary benchmark means very little to most corporates, so within broad quality categories price will be the main factor. AI datacenters have the same GPUs and so compete solely on price for compute; they have tiny labor / upkeep costs, so this is essentially just electricity and GPU depreciation (the latter of which will be an industry standard before long if it isn’t already) plus a tiny margin that your competitors will constantly be chipping away for everyone. Everyone in AI except Nvidia is selling a commodity with little pricing power, and even with Nvidia a bubble burst will depress demand and AMD and the Chinese may well eventually catch up.
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Many industries that will be initially disrupted by AI will collapse almost entirely rather than shifting to being primarily AI customers. If half the big SaaS or advertising or media companies signing megabillion AI contracts implode because AI code tools allow their valuable corporate clients or end users (in the case of TV, movies, games) to replicate their products and services in house…that actually means lower revenue for the big AI providers, not higher revenue. The same goes for big spenders on white collar software tools like law firms, financial services companies, accountants, consultants, insurers, tech outsourcers and so on. If white collar workers are fired en masse, demand for Microsoft’s central Office 365 product collapses, because it’s billed on a per-user basis. If the ad industry suffers because consumers spend less because they’ve been fired, there goes the source of 80-90% of Google and Meta’s revenue, which means much less to spend on GPUs.
Thus AI’s success and failure are both bearish for these stocks.
It's not the messaging that spooks me out, it's the sheer size of the marketing and education infrastructure that was deployed in order to drive adoption, the speed with which it was ready to go, and who it was targeted at. Public and public-adjacent institutions aren't usually pushing people towards the latest fads, but this is exactly what's happening right now.
The best mundane explanation I can think of is that it's some galaxy-brained eurocrat scheme to Lead The World In Innovation or something, except that doing a free marketing campaign for American tech companies (which they usually low-key hate) is a bit of a weird way of doing that, and even if we go with that explanation that still kinda is a conspiracy.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
My view of immigration is that there is no market clearing price for first world citizens doing a variety of shitty jobs- you can reallocate the limited supply by offering more money, but you cannot get them fully staffed.
Ideally we would let Hondurans come, make lots of money(for them) and then go home and enjoy the purchasing power advantage. But at a certain point it’s on us for being lazy and incompetent.
Okay, whose house is it then?
Open borders proponents always say "well, it isn't yours, so you have no right to exclude anyone". It's someone's. Who does have the right to exclude? It may be an individual, it may be a government, but that right didn't just go away because you don't personally own the country. Where did it go and who has it right now?
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