> a giant pedophile ring has been exposed that no one in power seems interested in doing anything about
But that's not true. The European Union and many other countries are taking extreme measures to ensure that what happened in the United States never happens with them and they are introducing a bunch of different measures to strengthen control over society, the media sphere, and other measures to ensure that no pedophile rings could be exposed.
"A 2024 report on child sex exploitation in Rochdale from 2004 to 2013 found that there was "compelling evidence" of widespread abuse, and that Greater Manchester Police and Rochdale Council had failed to properly investigate these cases, leaving girls "at the mercy of their abusers". While there were successful prosecutions, the report said that the investigations carried out during the period covered by the report only "scraped the surface" of what had happened, and that many abusers had gone unpunished."
> humans will be economically obsolete and worthless
Only if we are talking about a socialist system (and they are making pretty small progress in the field of AI). A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.
A people's well-being is literally the goods and services created by that people. How can it decrease if the people's ability to produce those goods and services is not hindered in any way?
So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits. The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes, taxation out of production, and other practices that would lead to people being declared economically obsolete and mass executed to optimize their carbon footprint or something.
> A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.
Yes they can. Your ability to produce goods and services depends on the infrastructure around you. When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.
See that land over there producing food you need to eat? It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc.
Under a US-style capitalist system the rich (i.e. the AIs and AI-run businesses) control politics, the courts, etc, so the decisions the system makes will favour AIs over humans.
> So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits
...to the AI-run companies!
> The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes
Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.
Yeah, and who is creating those infrastructure? Jesus? This is the same part of goods and services.
> When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.
So what? The ability to produce goods and services (and therefore general well-being) will not decrease because of that.
> It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc
By the way, a good argument against your position. Agricultural land is very cheap, but the vast majority of people who believe AI will put people out of work and worsen overall well-being are for some reason reluctant to buy this asset, which would see a catastrophic increase in value under such a scenario. So these people are either incapable of analyzing the economic processes, and their predictions are worthless, or they don’t really believe in such a scenario.
> will favour AIs over humans
Let me repeat: it does not reduce the ability to create goods and services. Under capitalism, this is the only characteristic that determines people's well-being.
> ...to the AI-run companies!
I think this is a fairly unlikely scenario. But even in this very unlikely case, people's well-being will not be reduced. Simply because of the mechanisms of creating well-being.
> Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.
Economic theory (and 20th-century economic practice) demonstrates the exact opposite. In every country that attempted to effectively implement UBI, it led to a sharp decline in production and mass starvation. Literally every single time.
Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully.
"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."
Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.
Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.
I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.
Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.
Ownership of the economy is split roughly 30/30/30 between the top 10%/1%/.1% with the bottom 90% of people making an entrance as the rounding error. If you picture "the owners" by drawing a representative sample of 10 people:
1 Normal person
3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)
It's worth putting these through the fundamental theorem of capitalism (rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are) to solve for passive income from asset appreciation. Plugging in the crude figure of 10%/yr (feel free to bring your own rate):
1 Normal person
3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
3 Successful ($1M+/yr passive)
3 Wealthy ($5M+/yr passive)
You get your incentives where you get your money. Most people get most of their money from working, but the wealthy get most of their money and incentives from the assets they own. In between it's in between.
Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.
EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence. It goes without saying that their brand of politics is all about pumping assets.
There's more to say, of course. The role of housing, the role of the government, using DCFs for apples-to-apples comparisons of assets, jobs, social services, and the incentives thereof, behavioral economics, and so on. If you reflexively recoil at the notion that assets have returns, however, you aren't even at the starting line.
> mentioning passive income in this context isn't even idiotic, it's a clinical diagnosis
We could use the IRS term if you prefer: "unearned income"
Yep, that's why substitute teachers' interests are more zealously guarded by Congress than the interests of billionaires are. Teachers have wielded the enormous power they hold to get a <= $250 deduction for school supplies they purchase with their own money.
GP said “a substitute teacher” vs “a billionaire” - why have you decided to pretend they said something else?
You’re also flatly wrong, given you’ve utterly ignored the trivial things wealth buys (for starters), but hard to expect accuracy when basic honesty is so lacking.
America only has the shallowest appearance of a democracy where voters get to control who is elected.
The electoral college system, coupled with it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states, means that voting is a sham for 80% of the population. The other 20% live in a swing state and their vote can at least potentially affect the outcome of an election, but even there "your vote" will literally be cast opposite to what you put on the ballet unless you end up being part of the winning majority.
We don't have numbers after that but I find it hard to believe a large majority in a country with middling approval ratings would suddenly want to completely overthrow their leaders in just a few years.
Generally I agree; i doubt that there is a large contingent of Iranians in Iran who are cheering for bombing and complete collapse of their civilization. However it’s not out of the question that the approval of the government could have plummeted precipitously within a couple of years - there’s lots of precedent for that across the world (UK conservatives come to mind, George W Bush 2nd term as well)
Sure, absolutely. And I'm sure it did plummet. But Bush or the UK conservatives weren't overthrown in a nation-wide revolution. To get something like that you need massive widespread disapproval that's been going on for at least a decade. That just isn't the case in Iran. It's been a pretty middling approval rating for years
Frankly, you sound like an Iranian bot. It's obvious that the Iranian government's approval ratings are, at best, around 20%. Measuring government approval ratings in a country where there's no freedom of speech, no political freedom, and where criticizing the regime is subject to mass executions is simply stupid.
Just out of curiosity, according to your methodology, what's Kim Jong-un's approval rating among North Koreans? 99.98%?
> Frankly, you sound like an Iranian bot. It's obvious that the Iranian government's approval ratings are, at best, around 20%.
This is not at all obvious... I've only seen one poll that indicates such a low approval rating - it was from GAMAAN, which uses highly questionable polling techniques
1. reaching out to people on social media, then asking them to share the poll with their friends
2. Repeatedly asking the same people to take different polls, effectively polling the same sample over and over again.
3. Asking users of ONE VPN provider, which is hardly representative of Iranian population.
Even looking at their cross-tabs in their report shows how out-of-whack their sample was:
Only 13% of those polled were in lowest third of income.
53% of those polled where in top 40% of income.
Only 29.0% of those polled indicated religion was important in their life, compared to 69.4% from the World Values Survey. Hilariously, they use that as an indication that their poll is somehow more accurate than World Values Survey, Gallup, etc.
GAMAAN is also headed by Tony Blair, one of the most notorious interventionist Neo-cons of the past 30 years.
I trust Gallup way more than GAMAAN here.
> no freedom of speech, no political freedom, and where criticizing the regime is subject to mass executions is simply stupid.
Your view of day to day life in Iran seems clouded by propaganda. Try talking with someone who actually lives in Iran and ask them what they think.
> if it spent more money on education and less on missiles
Wait, isn't the US has literally the highest spending on education in the world? And it is precisely the highest spending in the world on missiles that make it possible. So less money on missiles would mean less money on education.
Isn't that the whole point of all these pardon things? To reduce incentives to usurp power to avoid responsibility by providing less destructive for the political system ways to avoid responsibility.
Or concretely, would the Israeli wars end sooner if Netanyahu was pardoned of all crimes? Would Kim Jong Un consider giving up his position if he could be pardoned, or at least credibly believe that he could live a life in luxurious exile? I don’t know the answer to either of those questions, but I do think letting some people get away with crimes with witness immunity can make it much more difficult for criminals to organize as the optimum move is to defect before anyone else does. Which is why I think elite blackmail focuses on unforgivable deeds.
> Would Kim Jong Un consider giving up his position if he could be pardoned, or at least credibly believe that he could live a life in luxurious exile?
The kind of despot that sends assassins against people in exile is unlikely to choose it themselves.
> of lets say 200-300 USD for a somehow solid phone
More like 30-50 USD, judging by the research I did in 5 minutes (or 20-30 USD if you agree to a used phone).
No, I understand that Americans love to pay several times more for their houses, healthcare, education, coffee and everything else simply on principle, pretending that there are no other options, but you can literally google the largest phone manufacturers in the world and look at the prices of their current starter models.
And yes, we are talking about full-fledged smartphones that are quite pleasant to use, with up-to-date hardware and the latest versions of the operating system. Not some outdated torture devices with zero reliability.
There's also just an absolutely bonkers number of functional second hand devices out there. A lot of them make their way to Africa as phones people use (and the Chinese repair and refurbishmenr business is huge and a volume business).
There are charities which will also give away phones because for a homeless person a usable phone is quite valuable because it makes it possible to do things like apply for jobs, find services etc. (even if you're just surfing cafe wifi).
> google the largest phone manufacturers in the world and look at the prices of their current starter models.
for most people at the very low end of low income and low education group, this is a huge barrier.
Look: I haven been neighbours with people who had to search their whole appartment for a working simple pen to take a note - when asking for it they looked at me like an Alien: Really poor and uneducated people have high barriers in even the simpelst things.
Nobody is saying that the price of the phone isn't a barrier. What people are trying to tell you is that there's no need to lie about that price. If anything, using the real price makes it even more illustrative of how much being poor sucks!
Sure, phone choices in America are very limited compared to most of the world. But just go to walmart.com, seach for prepaid android and choose "New" condition. You'll see mainly entry level Motorola and Samsung offerings ranging from 40 to 200.
Well, I guess this means that they have successfully solved their smartphone availability problem. Otherwise, note taking tasks with a pen would be more important for them.
> I don't get the point of banning specific pornography niches/fetishes that are otherwise legal.
A typical practice for dictatorships to create a legal system capable of exerting pressure on any opponent.
> Are there not much more objectionable fetishes than this one?
The goal isn't to combat sexual perversions, but to silence anyone the dictatorial regime deems necessary.
You pass a law that's clearly unimplementable, and therefore won't cause much outrage, and then, as expected, the law doesn't work. But when you need to silence someone, a complaint emerges that someone accessed and distributed illegal content (some anonymous on some forum saw their IP-address doing that). In the public consciousness, the violation isn't serious (the law isn't actually implemented), so there's no significant outrage. Meanwhile, you conduct searches of the victim's home, confiscate their computers, laptops, smartphones and other gadgets, and open a criminal case against them.
And then you simply close the case, saying, "Yeah, nothing illegal was found, we are sorry". And the victim (and others) will think twice before going against the dictatorial regime next time. Typical practice, all dictatorships do it
> Switzerland relies on neighboring countries to police its airspace outside of regular business hours; the French and Italian Air Forces have permission to escort suspicious flights into Swiss airspace, but do not have authority to shoot down an aircraft over Switzerland.
They were friendly enough with their neighbors to let their own Air Force have the nights and weekends off.
Passport control when I went from France to Switzerland was someone coming onto the train and yelling “anyone not allowed in Switzerland? No? Good!”
But that's not true. The European Union and many other countries are taking extreme measures to ensure that what happened in the United States never happens with them and they are introducing a bunch of different measures to strengthen control over society, the media sphere, and other measures to ensure that no pedophile rings could be exposed.
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