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Comment Large companies never do that (Score 2) 12

The risk of creating a viable competitor is too big so they will do pretty much anything a government wants in order to avoid being kicked out of the country.

It's not about the profit they can make in the country it's about making sure that there is never a viable competitor that could enter into any of your other markets.

Ultimately there really isn't a lot these companies do that's special. The most we survived because they're the ones who when the market was developing survived via survivorship bias. When you're talking infrastructure including internet infrastructure you are generally going to end up with some form of Monopoly forming. At least if you're not extremely careful to enforce competition. And I don't think there's a country on planet Earth that does that

Comment Agreed but (Score 1) 35

In the blue States it's generally individual cops getting caught doing it. Albeit a lot but still individual cops.

In the red States it's coming down from the top that's the difference. It's because corruption at the top is more common in a red state than a blue state.

This is to be expected if you understand how left and right wing politics work.

In a red State you have a right Wing state. So you have people that are prone to hierarchical structures and obedience.

That's going to encourage corruption because the people at the top will view themselves as being absolutely in charge and the people beneath them will encourage that view. It's why Trump can get away with committing so many crimes and the public still loves him.

A hierarchical command structure versus a democratic command structure is going to lend itself to top down corruption more often and the corruption is going to be worse. There is just no getting away from that or the consequences of right-wing politics.

Comment Re:Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1, Interesting) 206

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

Comment The two largest economies on the planet (Score 2, Insightful) 37

Are actively hiding their economic data. We are going to have a 1930s style economic collapse.

All the pieces are here. We are in the middle of a industrial revolution with massive amounts of automation and technological unemployment without any significant new employment opportunities on the horizon. Seriously sit down and write out what the jobs are going to be after automation and ai and machine learning rip through the economy. You can't just go and make cars after the buggy whip factory shuts down when the car factory is also automated.

Next we have a huge economic bubble where we are spending trillions of dollars specifically AI infrastructure spending and the massive bank loans that go with it.

And we have widespread drought resulting in crop failures and increasing food prices. Even if you don't believe climate change and the water cycle breaking is the problem the drought is still real.

This is everything that led up to world war I at world war II.

We have the technology to stop this but we don't have the education and critical thinking and social structures to stop it...

Comment So why are we allowing this again? (Score 1, Insightful) 35

Seriously. I understand the bomb squad needs robots that's a good thing. But every year a crime goes down and every year we put more cops with better weapons and more weapons on the street.

I understand what's going on with all that immigration enforcement bullshit. There's a bunch of bitter old assholes who get off on seeing people slammed into the ground.

But is there really that many people for whom the pleasure of watching a couple of Mexicans get dragged into a black van by masked goons is enough to make them A-Okay with this bullshit?

I just had to get the new fancy license and they made me take my glasses off because they're using facial recognition now.

One of the funny things I keep seeing over and over again is confused white people in the middle class pulled over by cops and harassed the same way they're used to seeing "those people" harassed.

The place where it's really showing up is DUIs. In several red states with heavy duty police enforcement there is a ton of stories about people getting pulled over and arrested and losing their license when they were Stone Cold sober. There are a couple of big scandals where the local police were just told you need to get your arrest numbers up or else.

DUI is really popular for that because the cops can arrest you without cause or proof and it takes months before it comes out that you were innocent. Meanwhile your license is suspended.

The fact that they're doing this to the in group is a massive red flag. It's a huge shift in how things work.

Comment Republicans did this (Score 1, Troll) 206

They are objectively bad for the economy and they know it. People are starting to know it too no matter how much propaganda there is.

Google it. It is a fact that the Republican party is worse for the economy than the Democratic party. Trickle down economics doesn't work and never has.

We have been trained to get angry when we see anyone discussing the two political parties. So it's tough to have this discussion but it's a discussion we need to have.

Because without positive economic gains for 90% of us the Republican party has to give voters some reason to vote for them.

Yes homophobia and racism and transphobia will always be good old standbys but religion is fading in America. It's just not bringing the numbers in that it used to.

So they are pivoting to crackpottery with anti-vax being the big one.

Comment Re:Your tax dollars hard at work (Score 1) 71

That's still fixable. Just like how most computers are air cooled and not water cooled. They could build a very large air cooling tower and not need water at all.

Cooling from cheap to expensive:
1. Take in water, return water some amount hotter. Requires the most water to limit temperature rise.
2. Take in water, evaporate some of the water in a cooling tower. Results in less water, but also takes less water and controls temperature rise better
3. Dry cooling.

Most systems are actually something of a hybrid of the three.

Comment Re:Computers don't "feel" anything (Score 1) 53

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Comment Re:Computers don't "feel" anything (Score 3, Informative) 53

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

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