You don't just take away privacy or decent wages or job security or healthcare all at once. You got to boil that frog.

Here in America it took us 65 years. This whole mess we're in started when Barry Goldwater lost. The corporate wing of the Republican party formed in alliance with the racists and the religious extremists. We were explicitly warned about it but we ignored the warnings.

It was supposed to say keep workers in line.

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

So the underlining premise is that we can't just explore for the sake of exploring because nobody's going to pay for it.

We have to colonize just like we did hundreds of years ago because in order to get the kings, well the CEOs now but they're basically the same thing, to fund the whole thing we need to offer them the possibility of a reward. A payoff for them.

I suppose we could fundamentally reorganize our entire civilization so that we did not need the blessings of kings to do cool stuff but I think we are nowheres near ready for that.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

As I proposed in 1988: https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction.
        During the past semester, I have written one paper on this concept, entitled "The Self-Replicating Garden". Its thesis is that this concept provides a new metaphor for thinking about the relation between humans and the machinery that constitutes our political and technical support systems. Writing this paper has helped me organize my thinking and has given me a chance to explore the extensive literature relevant to the design of social and technological systems."

Still want to do it, but lots of distractions and small steps along the way.

On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements) see from me from 1999:
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...

and also from me in 2005:
"We need DOGS not CATS! (Score:2, Interesting)"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
        "So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck. So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
        So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
        So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored ... or a couple other sites I made in that direction ...
        My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now. ..."

Reprised in 2017:
https://science.slashdot.org/c...

Jeff and I took the same physics class from Gerry O'Neill as Princeton... We have related goals, but we took different paths since then though...

Not the way the .com bubble did.

The main purpose of all these llms is to replace White collar jobs. Everything else is just leading up to that.

So even when the industry shakes out and your left with two maybe three big players they're still going to need all that electricity to replace those jobs.

So we're not going to get any cheap capacity and infrastructure out of them because they're going to be using it.

Financially a bubble might burst when the industry shakes out everybody but the big boys, but it's not going to free up a bunch of electricity. It just means there will be fewer players and a bunch of people caught holding the bag on companies that never made any money.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

Um... A good buddy of mine is a guitarist and pretty heavily into music and was using Spotify for ages. The only reason they switch to YouTube music is because 99% of what he wants is there and quality is fine and he's already paying for YouTube premium to get rid of the ads.

But if you're into music there's lots of stuff on YouTube music and Spotify that's basically unobtainium even if you're going to sail the seven seas which in America is a high risk endeavor since if your ISP catches you they will permanently ban you and usually you only have one maybe two isps if you're lucky.

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

And the venues have been bought up and you've got stuff like Ticketmaster to deal with.

Over and over and over again the problem is market consolidation allowing big corporations to fuck over anyone that works for a living including working musicians.

I think the problem is back in the day when we had those giant factories with tens of thousands of employees it was really obvious to everybody when they were getting screwed in mass and it was easy for us to organize. We also had the churches which the billionaires noticed we were using to organize and have gradually replaced with mega charges run by crooks like Jerry Falwell

Now we're all kind of spread to the four corners of the Earth as individuals. And it's also super tempting to become obsessed with being a badass individual who don't need no help and don't need no organization. It just plain feels bad to know that you have to rely on your neighbors for help.

So it's easy to divide and conquer us. We're all getting screwed in individual ways

Ah, ah ah! Careful there or one of us snowflakes might need to charge a phone and unplug your respirator!

Erm, going with the meme's intent, shouldn't it be In Soviet Russia, HR protects you from company?

Because what you said is exactly what HR is for in all of the western world.

Seems about on par with my experience with HR.

Having to deal with those people can turn a body misogynistic right quick.