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Comment Put your $ where your mouth is, kids (Score 2, Insightful) 21

Who cares what the self-important talent thinks?
If they want to do something about it, take their vast wealth and instead of buying a 3rd home in St Tropez, set up a production co-op.
It's been done before.

"United Artists is an American film production and distribution company owned by Amazon MGM Studios. In its original operating period, it was founded on February 5, 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks as a venture premised on allowing actors to control their own financial and artistic interests rather than being dependent upon commercial studios." (wiki)

Put up, or shut up.

Comment While I sympathize (Score 1) 46

....part of me wonders about the opposite end of the 'tragedy of the commons'.

If a state were, for example, to ban all power plants within its borders, should it benefit from electric power created by such plants? (Of course the libertarian capitalist answer is they they're free to do so, but this gives pricing leverage to the states that ARE willing to suffer the siting of a power plant in their borders....)

Same with data centers. I recognize all their ills, and that (it certainly seems) that much of them are driven by people generating AI videos of the six-million-dollar-man as a cat. Will they suffer for that choice somehow? Should they?

Comment bad faith arguments (Score 1, Informative) 135

The level of bad faith argumentation here is sadly, unsurprising.

The same /. bunch who seem to generally believe that "everyone should learn coding!" are a fairly narrow socio economic cadre who would predictably denigrate faith. As Haidt would define you/us, it's WEIRD: Western, educated, individualist, rich, and democratic.
Understand, you are a tiny, tiny fraction of people in the world. There are literally billions of people enjoying very happy fulfilling lives for generation after generation in the faith contexts you sneer at.
To assert you have some sort of a magical monopoly on truth that they don't have access to is, well, bordering on Papal infallibility.
They don't lust for our lives; in fact to many of them our lives are empty, valueless scrabbling over material goods and status unmoored from family, tradition, culture, and continuity.

To the point of the article: llms aren't people. The idea of teaching them faith is fundamentally stupid and is nothing more then a propaganda exercise to promote them commercially.

It feels like we can agree on that without needing to virtue-signal to each other about how and why we all despise religion with a moral certainty that wouldn't be unfamiliar to a Christian missionary determined to save brown people's souls.

Comment Re:PCPartPicker? Seriously? (Score 3, Informative) 47

A vendor who has more customers than product to sell them has a choice: he can either increase the price (and therefore increase his profits) or he can keep the price the same (leaving some money on the table, but potentially keeping his customers' loyalty)

We're talking about manufacturers, whose customers aren't consumers, or even retailers, but distributors who want to keep their pipelines full and their business operating. The worst thing a manufacturer can to do their customers, the thing that is most "disloyal", if you want to put it in those terms, is to be unable to fill orders. Distributors mostly don't really care what the unit price is anyway, they operate on a percentage markup basis. They care about dollar volume, so as long as that stays constant (or rises!) they're good.

So the smart thing for a manufacturer to do, and the thing that their customers (who are businesspeople who understand supply and demand, not end consumers who are confused about how economics work and throw around ridiculous concepts like "price gouging") understand and appreciate is a supplier who responds to increased demand by investing in manufacturing capacity... and it's higher prices that facilitate that.

Comment Re:Right-wing nut jobs are taking over Paramount (Score 1) 143

Why am I utterly not shocked that rsilvergun believes it failed because it didn't go woke enough?
The simpler explanation, that people were tired of having a parade of identity-characters shoved down their throat in lieu of actually-compelling plots, of course can't be the case?

Setting ENTIRELY aside the woke crap, starfleet academy was awful. 90210 in space storylines and writing were childish. TOS stories faced serious moral dilemma and yes, often solved them with a liberal, positive, idealistic outcome. Deeply unlikable teenagers saving the day because of (implausible mcguffin) is just lame and lazy as fuck. Everyone *hated* Wesley Crusher, of COURSE we should fill a ship with even more repellent versions of him, focus on their inter social Twilight-caliber bullshit, and frame it with Star Trek.... OF COURSE the fan base will love it! Green light that!

Comment Re:Consequence culture (Score 1) 145

I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced. I see a lot of people on the right are getting tired of Trump's craziness, but I'm not sure they wouldn't be fine if it were just dialed back a bit, say to Trump 1.0 levels. In a way it may actually be a good thing that we're only a year and a quarter into a four year term. Assuming Trump doesn't keel over he's got a lot of time to convince Americans that it's a really, really bad idea to elect someone like him. Of course, he'll do a lot of actual damage along the way.

And you're absolutely right that we need the Democrats to avoid the temptation to go hard left just because they have a particularly-hated opposition... but I don't think it's at all certain that they will avoid it.

Comment Re: Anyone on the right wing want to defend this? (Score 3, Interesting) 145

I think you should take another look at the economic transition from Carter to Reagan.

You can make the argument that Reagan used left wing policies to address economic issues in some instances, in opposition to his campaign promises, or that secular trends or geopolitics hurt Carter, but you can't make the argument that Carter left a good economy for Reagan to fuck up.

You absolutely can, if you really look at what happened and when. What happened, basically, was that Nixon and Ford left Carter with an incredibly-damaged economy, and Carter fixed it, but the fixes took a while to take effect. If Carter had had a second term, those changes would have taken effect while he was in the White House, but he lost. Reagan is to be applauded mostly for not undoing what Carter did.

What did Carter do? The biggest thing he did was to appoint Paul Volcker as Fed chair. Carter knew exactly what Volcker would do, and knew that it would be painful, but believed the economists who told him that it was necessary. They were right, Carter was right to believe them, and Volcker's medicine of high interest rates got inflation under control and the economy moving in the right direction, even though it caused two recessions. Reagan was smart enough to believe the economists, too, so he reappointed Volcker and made some famous speeches, especially the 1982 one in which he told Americans we needed to "Stay the Course". He didn't, of course, mention that it was Jimmy Carter's course that we were staying, but it was.

The other big thing Carter did was massive deregulation. Reagan is also often credited for deregulation, but he did very little of it while Carter did a lot -- energy, telecoms, trucking, airlines... and more. Carter really was "The Great Deregulator", not Reagan.

None of this is because Carter was some sort of economic genius (though he was an extremely smart man). It's because he got good advisors and took good advice. This is a pretty consistent story, actually. I think there are two main reasons why the economy tends to improve during democratic administrations and decline during republican ones: (1) Democratic administrations make better use of experts and (2) Democrats are less likely to go to war (though they do tend to engage in more small-scale, humanitarian interventions). Those are just my opinions, of course, and this is an incredibly complex space.

Comment Re:Anyone on the right wing want to defend this? (Score 1) 145

Something I've noticed is lately outside of safe spaces the right wing keeps their damned mouths shut. Every so often one of them will jump in and yell TDS or something but they never actually tried to defend the actions of anyone on their side or any of their policies anymore. Mostly they either avoid conversations outside of safe spaces entirely or they lurk and mod everything they don't like down.

I'm a member of the Republican party. I have been on paper for decades, and until 2016 regularly (but not exclusively) voted Republican. In 2024 when the state GOP organization decided to switch from primaries to closed caucus meetings, I decided to get active so I could vote against Trump. I've since decided my participation as a never-Trumper is a good idea, we need more people who are fundamentally conservative (or at least small-L libertarian) to get involved to rescue the party and return it to something approaching rationality.

Anyway, that's background to explain why I just got home from the GOP county convention, which was very interesting in that during the whole three-hour meeting I never heard Trump's name mentioned even once, and there were some rather pointed allusions to how important it is that our elected leaders act with careful consideration and to promote peace. I think a lot of the GOP rank and file are getting pretty pissed off. The first break was the refusal to release the Epstein files. Minneapolis made a lot of them uncomfortable, and they found a lot of things that happened hard to defend. (CECOT should have, too, but early on they all believed Trump when he said they were gangsters.). By the time Venezuela came around, most of them had stopped trying to defend, and Iran actually generated some pretty vocal MAGA-world argument against Trump, while the soaring fuel prices just pissed off a lot of his supporters.

Comment Re:looks like a textbook 1st amendment case (Score 1) 145

Reddit is taking all the heat and standing up to the bully on the playground for them

Are they? I don't see that in the summary or the articles at all. All of the counter-filings are coming from the individual's attorneys, not from Reddit. Reddit is certainly to be applauded for not just voluntarily complying, for actually going to court, but it seems like *main* thing they have done is to notify the user in question, so the user could get lawyers from a non-profit, and it's those lawyers who are doing most of the work.

Comment Re:Laws with mission creep (Score 1) 145

The affirmative defenses from the person whose name they're trying to get suggests that that law is clearly being abused and has no relevance here, which makes me wonder if someone within the DoJ is intentionally trying to throw the case. Let's hope so!

Could be.

But it could also be the case that the DoJ's lawyers just suck. The DoJ has suffered a massive brain drain of competent attorneys since Trump took office last year. First, they explicitly fired or otherwise drove out anyone who'd gotten tapped for the massive and complex January 6th prosecutions. Then they made clear that loyalty to the president had to take precedence over ethics, legality or morality, and that they would fire any attorney who balked at doing something just because it might get them disbarred, all the while making everyone wonder if at some point the administration was going to begin flatly refusing to obey court orders (they haven't, quite, not yet).

That made all the competent and ethical lawyers leave, as well as many who might have been more ethically flexible but were too smart not to realize how badly continuing to work for the DoJ could burn them. To try to fill the massive vacancies, the DoJ then began a hiring spree, openly advertising that no real qualifications were required, beyond a law degree (any law degree) and loyalty to Trump. You can bet that they mostly got what they asked for.

If that weren't enough, the administration also took innumerable illegal actions that spawned rafts of court cases. Many of these were generated by ICE's misbehavior, but there were lots of others. Given the badly-reduced staff, quantity and quality both, this led to the remaining DoJ attorneys being massively overworked. Like Julie Le (who has since quit) who, when faced with a frustrated judge asking why Le came into his courtroom unprepared in a futile attempt to defend indefensible acts, asked the judge to please hold her in contempt and throw her in jail so she could get 24 hours of sleep.

And if all that weren't enough, the continual abuse of the court system by the administration has led to the judges near-universally deciding they have to treat the DoJ's lawyers as untrustworthy, making their lives that much less pleasant.

Given all of that, any DoJ attorney who has a shot at making a living in private practice, i.e. any of them who is any good, has left. What remains is a group of massively-overworked incompetents.

And if you wonder if the DoJ attorneys weren't always incompetents, because clearly the government doesn't pay as well as private practice... in fact, no, they weren't, because the work was considered quite prestigious. In particular, being a US Attorney was extremely prestigious. It has long been very common for talented lawyers to spend a few years in the private sector, making enough money to set them up for life, and then quit and go become a federal prosecutor. Because working for a high-priced law firm and making a lot of money makes you rich, but it doesn't carry the same sort of prestige as being a US Attorney, and then maybe a federal district or even appellate court judge.

But all that has ended. So, yeah, it could very well be that the government is making crap argument based on the wrong laws because their lawyers just suck. And also because there aren't any actually good arguments available and the lawyers are just throwing out anything so they can tell their bosses that they're pursuing the cases vigorously.

Comment Re:Consequence culture (Score 3, Insightful) 145

Did that happen when Trump 1.0 ended?

No, and this is why supporters of Trump's behavior aren't worried about the consequences of these expansions of power. They see liberals' reticence for engaging in the same behavior as a weakness that can be exploited since they don't have to worry about the expansion of power being used against them. I'm not arguing that liberals should abuse these expansions of power - I'm simply explaining why Trump's supporters don't fear the effects of those powers coming back to bite them in times of liberal leadership.

Indeed. And the only way this ends well is when voters decide that they don't like government abusing power the way Trump does, regardless of which side does it, and begin hammering those who do it in every election.

Sadly, there is zero evidence that most conservative voters care at all about abuse of office or the rule of law. We're going to have to suffer a lot more pain before people start to wake up, I think. Right now, we're at the stage where most on the right just assume that it always was this way, it was just hidden. We're not going to get any change until they decide that regardless of even if power was always abused and the law was always ignored, it sucks and it has to change.

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