That was always the case. And it's always the case in every representative country that allows voters to elects leaders.
You can have stability and continuity or you can have elections in which voters can make large policy changes.
Obviously a lot of that policy is unwise, but people were fooling themselves if they somehow believe that any representative system is immune from "population elects person with unwise policy platform".
Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"
We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.
I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.
15 or 20 years ago, social media grew because you joined knowing that your friends and family had joined. Now the network effect has flipped. I rarely see a post from anyone I know any more. It's easy to walk away knowing that your friends and family have already left.
I look forward to the avalanche of lawsuits that bankrupts Meta for all the harm that Facebook has done to the current generation of young adults. Social media can't die fast enough.
It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.
Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.
If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.
With all due respect to Prof. Serrano, he's being naive, like a whole lot of his peers. He just got hit smack in the face with a case study in human nature, and he can't get his head around it.
Academic integrity exists on a Gaussian curve. For that matter, so can most of human group behavior. The people at the top of the curve scrupulously obey the rules, and the people at the bottom will violate them without hesitation for personal advantage. The overwhelming majority in the middle will follow the rules, but only so long as they perceive that the rules are applied fairly, and the people caught violating them are punished.
Cheating runs along the same scale. Most universities have honor codes, but an unenforced honor code is meaningless. A professor's job is to create an environment where students perceive that academic integrity is being enforced. That's what keeps most of them from cheating, not a signature on a honor code statement.
Prof. Serrano's first mistake was thinking that most of his students were inherently honest. They're not. Like all college students, they were only honest so long as they believed the rules were enforceable. AI changed all of that, and every student in the middle of the curve, even including most at the top, gave up. After all, why let your peers get better grades than you with almost no effort?
Serrano's second mistake was believing that the administration at Brown University was going to give failing grades to nearly a hundred students, or perhaps even suspend them from classes for a semester, and then have to face a lot of angry parents. Plus, how did Serrano expect to prove they cheated? A poor performance on a final exam doesn't necessarily mean they cheated on a midterm. I personally wouldn't turn the case over to an honor council based on such evidence.
Serrano learned his lesson the hard way. Take-home exams are dead and gone. The only evaluations you can trust are the ones that happen in a classroom, under supervision, without access to a smartphone or laptop. Serrano wanted to believe in an academic ideal that never truly existed. Artificial intelligence is forcing a whole lot of faculty in higher education to face a very uncomfortable truth about their jobs.
This is the blandest, most watered-down way to say "lost their job" yet. Quite nauseating.
Or they're like me in their late 40s and early 50s with a bit of money behind them, mortgage almost paid off or paid off and just said "fuck it I can't be arsed anymore." I'm a lorry driver here in the UK, a "trucker" in American. I've spent the last 15 years aggressively saving and investing, I've got enough "fuck you money" that I no longer have to work if I don't want to. I'd already cut my days down last year to four. This year I'm down to 2 to 3 days - I've actually only worked one this week - and will be taking the entirety of August off in addition to the 33 days pro-rata paid annual leave I also get. I did toy with just stopping altogether.
I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.
Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.
Bitcoin used to have a strong correlation with the stock market, but not over the past year. While the stock market continued to go up, Bitcoin tanked by 50%.
Bitcoin seems to have its own weird 4 year price cycle, and we're in the middle of the "price crash" part of that cycle right now. It will be interesting to see if it recovers this time.
The market is saturated with cryptocurrencies. I think it's finally percolating into the public consciousness that anyone can create one. Bitcoin was novel at one point, but the novelty has worn off.
It also doesn't help that no one has come up with any useful application for BTC beyond paying blackmailers and criminals, or laundering money. BTC will keep on peaking and dipping, but I think enough people have lost their shirts for the party to be over.
Having a video record someone could check after the fact is fine. Checking against a database of criminals sounds fine. But what you get really quick is a database of everyone using public transport, when, and where they went.
If a transit system requires electronic payment, then a database of who rode the bus already exists from passengers' card scans. Combine that with the comprehensive video recordings made on modern mass transit, and it is trivially easy to pull that video and correlate with those scans to see where you got on and got off.
In other words, that surveillance network is already in place. And whether you are stopped immediately upon getting off the bus, or the next day once the authorities have analyzed the previous day's video footage, it makes no difference.
No safeguards. As soon as the Nazis in the alleged administration can manage it, they'll force the city to turn over all the scans and have an agreement to be sent all future scans.
My city's mass transit system has a contract with March Networks to provide audio and video surveillance of all riders. There are 14 (yes, I've counted them) cameras installed on the interior and exterior of each bus. Audio and video are recorded for each passenger. The stops where each passenger gets on or off are recorded. Every passengers' face, what they wore, who they traveled with, what they were carrying, and what they said - all recorded by March Networks. Where I live, there is absolutely no place outside of a government building or a military facility where you'll be more comprehensively surveilled than when you are on a public bus.
If the powers-that-be wanted to identify and track every passenger, they need only obtain that video footage from March Networks, and do all the post-processing they desired. Banning real-time facial recognition would barely slow them down.
If you are truly - truly - committed to the privacy of passengers in mass transit systems, you should go to your next city council meeting and demand the immediate removal of all cameras and surveillance equipment in all mass transit facilities. Do that, and you might find the response of your local politicians illuminating.
I guarantee there isn't a single city official in Kansas City that rides the city bus. If they did, they would have never voted in favor for this.
On the other hand, any city resident who has ridden a city bus and been robbed or assaulted would probably vote for it in an instant. For that matter, any KC official who had been similarly victimized would probably do the same.
It is very easy to take the moral high ground in situations where you will not be affected by those policies. It is a different matter when you are one of rank and file who ride the bus every day.
The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.
Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.
Are you having fun yet?
