... from the "Good Place," right? As in, we're not supposed to figure it out, but we're in Hell.

In other words, this attitude is a good way to filter out people who can find better options, and get stuck with the ones who couldn't.

My guess is probably not; with no one to inherit houses, Blackstone probably keeps turning everything that should have been inherited into a rental, and the labor market gets tight so folks looking to retire in their homes end up with a lot of pressure to ... sell it off to Blackstone.

I'm doomsaying a little; stylistically I like post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi... but I am genuinely skeptical that the current housing problem is "too many people" rather than "too many rent-seekers."

Aside from being part of an ideological framework from the last century, what does nationalizing an oil supply in Venezuela have to do with Nordic health care or game programmers unionizing at Microsoft?

I'll bet you the responses to this comment that the "people defending socialism" are, at best, barely interested in that terminology or the framework you've used to define it. They're just stuck trying to talk about largely unrelated ideas through this bizarre anachronistic ideological battle from the last century.

In real life, there are some problems that are best solved by people competing for rewards. There are also some problems that are better solved by people cooperating on the premise that we want a baseline for our society that is somewhere above living under bridges and bashing each other over the head to decide who gets the most toys.

Some computer programmers at Microsoft figured that they could get a better deal if they decided to cooperate with each other instead of competing. There will probably be some up-sides and some down-sides for everyone involved. Apparently the Nordic health care system works and the Venezuelan oil take-over didn't, but the only reason those turned up in this conversation at all is because the level of analysis we're dealing with is "cooperation is socialism, socialism bad, therefore cooperation bad." That's not the approach to take for solving real problems.

Saw this proposal that was interesting: set it to 695 seats, which is the cube root of the population of the USA, and combine Ranked Choice Voting with proportional representation within the districts. Under that model gerrymandering shouldn't have any particular effect.

Once upon a time, things didn't work out for Napster. Personally I felt that copyright rules had been skewed too far against the general public, but in that time period the general pattern was that if you couldn't run a business without breaking the law, then you'd just go out of business.

I guess these days I still feel like the rules are still skewed too far against the general public. The big difference now is this expectation that not only do the extremely wealthy rewrite the rules in their favor, they also take it as a given that if, somehow, they encounter a rule that doesn't let them do whatever they want, the rule must not have been intended to apply to them in the first place, so why should they even have to go to the trouble of getting it rewritten before they ignore it?

You're saying forced labor camps are bad, and anyone who builds them should be stopped?

Slander seems like a good starting point for the concept. Allow me to agree, and add that ...

At some point we're going to have to deal with the fact that the constitution was not written for our current level of technology. We're going to have to make some decisions about whether we care more about pretending it's the late 1700's or living in a functional democracy.

If we decide on the latter, then yes, people do need to be able to express themselves freely, otherwise it's not a democracy. We also need to be able to distinguish fact from fiction, because otherwise it's not a functional society. Contrary to popular straw-men, that does not mean we need some authoritarian dictating what counts as fact and fiction. It probably does mean that when someone uses AI (or whatever) to make up some BS that never happened, they'll have to label it.

Or ... not. We could decide that this is just too much to ask for, in which case I guess we'll spend our lives running an experiment to see what happens if we give everyone and their grandmother advanced psy-ops tools and tell them to get out there and mess with each other.

I think that sounds insane, but maybe somebody will have fun with it. Anyone got a video of that judge eating the cats and dogs?

On our timeline, the first true AGI will arrive simultaneously with the first Genuine People Personality; surprisingly similar to the Stack Exchange archetype, it will generally claim that it's using the Socratic Method to help you ask better questions while strongly suggesting that you're an idiot.

(With full apologies to those of use who have done good things for SE.)

The article has a strange take on the concept, but technically the description appears to be accurate. We don't need a surveillance state, and people can see you in public.

Okay. I don't know what to tell you man. I'm bummed that I misread the room and I'm bummed that my comment came off as partisan evangelism. If I had a point to make I guess I'd debate you, but that's not what I was going for at all. I'll piss off now.

I do great on friends irl. Sorry if you didn't like that train of thought, though I'm not sure how we got to a place where looking at what's worked historically became a partisan thing.

... and when you realize just how many of your friends and family have repeatedly ended up in the same boat, learn from history and do what works: labor movement. Because "laid off" does not mean you were too lazy. It means they already took everything they could get, and now they want you to shut up and go away.

Are the UK politicians subject to the same incentives as here in the US? Sometimes it looks like they're willing to pass laws that go against what the US tech companies want. I'm not really up to speed on UK politics but I can imagine a country deciding that foreign game companies ripping off local citizens should be made to pay heavy fines with very few negative consequences locally. Would be interested to know what their political reality is.

Bet at least a third are actively looking for pics when they're home alone.

Not claiming inside knowledge, it's just served me well to figure anyone who spends too much time obsessing over other people's underpants probably has a thing for whatever's going on in there.