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.

That 1.7%+ fee found in North America?

In France it is 0.4% - at the most. Sometimes it is as low as 0.2%

Not a type. Less than 1/4 of the amount North America pays.

No, they do not have the 1% cashback crap. But why would you want to pay 1% more now to MAYBE get 1% back later?

Cause you are paying that 1% more now.

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.

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

It's a pipe dream that libertarians came up with to try and preserve capitalism in the face of automation devouring jobs faster than technology can create new jobs.

By itself Ubi just ends up with monopolies sucking the money right back out of people and that's if you can get it through which you probably can't because there is nothing that pisses people off more than giving somebody who isn't working money.

You can explain and explain and explain but is Ronald Reagan said if you're explaining you're losing.

Giving people who don't work money feels bad. It makes you feel like a sucker if you're one of the people still working.

I don't know how you overcome that and I don't know what you do with all the automation we are doing. We have been automating away middle class jobs since the eighties with close to 70% of the middle class jobs eaten by it and we're about to do another huge round of automation. The only thing that's kept our economy from collapsing is we had two major bubbles, the .com bubble in the housing bubble and those are both over and AI isn't really the same kind of bubble because it doesn't generate a shit ton of weird jobs doing stuff or a bunch of economic activity that filters down to regular people. It's just more automation that eliminates jobs.

I honestly don't know what we're going to do. I think what's going to happen is we're going to hit 25% permanent unemployment and then we're going to have a world war and then we're going to give the nuclear launch codes to religious lunatics and they're going to use them thinking that they're protected by God and then well, game over man game over.

But Ubi is not the solution. You won't be able to get it through and if by some miracle you do the money can easily be extracted right back out of people without a shitload of additional programs which Ubi is designed to eliminate.

Back in the days of Unionization companies created management to keep an eye on employees and make sure the company came out ahead all the time.

Over the years unions got busted and broken starting with Ronald reagan. Widespread factory automation meant that you no longer had tens of thousands of individual workers at a single site who could readily organize. Also the corporations moved in and replaced small local churches that could be used for local organization with big mega charges that they controlled with their mega church buddies like Jerry Falwell.

Without the unions they didn't need management the same way to bust unions and keep workers in liworkershey started using management as regular line workers. If you're paying attention your boss has been taking on more regular work year after year and less management work.

But the company still needs somebody to make sure that the company's interests are put before yours. That's HR.

HR is the next evolution and making your life worse and making billionaires lives... Well I'm not going to say better because they're already as good as they can possibly get but just plain letting them have more money in power at your expense.

Of course all of this triggers the fuck out of a ton of libertarian types because they don't like the think about all the systems in the world. Folks want to believe that they can be tremendously successful just with their own two hands and maybe a little bit of brain work and that they don't need anybody else. It's something you pick up when you're a teenager and most people never grow out of it.

Pointing that out also triggers people.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.