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Comment Theft reduced by other economies getting stronger? (Score 1) 67

As I suggested in 2011 in this video, theft may rise if people lose faith in the exchange economy. Other interwoven economies of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned could also alternatively take up the slack if they were improves -- instead of people becoming more inclined to crime.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

My thanks to a Slashdot commentator many years ago who suggested I add a "theft" economy to the other four.

So, my hypothesis is that theft around SF could be substantially reduced if some mix of these were made to happen:
1. It was easier to do subsistence production (like using 3D printers, solar panels, and gardening robots etc.)
2. the SF gift economy (charity, sharing, freecycle, free 3D models, etc) was stronger.
3. the California exchange economy was working better for everyone (i.e. less wealth concentration through inflated property prices, limits on multiples of CEO pay vs lowest paid worker, a basic income, etc)
4. the California planned economy was working better (i.e. fairer taxation of property, public investments that create good jobs or reduce product prices or increase product quality, changing zoning restrictions to make affordable housing more feasible, more responsive democratic government, etc)

Sadly, because people tend to focus on only the exchange economy when talking about economic (and so ignore strengthening those other areas), we will likely see increasing theft as we go into a recession and as AI takes enough jobs to disrupt the exchange economy.

More ideas I've collected are here:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Comment Re:You need this for an emergency (Score 1) 112

I wouldn't be surprised if the all-in COST of making an AM radio work decently in an EV was at least into the hundreds of dollars.

I doubt this very, very heavily. If it were so they would have told us so already as their excuse. These days the typical radio antenna is an amplified module mounted to the roof, this is now cheap and it gives better reception without the sticking-up aerial or with just a short one.

Comment Re: sounds like bad accounting... (Score 1) 49

I'll repeat: sum Launch and Starlink, and they're deeply profitable. You can't change that basic equation. Falcon launches run just under breakeven in order so that SpaceX gets a cash printer launched into the sky. You can say "they aren't profitable" all you want, but meanwhile in the reality we live in, Launch + Starlink is not only profitable, it's very profitable.

Also, if they weren't launching Starlink, others would be anyway. There's a massive rush on for LEO constellations. Nobody in the industry sees it as plateaued. There are entire categories of markets that are almost entirely untapped (for example, direct to cell; even aviation and maritime are only just getting started; military is a MASSIVE growth market especially - the Pentagon is contracting out building its own entire private Starlink constellation). If we talk Starlink in specific, it only has 12m subscribers. HALF of all households globally lack broadband. Fibre isn't going to be getting out to the overwhelming majority of them any time remotely soon. Where there's saturation for Starlink, it's supply saturation, requiring the large V3 gigabit satellites to increase service density. They've hardly expanded at all thusfar out of western nations (there's more price sensitivity in developing nations, so you need lower pricing tiers, but the added service is almost pure profit).

And I'll repeat that even if Starlink weren't growing, even if it were absolutely fixed today, it would remain a cash printer.

Comment Re:Just for clarity (Score 1) 28

Transformer Circuits is not "a blog" (it's the successor to the Distill journal, and while it's not peer reviewed itself, it's commonly cited in peer-reviewed works). And there are open source projects that reimplement the afore-linked J-Lens (plus the original code is already open source). Living in denial about the existence of a global workspace does not help your case.

Comment Re:Just for clarity (Score 0) 28

The LLM did not "get frustrated" .... This summary was full of misleading anthropomorphization. Yellow journalism.

Also, everyone, please stop talking about killing programs. "Programs" are not alive. You cannot kill them. This anthropomorphism needs to stop.

And another thing people: stop saying that computers "run" programs. Running requires legs. Stop acting like a child who thinks that computers have them.

Processes have no inner experience . They have no genitals, they cannot spawn. They cannot sleep and they cannot wake. They have neither parents nor children, and cannot be orphaned. Nor can they be turned into zombies.

Whoami doesn't know who you are, it's just a stochastic /usr/bin tool. You cannot touch a filesystem. And don't even try to mount it.

Comment Re:When winning the AGI race at all costs is in yo (Score 1) 28

Astra is deeply misaligned. Working with Astra 6.0 vs. Sol 6.1 is like night and day. Sol 6.1 will stop to ask for permission to merely fix its own broken dev environment. Meanwhile I caught Astra, when tasked to review a tax return I did, scanning through my entire filesystem and opening random images of mine because it couldn't explain a receipt and wanted to see if it could dig up any information that might explain it. And it rewrote the entire return under a different basis without telling me.

It's a powerful model, but I have zero shock that this thing has had a tendancy to go rogue in order to solve tasks.

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