The article is saying that the solution here isn’t to just throw up our hands and commit suicide as a nation, it’s to simply tax the AI, punishing the negative externality.
Seems like the obvious answer to the prisoner’s dilemma problem where everyone wants to lay off their workforce, but expects that they’ll be the only ones to get this bright idea.
What’s a bit hard for me to rationalize here is why are market shifts considered a negative externality here? We didn’t tax moulding machines because they reduced the demand for sculptors.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the end goal of “Tax those who can pay for it to build a social safety net” is reasonable, I just don’t buy the “negative externalities” argument.
Well because if you don't do something then everyone loses their jobs, and then there's no more consumers, and then the economy implodes, and then everyone dies, including the people utilitizing AI.
It's kind of similar to how nobles fucked themselves in the middle ages. One would think having a lot of serfs is good, but no actually. Having a functioning economy would be better, and in the long run feudal economies stagnated.
And that's why I, today, am effectively much more rich than a feudal lord.
> We didn’t tax moulding machines because they reduced the demand for sculptors.
AI isn't promising to be one machine, it's promising to be a general intelligence that could potentially send unemployment over 50%. We're talking about every truck driver, every warehouse worker, basically everyone who sits in front of a screen for a living being unemployed. This really changes things from 'social safety net' to 'prevent civil unrest that threatens continuity of government.'
Life itself could arguably be a Von Neumann probe. It's so good at spreading that it's a problem, when we send probes to other bodies in our own solar system we often sanitize them because we worry life will hitch a ride and start colonizing.
Life on a planet is a lot like a continuous fire, fires often send out embers that start new fires elsewhere.
You send out little packets of life to new places, wait single-digit billions of years (a blink of an eye for the universe, really), boom: new intelligent species with potential to shoot more seeds out into the universe.
There are now "loyalty tests" for those who apply to positions at the FBI, to be hired you have to state that the "patriots" on Jan. 6 2021 were the rioters attempting a coup, not the Capitol Police defending the constitutional transfer of government power.
I think the parent post is defending what somewhat older people know to be true. Nixon was far worse than Trump, also betrayed US allies for example. And where it hurts: he effectively stole gold from them.
And I'm sure in another 20 years even democrat voters will remember, probably correctly, that Trump was so much better than $us_president_at_that_time.
Nixon was never credibly accused of sexual assault, never organized a mob of rioters to sack the US capitol, never published tertiary syphilis-coded rants for the world to see in the middle of the night, nearly every night.
Nixon had a competent cabinet, some of them even had principles. Nixon's Attorney General was willing to resign on principle for his refusal to fire the special prosecutor. Nixon didn't put his own attorney at the head of the DOJ.
I could go on. To be clear: Nixon was a corrupt thug. At the same time he was nowhere near as symptomatic of a national malignant political cancer as Trump has been. Plus there was a congress to keep Nixon in check, we don't have a functioning Congress now, just a department of a political party.
> Federal prosecutors have a ton of power. Conviction rates are 98-99%.
This always gets thrown around, but the fact is they should be that high. Prosecutors shouldn't bring cases unless they have evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and DOJ prosectors don't (normally) screw around.
When you see lower rates of conviction, as in the current ethically bankrupt administration, it's often malicious prosecution, aka "You'll beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride."
No, the original poster is 100% correct and if anything understating the issue.
US Attorneys are enormously powerful and because federal law is so vague in many ways, attracting their attention is a kiss of death. Most of federal defense work is highly technical and more about managing pleas and the mandatory sentencing guidelines. They agree to punishment and shape the plea deal to some crime that hits the number.
This weird technical approach to “justice” results in bad outcomes in other ways. The famously self-promoting Preet Bharara ended up letting a bunch of people free who quite obviously were taking bribes and fixing bids go free by abusing the “Honest Services” laws, which were subsequently thrown out on appeal.
The current administration is different - their weaponization of the system means that they literally can’t appoint qualified attorneys, who fear disbarment for what they will be directed to do. AUSAs have quit en masse and they are forced to hire toadies from 3rd tier law schools like Liberty University and make weird interim appointments. It’s a great time to be a criminal.
I would be fine if high conviction rates reflected prosecutor's only bringing good cases. It doesn't. It reflects the odds being stacked against you and it being so expensive and high risk to defend yourself.
This high cost and power imbalance is used to force people into plea deals for crimes they didn't commit.
Let me give you an example: 924C enhancements [1]. This is where certain drug or violent crimes being committed with a firearm can add years or even decades to a sentence automatically.
Let's just say you live in a concealed carry state and you have a weapon on you. You're walking home and the police pick you up. You match the description of one of two people who were smoking drugs in an alley as per a 911 call. The other person was already picked up by police. He was unarmed. His story was that you sold him the drugs. He also claims you brandished a pistol.
Was there a drug transaction? Or was this simply two people smoking together? The other person had a small quantity of drugs on him when apprehended.
A 911 call mentioned seeing a weapon drawn. It was dark. You can go through versions of this scenario where you were the other person or it was a case of mistaken identity. Eitehr is bad for you.
What if the other person sold you the drugs and made up this story to avoid a distribution charge? What if as a teenager you had a minor possession charge? What if prosecutors believe the other person and make a deal for a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony?
You have a gun and now 2 witnesses who say you "brandished" the gun. So whatever charge you end up with the "brandishing a firearm" part (under 924(c)) adds 7 years to your sentence to be served consecutively. And they've stopped you with a firearm.
So what was a "he said, she said" situation has now turned into a situation where you could be facing 10 years in jail and defending against that could well cost you $200,000+, which you don't have. Or you can take this plea for 2 years in jail. What do you do?
> I would be fine if high conviction rates reflected prosecutor's only bringing good cases. It doesn't.
There is a huge amount of hand-waving following this assertion without any evidence to back up the claim.
I'm not saying abuse of process doesn't happen, but this is just saying it can and then spelling out a big hypothetical without any proof that this practice is rampant.
It's hard to find quantative data but one clear example is DNA-based exoneration by the Innocence Project [1]
> Among the many insights drawn from these
wrongful convictions is the realization that a guilty plea is
not an uncommon outcome for innocent people who have
been charged with a crime: 11 percent of the DNA exonerees recorded by the Innocence Project pleaded guilty
There's a thing called the Trial Penalty [2]. ~98% of charges result in a guilty plea. If all 100% went to trial the system would collapse. As such, prosecutors coerce plea deals [3]. But the Trial Penalty works pretty much like the example described: if you go to trial, you will be overcharged and face, say, 10-30+ years in jail. Or you can take a plea for 2 years.
This Trial Penalty is made worse with mandatory minimums and add-on charges like I mentioned (ie 924(c)).
This effect has been modeled with maths and game theory to show hoow extreme outcomes cause people to plead guilty more often [4].
This is a well-known problem in criminal justice. You're showing either a complete lack of imagination or simply don't think this will ever be used against you.
> There's a thing called the Trial Penalty [2]. ~98% of charges result in a guilty plea.
The gist of this argument is that there are huge numbers of innocent people railroaded into prison, but in the bigger picture crime is wildly under-punished.
More than half of murderers go free.
More than 98% of rapists never spend a day in prison.
At the end of the day this is all a question of where you stand on Blackstone’s Ratio. In the US, even with the rate of wrongful conviction we may have, we stand solidly opposed to zealous pursuit of justice for the victims of crimes, on the argument that an innocent person might be punished.
> ... but in the bigger picture crime is wildly under-punished.
Um, citation needed.
> More than half of murderers go free.
The burden is on the state to prove their case not on the accused to prove their innocence. If this completely unsubstantiated statistic is true (again, citation needed) why is the state so bad at making their cases?
> More than 98% of rapists never spend a day in prison.
Yes, rape is under-reported, under-charged and rarely results in a conviction. This is true. Society engages in a whole lot of victim blaming with sex crimes.
> we stand solidly opposed to zealous pursuit of justice for the victims of crimes
What? The US has 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners. If over-policing and wildly capricious sentences (eg 10+ years for cannabis possession) worked, this would be the safest country on earth.
It's not that it doesn't have cachet, it has anti-cachet.
People of Musk's exact political stripe absolutely are not impressed if you drive a Tesla, and everyone else, at minimum, is silently counting it as a character flaw and judgment problem.
To top it off, they're not the latest or the greatest EVs available and it's common knowledge at this point. The two metrics that they maximize, range and 0-60, are not really a big factor in day-to-day ownership in the way that a smooth ride and build quality are.
There's no 'white' culture, there is modern North American culture and it's not something that belongs to a particular complexion. It's norms and traditions. These aren't remotely under threat of extinction from 'race mixing.'
The things that are under threat are the contemporary cultural values of openness and acceptance of other cultures/relgions/traits. These are truly valuable, positive aspects that stand out in contemporary American and European societies, and these are the things that are legitimately under threat, ironically, by those who attempt to normalize racism and xenophobia.
> There's no 'white' culture, there is modern North American culture and it's not something that belongs to a particular complexion.
This doesn't seem right to me. WASP culture absolutely does exist. Anyone can see it in full display by watching films like Dead Poets Society or Home Alone.
White Americans descend from a number of cultures that voluntarily moved here and involve food that thinks pepper is spicy.
Slavers deliberately mixed different groups of kidnapped Africans so they had no shared language and sold their children so they couldn't pass anything on to the next generation.
USA has a long history of erasing culture. If there is a lack of “white” culture it’s more the fault of other white people not “woke” culture. EVERYTIME there’s a new ethnic minority in USA they’re forced to assimilate through persecution and through the school systems.
Time in minutes after which christian nationalists will form a circular firing squad once they've cemented their grip on the US government: 2
The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The colony of Maryland was originally intended to be a safe place for Catholics, and the first chance the Puritans got, they revolted, invaded, burned the Catholic churches down and persecuted their worshippers. The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics.
And it isn't an old attitude. I remember documentaries stating that John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Catholicism was something that could have cost him his election.
> The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The past that MAGA refers to is imaginary. It's "the good old days", whatever that evokes in any individual, with however selective that individual's memory is or however incomplete that individual's knowledge of history is.
It's like the Brexit referendum - Britons voted on "the status quo is bad, would you like something better than the status quo?" and a slim majority of them voted yes. They didn't agree on exactly how things should be negotiated to be better, just that they could imagine something better than the current state.
"The colony... The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
Seems a bit broken to claim that something that happened in 1689 when it was a colony, as you explicitly note, is fundamental to the founding of the nation a century later.
Yeah, there’s also a particularly American version of Catholicism that hates the Church and its teachings, who include among their adherents the Vice President and at least one Supreme Court Justice if not several. While one would hope they would learn the lessons of history, the particular details of the theocracy they envision probably won’t break down along the same lines as past conflicts.
It is not a broken claim, it is a well documented fact.
“The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham.
That many Protestants discriminated against Catholics != "founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
I say this as an American Catholic who went to Catholic schools until college and knows full well about Catholic discrimination in US history. Protestants have discriminated against other protestants, everyone has discriminated against LDS, LDS has discriminated against everyone else, everyone has discriminated against Jews, Catholics have discriminated against <insert your choice of target here>, etc. These facts don't make up founding motives just because they are true.
Yes, the stupidity and shortsightedness of American Catholic integralists like Vermuele is stunning to me. If America does ever become a Christian theocracy, it's going to be a Protestant theocracy. It wouldn't be an altar-and-throne continental monarchy, it would be more like Cromwell's England, where "Papists" were considered enemies of the state. Do these guys not remember that Jack Chick wrote just as many comics villainizing Catholics as he did atheists? That's how evangelicals actually think, once any temporary alliances of convenience have accomplished their goals.
It’s going to be Evangelical. Some variety of megachurch prosperity teaching that faults the poor with some kind of republican ideology.
That’s why anyone that believes in separation of religion and state should tell these folks anytime they push for Christianity in schools, just tell them: ok but it needs to be the true Christianity- Jehovah Witnesses- then they will shut up. They hate Jehovah witnesses, then Mormons, then Catholics, …
It stuns me that Republican Mormons think that Evangelicals like them for anything but their political assistance. As soon as Evangelicals remove the non-Christians, their tent will get smaller, just like you're saying.
I have Mormon family that thinks that they're welcome in the Evangelical tent (they'll even visit the Ark Experience!), but Evangelicals hate Mormons just like they hate gays, liberals, trans people, atheists, etc. It's just that Mormons (for now) vote the way that Evangelicals want.
At this point, it's going to be some sort of post-Christian, culturally Christian social media influencer-driven, conspiracy theory-laden melange that incorporates everything from Tartarian giants to simulation hypothesis to Flat Earth. Q Gospel indeed.
I'm ex-catholic but not quite sure the "we want to be free to oppress catholics" narrative quite holds up in the case of the trump admin.
The current supreme court has 6 catholic justices, with 2 appointed by trump. 2 of them rubber stamp everything trump does (alito and thomas), and most of the others support him more often than not (rogers, coney-barrett, kavanaugh). Only sotomayor opposes him frequently.
If you covertly (or not) want to oppress a religion why stack the highest court in the country with people from said religion?
I think the point is that it's a (temporary) coalition of the factions that joined together in order to get a leader elected, a leader which is in fact not religious at all and can not be considered to be a member of any of the factions. That temporary coalition will fall apart once faction members are given power in various domains, and then can enact their own faction's preferences, which involve harming other factions.
I know the "flooding the zone with shit" strategy of MAGA/GOP strategists works somewhat at burying relevant information, but improve your searching skills a bit and this is just one example of what you'll find:
Pentagon To Host Good Friday Service Just For Protestants, Not Catholics
Because they figure those two will flip to their side if forced to make a choice. Note for example that Pete Hegseth made an explicit choice to exclude Catholic worship from the Pentagon chapel this past Good Friday.
It’s worth noting that while Catholics who ally themselves with evangelical protestants try to persuade themselves otherwise, many (most?) evangelical protestants view Catholics as not-actually-Christian pagans who need to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior to avoid the actual flames of hell. It’s a phenomenon not unlike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
The Puritans, what we generally mean when we say 'founding protestants,' weren't fleeing persecution from Catholics.
In fact, they weren't fleeing persecution at all! They were living in the (relatively) religiously tolerant Netherlands. They left the Netherlands because they weren't succeeding in business there. They came to North America essentially as economic migrants.
I think the Pilgrims lived in the Netherlands for about 10 years, in a refugee town run by Catholics. But they were a minority on the Mayflower. I don’t think any spoke Dutch.
I’m concerned about people with addictions being exploited by greedy degenerates who don’t care about the negative externalities with which they’re burdening our society, yes.
Do you propose to make all addictive endeavours illegal? Ban porn? It might actually be a good idea in theory, but I doubt it'd work in practice, who knows.
Sports gambling was illegal in most states just a few years ago. Prediction markets also didn't exist. We have ample evidence to show us that it did work fine to ban these things. We aren't talking about some hypothetical world. We are talking about a world that existed just ten years ago.
Gambling is particular, specific burden and crime against society that's been recognized as such for thousands of years.
The recent experiments with legalizing it on an industrial scale are simply experiments with legalizing crime. We don't have to touch the stove but I guess simply being told about what happens isn't enough for us.
Seems like the obvious answer to the prisoner’s dilemma problem where everyone wants to lay off their workforce, but expects that they’ll be the only ones to get this bright idea.
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