The news, and with it politics, have largely deteriorated to the point where only a few percent of the highest quality sources are worth any attention. It's all simple narrative grievance and entertainment. NYT in particular has fallen into oblivion resorting to typo clickbait and hate reads. The attention economy has defeated the information economy, with this one weird trick...
My prediction for the New Year is that LLMs won't make it better.
I've often wondered why the dishwasher vendors didn't put a label on the little flip open door so that it actually said, "dirty" on the outside, and "clean" on the inside.
Once you're selling them, put a bounty where kids can turn in the cards for money. Then you'll both set a price floor and know which stores are selling them and you can find out who's doing it. Nothing says that a token has to last for a constant amount of time. If kids turn in more than a certain percentage, then that location would have theirs expire early.
What I like here is that you've turned a digital problem into a physical one where we already have solutions and intuition for how to enforce rules.
I assume he will also no longer be able to live in the engineering hall basement. Beyond personal moral satisfaction, coming forward only means sacrifice.
But a number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective. A terrible event all around.
> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective
I disagree. The shooter’s victims fell to a random act of violence. (As in the victims were randomly selected. The shooter didn’t randomly occur.)
It is tragic. But it was a crime committed by one man, now dead, who targeted the innocent.
The tipster is more than innocent. He is a hero. His eviction is not a random act of cruelty, but a result of his heroism. And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.
To be clear, there’s no actual evidence that he’s being evicted. Talking about “his eviction” is pretty premature. It also seems like he will receive the reward.
I'm drawing a moral analogy to mass murder, so the whole thing is going to tend towards the unhinged. But I'll stand by it. There is something sad in ordinary people bending to banal evil. Monsters being monsters is just horrific.
Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.
The building owners do have a right to occupy their own building, right? Or are you proposing we deny them their ownership as some kind of reward to the hero? That would amount to advocating that two wrongs make a right.
Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
> Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
The characterization of “us” as “assailants” is an acknowledgment of the sorrowful fate that we as a society inflict on nearly every whistleblower despite the fact that we as a society encourage people to be whistleblowers.
Oh if he wasn't interferring, then they must have allowed him to keep living there? Why is that sad, you want him to be kicked out?
(You forgot to use logic or explain a point of view and instead just made a random moral judgement and expressed the emotion it made you feel, so I had to make some assumptions about your intentions and depth of thought)
I think my logic is fine. You pulled reasons to get rid of him out of nowhere, not based on the facts of the case. Not just supporting a possible eviction but preemptively deciding it's the only way to get peaceful use of their building even though they were already getting peaceful use of their building. That's sad, because you're justifying a big punishment as consequence of doing a big good deed, with nobody benefitting.
And your first sentence makes no sense. That's not how people usually work. They get possessive and risk-averse and ban things that are unusual. That "if-then" is a total joke, and without it your criticism of my argument falls apart.
And I'm not just saying that as a reaction, I really want to know how you could have possibly interpreted the above comment to get that reaction. Please explain.
The biggest problem with calculators (rather than slide rules), was that because calculations with big numbers (large mantissa) were so easy, people got used to doing them that way without consideration.
Using a slide rule meant inherently knowing order-of-magnitude, rounding, and precision. Once calculators make it easy they enable both new kinds of solutions and new kinds of errors (that you have to separately teach to avoid).
At the same time, I basically agree. Humans are very bad calculators and we've needed tools (abacus) for millennia.
I guess I'm in a bubble, because it doesn't feel that way to me.
When AI tops the charts (in country music) and digital visual artists have to basically film themselves working to prove that they're actually creating their art, it's already gone pretty far. It feels like the even when people care (and they great mass do not) it creates problems for real artists. Maybe they will shift to some other forms of art that aren't so easily generated, or maybe they'll all just do "clean up" on generated pieces and fake brush sequences. I'd hate for art to become just tracing the outlines of something made by something else.
Of course, one could say the same about photography where the art is entirely in choosing the place, time, and exposure. Even that has taken a hit with believable photorealistic generators. Even if you can detect a generator, it spoils the field and creates suspicion rather than wonder.
It's interesting, because I read that and the following comment, “Most of the increase in child poverty has occurred in large families,” as almost getting the point.
The point should be, "how to we forestall demographic collapse?" Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that, so better make it easy to have lots of kids!
if you want to nudge people to have kids that they can’t support to solve some fertility crisis (despite automation proceeding at breakneck speed), then just ban abortion.
And also provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Recently after dropping no-fault divorce, more onerous child support laws, "red flag" and other temporary protection orders that can be obtained on little more than a mere one-sided claim (David Letterman famously had one against him for "sending coded [abusive] messages through the television"), alimony that relies on old timey presumptions a divorced partner can't work, etc, the calculus is looking ever more desperate.
Nowadays marriage still has most the downsides, but the upsides are looking less and less. And even more, the contract can totally change out from under you, you are basically agreeing to a vague contract that society can arbitrarily change at any moment and all the meanwhile scream "you agreed to this" no matter that it was unilaterally changed by a 3rd party to the contract and the playout of the actual terms of the contract hidden within places like family court where it's literally illegal to release the proceedings that allow one to make a rational decision upon ("think of the privacy of the children").
> provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Not causally it isn’t.
I disagree with this entire social project, babies aren’t interchangeable and I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments. Need to encourage people who are doing well supporting themselves to have more children rather than squeezing out the tenth from two-timing Jimmy.
Please provide your evidence there is no causal association between marriage and fertility rates.
>I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments
A prime reason why I didn't have kids in my 20s was because I could afford the kids in marriage, but couldn't afford to spend 20% (more like 30% post tax) on child support, as I had calculated it out. And knowing divorce is always possible, not willing to risk that. The actual cost of my kid is like 10% of my income, but because I'm married I'm not forced to spend closer to 30% as a transfer payment with no check it actually goes to the child. Without poorly thought out child support laws I'd have had kids sooner, and possibly more, and the kids would likely have been better off because when I was younger I had more energy and better genetic material to produce them.
I would even assert the people thinking ahead of time about child support actually calculated in a way that achieves roughly enough to take kids out of poverty, rather than basically a % of income, are exactly the type of people that should be parents. Under the current system child support can be next to nil, or extremely high if you're high income, rather than revolving around ensuring it is actually a number and check and balance to ensure the payment and spending is to bring kids out of poverty. The current system has less child support for poverty-born children but higher for wealthy-born children, meaning the incentives are precisely backwards from incentivizing children born into higher income marriages and the CS incentives higher for higher-income families to divorce and fall back into the lower-fertility unmarried bucket.
Those are support for marriage. Despite the stereotypes, the limiting factor for marriage is women -- there are more men that want to marry than there are women. Things that lower the costs and risks of marriage for women will make marriage more common.
Women have risks from pretty much all the things I've mentioned.
I struggle to find any data that shows positive (increasing) correlation between modern family law and marriage rates, so I'm curious where you got your conclusion from that those things are improving women's proclivity to marry.
pretty obvious. the cause of the fertility crisis writ large is not men choosing to not have children, the entirely reply is clearly projecting some personal injustice the commentator felt into some broader social issue.
Would that work? It would be a strong incentive for effective contraceptive use, and some people who would have otherwise had a child later will already have one, etc.
No idea how it would all add up, but its not obviously true.
It’s not obviously true that a ban on abortion would lead to more children? Contraceptives aren’t 100% effective. The availability of contraception + abortion is absolutely going to block more children from being born than contraception alone.
Asking the right questions (in the right language) was important before and it's even more important with LLMs, if you want to get any real leverage out of them.
My prediction for the New Year is that LLMs won't make it better.
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