canarypilot

Of all the replies I was expecting from you, this wasn’t on my betting slip.

There’s no condescension here; you had one key thesis I objected to (and, incidentally, were the first to invoke a robot war!)

> I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.

My argument is - it did “used to be this way”. Your proxy, as best as I can tell, agreed.

> formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then.

And your courageous avatar made a weak (e.g. the word probably, not provably and “I think” not “I showed”) supportive claim (I cannot see the reams of research behind the conclusion).

> I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago

I said, ok, let’s take that at face - where do you feel the transition happend, and posited reasons why the transition may seem stronger (social media).

Now you’re unwilling to argue specifics and off dismissing my sincerity. Adult argument fully abandoned, feelings abound!

So neither of us will learn anything useful today. I’ll never find out specifically when you believe our slippery slope began, and you’ll never explore whether reality matches your thinking. Let’s hope the data centers that powered your race to self-confirmation were running on solar, so at least the environment was spared!

In the hope of rescuing some thread.

> There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change.

This is not only demonstrably false, it also turns your initial thesis “it didn’t used to be like this” into a farce. You were the first to claim there was some time boxing we could apply!

It also, candidly, reinforces the first conclusion robo-me reached. “ someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book”. My robot gave me 10,000 examples of books on the study and findings of historians researching the evolution of cultural norms over time. It is very much a thing. I very much believe in it sincerely as a valuable discipline.

If you really want to argue that nobody can say Victorian social norms evolved, and were arguably most harmed by the First World War. Or that the gender and sexual attitudes of the post-second-world-war were pushed to breaking point during a period known as the “swinging sixties”. Or that the introduction of social media and camera phones to the schoolyard caused a dramatic change in kids’ behaviors. Then I think you’re being a special kind of Saturday obstinate.

But if you are actually trying to discuss rather than play-fight, try answering the question - when specifically do you think that the decline began, such that we are no longer living in the rose-tinted era where things “used to be”?

And dude, you can back your claim down or add nuance to it - “creatives censor in a different way in the internet era to how the censored in the TV era” is a defensible claim, I’ll even let you have “the nature of what is censored now has changed”. You’re just not getting away with a demonstrably false “there’s more censorship now”.

My robot says:

““use a better paid model” as an argument from authority is magnificent. We’ve somehow reinvented “my dad can beat up your dad,” except our dads are inference-time budgets”.

So there’s that.

Getting back to human responses; it’s hard to argue your robot’s conclusion when it only got to a weak “probably” while comparing the communication environments of 1980’s (no social media) and 2026 (very much social media). Lots more people with lots bigger platforms dealing with lots more voices on what should/shouldn’t be tolerated -> perceived increase in volume of censorship by both audience and other creatives (themselves taking role of both audience and performer playing to their own audience)

Elvis may not have been calling to censor himself, but the hosts and producers (themselves creatives) followed the demands of the audience - surely at least a somewhat close analogy to creatives amplifying the voices of their audiences today?

To get a bit better than your model’s “probably”, maybe we should shoot for specifics. If we agree there was a “dark past” where government and religious pressure created artistic censorship to comparable levels to today, and if I concede to move the argument forward that we’re in “historical decline” now. Where specifically do you put the beginning and end of the “golden age”?

TV self-censored for years. Elvis was unfit for family viewing. Punks wouldn’t share stages with racists and ejected National Front supporters from gigs. Rock against Racism was founded partly in response to Eric Clapton’s pro-Enoch Powell racist remarks. Dead Kennedeys were not exactly coy about where they drew the line.

If you want medical analogies for COVID, AIDS disinformation is perfect. ACT UP and similar AIDS movements would have laughed you out of creative spaces for bringing misinformation about how AIDS was spread.

If you have ChatGPT tokens going spare, you can ask it for a balanced view of historical artistic deplatforming and self-censoring. I asked mine and, in classic one-liner machine-slop dunk, it said…

“The argument sounds like it is being made by someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book, or someone over 40 who missed the world around them. Ask them which they are.”

Yes, and, Bush-Cheney were the modern forefathers of pushing the unitary executive theory, building on the work of Reagan after a 90’s shaped lull. Reagan took ideas from The Heritage Foundation, who returned in the ‘24 elections pushing Project 2025. A natural endgame and roadmap for the movement of power to the president, that is being followed as approximately as any political roadmap ever is.

Remember that each time you’re tempted to crack a Coors light!

Need to triple buffer or there’s a condition where you have used a plate from the clean pile, but the dirty wash is still running. You’d just have to stand there in the kitchen like some kind of Sims character.

Great Stuff Guys! But I worry the concept of a long-running gag may be lost on today’s youth.

If you had some way to illustrate an aging joke, possibly situated near to something much younger (for comparison) I would be deeply obliged if you could print it on page 94 of your organ.

Removing context to make a selective argument is intellectually dishonest.

The article contrasts the operating environment of “Big Three” auto-manufacturers across countries. It compares manufacture costs in Germany and Japan with those in the US, and the paragraph you cite links through to a (2004) article in which it is estimated that pensions and health insurance combined add $1,784 to the cost of a car in the US.

You need to subtract some contradictory numbers in the article to come to a number you can ascribe to health insurance, but somewhere between $400 and $800 fits a quoted “$900 will flow to [pension] funds”.

Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a result of the US having no universal healthcare system.

Lamentably for your position, just because there are political decisions involved that bring about consequences, factual discussion of those consequences is not itself necessarily political.

Challenging this axiom is why when I think of the threat model I face traveling from place to place, I come to the inevitable conclusion that I am very likely a target of assassination attempts.

Consequently, I ensure that my motorcade of armed guards are always with me, and accept cars loaded with only the toughest reinforced glass. I am, of course, paranoid about physical proximity to strangers and that mostly incentivizes me to avoid public travel, particularly flights (though even my private jets must be carefully maintained only by my most trusted insiders lest they find themselves tumbling out the sky near Tver). When flying on particularly important trips I send a decoy plane, and I make sure that air space near me is well controlled.

Or maybe, just maybe, I don’t actually face the same threat profile as presidents, spy agency bigwigs, and leaders of paramilitary organizations, and pretending I do is an act of high fantasy that far from empowering my true human soul would be so ridiculous as to make life unlivable!

One hop from the parent article is a discussion on why these researchers believe it matters.

Hacker News comments have been in a bit of an anti-academia, pro-business mood recently, so most relevant question copied below.

Imagine an (exploitative? Creative?) product launch for a probiotic yogurt made “to give you the biome of a true paleo”. We might want to ensure those whose mouths were swabbed to unlock that tag line were compensated.

> Q: What is microbiome ownership, and why is it important? Weyrich: This means that someone could own or have rights to their own bacteria. The ‘next generation’ of probiotics to support health are coming from people who donate their microbes — not yogurts or fermented foods, so establishing a framework for people to own their microbes means that they could benefit or profit from the commercialization of these microbes. This framework is important for providing equal benefits for research participants, research teams and companies that may want to commercialize someone’s microbes to make ‘next generation’ probiotics.

Best drop that M from STEM; from the article, and similar recent reporting, the graduate Maths program is one of the indulgences Virginians can do without.

Knowing that group N passengers may be forced to check their bags, the pricing to put yourself in group N - 1 is your “calculated misery”. Repeat across other airline convenience fees like seating.

CPU Hotplug is a long established name for this process, whether for correctness or power, particularly in Linux Kernel contexts.