nocoolnametom

You hit on the head something that I've been trying to put into words for a while now: it seems that the benefit of technology to increase learning appears to be a bell-shaped graph where for each combination of subject matter there is a sweet spot where the level of technological assistance becomes helpful but after which it replaces too much of your own internal neuron-connecting processes and inhibits learning.

For many years I often wondered why wealthy American capitalists (except for the ones in insurance, obviously) didn't actively promote socialized medicine that would free their companies from having to provide health insurance to their employees: it'd be better for their bottom line, wouldn't it? Healthier workforce, lower expenses per headcount, etc. I figured it must just be a generational thing from those who grew up during the Red Scare to distrust anything "socialized."

It's been in recent years, though, that I have come to see that it's still _very_ much in their interest to have employees who already have a job to feel _scared_ to leave it. I don't think this is an organized operation, there's no annual meeting of US company HR departments who scheme about it, I doubt it's something actively thought about by many people very often, but all the same the loss of corporate-provided insurance would do _so much_ to loosen the fears that keep people working for jobs that it would no doubt have a _large_ effect on the economy and every company. The biggest effect would be that it'd be extremely simple to leave a low-paying job to seek a higher wage if you have just enough saved up to cover rent and living expenses for the interim.

As such, it finally makes sense to me why so many of the wealthy choose not to lobby for socialized medicine or even to actively fund lobbying against it even if they're not involved in the insanely-powerful for-profit health industry themselves or to lobby in other countries to weaken/dismantle/destroy their existing systems (yes, I know that with an aging population costs of care are getting higher everywhere, but a lot of the funding issues with UK NHS and Canada Medicare are also political in origin): it weakens labor and wages more than they ever have to spend on insurance.

This is what REALLY pains me about this discussion: I am 100% about personal digital freedom, but I am also 100% opposed to promoting political violence and promoting theft and grift using generative AI. If C2PA is going to work towards one goal by being diametrically opposed to the other then it _cannot_ be a useful tool and we need an _actual_ solution. I was extremely excited by C2PA until today and now am only disappointed that there isn't already some better solution.

Edit: Thinking through this a bit more, I think the goal of _authenticating_ a photo using C2PA is still useful. If the goal is to remove them to get a "naked" image, that's fine, such an image is then inherently no more or less trustworthy than any other image. If the goal is to figure out how to reproduce a valid provenance chain on top of an altered image then I have problems with that.

Perhaps, but the entire ecosystem of associated buzzwords/ideas is pretty popular in our culture today: "job creator" C-suite executives magically "create" jobs and/or raise pay because their budget for taxes goes down and they just don't know where else to put the cash, thus everyone benefits. Is it a straw man? Sure. Is it the same pablum often delivered by the evening news and politicians? Yes. Is reality a TON more complicated and often counter-intuitive? Yep. (Raising wages doesn't seem to have a _direct_ correlation to inflation, it's correlated but often lagging and muted in response; job creation seems to be mostly a market effect not corporate decision; the modern definition of "fiduciary duty" means extra cash should go toward immediate stockholder benefit so stock buybacks are always FAR more likely than employee benefits; etc; etc).

The one area I'd push back strong on is that nobody is "advocating" for it. Many stockholding orgs/individuals are. They don't care if its a straw man, they know what the real-world systemic effects are of lower taxation rates.

The fact that it is private equity that is going to evaporate when the bubble bursts is the only silver lining I can see. However, my natual cynicism makes me bet they'll spend whatever they've got left over on their pet politicians to use government (ie, public funding) to bail themselves back out.

You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.

Indeed, source very much still matters. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

"Qui bono," who benefits, is a great question to ask about the organization and the story when reading it, especially when combined with Hanlon's Razor. Tend not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. And when malice is reasonable, then make sure to ask Who Benefits from the malice. If that's difficult to determine or the benefit seems small in comparison to likelihood of human stupidity, assume human stupidity.

Is the organization historically trustworthy? (MSNBC and Fox News, when not being talking heads and not talking about the current culture war buzzwords, tend to do good reporting.) If the story is wrong, is it reasonable to assume it's because someone somewhere misread something, mistyped something, misstated something, or otherwise made a mistake? (Perhaps the story breaking or otherwise too recent for slow, quality research. Perhaps the reporter, while trained in research, is not expert enough to come to the correct conclusions of their research, or is not researching or can't find nonexistent peer criticism to the research, both big problems in science reporting, especially when the reporting is of initial findings that haven't been peer reviewed.) If the story is not accidentally wrong through human stupidity, then qui bono, who benefits from malice? (Does it present a politician as unhinged or out of control? Does it ? And especially, would the story impact wealth, either to hurt it or protect it?) Sources like PBS, which (while they are NOT immune) are impacted far less by click-through ad rates and through funding partially derived from donations and public funding have less incentive to push narratives that benefit particular monied and/or political interests, or foreign sources like BBC or AJ don't get as much benefit when it comes to stories about US events that don't tie directly back to their organizational/political benefits. (When these are NOT the case, of course, then malice become far more easy to assume for these sources!)

So is it more likely that Governor Whitmer targeted gardening supply stores during the early pandemic because she was testing/pushing the limits of government power to limit the freedom of citizens to go where they wished or to expand government's economic control over the American marketplace, or is it more likely that there was political power to be derived from presenting the image of the governor as petty, tyrranical, and nonsensical? Or is it more likely that everything, both the initial EO's presentation, the angry response to it, and the fact-checking of the response, were victims of our human foibles?

Personally, I think it's far more likely a mix of human stupidity in writing the EO in a way where it was easy to misread the EO as specifically targeting gardening stores, combined with a malice decision to push hard on what was probably originally a misreading because it presented a view of the governor that worked to politically tear down her trustworthiness as she was taking actions that were having an economic impact on monied interests in the state (the EO essentially tried to turn big box stores into grocery-only stores to limit gathering, which during the Fog of War of the early pandemic was a reasonable health goal even if years of hindsight have given us a far better view of how impactful that actually was or not). Plus some stupidity on pushing back far too hard on the fact-checking response to give the impression that the EO didn't even mention gardening (it completely did, very clearly, in the list of attempts to pre-empt loopholes to the EO's attempt to limit the uses of large stores in order to minimize the reasons for people to gather in them to limit crowd sizes). Also, the Facebook/Twitter viral news sources get their money from clicks, so their stories tend to be far more about pathos than ethos or logos and truth is all-too-often a casuality for them.

I'm sorry about the length of my thoughts here. Bevity is the soul of wit, and I'm a rather witless man.

s/Democrat nominee/Democratic nominee/g

or

s/Democrat nominee/nominee for the Democrats/g

"Democrat" is a long-used general US political slang to refer to an individual member of the Democratic Party (or to refer to a collective of individual members if used as the plural "Democrats"). In the past few decades right-wing commentators have made frequent improper use of the slang to refer to the official party, partly due to its easy association with negative words such as "autocrat" and "plutocrat", resulting in the common misuse of the slang. However, there is no such thing as the "Democrat Party" or "Democrat nominee".

And it'll be pretty easy to keep track of how many crimes they _do_ discover, because the first one will be trumpeted loudly everywhere, and then after that they'll use the entire list of people as though it's a partial example: "How do we know that this individual is not associated with <crimes>, as we've already seen with _countless_ examples, like <the unspoken entirety of the list of examples>?"

Yes, but each time diluting the power of the justices individually. Right now if you have one wacko justice who decides on the basis of political ideology instead of some of the established legal theories they have 11% of a say in things. Add another few justices who are relatively normal and the ability of the wacko to swing things into dangerous territory goes down. Even if the tit-for-tat tries to cram more wackos in you have to try to convince the Senate to let more and more obviously terribly choices through.

The problem comes with "Extend."

"We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's already present for all users!" Repeat until you gain enough influence that ActivityPub is seen as inferior.

Then comes "Extinguish." Breaking changes to MetaPub reducing federation to only MetaPub clients or give up entirely and turn off federation anyways.

I know, right? It's like, I don't even want to HEAR about your ideas on how to fix a broken system unless you've taken the personal responsibility to try and reorient your personal life to adhere to your proposed ideas while continuing to try living in the still-broken system even if that personal transition, without any systemic changes to the surrounding culture and community, make your new life impossible to live.

That's the way we _always_ implement change in America!

*Also, do you not like that the socialist merely _has_ two homes, or do you not agree with the reasoning behind _why_ they have two homes?

> "Even if you have whistleblowers come forward, they're ignored."

Do you have any sources for this? I'm rather disbelieving of it, but would love to be proven wrong. I can't imagine that _some_ major news outlet wouldn't love to stick it to the status quo with a whistleblower, unless the "whisteblower" made false claims about their proximity in the company to the dangerous/illegal actions they are trying to bring attention to.