ramblenode

There may always be a moral panic but that doesn't mean every moral panic is equally misplaced.

Most high school age children of the 1800s weren't inclined to read novels 12+ hours a day and neglect their sleep and hygiene to finish a few more chapters...

> is it damaging if your caregiver uses phone a lot but remains responsive.

> but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.

This is probably more relevant to people who are using their phones for passive entertainment than work. The difference is that your kids are more engaging than your work, so your attention will naturally be pulled toward your kids, whereas parents who are scrolling social media or playing games are going to be more drawn to their phones and are going to have punctuated and shallow interactions with their kids.

Personally, I don't think I've ever observed someone who was actively engaged with their phone who was also fully engaged with the people around them.

> Like the panic over fracking

Fracking is absolutely not harmless. I posted elsewhere in this thread about how I have had family property damaged by fracking-induced earthquakes. This is in a region with no active faults, with no record of earthquakes before the fracking started, and the wells are tens of miles away, not next door. I certainly hope data centers are better than fracking wells because those things are a plague.

> Honestly, fracking is a better deal than a data center.

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but fracking is an absolute plague, and I would encourage you to do more research about it's downsides if you think it is mostly benign. Aside from the better known ground water poisoning from leaks and dumping, fracking creates actual earthquakes that can be felt tens of miles away. My family has property that has been damaged by these earthquakes---in a region with no active faults where there wasn't an earthquake in living memory before the fracking started. Now there are at least several per year strong enough to rattle a tea cup off the table. A few people get paid, but it's a horrible deal for almost everybody else in the county.

I'm sure there's plenty of people who say that (on earth), but how many are going to have buyer's remorse after the first month? We tend to only send the most exemplary humans to space because you have to be in excellent physical and mental health just to weather the difficult conditions.

Looking out for the best interests of your members isn't activism.

Most of China's large projects are actually some type of competition with the US. The Tianjin Grand Bridge was basically built to eclipse the Causeway and showcase China's engineering prowess. The massive Shanghai subway buildout was a direct challenge to New York City's subway hegemony. Those 20+ story pig towers? Totally unnecessary way to do farming, but a source of national pride when compared to the already impressive scale of US factory farming. China is building record numbers of both solar and coal plants, which seem to be at environmental cross-purposes, but it makes sense when you consider they are trying to beat the US at both clean AND dirty energy. It's in the five-year plan.

"Grains" usually refers to cereal grains. Everything you listed except for oats is typically classified as a legume or a pulse, not a grain.

I think your second point is a good one, although most economists would probably say this is an argument against the minimum wage rather than an argument for tariffs.

The ultimate problem with your first point---that tariffs boost domestic industry---is that the time horizon for reshoring manufacturing and domestic supply chains is longer than the expected lifetime of these tariffs. Trump is a second term president, there isn't broad consensus or even majority support for the tarrifs, and there is a great deal of opposition from business owners: all signs the tariffs are not for long. Who wants to invest in an expensive factory and workforce when the only thing guaranteeing your competitiveness is the remaining years of Trump? It's actually much worse than this, of course, because the tariffs are being used primarily as diplomatic leverage rather than economic policy, so they change frequently and unpredictably.

There are also serious downsides to the Trump tariffs that don't exist for traditional tariffs that are predictable and operate on a long time horizon. These tariffs create price shocks to domestic industry and retailers, which tend to disproportionately hurt smaller businesses and those with slimmer profit margins. They've also damaged the US's reputation with long-term partners, particularly Canada and the EU, which are now exploring competing trade deals with China and are figuring out how to extract themselves from dependence on US arms and tech companies, two major exports.

The effect of these tariffs is not going to be short-term pain for long-term gain. A great deal of US economic competitiveness comes from investments in diplomatic and military partnerships that have now been undermined. These tariffs will spur reciprocal tariffs from other nations and will accelerate the remodeling of the global economy away from US exports, trading competitive US exports for uncompetitive and commodified domestic industry.

Economies of scale aren't specific to states. That's something every cooperative group benefits from.

Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.

Here is my (hot take) proposal for regulation:

1) *All major players open source their unobfuscated training data.*

a) The evidence so far shows that every major AI company engaged in intentional and historically unprecedented copyright violation to obtain their training data.

b) LLMs have now poisoined future data for any new players. This is a massive negative externality, and we shouldn't accept this externality as a moat locking out future players from competition.

2) *Levy a 20% royalty on all future genAI revenue to authors and artists who appear in the dataset and exempt genAI from future copywright violations.*

a) The current copyright model is bad for both authors and AI companies. It's hard for authors to collect from violations, and it's expensive and tedious for AI companies to comply with innumerable individual copyrights. Simplify the regime for everyone, and properly reward the people whose work is the foundation of these models.

b) The specifics can be worked out, but, among other things, the royalty should be proprotional to the token count of a work, not just number of works.

Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum.

The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.

I bet it could be done if even a fraction of the Artemis budget were devoted to it.