sham1

As someone from one of those non-US democracies, the reason why we can mandate IDs for votes is because they're basically trivial to get, whereas from what I've heard of the American hodgepodge of state-level IDs and "this one counts while this one doesn't" shenanigans, that doesn't seem to apply to the US. Now, I know that over there, the several states are responsible for running the elections within their borders -- that being in the US Constitution -- but some states seem to try to (and succeed in) making it unnecessarily difficult, and that may or may not be on purpose. Civil Rights groups certainly seem to think that it is, and that it affects minority populations disproportionately, because of course it does.

For a point of comparison, here in Finland we require that a voter has a valid ID, that is an ID card, a driver's licence with a photo in it, or a passport. Now what if you _don't_ have one of those IDs? Easy, you go to the police station and get yourself a temporary ID, which is by law given free of charge. You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.

And of course there are other things outside of the ID issue which make the elections not rigged against minorities. Simple things like having the actual election day on a Sunday, the polling stations being usually in walking distance in cities -- people living in the countryside most likely have a car -- and that said polling stations tend to be in schools, shops, and other such places where people would be going anyway. Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.

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The US could totally start doing ID mandates, but the problem is that in the US, their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns, but out of voter disenfranchisement, which again, hits minority populations disproportionately hard.

The Christian conservative movement seems to really have that sort of an outlook. I mean, last year there were some that called out a priest for "the sin of empathy" when she was preaching about taking care of the less fortunate and not laying immigrants to the wayside. Because as we all know, one of the things that Big J disliked was checks notes empathy!

And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.

> Example: many believe the rich ought to be taxed more; but the problem is the Laffer curve: when they're taxed too much, they work less or leave France. So tax receipts go down (not up).

Has this literally ever happened, like anywhere? Yeah, the Laffer curve is a very real concern and a by-product of Rolle's theorem, but we don't even know where the supposed inflection point is, much less whether any given tax reform that would cause wealthy people to pay more would go over it.

> So the change harms the very people who are protesting for the change.

Human psychology is weird in that they might even be okay with this as long as the perceived fairness increases. But the only way to find out would be to do an experiment. That might also help us find the inflection point in the Laffer curve.

There has never been socialism in the EU.

The irony with these AI corpos is that they're okay with scraping all of human creative endeavours yet they get annoyed at others doing distillation on their models.

Compensating authors would be a moral thing to do, but morals aren't really a thing for corpos, so whatever. However the fact that they then turn around and get annoyed at other actors for scraping their stuff is very hilarious and shows how much they care about the social contract :)

While your point is valid enough -- although it could have been made without this kind of snarky and sarcastic snide -- it seems clear that global copyright legislation is a lot more beneficial to the wealthy capital owners rather than the artists that you were alluding towards. Now, this is no insurmountable obstacle at least in theory. The laws could be modified in a way that lets small artists etc focus on following their passions without starving, without allowing capital to do what is essentially the intellectual equivalent of enclosure of the Commons.

Of course, one thing needed for this is the political will as well as getting rid of the idea of defending exploitation by the billionaire class by conflating their needs with the needs of starving artists because one can technically argue that copyright helps both, despite everyone knowing that one party is benefiting a lot more from it than the other.

Solving the universe's mysteries is over thing, and if this really was about just the researchers' feelings then your perspective would be the valid one.

However, we live under capitalism. People also need to have their careers to be able to afford the goods and services to keep themselves alive. So unless AI causes a radical -- some might even call it revolutionary -- reconfiguration in the way our societies work, putting people out of work is just cruel and the gleeful commentary around that is just more salt in the wound.

Are you ready to fight for the AI to seize the means of production for the betterment of all humanity or at the very least enable us to have proper universal basic income? Because just disrupting every industry to make humans obsolete without a plan will just result in that happening anyway, just with more misery and conflict.

The Purge was a terrible movie in so many ways but its message is still extremely resonant. It's also about as subtle as a brick wall, yet I'm afraid that it might have been still a tad too subtle.

Maybe I am, but I'd argue that in that case I'm depicting literally all professions as rent-seeking, as people really want to protect their income and livelihoods from infringement that would endanger them. And at that point it's probably not useful to talk about it as rent-seeking.

If AI can do literally any job more efficiently than a human, then there's no need for human labour anymore and at least to me that seems that unless we get a radical transformation of our political economy, that will not be allowed to happen. You can't just put literally everyone out of a job, capitalism just wouldn't be able to cope with it and it'd implode, most probably because of the inevitable backlash that would occur for to no one being able to afford the basic necessities of life. It would be orders of magnitude bigger than either the French or Russian revolutions.

I'm no mathematician, but if being concerned about being able to keep my employment to be able to feed myself makes me a rent-seeker, then I will wear that on my sleeve proudly, crossing my heart, hoping to die. The misery of the alternative is too great to fathom.

Didn't you literally say

> Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity.

And I gave a way in which charging a price does that.

I am open to the idea of being incorrect in this case, in which I apologise for misunderstanding, and concede that I'm missing the nuance but in my defence, I'm not a native speaker.

You'd be ecstatic until you realise "oh damn, how will I get enough money to eat?"

Sure, there are probably some mathematicians that are sad that robots can do all the proofs and such for them, but it seems to me that most of them probably would be happy with the robots helping to solve problems if not for the little issues that mathematics is their profession and in the current state of things, they need to eat and have a place to live.

And that is the actual problem. Let's just remember, the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were against the technology being owned by a small elite that could use it to take away their livelihoods. They were against the capitalists essentially throwing them into the ditch to starve, and we're seeing echoes of that in the current AI discussion and the reactions of mathematicians, programmers, artists, etc. Back in the 1800s it was physical and artisan manufacturing labour in danger, and now it's mental labour.

Selling a book quite literally is gatekeeping, since the idea is that you're prevented from engaging with the work without paying for it. Even with libraries it was society who paid for it in order for the commons to get access, but payment was nevertheless needed.

It just turns out that the Chesterton's gate is useful and people tend to think that people should be paid for their labour, since people kinda need a roof over their heads and food on their table.

And this is why we must ensure that the AIs get aligned towards humanity and crucially that they don't get aligned towards capital, which seems to be the current trajectory.

There's a better chance that a humanity-aligned AI would make sure that humans have something to do and keep us alive versus a capital-aligned one. At the same time, if AI would be the deathblow to capitalism, that'd be very, _very_ ironic.

Eh, that analogy doesn't really work. It'd be more like claiming that you built a PC when you bought a pre-built one.