Philosophically: The tech billionaires, AI investors, and the folks arguing "biological consciousness is of no greater worth than the future digital variety" have effectively adopted nihilism and rejected humanism. If I recall my old humanities classes correctly, both of these are fundamentally rationalist - to my knowledge, the only way to make a logical argument for the value of human existence is to found it on the subjective experience of wanting to exist.

Humanism (which is, IIRC, approximately the foundation for modern western civilization), embraces the required component of subjectivity and suggests we enjoy the ride and, you know, maybe not go around killing each other and destroying ourselves because:

1. 1. Subjectively it sucks.
2. 2. Objectively, the only way things can suck is subjectively, therefore if something sucks subjectively then ... it sucks.

In the current context it looks to me like the relationship between humanism and nihilism on a spectrum of existentialism is becoming literal again. We either decide that we want to exist, and we're willing to do what is rationally necessary to support each other in existing, or we're out.

... and, yeah, that "biological consciousness is of no greater worth than the future digital variety" argument, is a literal declaration that the folks making this decision are perfectly happy to end your existence in pursuit of their nihilistic fantasies.

I'm guessing organized crime using crypto now is like Disney doing streaming after Netflix proved the business model.

I assume he means "remain competitive" in terms of ROI for billionaires. Which might be true despite the productivity loss and burnout if you assume individual workers are a disposable resource.

On the other hand, mathematically, if you are someone who actually produces anything, your best bet at achieving for a better life in the current environment would be for us to fully defund the Epstein class.

That quote was probably included to get the exact reaction I'm going to give, and I'm good with it. Set aside anything else Anthropic might do later.

Moral judgement is what we're supposed to do. When the friggin' AI companies think you've taken the quest for power and surveillance too far, you're in a very bad place.

Are you attached to the local numbering on a 12 hour clock? Do people find the current situation preferable to (as an example) standardizing on UTC+0 globally, and then working through whatever semantic and work-shift accommodations are needed to keep things working at a local level?

Maybe I'm doing something dumb here, so spot check me, but in terms of daily intake: "at 86 degrees, it's more than 15 grams. Beyond that, appetites lessen and added sugar falls off, according to the study in Monday's Nature Climate Change."

If there are 40 grams of sugar in a normal soda, then sounds like they're saying that when it's above 86 degrees, the typical American might buy a soda approximately once every 2.7 days. So that 100 million lbs / year is just big because there are nearly 350 million people here. Obviously soda isn't the best drink, but it sounds like the whole thing could just as easily say "when it's hot out, people will occasionally buy something at a vending machine."

Simultaneously making it harder to be well informed, but easier to believe one is well informed.

-- "Who controls the present now? Now testify!" ~ Jane Austin

OP is suggesting that the police ought to be smarter than a bag of hammers.

If we actually wanted to get money out of politics, and maybe do something about getting a government by the people instead of a few oligarchs, we'd have to quit falling for the trap. As soon as the conversation starts revolving around whether "the left" or "the right" is to blame, and worrying about hobbling "our side" while the "other side" keeps getting ahead - we're back in the trap: fighting against ourselves while the Epstein class pulls all the strings.

Almost nobody is going to unilaterally disarm while their "other side" is threatening them. Unfortunately can't all just count down from three and agree to forego PACs at the same time, but we could make some incremental steps.

First:

See that "approval rights over political content" thing? Take it as a given that if someone is claiming to represent "the left" but not actively working to get rid of oligarchs and big money in politics, they aren't accurately representing the biggest concerns of "the left." It doesn't depend on whether they get paid to make political ads - but it does depend on whether they oppose oligarchy and political bribes.

Second - adjust the "our side won't give it up because your side is worse" thing with "ready when you are" approach, similar to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact approach. (I'm not arguing that you should / should not support that compact, just using it as a example for how to deal with this kind of situation.)

Anyway.. this sucks.

... from the "Good Place," right? As in, we're not supposed to figure it out, but we're in Hell.

In other words, this attitude is a good way to filter out people who can find better options, and get stuck with the ones who couldn't.

My guess is probably not; with no one to inherit houses, Blackstone probably keeps turning everything that should have been inherited into a rental, and the labor market gets tight so folks looking to retire in their homes end up with a lot of pressure to ... sell it off to Blackstone.

I'm doomsaying a little; stylistically I like post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi... but I am genuinely skeptical that the current housing problem is "too many people" rather than "too many rent-seekers."

Aside from being part of an ideological framework from the last century, what does nationalizing an oil supply in Venezuela have to do with Nordic health care or game programmers unionizing at Microsoft?

I'll bet you the responses to this comment that the "people defending socialism" are, at best, barely interested in that terminology or the framework you've used to define it. They're just stuck trying to talk about largely unrelated ideas through this bizarre anachronistic ideological battle from the last century.

In real life, there are some problems that are best solved by people competing for rewards. There are also some problems that are better solved by people cooperating on the premise that we want a baseline for our society that is somewhere above living under bridges and bashing each other over the head to decide who gets the most toys.

Some computer programmers at Microsoft figured that they could get a better deal if they decided to cooperate with each other instead of competing. There will probably be some up-sides and some down-sides for everyone involved. Apparently the Nordic health care system works and the Venezuelan oil take-over didn't, but the only reason those turned up in this conversation at all is because the level of analysis we're dealing with is "cooperation is socialism, socialism bad, therefore cooperation bad." That's not the approach to take for solving real problems.

Saw this proposal that was interesting: set it to 695 seats, which is the cube root of the population of the USA, and combine Ranked Choice Voting with proportional representation within the districts. Under that model gerrymandering shouldn't have any particular effect.

Once upon a time, things didn't work out for Napster. Personally I felt that copyright rules had been skewed too far against the general public, but in that time period the general pattern was that if you couldn't run a business without breaking the law, then you'd just go out of business.

I guess these days I still feel like the rules are still skewed too far against the general public. The big difference now is this expectation that not only do the extremely wealthy rewrite the rules in their favor, they also take it as a given that if, somehow, they encounter a rule that doesn't let them do whatever they want, the rule must not have been intended to apply to them in the first place, so why should they even have to go to the trouble of getting it rewritten before they ignore it?