> Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should.
Should it though? You can buy a piece of real estate without living there, e.g. because it's a rental property, or maybe the school is announced to be shutting down even though it hasn't yet. And in general this should have nothing to do with the bank; why should they care that somebody wants to buy a house they're not allowed to be in?
Stop trying to get corporations to be the police. They're stupendously bad at it and it deprives people of the recourse they would have if the government was making the same mistake directly.
Yeah I agree, a corporation should not only not care, they should be actively prevented from being allowed to make discriminations base on anything outside of whether they can pay or not. If they sense a potential other problem, at worst it should be reported to police or some other governmental authority, it simply isn't their business otherwise.
To me any other viewpoint inevitably leads to abuse of one group or class or subset of society or another. If they are legally allowed to discriminate in some ways, they will seek to discriminate in others, both in trying to influence law changes to their benefit and in skirting the law when it is convenient and profitable.
There should be ways for a corporation to vet based on severity of the role to match the severity of the candidate, backgrounds included. Cases like, you wouldn’t want to hire a CFO who has been convicted of fraud. Likewise you wouldn’t want a president who’s been convicted of crimes either.
But if you don’t need access to sensitive information, you aren’t dealing with corporate funds or accounting, just a cog in the machine, I don’t think it should matter.
The issue is now, even the smallest issue from years ago is flagged by an AI, which in turn rejects you from a downstream workflow, which doesn’t put you in the hiring managers lap.
> If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent.
Couldn't they just point to the court system's computer showing zero convictions? If it shows guilty verdicts then showing none is already proof there are none.
> All economic growth is traded off against future global temperature increases to some extent, but this is even more acute in this electricity-intensive industry. How many degrees of temperature increase is worth one .. whatever the unit of AI gain-of-function is?
The premise here is that if we use more electricity then we burn more carbon. And the media hates AI, so if anybody restarts any coal-fired power plant to run a data center anywhere, that's the story. But then there's this:
Nobody actually wants coal because solar is cheaper.
And data centers are a pretty good combination for this because the biggest problem with solar and wind is what to do during multi-day periods of low generation, but data centers have backup generators and would be willing to turn them on whenever the cost of grid power is higher than the cost of operating them. Running some gas turbines for a week every two years in exchange for stabilizing the grid and being able to run on renewable power for the other 103 weeks is a pretty good outcome for everybody, not least because that amount of grid stabilization would exceed their consumption, i.e. allow more renewables to be added to the grid than they're using. If they can shed 1GW of load when a 2GW (long-term average) solar farm is generating at 50% of typical capacity for a week, you can add that 2GW of solar to the grid and remove 1GW of fossil fuels even while the data center is increasing consumption by 1GW.
> If the new factory can make a billion drives but they only have 2 of those futures contracts sold (that is 200k drives) they don't build the factory.
But the AI companies are flush with cash and trying to buy everything, right? Why wouldn't they buy up as many futures contracts as the fab company needs to justify more fabs?
> Every year a few farmers realize they are contracted to deliver more grain than they have in their bins and so have to buy some grain from someone else (often at a loss) just to deliver it.
This is most commonly because they sold a futures contract for X bushels expecting to grow 2X but 75% of the crop failed and they only have 0.5X.
Semiconductor fab yields aren't as susceptible to how much it will rain next year and the companies generally have a pretty good idea of what their yields are for a given process node.
That is the question - will those ai companies buy the contracts
edit: actually it is worse - who else isn't buying contracts - if they build new capactity on contracts and ai collapses the existing users will take up the contracts but the old capacticy is unused.
If they build the new fabs and AI collapses then they still got all the AI companies' money because they prepaid. The current market price of chips is then going to crash, but that's what happens when AI collapses regardless. Might as well sell them five years worth of chips rather than two years worth of chips before the cash cow dries up.
Meanwhile, the fab companies want to think about what happens if AI collapses, but the AI companies don't. What do they care if they get screwed on a contract the day after they go bankrupt regardless? So offer them a contract where they get screwed if they go bankrupt, e.g. prohibit them from using any of the hardware for anything but AI for five years. Then the hardware is locked into AI stuff regardless of whether AI dries up and you can still go sell the rest of the chips that aren't to PC OEMs etc.
The "problem" back then was that nothing required sites to provide a rating and most of them didn't. Then you didn't have much of a content rating system, instead you effectively had a choice for what to do with "unrated" sites where if you allow them you allow essentially the whole internet and if you block them you might as well save yourself some money by calling up your ISP to cancel.
This could pretty easily be solved by just giving sites some incentive to actually provide a rating.
> I see the primary issue with IPFS is a significant majority of all web users are on mobile. They can't act as content hosts or routers.
Is there any reason this has to be true? Probably some majority or significant minority of mobile devices spend some eight hours a day attached to a charger in a place where they have the WiFi password, while the user is asleep. And you don't need 100% of devices to be hosts or routers, 10% at any given time would be more than sufficient.
If a peer says "hey there's a new version of this" and that peer also has pinned that version, then I can get it from them right now, well before the network converges. Yeah maybe it'll take a few hours for the other side of the planet to get the word, but for most data a couple hours or a couple days is fine. Tolerating latencies was kind of the point of calling it "interplanetary".
What's the use case where I'm on the other side of the planet and I somehow end up with a CID which I can't resolve? How did I get that CID so much faster than content to which it refers?
That's assuming they're deriving a benefit from misbehaving.
There is no benefit to immediately re-crawling 404s or following dynamic links into a rabbit hole of machine-generated junk data and empty search results pages in violation of robots.txt. They're wasting the site's bandwidth and their own in order to get trash they don't even want.
Meanwhile there is an obvious benefit to behaving: You don't, all by yourself, cause public sites to block everyone including you.
Now apply the same logic to laws, except that laws are a lot slower to change when they find the next workaround.
And it's a lot harder to get the law to stop doing something once it proves to cause significant collateral damage, or just cumulative incremental collateral damage while having negligible effectiveness.
That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.
People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.
But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.
I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor.
On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.
If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.
There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.
The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.
Oh sure, if we can somehow get functional anti-trust, campaign finance reform, labor protections, and progressive taxation, then we probably wouldn't need nearly as many of these protective laws.
However, I don't see that happening anytime soon so the numerous laws are the best option we have.
I will add this: the number of ways in which humans can harm one another is immeasurable, and every law comes with an associated cost. At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions. But bad laws can also dampen legitimate economic activity, making social problems worse.
As a society plunges into dysfunction due to economic stress, the number of people harming one another increases. If the society responds using more laws, and fails to correct the source of the dysfunction, it will eventually collapse under the weight of those laws as enforcement becomes uneven and politically driven. (This is the failure mode of legalist and bureaucratic states.) Alternatively, if the society responds with a more arbitrary case-by-case system of punishment, it will collapse into mob rule or dictatorship, so lack of structured law isn’t a solution either.
The only real solution is to fix the root problems facing the society. Antitrust helps with this because it can “unstick” parasitic incumbents who are preventing the market from dynamically responding to real economic conditions.
> At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions.
Don't forget compliance costs. Those are some of the largest costs and they're largely hidden because they don't go into the government budget. You pass a law to prevent a million dollars in total harm and then a hundred thousand companies each spend $100 to comply with it, what did you get and what did you pay?
Compliance costs also have a specific type of cost because of their asymmetry. It's like adding a fixed amount of weight to a boat. If you add 1000 pounds of regulatory costs to a 200,000 ton container ship, it doesn't even notice. If you add the same amount of weight to a kayak, it sinks. But if you keep adding costs until you sink all the small boats, and then sink all the medium boats, you're not just failing to solve all the problems caused by market consolidation, you're actively making them worse.
How do you forsee contract law helping? I can't very well sign a contract with every person that I meet. That's to say nothing of situations where they simply refuse to agree to reasonable terms.
If it's not supposed to be public then don't publish it. If it's supposed to be public then stop trying to restrict it.
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