This seems surprisingly backward looking. Most of the thought leaders around UBI aren't politicians. I agree UBI probably doesn't work without a paradigm shift, but everyone's talking like we're amidst a paradigm shift (whether we are is questionable) but like, communism doesn't work because of the way it impacts incentives (as described) but what happens if you fully automate egg production? Then "And even worse, many people quit work once they got the UBI. So now less eggs are made." become irrelevant.
If everything's fully automated, then "many people quit work" is irrelevant, because not many people are working, which is the point?
The sad thing about a lot of these arguments is that, they’re beautiful in some ways, but they’re too idealizstic. I want to believe is that all we have to do is believe in the power of classical liberalism and the spirit of Thomas Jefferson will bless the American future. But the problem is structural and probably economic. People are way more concerned about the cost of tuition then woke, and being able to ask questions about race realism in class, while potentially satisfying won’t help you get a job.
Besides, Even University of Austin the free speech university is suffering under the weight of its own ideological donors.
Anthropic probably can’t fold, they might lose an existential number of researchers if they did. This is literally an unstoppable force meets an immovable object situation.
Hegseth probably folds. It would be too unpopular for him to take either of the actions he threatened.
The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.
I thought it was interesting he threw in the bit about the supply chain risk and Defense Production Act being inherently contradictory. Most of the letter felt objective and cooperative, but that bit jumped off the page as more forceful rejection of Hegseth's attempt to bully them. Couldn't have been accidental.
Th is isn't discussing individuals, it's discussing trends as a whole. There are still plenty of makers getting value out of 3d printers as well, but it's not everyone like we talk about everyone becoming a software developer with vibe coding.
Software is just a collection of functions. Some input returns some output.
That is what people do every day with LLM. When they ask LLM to do something, they are being software developers without them or you even realizing it. But what are they doing but building something with the LLM that takes digital input and returns digital output. It is software. Summarize this email for me gpt. That is a tool.
The frustrating thing about wellness is that wellness influencers are subject to a similar level of bad incentives as everyone else. Maybe it's because wellness is not sexy. Sit less, exercise more, eat more vegetables, but then the people who get attention are the "one neat trick folks who want to tell you about something you _don't_ know." And I'm sure Bryan Johnson knows some things your average person doesn't. but is 2% good, 98% crap and he doesn't know which 2% is good?
Point being that maybe the surgeon general should be a wellness expert, but there's as much if not more corruption and snake oil in wellness as their is in big pharma.
It felt like the first half of nominee Casey Means book is very much a repetition of Robert Lustig’s examination of the role of sugar in bad health outcomes, the second half was a sales pitch to buy the services of her company to guide readers to a healthy life. I read it because it was on best seller lists at the time and was just curious what the fuss was about.
There was a recent conflict that came up, and there was a debate about whether or not one of the sides was committing war crimes. And I remember thinking to myself and saying in the debate “if this were a video game strategically speaking, I’d be committing war crimes.”
I swear I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I think it'd be useful/valuable to know where you're from and what country you live in, as this certainly shapes how we feel about these sort of issues.
I've also been dabbled in such thought experiments with friends lately, and so far we've all landed at very different conclusions, even thought there are some reasons that it might make strategic sense at the moment.
In in the US. I mean flame away, but I’m not happy about the observation I’m making, I’m not saying “given what I would do in a video game, it justifies what people would do in real life.” I’m saying “given what I would do it a video game, I think I see more clearly the choices people are making in real life.” life shouldn’t be a video game, but I think to a lot of high level leaders trying to compartmentalize it becomes one.
This is monstrous in the real world with obviously real consequences. But I think too many people say “obviously government X wouldn’t act in a monstrous way” but the video game analogy helps you see the incentives and thus, why they would/do.
if you win the war then there really isn't any such thing as a war crime. Worst case is you feel guilty about it, there aren't any other consequences of your actions.
It holds up if you assume war crimes are beneficial to your goals but there is quite a lot of evidence, and sophisticated theory going back to clausewitz, that they mostly aren't.
They can look useful at a certain level of conflict, but once you are thinking of war as being a tool for accomplishing policy goals (how modern nationstates view it), a lot of the things you would "want" to do stop being useful.
Wars that can be won quickly through decisive military action alone are quite rare historically! More often things like support/enmity of the local population, political will in the home state, support for recruiting or tolerance of conscription, influence of returning (whole, dead, injured, all) veterans on the social structure all become more decisive factors the longer a conflict runs.
It's not that these techniques don't "work" it's that they are very expensive in terms of the resources I discussed, that ultimately boil down to something approximately like "national will to continue the conflict." If a state has an extremely strong will to continue, then they are going to consider some of these techniques more worthwhile, but it is still about costs in one way or another.
That's normally where the international system has an influence, through sanctions or simply refusal to support the conflict, or deciding to support the other side, etc. Intentionally killing civilians would almost always fall in this category, but israel has apparently unlimited will to do it and is effectively unsanctionable in the current political environment, so it will continue.
Anyway there are much more illustrative examples that prove the rule, for example landmines. They aren't currently considered war crimes generally, but they are extremely damaging to civilian populations during & long after the conflict, and most countries have signed the treaties banning them. The countries that never signed are exactly the ones plausibly expecting to fight a war soon: US, china, russia, israel, iran, india, pakistan. And now some eastern european countries have withdrawn as well for similar reasons.
So from that you can kind of infer that landmines are probably very effective at their military goals, in a way that eg summary execution of prisoners or bombing hospitals may not be.
If everything's fully automated, then "many people quit work" is irrelevant, because not many people are working, which is the point?
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