It's no surprise that the companies with all the money and influence over government have managed to manipulate the general public to turn against the things that could get in the way of those same companies exploiting their workers and screwing over everyone else in the process. I'm just surprised that such weak arguments were what ended up being actually effective!
On one side they tell you "You'll get Weekends off! You'll get more money! You'll work fewer hours!" and other side says "You can't talk directly to your boss! Corruption could happen in your union if you do nothing to stop it! Lazy people might keep their job unless HR documents the problems!" and somehow people are like "Man, I'd much rather spend less time on my family and hobbies than not be able to go directly to my boss!"
Same with regulations. One side says "Have clean air and water! Don't get screwed over by companies who poison you!" and the other side says "Billion dollar companies would have to pay more to not poison you! Look at all these terrible regulations we already bribed lawmakers into passing! Regulations BAD!" and people just eat it up.
It makes me wonder how much more extreme they could take things before people stopped falling for it.
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates à la lanterne.
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates on les pendra.
Si on n’les pend pas
On les rompra.
Si on n’les rompt pas
On les brûlera.
These convenient and cheap book/game/video platforms sure killed piracy. Now that piracy's gone forever, we can enshittify the whole thing again! At least I imagine that's how it went in the meeting of 35 year-old corporate suits.
That's not what's considered waterfall, though. Specs are always required for any work, even if they're only in your head, even if the work takes 15 minutes. It's the length of the feedback loop and the resistance to spec change that makes waterfall, and by his use of tracer bullets I very much doubt it's the case here, if there was any doubt at all to have.
Sure, if the chili peppers or the beans are not packaged, you could buy as little as you want. Sometimes you might get funny looks, sometimes they'll give you the bean for free as it's not worth the hassle to sell an individual bean.
But what about prepackaged beans, like 500 gram pack? You can't open the package and expect to pay for part of it. Sometimes the beans are packaged by the grocery store with their branding. That's the same as not letting you buy an individual bean.
Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.
Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish?
The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.
Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
Similarly, as one meme puts it "Unions were the answer to violence" but now they've been ground into dust we have people torching warehouses instead, saying "All you had to do was pay us enough to live"
Yes, and in addition to this, we see examples daily of violence being inflicted on the poor by the rich, both literally (ICE, police militarization, harsh prison conditions, poor oversight of prisons) and figuratively (reduced social safety net, threat of ruin and bankruptcy due to medical debt, thread of lost jobs and corresponding loss of safety, a lack of consequences for criminal behavior directly correlated to wealth).
I often can't help but see the "all violence is bad" narrative as another tool of oppression by the ruling class. Even if that isn't its intent, it certainly seems to serve their purposes.
In the United States, not having a job for the short term means you lose your healthcare, for the medium term means you're living out of your car, and for the long term means you're out on the street, incarcerated, or dead. AI executives talk to the public like "investors are pouring billions into my new invention, the Job Killer 9000. Sure millions of people are going to get laid off and over time it'll force the price of wage work closer and closer to zero, but that's just the price of progress!" That in itself is inherently a violent threat. I am not surprised that some people are responding to it with violence.
Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums.
There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.
Either pay for my health care or get your nose out of it. If my healthcare is going to be my own private matter, then it should be just that. How insulting.
One problem with this mentality is that reality doesn't really make the ideological distinction between whats private and what isn't, or who pays for what. Healthcare is not an intersubjective field, and so actions have consequences, no matter what you think about them.
Vaccines are a good example of this, herd immunity is needed for many of them to work. Antibiotic stewardship is another, unregulated usage of antibiotics risks breeding superbugs.
More generally, "private" ideas are rarely private. Kids born to idiots practicing alternative medicine often die. This scales to societal effects if you have enough idiots. Even though capitalism makes this very fuzzy, many resources in medicine are in fact finite, meaning that time and money spent on one person might mean that another dies. Sometimes that other person is in another, usually poorer country. COVID vaccine availability illustrated that effect nicely.
Essentially what you are advocating is widespread natural selection, with potential consequences affecting anywhere from small local communities to the entire planet in rare cases (COVID is a good one, look up Trichophyton Indotineae for a recent example). And even if you actually do want that, unless you truly follow through, this also comes a huge amount of waste of very limited resources. That is unless you are willing to go the distance and advocate that unvaccinated kids with pneumonia from a measles infection should just go ahead and die because of their parents or neighbors stupid choices.
If you take Kants approach to ethics, that you should only act on principles that you would want to become a universal law, then the principle of healthcare being a private matter is a bit of a non-starter, at least by most ethical systems.
I would switch to Codex, but Altman is such a naked sociopath and OpenAI so devoid of ethical business practices that I can't in good conscience. I'm not under any illusion that Anthropic is ethical, but it is so far a step up from OpenAI.
I'm with you on the ethical part, but everything is a spectrum. All the AI leadership are some shade of evil. There's no way the product would be effective if they weren't. I don't like that Sam Altman is a lunatic, but frankly they all are. I also recognize that these are massive companies filled with non shitty engineers who are actually responsible for a lot of the magic. Conflating one charlatan with the rest of it is a tragedy of nuance.
Yeah, but there's distinct difference between "risks their company because they refuse to help with killing little kids" and "happily helping with genocide".
There's not one thing that stands out, but he abandoned the entire core principles of OpenAI (took a 180), constantly lies to people and doesn't plan to stop.
