Washington State Housing Finance Committee has worked with residents to help them buy the land and turn it into a housing co-op, in partnership with ROC Northwest. That company also helps private businesses convert to worker-owned businesses. If we really love democracy as much as we claim here in the USA, let's bring it to where we live and work :)
So I guess you don't read books/comics, watch TV/Movies/plays, play video games or listen to music? People aren't born skilled artists, that takes time and effort. Being able to prompt GenAI well just makes you a skilled prompter, not a skilled artist. Over time, we will lose a lot of skilled artists and that is something worth thinking more deeply about, instead of giving a callous hot take. Artists are trained to view the world critically, and I want more critical thinkers - not less.
My wife and I went for wall decoration. There’s an art gallery and a poster shop right next to each other. The price difference is a factor 100 for an average art piece.
In the poster shop you can choose between a bunch of classics, or you can upload your own AI-generated picture and have that printed as a poster.
Art was always expensive, and posters as an alternative to paintings existed way before AI. Same with copying all kinds of art.
The main difference seems to be that we can’t clearly pay royalties to anyone for AI artwork, because it’s not obvious exactly where it came from.
There was a YouTube channel dedicated to Warhammer lore narrated by an AI David Attenborough. It got taken down for infringing on his voice, but its replacement came up, starting out with a generic old man’s voice and over time gradually more Attenborough-like. When should the Attenborough estate start to get royalties? At 60% Attenborough? Or at 80% Attenborough?
In my original comment I was asking people to follow me into an imaginary future where there are less artists. Artists reveal something about the world that speaks to us, which they do through critically breaking down and reforming what they see. I can't remember who said it, but they said when art speaks to you, it's a momentary bridge between the artist's soul and yours.
I'll answer your question, but my question for you is: why were you buying wall decorations in the first place? To me, it sounds like you were searching for a product category, and not specifically for art.
Regarding your example, if the AI is capable of imitating David Attenborough by including his name in the prompt, then it was probably trained on his data. If he didn't consent, then I might argue that is ethically wrong and, in my view, theft. If the channel was not monetized and done without his consent, I might argue that is just an ethical failing. In using his voice, the channel betrays the fact that it has value, otherwise they would continue to use the random old man voice.
Refusing to use the contingency fund was pretty rich, dangling food away from starving peoples so they wont pay attention to losing health care - the negotiation is next level
How do you define socialism? I don't believe that we the people or the state collectively own the means of production in any major industry. Private ownership by capitalists is still the dominant economic system in the US.
The US literally purchased shares of Intel - thus owning means of production.
The US also bails out a group of people all the time. The group is called the rich.
Furthermore, it subsidizes select groups like big ag.
Except these, the US is predominantly capitalistic but so was Argentina. Their populace was fed up with the pretense of helping the poor while bailing out oligarchs. America doesn't seem to pretend to help the poor. Poors are undesirables.
Owning part of one company in one sector is not socialism unless you think nearly every country in the world since the invention of the limited company is socialist?
“Bailing out the rich” isn’t socialist is it? What do you think “socialist” means?
I don’t think you understand why the word “socialist” scares so many people. It’s not a word you can just slap on anything to make it “bad”, many people are actually scared about the underlying ideas not the word.
Some Americans seem to just think socialism=bad “because the CIA and the NYT does propaganda”. You may think America is bad and I may agree with you, that doesn’t make it socialist.
In the GDR you couldn’t start a private enterprise without a license. Any enterprise doing anything.
In socialist Burma, there were no privately-owned factories _at all_.
In Czechoslovakia the constitution banned a private company from employing anyone other than the owner of the company.
In Soviet Russia you needed a permit to move city. If you were a farmer you were unlikely to get that permit. You work for the collective farm, the government set the price they would pay you for your produce, and you couldn’t move city to a new job.
I hope these examples show why “the us government is socialist partly because it owns shares in Intel and partly because it’s a lender-of-last-resort for rich people” sounds fatuous.
I'll tell you why you are wrong - you are wrong because you think that real socialism is only one that maps exactly to a prior example. You think it can't be real socialism if there is even one edge case that differs from a pre-existing example.
Your argument is a variant of the straw man fallacy. Look it up.
I think myself and the other poster are mainly taking issue in your use of a specific term "socialism." I think you could argue that if the US owned 51% stake in Intel, you could argue that would be socialism. I've heard the term "socialize" applied in similar conversations such as "privatize the profits, socialize the losses," which I believe is a more accurate rephrasing of your original point.
In my reading, I came across the term "Mixed economy" which I think aligns with what you're saying. Nobody is arguing in good faith that socialism/communism would have 100% coverage of the economic system. There would be room for luxury goods to operate under roughly the same economic conditions. The key difference being that basic needs like food housing and Healthcare would operate under state control for the benefit of all citizens. We would have some vote in their operation via representatives, unlike now where we have 0 say in private operations unless we pay to play. And some people don't have the means to pay, so they don't get to play.
Pretty much yeah, I wouldn't put as much in the state controlled basket as you but like that's a policy discussion—I don't think we have some fundamental disagreement that means we couldn't work together and be pragmatic. One of us doesn't have to "win" control of the government to make progress.
Yeah, this is ultimately why I don't love the idea of single payer. But honestly I'm (slowly) warming up to it as the fears of government controlling healthcare in the way you describe are starting to happen anyway. I guess we'll see how bad it gets and how successful government is at sticking their fingers in private healthcare.
Before the ACA, there were dozens of reasons for which you could be deemed uninsurable, not the least of which is that you had a "pre-existing condition" (i.e., you were unlikely to be profitable enough). North of 15% of the US population lacked health insurance as a result. Even after ACA's passage, we straddle 10% uninsured, rising above some years and falling below in others.
When we have regular, required medication like insulin costing tens or hundreds of times more here than anywhere else on the planet, being uninsured can be a particularly cruel, slow death sentence.
Still, the joke's on GP: he/she still is relying on Trump not to take away healthcare and housing from people he doesn't like (re: poor people, i.e., nearly everyone). The BBB guts medicaid and ACA subsidies, which will ultimately remove health insurance from millions either directly or pricing it out of reach, and his combination of tariffs and deportations of (often times not-so-)illegal immigrants make building more housing difficult and significantly more expensive.
Expect even harsher austerity measures and/or batshit insane policies the next time the Republican party wants to shake the tax cut for billionaires tree or perhaps even just for shits and giggles since many of the cruel policies are there to put the rabble in their place.
It's crazy to me that many of the people who are so proud to be American don't seem to realize that they are actually at odds with the spirit of America. They latch onto superficial anti-gubbermint thinking while surrendering their rights to billionaires. Being an American is supposed to be about telling powerful people to go fuck themselves, standing up for inclusive equality and reckoning with our slights against what we claim to believe. It's supposed to be about modeling democratic ideals to show the world there's a better way. It's supposed to be about being so morally righteous that others come to their own conclusion that we're worthy of emulation, and not because we regime changed them. Somehow we let all of that get away from us.
If you watch modern American politics, the President has vastly more power than he was ever meant to be, combined with a house and senate that follow his wishes to the T.
Why would we allow the president to do that? Because at some point in the last 300 years we decided it was a necessary power for him to get past some crisis, and no President ever relinquishes power.
No disagreement from me. I just think that the argument that the state shouldn't offer Healthcare because the president could cancel it is interesting to think about. Maybe I misunderstood you, but that's how I interpreted it. As the other poster said, he's basically canceling it now anyway for millions of people so it seems to me that presidentual power is irrelevant to the concept of state run Healthcare. Sent from my bidet.
I kept it pretty vague intentionally because I was simply complaining about how dangerous that one particular thing would be right now. I'm undecided on how the overall healthcare issue should be attacked.
I just want people to be open to try things. One thing that this administration has proved is that you can actually make parts of the government move faster, for better or for worse. We stopped innovating on democratic ideals, and the world is starting to lose faith in us. I think we all feel that on some level.
Agreed, but change is very scary to many, many people. It's hard to convince them to try new things. It might be less frictional to simply explain how "actually new thing" is pretty much the same as "old broken thing".
With that being said, the major problem I have with pretty much all candidates is that they just campaign on an end goal, rather than a process. Yes, we all want to "tax the rich", but what does that look like in reality? Are we sending out wealth assessors? Are we requiring new reporting? Are we doing something else? (this is just an example that can be applied to just about any major political platform today)
Impeachment flatly isn't happening. We're not getting 67 votes for it in the senate. If the fake electors plot and Jan 6th didn't do it, nothing will.
So as shitty as that is we need to operate within that reality.
Also, Trumpism isn't going to end with Trump. Now that his base has had a sold run of "winning" they're not just going to dissipate, even if any potential successor may not be as effective as Trump in creating a personality cult.
There's millions of Americans that want these things.
We'll see about that. The prominent members of his like are all doing their best impressions of him and it's they're not very convincing. Their sycophancy is the best indicator that they lack the spine to do the audacious things he does.
Someone with a completely different demeanor yet still standing above the crowd is what will likely succeed Trump and, as of now, I don't see it.
Regardless of the quality of potential successors, his supporters will still be there after and their core beliefs won't be any different after he's gone.
No, they hold core positions that not even Trump could switch them on. Like imagine if Trump reversed all his positions on immigration? They're not going to go along with that.
The lines between their in group and the out groups they target don't depend on Trump. He's just very effective at wielding them.
You're just talking about Republicans. Having a problem with how immigration was, mask mandates, "forced" vaccination, boys in girls sports, etc are pretty mainstream issues. Despite what the "very online" crowd thinks (including most of the media), those are very normal opinions.
The MAGA crowd aren't the same. MAGA dies with Trump. Nobody is going to get away with saying what Trump did about McCain post Trump. Nobody else is going to try this tariff nonsense. Nobody else is going to send the national guard to American cities.
Trump has extreme solutions to main stream gripes. The gripes will stay, the solutions won't.
> Do you want a few large corporations to have to have absolute and total control of all AI?
Is this not what we currently have? Large corporations own the data centers, and there will never be a collectively-owned data center unless our dominant mode of production changes.
I know there are open models, but how do you serve them to users who don't have the compute?
Users can obtain the compute, it's not even that substantial for current LLMs, esp if you don't mind running them somewhat slowly.
Sure, not every user can obtain the compute. But the fact that a great many people can, and that the people that it makes the most difference for can, creates a tremendous playing field leveling.
Imagine that welding could only be performed by WeldCo and what a negative effect that would have. Fortunately anyone can weld, most people won't. But if you found yourself dead in the water and weldco was trying to extort you, you'd just pick up the equipment teach yourself, and commence with the welding. (or go hire someone to do so). Now realize that LLMs may well turn out to be more general than even welding is. So the freedom to access these tools is all the more critical, even if many will find they don't need to. The widespread access is why you may not need to.
Sure, but my point is that there are people that reason like "such and such an elected official is bad, therefore everything they do is bad and will have drastic results", and that's not particularly informative even when I agree about the elected official being bad.
Krugman does a decent job of not letting his opinions about the political aspects color his analysis too much.
Things like
"Contrary to what many people believe, tariffs don’t necessarily lead to high unemployment. America had a high average tariff even before Smoot-Hawley — 15.8 percent in 1929 — but the unemployment rate in 1929 was under 3 percent."
He doesn't like the tariffs, he (and pretty much any serious economists) think they're bad, but he tries to be clear about why they're bad rather than just waving his hands at everything.
Politics and economics are two different lenses on the same subject matter, because “wealth” and “power over others” are two different ways of saying the same thing.
This is also why capitalism and democracy become progressively more clearly opposed the farther the status quo environment you are working in gets from feudalism or absolute monarchy, under which both seem to be changes in the same direction.
> This is also why capitalism and democracy become progressively more clearly opposed
You mean linked? Capitalism is what lets the people make economic decisions, democracy is what lets people make political decisions. I think you mean communisms where people can't make economic decisions is what's oppose democracy.
> Capitalism is what lets the people make economic decisions
No, it isn't. Capitalism is the organization of power around a narrow elite defined by the ownership of the non-financial means of production, the feature for which it was named. It was (at least initially) progress in the direction of democracy from control of the same thing being in even narrower hands than the early mercantile class defined by ownership of land under systems like feudalism, to be sure.
But, still, ultimately it conflicts with the equal distribution of power defining democracy.
They are rationalized as consistent by pretending that economic and political power are different things, rather than different applications of the same, undivided, power.
Not hard at all as it turns out. I had to do this a few years back to extract PBI metadata (metric names, queries, data sources, etc.) from of our dashboards.
I generally agree with this, but we’d need systems in place to incentivize companies to keep local workers and for customers to support local companies. There are a lot of politics at play.
Unless the country can be completely self-sufficient, even that is not enough. If a country decides to cut working hours and other's won't, it will eventually not be able to afford the resources it needs from other countries because the countries that squeeze their workers will have more money to pay for them. I believe these competition based systems will be our downfall. Nobody can do anything that doesn't improve their position compared to competing countries/companies/people, even if it would make things better overall. If you do, you lose and die out. We will use all our resources, kill each other, etc in pursuit of victory for as long as the systems of this planet can support it and then we die.
Those are called tariffs and other barriers, and in many sectors they work very well. I live in a country (South Korea) where such barriers have been enormously successful in keeping tech jobs and revenue inside the country. Literally everyone here has benefited from it, it's a huge win-win-win; consumers get human customer service, properly localized services and much less enshittification, politicians have a success to point at and get more tax revenue, the public gets jobs. Everyone gets sovereignty.
This also extends past tech. Forcing physical companies to set up a local subsidiary/do JVs has done the same. Examples abound, Starbucks being a big one. Forcing them to do a JV means a huge portion of the revenue of the biggest coffee chain in the country stays inside the country, as well as plenty of office jobs. Otherwise everything but the actual in-store jobs would have once again flowed to the US.
China of course has done the same, to similar success. Imagine if they hadn't, and just let e.g. Meta be their social media platform of choice, Google their search engine, Amazon their shopping platform. It'd be nothing but a massive net loss to everyone involved but those tech firms; including the Chinese public as the state would impose the exact same censorship and rules on those companies, as they currently do with the remaining ones.
That other countries haven't done so and just let SV walk over them in order to appease the US - who has now turned out not to be their friend after all, surprise surprise! - is very unfortunate.
This incredible imbalance is what has let the average HN FAANG employee make absolute bank at the cost of the rest of the world, so I'm not expecting this to be particularly popular here :)
