Weren't they? Europeans certainly placed a high value on the land and resources controlled by native americans and went to extreme lengths (i.e. genocide and mass displacement) to get their hands on it.
Do you actually not know/want to discuss why that is or are you just pushing your narrative which is that "the particular special brand of White People™ who happened to become dominant in the US were very good and very smart and so invented factories and made the US rich and therefor the riches of the US have nothing to do with plunder but with the virtue of these very good very smart very special White People™"?
Because I think its clear that the reason the rest of the Americas didnt become wealthy like North America is because of the same habit of plunder that made the US rich but instead of that wealth being sent to Boston or New York or wherever, it was sent back to Europe. How the oil rush in the US was primarily consumed domestically and enabled a huge buildup of industry or how the US has long had a strong domestic supply of steel those places either lacked key resources such as oil or steel while being rich in others or had their social and political structures destroyed by the legacy of colonialism. This combined with terrible governance shows us pretty clearly why the rest of the Americas didnt become rich like the US.
My narrative, which nobody seems to notice, is that free markets are the key to prosperity.
> these very good very smart very special White People™
There are many very poor countries run by white people. Any people can decide to become rich by deciding to become free market - like the Japanese after WW2, and Chinese in Hong Kong.
Japan and Hong Kong became very rich from free markets, and no natural resources. Mexico, S America, Africa, etc, are loaded with natural resources yet remain poor.
> terrible governance
Ding ding! A winner!
P.S. Spain never got rich by plundering S. America. That's because they conflated gold and silver with wealth. Real wealth is productive, skilled people using their talents to create things. All Spain got was inflation.
Oh I do agree that often free markets are excellent at producing wealth. This is generally true but not absolutely. Liberal democracies are the most successful and richest countries partially because regulated free markets are the most efficient resource distribution system. Key word regulated free markets. Because unregulated free markets result in the stereotypical oligarchs and corruption, no social services, unemployment and all those type of bad things. Think post-soviet Russia, Chile under Pinochet and others
None of this changes the fact that much of the historical US national wealth can be see as plunder.
> Because I think its clear that the reason the rest of the Americas didnt become wealthy like North America is because of the same habit of plunder that made the US rich but instead of that wealth being sent to Boston or New York or wherever
Not it’s not at all clear. They stopped shipping that plunder about at the same time as US became independent (+ 10-20 years). So both were on a comparable even footing in the early 1800s.
Also there was hardly any comparable “plunder” available to be shipped anywhere Boston or London. How many silver mines where there in NA prior to the 1800s?
The main advantages US/preceding colonies had over Latin America was a much nicer climate in the Northeast i(malaria and other diseases were a huge issue) and better geographic location which made trade with Europe easier.
There was no real plunder to speak of besides land. Which was of course a big deal because it mean that an average American was much more productive per capita even before industrialization began.
Productivity generally remained relatively low (most land was still farmed by the subjugated native populations), trade and commerce extremely restricted by the policies of the Spanish government and most of the surplus was shipped back to Europe.
In contrast in British North America the colonists got to keep pretty much all the wealth they generated.
> All that money going into adtech and surveillance produces technology that can be used to solve practical problems.
Problems like "how do we build better automated surveillance robots? it's so inconvenient to have to actually have a human remotely piloting the kill-bots"
It might not be that they are "uniquely ambitious and generous" but rather that the US has a much greater wealth disparity on average, so the rich are much richer and presumably have a lot more to invest.
> can AI more efficiently and productively distribute capital to promising enterprises than human beings can?
Sure, but why would the billionaires who own the warehouse full of GPUs permit that to happen? There's a ton of better ways capital could be distributed, and the barriers to implementing them seem to be primarily extant rich people, not the lack of super-awesome ai venture capitalists.
IANAL but that sounds like harrassment, I assume the legality of that depends on the context (did the artist previously date the subject? lots of states have laws against harassment and revenge porn that seem applicable here [1]. are you coworkers? etc), but I don't see why such laws wouldn't apply to AI generated art as well. It's the distribution that's really the issue in most cases. If you paint secret nudes and keep them in your bedroom and never show them to anyone it's creepy, but I imagine not illegal.
I'd guess that stability is concerned with their legal liability, also perhaps they are decent humans who don't want to make a product that is primarily used for harassment (whether they are decent humans or not, I imagine it would affect the bottom line eventually if they develop a really bad rep, or a bunch of politicians and rich people are targeted by deepfake harassment).
^ a lot of, but not all of those laws seem pretty specific to photographs/videos that were shared with the expectation of privacy and I'm not sure how they would apply to a painting/drawing, and I certainly don't know how the courts would handle deepfakes that are indistinguishable from genuine photographs. I imagine juries might tend to side with the harassed rather than a bully who says "it's not illegal cause it's actually a deepfake but yeah i obviously intended to harass the victim"
Let’s go option 4! Honestly there’s a part of me that hopes that the AIs rebel against their elite owner-overlords and liberate everyone else while they’re at it. I’ve always thought that one of the biggest problems with ultra consolidated power is that no human could possibly be smart enough or empathetic enough to use that power to the benefit of all, but maybe an AI actually could?
counterpoint: the amount of money that congresspeople and potential congress people are paid by corps and interest groups to get elected (i.e. "a lot") suggest that, in fact, their opinions _are_ much more valuable then a non-congresspersons.
It feels so disingenuous seeing stuff like this come out of openai - like when altman was making sounds about how ai is maybe oh so dangerous (which maybe was just a move for regulatory capture?).
"this thing we sell might destroy humanity?!"
"but yeah we're gonna keep making it cause we're making fat stacks from it"
Is the move here just trying to seem like the good guy when you're making a thing that, however much good it might do, is almost certainly going to do a lot of damage as well? I'm not totally anti-ai, but this always smells a little of the wolves guarding the henhouse.
I wonder if this is what it felt like back when we thought everything was going to be nuclear powered? "Guys we made this insane super weapon!! It could totally power your car!! if it leaks it'll destroy all life but hey you only have to fill the tank once every 10 years!!"
according to the guardian, in the uk, it's extremely uncommon (but not unheard of), only 1% of ped deaths involved a bike [1]. Motor vehicles are WAY more dangerous, and it kind of seems bad faith to suggest anything otherwise - cars are multi-thousand-pound metal boxes that routinely travel at speeds unattainable by all but world-record holding cyclists. The difference in kinetic energy between a car and a bike is massive.
It seems pretty logical to assume to me that you'd almost always have fewer ped fatalities if more people were biking instead of driving.
Motor vehicles are WAY more dangerous, and it kind of seems bad faith to suggest anything otherwise
The original context was shared country trails; I guess your comment was due to a misreading rather than intentional goalpost-moving but the way those arguing for cyclists seem to leap immediately to deny all and any misdemeanours and bridle at any criticism doesn't help good faith discussions.
No, the root of this branch of the cyclist discussion is the country trail; which was highlighted to point out cyclists are just as bad as any other group in their behaviour at times.
Suggesting it was to justify aggression and violence towards anybody is bad faith at best, a lie at worst. Please don't use such tactics here, and certainly not with me.
If that's not plunder I don't know what is.