> Is it reasonably possible to steer the direction or speed of advancement of technology, or is this scenario just the inevitable result of a society that continually iterates on past technology without end?
The Amish limit their technology, in an attempt to prevent it from interfering with their culture.
Theoretically we can decide to do whatever we (collectively) want.
How much rent seeking and regulatory capture that goes on is enabled by modern finance?
What about bailouts for financial institutions that are too big to fail - the idea of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses?
Real wages are down and income inequality is up over the last several decades, coinciding with a lot of growth in the finance industry. Subprime and payday loans, 30 year mortgages backed by the government, leveraged buyouts, stock buybacks, tax havens, etc. Private and public debt levels are way higher than at any time prior to WWII. Right from the age of 18 we have kids signing large student loans, the banks don't care about their risk since the loans are federally backed and will follow these kids until the day they die.
A lot of people feel that the general public is being squeezed by financiers. Are they wrong?
How big a deal is harmonizing things across state lines?
If no federal constitutional dictates are being violated does harmonization just amount to a convenience for big companies, at the expense of local self rule as per the constitution?
Worst case you end up with multi-nationals bribing one set of federal politicians to get national laws enshrined. One stop corruption.
There's a constitutional question. Congress does not have the authority to create new forms of intellectual property. Copyrights and patents, that's it.
That's why the US doesn't have database copyright.
States can go further. States have a "general police power" - they can make almost anything illegal.
it can recognize any forms of property including IP
the stuff about copyrights and patents isn’t mentioned in the constitution, those are forms of IP Congress passed as instructed by the article of the constitution to promote arts and science by granting temporary monopolies
Sigh. Yes, it is mentioned in the US Constitution.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To ...
Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
That's where copyrights and patents come from. It's an enumerated power, and Congress is limited to what's written there. Congress can't create entirely new kinds of intellectual property. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone.
yeah we’re quoting the same article. we agree on that. and new kinds of IP for a temporary monopoly is not the argument. That article is only about temporary monopolies.
outside of that, congress can recognize and regulate any aspect of interstate commerce, including the trade of assets it didnt previously know about or recognize. which is a different enumerated power.
Not quite true; it is constrained by the constitution's use of the term "Writings and Discoveries" which is why copyright requires the work to be in a "fixed form"
the regulation of interstate commerce is an unlimited dictate thats also part of the constitution, as all commerce is interstate commerce for the last century there is no federalism left in this country outside of what the federal government merely tolerates from the states, and in the parallel judicial systems against persons
there is no prioritization of “local self rule”, an ethos of the original republic and 10th amendment, the federal government has subjugated all states since then and throws them a bone here and there since it technically derives support from the collection of states
with that in mind, this specific industry of image and likeness releases has been long overdue for one framework to rule them all. the issue isnt big companies, its small operators and enthusiasts that dont really know what text to put in their release forms and always have been operating in multiple states.
> Look how much hatred there is for Neuralink. A company actually trying to productize and bring to market a device that will allow quadriplegic people to move and walk again
People are wary of Neuralink because of how big tech manipulates peoples and pollutes society for profit, not because they are opposed to helping quadriplegics.
I agree there are things to be wary of, all new tech is a double edged sword. But the pro’s obviously outweigh the cons in the same way the internet and smart phones have.
You’ll find very few people who will say they would prefer to live in a world where all humanity’s collective knowledge is not instantly accessible to everyone. You used to have to drive to the library to look things up! Is that old world better? Heck no.
It will be the same with neural implants. Overcoming neurological illness and giving everyone’s brain super computer capabilities are worth the risk.
> But the pro’s obviously outweigh the cons in the same way the internet and smart phones have
I suspect we're just starting to realize the extent of the cons for both of those things. The internet we probably have to accept was worth it, but you can probably already imagine ways that smart phones could be abused today which would be far worse than the convinces they offer. We're just sort of hoping that those types of abuses wont happen or aren't already happening.
The problem we have is that good tech designed to work for us is increasingly being turned against us, and new tech is being explicitly designed from day one to be adversarial. I'm already avoiding a lot of technology and modifying other technology to avoid the harms. No way would I ever risk handing direct access/control of my brain to a third party who wants to exploit me.
> in the same way the internet and smart phones have
I think the jury is very much still out on that one. I just got on Facebook for the first time in almost 10 years, and the comments on 'suggested' content have made me seriously question whether society was ready for these technologies. The corrosive impact of the falsehoods that are being thrown around has only begun to take effect.
People have always thrown around corrosive falsehoods like you wouldn't believe. At least modern social networks also let others spread corrections and counteractions to common myths and bullshit political beliefs.
I'd love to see some modern polyannas about "misinformation" hop into a time machine and then spend even a few days talking to any average group of people about their general beliefs in the mid 20th century on downard, or just take a look at the kind of utter invented garbage and hyperbole that was constantly peddled and regularly sold to wide swathes of the public by government and media organizations of all kinds so much more easily in previos decades and centuries.
Humans love to invent stories based on tribal notions and biases, so falsehoods never go away even in the most advanced communication age in human history, but historically, we're not doing so bad, simply because the cost of spreading any idea is now lower than ever previously and the means for doing so are more widely available than they've ever been, letting things average out much more rapidly towards message dilution. Anything in the opposite direction, and any centralized "vigilance" of supposed wrong ideas will only take us back to a place where a small number control more narrative than they ever should, and that small number will always tend towards dictating based on selfish interest.
Generating knowledge and novel concepts requires privacy and control over the concept.
Instant access to knowledge has cheapened and diluted the process of creating new concepts.
The guys who put knowledge on the 'internet shelf' are not the guys who made the valueable knowledge in the first place.
The best way to create knowledge is to isolate concepts, structures and relationships into the human mind.
As soon as a concept stops being literally secret, it becomes infintely less worthwhile. Nobody works on hard intellectual problems any more because they've been massively cheapened by CTRL C, and CTRL V functionality.
The James Bond-ian culture of spies fighting over a hidden concept, is not just a flight of fancy at the movie theatres, it is one of the best culturally visible examples of how to develop and keep secret, aka. a new concept.
Spying, duplicating and publicating knowledge into instant-access platforms, is way more dangerous than anyone publicly admits.
I'm not too worried about a random sick deer in the middle of some forest infecting a whole bunch of humans. The worry with animals is that they could mutate the virus into something much more nasty. Especially in factory farm settings where animals aren't properly cared for and are packed in like sardines while covered in shit and open sores, and where workers who are also treated terribly could end up getting exposed.
Lockdowns could do a lot to reduce spread and protect people from infection in large population centers, but certain areas are basically breeding grounds for disease and even before covid they were a risk for things like antibiotic resistant bacteria. Ignoring them was always going to be a problem.
I brought up covid in animals because the original poster mentioned the elimination of covid in the context of lockdowns.
The fact that covid can move between animal and human populations would seem to mean that lockdowns for the purpose of elimination will not work. Eventually humans would be reinfected from animals - mice, rats, pets, etc.
This has perhaps already happened. There is dna evidence that omicron evolved in mice and then jumped back into humans [0].
On the idea of lockdowns to eliminate the virus:
> The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said [1].
It would be a bummer to be locked down for months or years in an effort to eliminate the virus, and have to deal with the negative repercussions of lockdowns during and afterwards, only for everyone to become reinfected again from animals, and the whole thing start up again.
My apologies if I misunderstood your reply. You did seem to have a different angle than the original post. I just don't get it when people mention lockdowns to eliminate covid, when such a thing isn't possible.
I'm not sure what to say about your concern that animals can evolve a more dangerous virus. That seems like it can go either way. Animal evolved variants can also be less dangerous, like omicron, which is a good thing. Also locked down humans could be more vulnerable to more dangerous variants, their immune systems not having any prior exposure. How can anyone be so sure lockdowns always help?
How do you know that you're not missing out on an even better deal?
If amazon had real competition maybe they would not have raised seller fees so much, and would not have prevented sellers from allowing lower prices in other places. So a cases can be made that they are using their market share to drive up prices, not lower them. Costing the consumer more.
There's other issues besides cost, for example counterfeits. If they had real competition then maybe they'd have to do something about all the counterfeit products they sell, which hurts both buyers and sellers.
Just a couple examples. There are other ways that monopolies can impact markets.
I've had similar thoughts about facebook. We could have had much better social/messaging systems, but facebook bought the competition. We likely missed out on more variety and perhaps much better options. Consumers were harmed by these lost opportunities.
California seems to be forcing zoning changes onto cities that have not allowed enough new housing to be built (things like expediting approvals for allowed development, also allowing R3 to replace R1).
I assume that their politicians were worried about all the people leaving.
It makes sense to set a lot of zoning policy at the state level, where all people are represented, so that incumbent local property owners can't selfishly micromanage everyone else.
Japan is an example of a place that does a great job with this. Housing there is more affordable and convenient. Residential side streets are off-street parking only, and each property can be a triplex, with one unit allowed to be a low-impact business, off-street. These side streets connected to larger roads with denser retail/apartments leading to planned high-rise areas that are allowed to grow when/if the population grows. Industrial areas are separate, on the other side of town.
Owners are supposed to make up the difference if tipped employee federal minimum wage plus tips ($2.13/hour + tips) is less than the regular federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour).
So that means the first $5.12 of tips each hour goes into the owner's pocket, not the employee's.
They often don't. Wage abuse in the restaurant industry is rampant. The current purpose of tipping is to have staff that essentially works on commission so restaurants don't really have to pay them, and getting 20% off the gross usually isn't a bad deal... But if you get a string of shit tippers, $7.25 an hour isn't worth much in rural Nebraska, let alone cities where most restaurants exist. This is a career for many people who have families to feed and clothe, mortgages and rent to pay, etc. "But they still make minimum wage" is an excuse that dissolves once you move beyond places that employ part-time high school students. Your electrician would also survive on their other customers if you stiffed them— the difference is that it's illegal. Even though stiffing waitstaff is not illegal, our country's social contract states that you tip a minimum of 15% (and usually 20%) when you dine out. If you stiff them altogether, they even get taxed on what the IRS assumes they were tipped at a minimum.
No matter what kind of BS justification people break out, usually styled as a righteous social protest supposedly in defense of the people they're screwing, not tipping employees making tipped wages is, morally, theft of services.
> When you make the choice to become a whistleblower, you are making the decision that the information you have is more important than your personal freedoms.
So it's wrong to expose a corrupt government without becoming a martyr? It's better to let the public to be fooled?
Not everyone thinks this way. Sometimes it matters, and sometimes it doesn't.
> he went right to Russia and horse traded information for protection
Do you have a source for the above statement?
It's my understanding that the U.S. revoked his passport while he was en-route to Ecuador, trapping him in Russia. I haven't heard that he gave the Russians any intelligence.
The Amish limit their technology, in an attempt to prevent it from interfering with their culture.
Theoretically we can decide to do whatever we (collectively) want.