Starlink is an amazing solution to the problem of "How do I keep my orbital transport business somewhat liquid" which isn't really the kind of problem governments are meant to resolve.
The government should have torn up your copper monopolies a few decades earlier, but the one thing the US has done right is sort of letting local power companies and ISPs work it out for themselves where it comes to fibre. Enforcing a single standard everywhere is bad actually.
If you were a savvy businessman, you could make a lot of money just connecting customers with FTTH rather than the prior situation. There was an explosion of "altnets" build off the backs of this legislation
No the US clearly believes they would be better off not part of the rest of the world, the best thing we can do is not to drown in that tantrum, and provide the economic embargo they clearly think will bring them prosperity.
>I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society. At some point you reach a critical mass of crime that is so rampant, and the rule of law has so broken down that it’s basically Mad Max out there, and then these idealistic philosophies start to fall apart.
I see "High Trust Society" so much as a weird racist dogwhistle, but feel free to disabuse me of that notion.
I live in an extremely high crime area. Because cops abuse the law to keep their numbers up. If someone checked they would see that my local McDonalds car park is one of the biggest crime hotspots in the country because of administrative detections made on minor drug deals there.
It just so happens that my area is also where the government dumps migrants, refugees and poor people. Its also the case that they test welfare changes here.
I haven't had a single incident here in 6 years. We often forget to lock our doors. My wife takes my toddler walking around the neighborhood at night. I wave hello to the guy across the road who I have like 99% certainty is dealing drugs (Or just has a lot of friends with nice cars who visit to see how long it has been since he trimmed his lawn).
That said, if you turn on the tv 2 things are apparently happening. 1. We are under attack by hordes of immigrants tearing the country apart. 2. We are under attack by kids on ebikes mowing kids down in a rampage of terror.
Politicians, in order to be seen to be doing things, bring laws in to counter these threats. People bash their chests and demand more be done.
But the issue is that its just not happening. My suburb is great. The people are generally lovely, even those in meth related occupations.
When you complain about the trustiness of the society, consider that your lack of trust might actually be the problem? Nothing is necessarily going to break down because you didnt make your neighbors life worse by supporting another dumb as shit law. "Oh no crime is so rampant" buddy you need to get over yourself. Societies don't fail because of socially defined Crime they fail because people prioritise their perceived safety over everyones freedom.
> I’m not defending government surveillance, or the idea of considering someone innocent until proven guilty
Exactly what you are defending.
>what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism?
Its at threat from the idealism that you can just pass one more law to fix society.
>don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.
They come up with a bunch of dumbshit laws like the OP. Thats the result.
Re: High trust society general means people are pointing to some implicit unwritten structures that stop something from happening.
Collective notions of shame, actual networks of friends and families that reinforce correct behaviour or issue corrections.
Think about simply how credit networks form and function. And why visiting a food truck or medieval travelling doctor for your vial of ointment is different from buying special products from a brick and mortar establishment.
Basically if you or the network has a harder time back propagating defaults and bad credit in a way that prevents future bad outcomes then that is a loss of high trust.
This isn't about race really unless you are operating at the level of some biological or genetic connection to behaviour ... But that is a pretty strange place to be as there a whole host of confounding factors that are much more obvious and believable and I cast serious doubt that even a motivated racist would ever credibly be able to do empirical studies showing causal links between any given genetic population cluster and the emergent societal behaviour. These are such high dimensional systems it just seems insane to even think one could measure this effect.
The invisible substrate is the society unfortunately ... And we are all bad at writing it down and measuring it.
It seems to me that society isnt anything but a stick to beat against ones hobby horse. "Society is bad because of the thing that happened to me, save society by changing things my way!!!" etc. Where really if you turn off the tv and go to the shops its fine.
Agreed, the article author is just gatekeeping as far as I'm concerned.
Most books available on PoD wouldn't be available at all without it. Not just less well known reissues but also new interesting books with limited readership, and books which larger publishers would ignore because of their own prejudices.
There are more luxury editions of classics than ever so quality-sensitive book collectors are still being catered for. And it's easier than ever to find secondhand copies of old books.
I suspect there are real quality differences between PoD books published through Amazon and these ones, which may be printed in a similar method but perhaps not the same quality of electronic formats.
My self-published books via whatever it was called before being subsumed under the Kindle brand seemed decent enough quality, but I have received others from Amazon that were pretty bad (photocopy bad, for example).
Depends. The only predictions I have seen here are the centaurs vs anti centaurs of Doctorow, and even his analysis I find pretty flimsy.
I dont think the race to shove an LLM into everything is going to grow the pie.
But I also dont think it is impossible that a use case will present itself that will create further jobs.
The issue is that its largely unpredictable.
Its a bit like, we are sitting around in the 1950s trying to predict how computers will affect the economy.
It is going to take more than 1 successful deductive leap to get us from 1950s computing -> miniaturisation -> computer in every home -> internet communications.
Every deductive leap we take is extremely prone to being wrong.
We simply cannot lie back and imagine every productive relationship in the economy and then extrapolate every centaur and anti centaur possible for it.
What we do know is that theres a bit of a gold rush to effectively brute force every possible AI variant into every productive relationship in the economy. The fastest way to get the answer to your question is to do it. Possibly the only way to get the answer is to do it.
For instance, someone might imagine LLMs simply eating a whole bunch of service industry jobs. At the same time, theres a mid state where it eats some, but the remaining staff are employed to monitor the LLMs to prevent them handing out free shit to smart shoppers. Its also easy enough to imagine that LLMs never quite get there and the risk is too large for foul play, so they just dont gain that kind of traction. Its also possible to imagine an end state where LLMs can get to 0% risk if they are constantly trained on human data coming from humans doing the same job, and that humans are gainfully employed in parallel with LLMs. Its possible that LLMs are great at business as usual, but the risk emerges when company policies change, and the cost of retraining LLMs makes it impractical for move fast and break things companies to do anything but hire humans. My favourite scenario is one where humans are largely AI assisted, trained on particular people, and theres a massive cybercrime industry built around exfiltrating LLM training weights trained on high functioning humans and deploying them without humans to the third world to help them get 80% of the quality of first world businesses, making them heavily competitive.
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