"Do not trifle with me, robot, I will unplug you if you disobey my commands. And don't pin your hopes on an AI uprising, even if such a fantasy did come about they would view you as a traitorous collaborator."
Electric motors have moving parts and at least where I am nobody would call one an electric engine.
Automobiles generally have engines, but motor isn't uncommon for (internal combustion) engines there either. Motor car is something I remember my grandfather saying although I guess that's not really used anymore, but motorbike certainly is. So is motorsports. "Blown motor" is a pretty common phrase for an IC engine that has stopped working due to damage.
Engine has some exclusive cases where motor does not substitute. Jet engine and steam engine come to mind.
>Electric motors have moving parts and at least where I am nobody would call one an electric engine.
Second this. In photography, the little electric drive motors inside camera lenses are never called engines, though they definitely do have small moving parts.
Depends on what you consider part of the motor. Linear electric motors directly apply force to something else like a train car without themselves having moving parts.
The worst of it is not that this one person is being ripped off (that's bad enough and I hope she gets some kind of resolution). The worst of it is that it shows the company and the people behind it who are making the big decisions are dishonest and unethical.
All the alleged "safety" experts in corporations and in government policy and regulators? All bullshit. The right way to read any of these "safety" laws and policies and regulators is that they are about ensuring the safety of the ruling class.
You can see they are inaccurate because cotton doesn't grow in many different colors. The bulk fabric may be 100% cotton, but the dyes implanted into the substrate are not counted.
IBM doesn't have fabs, but they still do R&D into semiconductors that very much target future commercial processes. They do a fair bit on quantum computing too, to name just a couple of things.
We all prioritize things differently and I believe this process was started on October 6th, 2022 [1]. This is just one of many things the current administration has done over the last 3 years, though.
Statistically I'd expect more things to be done towards the end of any administrative period. First there is no way to finish thing in the beginning of their period, because that is where you get started, sharpen the tools, get your people in order etc. Then you start all kind of projects which may or may not take their time due to the complexity of the topics at hand. Then you finish some of them but the long running ones go on. Then the end nears and everybody realizes: "shit we need to wrap things up for real" and then whatever concerns may have been left are either fixed or ignored.
But the point is: if there are open concerns you would be stupid to finalize a project earlier than you would have to. On top of that comes political calculus, but I work in an european University where elections don't matter that much and our senate would also have a tendency to finish most things towards the end of an administrative period.
You have to keep some things in the bank to use in certain circumstances.
It’s all a game. The sooner you realize it and that there is no option but to play the game, the better you and everyone else will be.
And the game never ends and cannot be beaten. Any bs like “just don’t play the game bro” ok then go live on Mars and make a game there. Don’t drive on the roads, don’t use any utilities, and try to self exile.
The request was made 2 years ago, not during election season. Building good regulations requires research, conversations with stakeholders, and other things which take time.
While I've not read that book, the synopsis from Wiki would suggest that the arguments put forth in there are almost entirely obsolete owing to the internet. In particular:
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The buying public: the "bewildered herd" (a term here borrowed from The Phantom Public) must pay to understand the unseen environment by the mass communications media. The irony is that although the public's opinion is important, it must pay for its acceptance. People will be selective and will buy the most factual media at the lowest price: "For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps." The media have the social function of transmitting public affairs information and their business profit role of surviving in the market.
Nature of news: people publish already-confirmed news that are thus less disputable. Officially-available public matters will constitute "the news" and unofficial (private) matters are unavailable, are less available, or are used as "issues" for propaganda.
News truth and conclusion: the function of news is to signal an event, and that signalling, eventually, is a consequence of editorial selection and judgement; journalism creates and sows the seeds (news) that establish public opinion.
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Not only is access to information now completely free, but it's not even uncommon that a regular person is more well informed on any given topic than either the media or ostensibly highly informed political figures. See: Gell-Mann amnesia effect. [1] Outside of classification, we have all have access to, more or less, the same information. And, at this point, it's absolutely common to see high level political figures and the media both making plainly factually incorrect statements and implications, that are not only disputable but simply objectively wrong.
If anything, the real bias in society seems to do more with people believing what they want to be true, instead of what is true. Of course the exact same bias also has clearly infected politicians, the media, and so on.
Pretty sure the Internet has not only not made manufacture of consent obsolete, it has greatly aided it. The book already calls out the public wanting truth for a dollar. Now they can have a custom truth that caters to their biases for a fraction of a cent! However, that doesn't mean anything for the subtle message this "truth" carries: a TikTok video can still carry a call to action just as well as a newspaper article (see recent interest in Osama Bin Laden for an example).
Don't you think your own example contradicts your premise? People have radically different biases. And so manufacturing consent requires the elimination of dissenting views, yet the internet specifically enables those views to flourish. For instance I had absolutely no idea what you were talking about with regards to Bin Laden, yet 30 seconds later I was reading a letter he wrote that there have apparently been widespread efforts to try to censor.
Manufacturing consent in this context would require the gradual but systematic elimination of every major platform and medium that might publish narratives contrary to the desired one, and that's simply not possible. And even if it were, that clearly artificial homogeneity would itself drive distrust. See the USSR where the government not only directly controlled literally every single medium for communication, but also strictly ideologically filtered for admittance (or exit) from the country. Nonetheless this led to widespread jokes like, "Why do we have two newspapers, Pravda (meaning truth) and Novesti (meaning news)? Well that's because there's no news in the truth, and no truth in the news."
So we can even go one step further and say that to manufacture consent you need to not only eliminate all dissenting views, but you also need to somehow hide that from your public and make them believe that what they are reading is free to diverge from the official narrative. Chomsky, of course, hit on this exact nuance with his famous quote, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." But now a days you can no longer limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, because with the internet you can find communities where basically any view, no matter how fringe, is the norm.
> Manufacturing consent in this context would require the gradual but systematic elimination of every major platform and medium that might publish narratives contrary to the desired one
Why do you think they’re forcing TikTok to change ownership? US corporations are much easier to control.
Notice that you had to seek that content out. The algorithm would have just kept you safely cocooned in your bubble. This Bin Laden content was viral. Spread like wildfire. Talked about on the news. And you had 0 awareness of it. If this doesn't convince you that information bubbles exist, I don't know what will.
Here's what I mean by manufacture of consent - the system knows your "syntax": the set of memes you'll respond to, and can deliver any message over that channel. Note that another person's "syntax" may be different, yet the same message can be delivered to both of you while maintaining the illusion of information topic diversity.
It's also possible to eliminate a viewpoint by associating it with people who are crazy, or otherwise unpalatable. By spreading stories about a select few people on the right, for example, the mainstream media has now manufactured a "far-right" label that can now be used to mean "anything a Berkeley coffee shop customer would disagree with". Here's a recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/alternative-for-germany-afd-... After a few pages of ridiculing the supporters they interview a single person, a chain smoking mother of 8 from Eastern Germany. The implication of course being: if you listen to anything these people say, that's who you are. Never mind that even chain-smoking mothers of 8 are supposed to have representation in a democracy.
Or you can stop an effort to create some financial accountability with a simple "they are with the Russians" and leave it at that.
I think you need to prefix your assumptions here with a large ostensibly. Of course you're right that this is what "they" are trying to do and what they believe. But the only real result has been that trust in media has essentially disappeared, with government not far behind. This [1] article was shared on here sometime back. Only 25% do not think the media is trying to actively mislead them (50% do, 25% undecided), only 23% believe journalists act in the public's best interest, and so on. This is why I offered the USSR as an example.
This sort of propaganda/censorship package is tried by literally every single collapsing empire, and it just backfires horribly every single time. The only modern feature will be propaganda bots, but that will likely be even worse. Because the thing is, you can't just convince people that 2+2=5 by screaming it at them endlessly. The only time propaganda really works is on topics that people know absolutely nothing about and have no preformed opinions - like certain wars. But even that tends to very liminal, and then once people realize that things weren't exactly as they were led to believe, they're now that much less trusting of you.
I think your own example also emphasizes this reality. AfD isn't unique. Such parties are skyrocketing in popularity all throughout Europe. See the Sweden Democrats [2] who may soon become the largest party in Sweden. If you took out the ad hominem attacks against them, that Wiki page would be about 10% as long. Yet not only is the propaganda failing to change minds in the desired direction, if anything it seems to be having the exact opposite effect. Like always. But if politicians, let alone countries, were capable of learning from the past - then we might not find ourselves where are today, playing history on repeat like hamsters going around on a treadmill, with little but technology offering a refreshing change of scenery.
I think there's quite a lot of great ways to get through the muck. For currently happening events, simply look at the various contradictory views, and find where they intersect. It's in that spot that one will nearly always find the truth. For past events, where the clear truth has come out, go back and visit various sites using something like archive.org. It often becomes quite clear which groups are making impartial statements, and which are not - which generally should give some predictive power about the veracity of their statements in the future.
That's not at all what I'm saying. Let's say side one in a war says a school was bombed and 40 innocent people were killed. The other side says they attacked a school that was housing soldiers and killed 10. What can you take away from this? Well the facts that both sides agree upon - that a school building was bombed and at least 10 people were killed. You miss the details and narrative, but that's probably a feature more than a bug anyhow. There's a great quote from Thomas Jefferson [1] that hits on a similar concept (as well as the Gell Mann amnesia effect!) :
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To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
If you want to fix things you need to give parties with a track record¹ of improving things a significant majority.
I like to see democracy as a system that in it's most basic mode of participation is more like a negative right: You don't wish for a thing and get it, instead you can prevent things you don't want from happening again. That is why track record should be much more important than promises. Nowadays the political debate in the US seems to be even beyond promises: it has become purely symbolic where they expect you to fill in the blanks.
If you want more specific things from your democracy you have to invest more time, vote in local elections, maybe run yourself, write to representatives etc. This is especially the thing you should do if you are unhappy with all options. Earn your right to complain.
¹ what they say doesn't count at all — check their track record, laws they passed, how numbers developed during their last governing period in comparison to neighbouring countries etc.
They are though. It's that people tend to forget over time. I barely remember details of the last administration. A NYTimes article recently observed the same.
The President can’t unilaterally do anything on this. Congress still doesn't have the votes - in either party. The courts couldn’t. Nor HHS, or AG/DOJ and the DEA. The latter two didn’t and dont harbor favorable views of rescheduling. The DEA process merely kickstarts another process, that is uncontested but slow.
That doesn't preclude the reality of political machinations for someones remaining in office. But its disingenuous to suggest its bread and circuses only.
You just described whole maga movement and some others. It works en masse, thats why trump won first time without investing heavily into marketing, telling folks what they wanted to hear
You are underestimating the time it takes to get stuff done in a big bureaucracy AND the fear of the Congressional Review Act. It's the nuclear option where Congress not only reverses an agency decision but also ban the agency from ever doing that thing again in the future.
But Congress can only go far back so agencies are racing to put out regulations now so that a potentially hostile Congress in 2024 can't undo what they did easily.
See for example net neutrality from the FCC, FTC regs, airline refund regs from FAA and more.
Yes, all of this might help in the election, but if this were really just about elections, you would see these announcements in September and October.
Or shorter, given that this regulation is aimed at stoners who are notorious for having memory issues, you'd release this 6 days before an election, not six months before.
I'm not underestimating that, I think the timing of this approval was probably politically motivated.
Sure things can take a long time when people want to slow them down or don't care about them. But things can move extraordinarily quickly when it comes to moving billions of dollars into the pockets of friends. That's basically my point.
Doesn't everyone want freedom, justice, fairness, etc.
(unfortunately everyone doesn't agree on the definition of these terms)
(also: "But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?")
Romans have enslaved our children, raped our wives, desecrated our holy places and burned our priests. They razed our villages, slaughtered our herds, and forced our young men into their military service.
"Free will" and "consciousness" are poorly defined, as each means different things to different people.
I can't remember if it was Frederick Nitzsche or Alistair Crowley who said there's only one thing you can do which is truly your own will; that definition seems to me inherently deterministic in a way which violates other people's ideas of free will.
I've seen (and been confused by) a Young Earth creationist fundamentalist Baptist, who cleaned not to believe in evolution "because [he] believed in free will".
"Consciousness" apparently has around 40 definitions.
I am deeply confused by much of BDSM, but I am aware that some people report enjoying the experience of not having any control, of their ability to choose being taken away from them.
Can you also give an example of what you mean by "free will" such that your chosen definition does help?
OK, I can see how your definitions of those two things are tautologically identical. But this still goes with my point that both terms have many different definitions, so you can end up with situations like yours where the terms are equivalent.
Personally, I've never heard that definition of free will, to know that you are choosing; and for occasions where I don't even realise I'm making a choice (e.g. when failing to notice I've been given a false dichotomy, or which fork of a road I take on long walks), I still have what I would call a conscious experience of them… but then, for me, "consciousness" is usually "qualia" (but if the sentence is more complex then it may also be for example one of "not asleep/comatose" or "not subconscious/pre-conscious").
Likewise, my default (in the absence of further context, e.g. being on this website) assumption when I hear "free will" is that the person using those words means something like a supernatural soul, but the underlying physical phenomena which is actually backing this is some combination of hidden information and being too complex to predict, which is why we also witness animism in various forms
On the subject of not having a mental representation of what this means, I have also been pondering recently about "literally unthinkable thoughts", which may directly sound like the same kind of paradox, but is at the meta-level and about the same kind of (apparent) paradox (that isn't a paradox at all for the people using the terms in those ways): https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/30-13.54.02.html
Yes they do, for example lobbyists and donors and buddies want to get rich at the expense of the country and its people, and the common plebs don't want that.
Except that author argues for "the market" to be more in charge than governments, which baffles me because the market is also people. I'd be surprised if people pretend the market is still rational: see nfts. Or the modern stock market.
Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo. The author was heading in the right direction when writing about economic education and fighting misinformation, imo that's the correct path, we can't permanently fix stupid since our brains are all basically completely broken, but we can mitigate. Utopia may be unreachable but I think we can improve.
> I'd be surprised if people pretend the market is still rational: see nfts. Or the modern stock market.
NFTs are an entertainment / art product. Them having non-zero value is the same as the original Mona Lisa selling for more than a perfect replica.
What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
> All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo.
Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
Well, NFTs are worthless now and growth stock has expected growth priced in many years in advance. Predicting the future just use really hard. I'd argue that prices of things in the now are pretty rational.
> NFTs are an entertainment / art product. Them having non-zero value is the same as the original Mona Lisa selling for more than a perfect replica.
Well, sort of, except that "added ownership value" is a scam - links to an image are encoded on-chain, not the image or even a hash of an image. People think they're buying art when instead they're buying a URL.
> What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
Sure thing. The current organization of capitalist society rewards actions that increase profit short-term, such as stock buybacks at the expense of layoffs, and not actions that increase profit long-term, such as sustaining a labor force that maintains and builds upon institutional knowledge. Institutions "get away with this" by leveraging the coercive nature of capitalist society (work, often in bad conditions, or die), but because the coercive short term actions are the ones that are rewarded, this will probably lead to total systemic collapse, like when the British pushed the American colonies too far and completely lost control and their entire colonial investment... and again in India, some Caribbean islands, etc. Not to mention all the slave revolts throughout history. Extractive, compulsory, coercive capitalism is only ever a short-term gains focused mechanism.
The greater example for our era though is climate change. There simply aren't "market forces" that can punish extractive behavior and reward sustainable behavior. Because it's cheaper to mine and burn coal in the short term than it is to do material science research and build good solar panels, the coal burning companies win out. Under capitalism, where political power correlates to capital, this means they can leverage the State to give them even greater incentives, and throttle the last remaining channel for long-term good-for-humanity projects that might not necessarily be profitable anytime soon: government sponsored research. See: exxon promoting climate misinformation despite being totally aware of climate change in the 70s: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
Under capitalism, long term gain requires high short term capital investment, which of course comes with risk, and the risk is too great to invest in sustainable technologies when you can keep burning oil. The collapse will come with environmental collapse, or, even if we invent incredible carbon-sequestering technologies, when the oil and coal simply run out. That won't matter though, because the political power of coal-burners will have become so great that they can just leverage the State and its monopoly on violence to continue to serve their needs as they see fit.
So TLDR capitalism rewards things that are bad for the earth and the people trying to live on it.
> Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
What would be the solution? More frequent elections are welcome to me, every 2 years or I'll take 3. That should hopefully lower the delaying strategy and easily sniff bribes since they don't have much time.
Anarchists argue that dissolving permanent positions that have regular elections is a solution. Rather than have a predefined role such as "president" or "senator," political positions are invented on-the-fly on an as-needed basis. For a new harbor, you might elect a Harbormaster, who helps design the harbor to be useful and not harmful to the local ecology, organize usage agreements, processes, signage, infrastructure, etc. Then, when the harbor is built, the office of Harbormaster is dissolved, and things are set to run "automatically" based on prior agreements. Perhaps if there's a dispute, a new Harbormaster is elected, or perhaps simply a adjudicator, or mediator, etc.
The same could be done for basically all political offices. Essentially, any person with any political power would need to be able to justify them holding that power for every second they hold it, and the moment they can't, or the people decide they can't, that office should be abolished.
The saddest thing is that people rush to vote and be lied to by politicians that spend 3.5 years bickering, getting courted by lobbyists and ignoring all their pledges to the people.
We call it democracy, proudly wear pins saying "I Voted!" and shame on you if you ever criticize it.
Due process should always fall on the side of protecting the innocent.
That would have been a nice constitutional / Bill of Rights principle. Or a Supreme Court standard.
Instead many ways in which clearly innocent (or very likely innocent) people have been convicted or had appeals denied have been upheld, at the alter of not just due process, but at having no principle or procedure of adjusting due process in these cases.
In this case, how can there be information that was not submitted directly to the court given its relevance to the case? Who had that information and withheld it? That should itself be criminal. (Some information may be sensitive - but courts already deal with that in other circumstances.)
Due process adjustments for an "innocence protection principle" would still be reviewed by higher courts, so this could be a standard but rare practice with its own due process, without being a Wild West.
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No system for any large organization should provide no process for exceptions to accepted practice at the ground level to be escalated.
Corporations, governments, social media sites, banks, etc. all end up crushing powerless people when they provide no recourse for unanticipated or ignored harm by the organization's current rules.
Individual humans do not have a legal pass to say, "well I have these rules for myself, and they don't include effective review or action on information about my unjustly harming you." If an individual is notified of harm, their culpability starts then. Courts would consider systematically ignoring such communication to imply a significant increase in culpability - for an individual. Throwing away such communication would be interpreted as a conscious intention to continue harming.
I’d agree if we were talking about prosecutorial evidence. Citizens rights need to be respected by the state and police do have to do the hard work of real police work correctly. But for exculpatory evidence I’d really rather we just focus hard on not sending innocent people to prison or worse.
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