why'd this get downvoted? at least some of the countries there have populations who are vastly less values-compatible with Good Things we believe in. ceteris paribus we should expect more good from the marginal person being born in Europe or the Americas rather than the global south or many parts of Asia. most of the countries in those areas who are friendly to America and our principles have declining birthrates too so we should exclude those and hope they continue to grow. we also want to ensure that America remains the 800lb gorilla in terms of both military and economic power and population growth is a pretty good way to do that.
this wouldn't actually fix anything because that's not how politics works. politicians set constraints that maximize their PR points then the job of everyone with a brain is left to scramble for a solution. they also don't actually care about preserving encryption and they generally don't care about collateral damage unless said damage has enough clout to make trouble.
Neumann still retains an incredible level of confidence and respect from many of the people who know him. never met the man personally but it's kind of a trip. even from people who i suspect are less clouded by whatever world-class charisma he works. i'm not sure what's true and not but i'm also not surprised he's the keynote.
scale. producing that level of return on that amount of capital is nigh on impossible. this makes them structurally worse investors, combined with a fixation on bubbles and unfortunate timing.
i'm glad they're happy but that sounds actually terrible. infinitely worse than living on a large plot of land with trees and a garden, having a nice shop to work in, a comfortable home office, a spacious kitchen, plenty of space for cars. i honestly can't see how people prefer this; i am assuming at this point it's cope and/or people who are trying to gaslight everyone into preferring it for policy/environmental/political reasons.
not particularly, no. while the "boomers ruined the economy" trope isn't all right, neither is it all wrong. they effectively mortgaged much of the future value of the country and extracted it.
now "old folks" in question are demanding a lavish retirement at the expense of me and those who are currently young despite the fact that when they funded something similar for their grandparents, the proportional burden was radically lower. a society that would significantly burden the future of its young (and therefore its own future) to cash out the olds smacks of a ponzi scheme and is hideously distorted.
what's more, elder care sucks dollars from investing in interesting industries (colonizing space, growing our industrial base, new computing technologies) to mindless nonsense. instead, those dollars will go to building bingo halls.
you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false. sometimes it's for the better (in America, we have many well-educated immigrants from India and China). sometimes it's for the worse (see Europe's struggles with uneducated muslim immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East).
importing large groups of people sometimes works; we did it pretty well in America because we had so much room to grow. transportation and communication were also much harder, so it was less easy for people to maintain ties to their former country and family there; they adapted a little more, though ethnic ghettos were still a problem.
it's not an intractable problem but saying "just get immigrants bro" isn't really a good solution. we are sometimes biased in the US because we are selective (too much so, I think). we bring in the best from high-population areas like Africa and India and we see benefits for that. on the other hand, while migrant working and a moderate level of illegal immigration are fine and even economically beneficial, it would be silly to deny that the current levels are causing severe problems. when you lose that selectivity and control, things don't turn out so well. and to import enough people to make up for falling birthrates we would have to broaden our horizons beyond skilled workers.
Before everyone shoots schadenfreude at the Evil Monopoly Man Bigtechs, please remember this is the same government that is trying valiantly to ban/backdoor E2E encryption. It should be implicitly distrusted. A few things they want, per the press release:
- scanning twitter DMs, google chat, gmail, google messages, discord messages, and google meet for "sextortion" with "language analysis"
- automatically watching all video calls for CSEA
- policing the above (through unspecified means) for "grooming"
So before jumping on "muh elon bad" and "muh bigtech needs regulation" think about what exactly they're trying to regulate and how.
Theoretically could be considered union-busting. But since the company was just acquired (likely sold due to poor performance and almost certainly being reorganized) there is very good plausible deniability.
productivity is what feeds and powers the country. it's amazing how many people forget that no amount of financial engineering will permanently abstract the physical output of goods and services countries produce. there's a line between PE vultures juicing the marginal penny and just totally discarding productivity.
no, this is a lousy analogy because there is a clear harm to others in the case of theft. we've tried regulating other difficult to regulate things where the harm is unclear or indirect (drugs being a good example) to no avail.
your piracy example is better. consider that it's the rise of more convenient options (netflix and spotify) not some effective policy that curtailed the prevalence of piracy.
on the contrary, it's proof that popular support for something can overcome even what was a fairly brutal crackdown by large men with large guns and quasi-military strength. people like dalle and midjourney and chatgpt.
right, this is why i'm specifically questioning your assertion on copyright law. you weren't talking about ai displacing jobs generally, just copyright law - which doesn't protect jobs in marketing, legal, journalism, healthcare, and probably not software. i don't understand why you believe that "if copyright law doesn't take a massive leap forward in the next year" this sort of thing will happen.
can you explain why you think obsoleting the majority of commercial artists will "throw a wrench in our entire economy"? since you're addressing copyright law i'm assuming that's all you're addressing. this sounds like a very small number of people. for the economy as a whole, bringing down the cost of art is probably a positive.
i understand the arguments about artistic value, but those are quite separate from yours.
I agree. I'm kind of surprised more unions haven't taken responsibility for opening up co-ops. They have lots of money to do it, it's pro-worker, and it enables them to own the means of production.
Unions ironically act very conservative these days. They could take some bold steps to potentially create very worker-friendly, worker-owned shops, which would create a voluntary, non-coercive path towards the "market socialist" structure many people advocate.
Even in large industries like automobiles where this is hard, they could probably start doing something like smaller-scale parts production and sell those.