I'm having difficulty parsing what you're saying in your first paragraph. What is it to 'meet the wealthy half way'? Did the ultra wealthy meet the middle class or the poor half way when they essentially ended their tax obligations and legalized mass influence buying in Citizens United? What's the 'half measure' that is going to rein all that back in?
No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.
That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy.
If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.
> It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.
It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.
>You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment.
If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.
I don't really want to cut taxes for the working/middle class though. I want to tax the everliving fuck out of the hyper-wealthy, to the point that they cease to exist. The money should go into providing goods and services for the working/middle class, but collecting that money and lighting it on fire (or parking assets in a sovereign wealth fund) is a superior option to doing nothing.
Neither our democracy nor our position as a world power survived capitalism eating itself and everything else. We are down to single individuals holding more nominal wealth than whole continents, and the worship of the billionaire has replaced the worship of Jesus Christ for most Americans, a palace cult committing national suicide on your behalf. If you want any of the things that America pitched as its merits in fighting for influence in the Cold War, you want this situation over with.
Let them eat three commas and not a penny more. When you become a billionaire we give you a medal and confiscate every dollar above 1 billion. Using a carrier strike group if necessary.
They're not standing still now. They're eating our entrails. Right now.
We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for electoral democracy), we're unilaterally withdrawing from trade and military alliances week by week. We have fascist armies on the streets pulling people from their cars and houses. Our leaders openly brag about their corruption and a good fraction of our people praise them for it simply because it pisses other people off.
We are allegedly about to "Federalize Elections" and also enter a war with Iran that a supermajority of voters do not want.
In terms of state capacity, in terms of our agency in the world, in terms of what we historically regarded as our legacy and our culture and our material security and our institutions, we are in freefall. And it is mostly down to having far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.
Have you considered that enforcing any right against a wealthy person is punishing them for being successful? They can't come on your property, that's a punishment.
The prospect of "Attack" and "Literal War" is limited by the fact that worst-case resistance involves a drone strike, and worst-case compliance involves retaining enough wealth for you and everyone you know to live on the beach sipping mojitos for the rest of your natural lives, while holding a nice trophy.
Just not, you know, a space program and a larger military than Krushchev's reporting to you personally.
Tax cuts for the ultra wealthy are routinely paired with tax cuts for the less wealthy, for the same reason that countries which tax the ultra wealthy a lot also tax the less wealthy a lot. Building support for taxation means convincing people that taxes are great and they should embrace the benefits of living in a society with lots of tax revenue to spend.
not sure if you're aware of this, but there is a broad, robust, competitive and inexpensive market for buttons of every conceivable type and function, which have the advantage of providing consistent and direct feedback when reached for, touched, and actuated.
yes, to huge levels of success. It's not clear what kibwen is going on about, but local + remote actor concurrency transparency, while not without its complications, comes with massive development and deployment wins.
While the general premise is true (big company will try to rip off small company), Amazon doesn't have the magical power to get around patent law and the economic penalties are fairly harsh, which is why most companies don't do it. And no war chest of tech patents is going to get Amazon around a patent in the trucking industry because the inventor of the trucking gizmo couldn't care less about whether Amazon patented the right to make Alexa speak in tongues.
It's possible, and likely, that Alibaba vendors decided to rip off the product, but again...patent law is a useful tool for those who use it, and Amazon can be held liable for the sales of infringing products on its storefronts.
That's because criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.
Patent litigation is a different thing entirely. The burden of proof is lower, and the payouts are higher.
To put things in perspective, Apple, Amazon, etc., have lost patent lawsuits worth hundreds of millions over trivial aspects of their devices that are just tiny parts out of thousands compromising the phone/tablet/whatever.
It seems a lot of people on HN fundamentally misunderstand how patent litigation works.
If this trucking device actually existed, and for some reason was being sold on Amazon, and the inventor had sued, he would be living large these days off the settlement.
Yes, Amazon sellers have copied products before, but those aren't Amazon. Amazon prefers to just buy the competition (see, e.g., Diapers.com and Zappos).
>“We have already initiated a more aggressive ‘plan to win’ against diapers.com,” longtime Amazon retail executive Doug Herrington apparently wrote in an email released by the committee. “To the extent that this plan undercuts the core diapers business for diapers.com, it will slow the adoption of Soap.com,” another company owned by Quidsi.
>Herrington called Quidsi Amazon’s No. 1 short-term competitor. “We need to match pricing on these guys no matter what the cost,” he said in the email.
I bet Quidsi was also selling the diapers at a loss since they were using UPS and Fedex, so not sure what the difference is if Amazon sells diapers at a loss or Quidsi was selling diapers at a loss.
The innovation would have been in the logistics buildout, which Quidsi obviously wasn’t doing.
The logistics buildout is arguably Amazon's biggest retail lynchpin.
However, it's built on a few fragile external costs.
First that comes to mind, is the comingling, which will theoretically resolve one way or another with their ending of comingling. Comingling almost certainly lowered logistics costs however...
Second being, the externality of how both warehouse and delivery workers are treated in the name of the almighty metrics. NGL I feel like the public's acceptance of their labor practices has ironically only accelerated the erosion of labor rights and worker treatment.
It's good to ask for a link (although not good to give one if this is your friend and it may affect their relationship with Amazon that you're talking about this in public), but you can't expect people to waste time thinking about your ringing ears.
Then don’t believe it and go on with your day. No one owes you a link to anything, especially if you simply don’t pay attention to Amazon’s widely-reported business practices.
(1) a couple of years ago, LLMs for coding sucked pretty bad.
(2) LLMs are a force multiplier. If you start with a negative number, then your coefficient makes things worse.
(3) Microsoft has never been a place of quality. It's not organized for that, it doesn't have that as its philosophy, and so you should never be surprised that it doesn't deliver that.
I wouldn't speak so quickly for the 'uncommon' language set. I had Claude write me a fully functional typed erlang compiler with ocaml and LLVM IR over the last two days to test some ideas. I don't know ocaml. It made the right calls about erlang, and the result passes a fairly serious test suite, so it must've known enough ocaml and LLVM IR.
> the same place an increase in power comes from when you use a lever.
I don't understand the analogy. A lever doesn't give you an increase in power (which would be a free lunch); it gives you an increase in force, in exchange for a decrease in movement. What equivalent to this tradeoff are you pointing to?
I used to be an AI skeptic, but after a few months of Claude Max, I've turned that around. I hope Anthropic gives Amanda Askell whatever her preferred equivalent of a gold Maserati is, every day.
I'm honestly struggling to understand your position. You believe that there are true moral absolutes, but that they should not be communicated in the culture at all costs?
I believe there are moral absolutes and not including them in the AI constitution (for example, like the US Constitution "All Men Are Created Equal") is dangerous and even more dangerous is allowing a top AI operator define moral and ethics based on relativist standards, which as I've said elsewhere, history has shown to have deadly consequences.
I don’t how to explain it to you any different. I’m arguing for a different philosophy to be applied when constructing the llm guardrails. There may be a lot of overlap in how the rules are manifested in the short run.
You can explain it differently by providing a concrete example. Just saying "the philosophy should be different" is not informative. Different in what specific way? Can you give an example of a guiding statement that you think is wrong in the original document, and an example of the guiding statement that you would provide instead? That might be illuminative and/or persuasive.
Doubtless Hunter Biden's job was a naked nepo quasi-bribery thing, and he said and did all sorts of ridiculous things. Dude is indefensible.
But on one hand you have a president joining a conference call and not discussing business, and on the other hand you have a president literally demanding tribute, gold bars, a ballroom, firing all available oversight, blackmailing all of the universities to toe his ideological line, installing crypto and antivax scammers, and looting like it's going out of style, and meanwhile all of his kids are becoming millionaires trading openly off the name and the power.
"Barron’s first major business move came in 2024, when he co-founded World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture launched with his father and older brothers. He is even credited inside the family with explaining basic crypto concepts to his father. After Trump won the presidency, the company exploded in value. Forbes estimates it added more than $1.5 billion to Trump family wealth—about 10% of which belongs to Barron." (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/net-wort...)
Given your statements about Hunter, I believe you have decent visibility into both sides of the issue. Kudos to you.
I don’t disbelieve what you say about Trump and his family. I am certain they are cashing in on his time in office, at a tremendous pace. ( It has to be worth it, given the damage being done to the Trump corporate brand. )
I’d like your opinion on something. What do you make of these allegations?
1) Romania: On September 28, 2015, Vice President Biden welcomed Romanian President Klaus Iohannis to the White House. Within five weeks of this meeting, a Romanian businessman involved with a high-profile corruption prosecution in Romania, Gabriel Popoviciu, began depositing a Biden associate’s bank account, which ultimately made their way into Biden family accounts. Popoviciu made sixteen of the seventeen payments, totaling over $3 million, to the Biden associate account while Joe Biden was Vice President. Biden family accounts ultimately received approximately $1.038 million. The total amount from Romania to the Biden family and their associates is over $3 million.
2) China- CEFC: On March 1, 2017—less than two months after Vice President Joe Biden left public office—State Energy HK Limited, a Chinese company, wired $3 million to a Biden associate’s account. This is the same bank account used in the above “Romania” section. After the Chinese company wired the Biden associate account the $3 million, the Biden family received approximately $1,065,692 over a three-month period in different bank accounts. Additionally, the CEFC Chairman gives Hunter Biden a diamond worth $80,000. Lastly, CEFC creates a joint venture with the Bidens in the summer of 2017. The timeline lays out the “WhatsApp” messages and subsequent wires from the Chinese to the Bidens of $100,000 and $5 million. The total amount from China, specifically with CEFC and their related entities, to the Biden family and their associates is over $8 million.
3) Kazakhstan: On April 22, 2014, Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani oligarch used his Singaporean entity, Novatus Holdings, to wire one of Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca entities $142,300. The very next day—April 23, 2014—the Rosemont Seneca entity transferred the exact same amount of money to a car dealership for a car for Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden and Devon Archer would represent Burisma in Kazakhstan in May/June of 2014 as the company attempted to broker a three-way deal among Burisma, the Kazakhstan government, and a Chinese state-owned energy company.
4) Ukraine: Devon Archer joined the Burisma board of directors in spring of 2014 and was joined by Hunter Biden shortly thereafter. Hunter Biden joined the company as counsel, but after a meeting with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky in Lake Como, Italy, was elevated to the board of directors in the spring of 2014. Both Biden and Archer were each paid $1 million per year ( note: I am quoting a source here. I’ve always seen this number at 500k, not 1M ) for their positions on the board of directors. In December 2015, after a Burisma board of directors meeting, Zlochevsky and Hunter Biden “called D.C.” in the wake of mounting pressures the company was facing. Zlochevsky was later charged with bribing Ukrainian officials with $6 million in an attempt to delay or drop the investigation into his company. The total amount from Ukraine to the Biden family and their associates is $6.5 million.
Are people that ignore these ‘feckless traitors’? Why or why not?
Why do you think that I'm going to defend Biden? Politics are not sports, and I don't have a "favorite team". Your silly gotcha questions won't work on me because I don't reflexively defend people just because they are supported by corrupt political organizations.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and one person's crimes do not excuse another's. Arrest them all.
We need fundamental changes in our political system, and we're not going to be able to achieve anything if you keep pretending like these whataboutisms are worth anyone's time. Wake up.
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