The problem is that the founding fathers believed in constraining the state because it could be abusive, but they should have understood that all power ought to be subject to the people, not just state power.
I wonder what the largest and most powerful private enterprise the FFs knew about was. I suppose they'd probably heard of the Hudson's Bay Company, but I have no idea how they really felt about the potential that many normal people would feel equal amounts of domination from companies with revenue much larger than most countries' GDP.
The FFs were literally bourgeois, the american revolution was a bourgeois revolution. They were the big private enterprises, and they wanted to stop giving a cut of their winnings to king george.
I find him more interesting when he talks about non-AI topics. Lots of other interesting people are like this too. I'd rather get my knowledge on AI from people who have unique insights into it. Scott has a lot of unique perspectives of his own, but his views on AI are bog-standard for his social group.
Not sure what you mean, maybe it depends on region. I am in EU and have Type 2 and CHAdeMO connectors. I only charge at home and travel to go to work and back, so barely ever use CHAdeMO. I agree, though, that I don't and wouldn't travel long distances with this car.
I don't know of a single leftist who would call Gates a leftist. Liberal, perhaps, in the economic and social sense, but not a leftist in any way shape or form. I don't know why its so hard for people to distinguish between these two very different groups.
Blame Rush Limbaugh and others for conflating them in the 90s.
I don't know if people generally know the difference before that, but personally it's only been recently that I've been exposed to sources that distinguish between left and liberal.
What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?
The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
To me it feels like controlling a power tool. These things have a sort of momentum to them, because they do stuff so fast. It's easy to let the tool get out of hand.
Are the trade-offs really unacceptable? Like why can't we just build treaties and international accords and just like do what humans have always done forever, and muddle through?
Maybe we should have the balls to admit that these two obviously good things are good and maybe, if you give free humans good things, and they decide to have fewer children, then that is good too.
A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.
People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years
Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
>And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip.
The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.
Isn't it unburdening their children? The alternative is the same children paying for everyone's retirement, not just their parents, who presumably have several children to split the cost between.
It isn't so much a problem with democracy as it is with human beings. I think of democracy as averaging out things so the swings related to specific types of evil, shortsightedness, good, bad, aren't as big.
More authoritarian systems have higher variance, even if specific instances might be "better". I use scare quotes around "better" because I would argue giving people democratic power is valuable even if they do dumb shit with it, so you can't just compare democracy to authoritarianism. The latter simply lacks one key thing that democracy gives: some self determination.
This is not a defense of any particular contemporary realization of democracy.
> "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
Part of the problem is that the decision to not have children isn't a decision for many people. Some never find a partner (and no, I'm not talking about "incel" nutcases here - I'm talking about countries and regions with a severe oversupply of males), some suffer from medical infertility (e.g. due to injuries, cancer, PCOS, endometriosis), some from genetic infertility (e.g. people with genetic disorders, being somewhere on the wide DSD spectrum or where the partners are not genetically compatible), and some have no other choice than not having children for ethical instead of medical reasons (e.g. both partners are carriers of genetically passed diseases or suffer from mental health issues that make them unable to take care of a child).
You can't just go and punish these people for not having had children in their life, that's just as unethical.
You also can't make general policy based on exceptional circumstances. What you do is put exceptions to the general policy for exceptional circumstances.
No one seriously wants to compare the relative merits of child factory slavery and traditional child bride type situations. Like literally no one here is saying "its better to enslave children in factories compared to having them exchange their womb for protection from a local man."
Being forced to do anything is bad. Having an evaluation of your options is good. I don't think a facial argument can be made you're better off in the factory, although it might be true. I can think of many scenarios where I'd rather be in the factory, but also many where perhaps I'd prefer to have some selection of pastoral herding families to marry into over being funneled into "the one factory" where the god-billionaire has even more power than a vindictive husband.
I'm certainly not going to look at a piece of paper that says "factory move into town and women (or chidlren) took the jobs" and then just declare the women are better off. What happened before that factory was there? Did they buy off the agricultural or herding land and turn it into a waste dump? Are the power dynamics against women even worse now, where before it was a decentralized network of husbands but now one centralized hierarchal company with bosses that are even more above the law than the husband was? I don't know.
Here is some evidence: https://womensenews.org/2002/07/bangladesh-garment-workers-h...
“Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
I'd be interested to know what happened when this transition took place in Europe and the UK, because we'd have the advantage of hundreds of years of history to inform the outcomes. It's easy to forget that our great grandparents and grandparents experienced roughly the same dichotomy between living on a farm raising kids and going to work for a capitalist owner of a factory for a meager wage. The romanticization of that period paints a picture of choice that I don't really buy. It seems like your desire to find nuance is validated by what I do already know.
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