u/brianscalabrainey

You can say this about any job though? Would a teacher be there for their kids if they weren't getting paid? Would a nurse attend to their patients? What about professional home care givers? The fact is that even humans doing relational and / or care work must make a living. It does not diminish the fact that (1) the people doing these jobs do, in fact, care deeply about the people they serve and (2) these forms of labor are almost always very undercompensated by the market for this very reason.

No one takes a discount to work for big tobacco. They do take discounts to help underserved children, work at non profits, etc. That feels like evidence of care, to me -- even if there is a transactional component at play (a paycheck). AI "care" is categorically different.

Not sure why you're so downvoted. This is a good reminder of how rapidly things can change once there is sufficient collective will to do so.

Some sort of New Deal for Housing could be a powerful lever to solving many problems at once. Builds new housing stock, creates good construction jobs for an increasingly disaffected population (one that is AI-proof as well -- and I expect AI job losses to be a big theme in 2027/2028), and shows that we can do big things once again. It can be federal gov led or we can create some sort of public-private partnerships where every kW of data center capacity the hyperscalers want to build must come with X units of housing stock.

You can frame it both ways... when fossil fuel emissions, climate catastrophes, and global warming are through the roof, sure lets keep drilling baby!

I agree its a balance. I think pursuing bad climate policy will also lose votes in the medium term for similar reasons.

I mean Abundance is an easy example. Voters don't really care about permitting reform, and they often don't even want more new construction near them. Should politicians become NIMBYs to avoid losing votes? Should we have more politicians pursing rent control?

Growth at all costs. You'd make a great libertarian.

I never said it was

Isn't part of a representative democracy to have politicians to make these sorts of calls? Voters will never make the green transition their top priority -- its a classic creeping long term risk that democracies are poorly suited to address. A more responsible government would see that it is a reasonably high priority for voters and in the country's best long term interests to address.

It feels like they are only in conflict if you start with the premise that we need to feed the energy demand generated by data centers and AI, no? Holding energy consumption flatter, we could generate all net new energy via renewables as fossil fuel sources are retired.

If you are seen as morally compromised though, you will lose votes. It's one thing to say: I believe in health care as a human right, and I want to get there incrementally. It's another thing entirely to say the best we can do is Obamacare, and leave it at that.

I also don't think we can / should blame the people who didn't think Kamala was good enough for the actions of the fascists. Perhaps we can blame the fascists themselves? Or the people who voted for the fascists? Or the candidates who couldn't persuade voters they were better than the fascists? Feels most logical to blame all of those groups first...

Sorry you're getting downvoted. I found this amusing.

You want him to take a selfie from prison?

In theory we have that today, and yet leisure time is being increasingly swallowed by the consumption of screen-based entertainment

What you are describing is basically Brave New World, which Ezra referenced here as well. A society of adult-children who spend their days doing drugs, masturbating, and generally never doing anything meaningful. There is a reason the novel is considered a dystopia. With the rise of addictive short form video, we're certainly on the road there..

Muse is a privacy nightmare and seems built to break the internet. In any case, we're in the "golden age" of AI when no one really cares about profitability and everyone is trying to get users, market share, and mind share.

The real question is what will happen down the road when Muse for example wants to turn a profit? Will they sell markdown files summarizing each user's deepest desires, purchasing habits, etc. to advertisers? Will they partner directly with advertisers such that Muse gives certain vendors preferred treatment? No one has really thought through how to monetize consumer-facing AI -- but the options that have dominated consumer tech for the past decades seem incredibly fraught.

Artists bring moral clarity to a topic that intellectual types generally have a hard time grokking. A smart enough person can bring find counterarguments to every topic (indeed, in their eras there were robust intellectual debates about slavery, suffrage, civil rights, etc.) but sometimes it is more powerful -- and correct -- to simply draw a moral line in the sand. Artists are much more able and willing to do that without being bogged down in "nuance" that ultimately distracts more than it clarifies.

Monstrous Rage is basically the only pump spell to ever be constructed playable for that exact reason though.

No I simply want to encourage you to think about politics more broadly

Yeah this is like saying people prefer candy to carrots. Frictionless products designed to appeal to our lizard brains usually are far worse for us in the long term.

Politics is fundamentally about how society is organized. This is absolutely a discussion about politics. Most of politics doesn't happen in Congress.

Great point, political discourse used to happen out in public in a participatory way, and now it is largely consumed online and alone

China governs the content of speech itself. I'm "merely" advocating for changing the underlying incentive structures at play such that platforms that serve as the defacto square are not subject to profit incentives. Currently "The Algorithm" is skewing what speech people see far more than any heavy handed government intervention could, and I think its far smarter to tackle the root of the problem rather than trying to address individual symptoms like foreign bots from Russia, Israel, etc. Because you could eliminate all the bots / foreign actors and these platforms would still be incredibly corrosive to democracy

Fully agree. Liberalism and free speech principles were constructed in a completely different era of communications mediums and must be adapted for the modern age.

People who think of themselves as pro "free" speech don't recognize the litany of restrictions on their speech that already exist. They take those restrictions for granted as natural and good (e.g., truth in advertising laws, libel laws, etc.), but think of further restrictions as some affront to the principles of liberalism.

Given modern VPNs and agentic LLMs trying to figure out when posters are of foreign origin -- or even human -- feels pretty fraught.

A far better solution is to change the incentive structures on these online platforms themselves so they don't promote ragebait, disinformation, extremist content, etc. The root of all of this is that the algorithms are trying to maximize your time on screen to sell more ads.