I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will notice, and we'll essentially get proprietary cloud-hosted compiler that most in the world depends on to build software. With built-in telemetry and backdoors and clause in license that allow full overtake of your business if provider wants it ofc. It's a great shift from the internet we all know and love towards the new subscription-based access to world's propriatary knowledge base. It's a perfect "mind control" tool as well - you don't need USAID, "free media" and stuff like that in other countries when all people there including politicians ask chatgpt everything from meaning of life to recipies of pancakes. Once you see these political and philosophical dimensions it's hard to unsee how claudecode running on my PC won't turn into a weapon some day. But in blissful ignorance it's fun to use, and companies love it for the promise of replacing people. Amen
The argument that LLMs are "feeding me back free and open internet" seems to skip the most useful aspect of the tool.
I could never, as an individual read, let alone synthesize and make decisions with, the amount of information on the internet. The LLM takes that free and open information and feeds me back novel information based on that free information. It gives me ideas, opinions, and hard data based on that information.
It's the most powerful information synthesizing tool in existence. I don't find the argument that "it's built on free information and sold to you" fair or plausible at all.
It's like saying you're free to make your own bottled water. Technically true, but in reality not.
I think you undervalue the contribution of internet-scale data to foundation modeling, and because LLMs can obsolete the content they required, I think its fair to characterize it as theft. Obviously RL contributes a lot to capabilities, but the judgement that an LLM uses to 'synthesize information' is born from the training data. The scale of the data really is beyond intuition. books3, for example, would 230 yrs of continuous reading
I actually think the "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet" does a lot to characterize the capabilities and effects to a lot of people. Obviously coders are more in tune with how well agents can work, but that's also due more to the RL breakthroughs than foundation modeling.
Can you steal something that is free and openly available?
I just don't understand this argument. "Theft" feels like a nice, heavy, moral accusation to toss at those you're debating with, but the actual prerequisites for theft don't even exist in this situation.
It is a lot more complicated than that. Your content is not simply used, copied, or even just simply distributed. The very terrain that you produce, distribute, represent your content has shifted due to the mechanics of it. Anything you produce is grabbed into AI summaries. They're grabbed into the training data. Humans produce free/open materials for many reasons. A lot of them don't have room to breathe and gain structure due to AI siphoning the entire atmosphere of web; eg communities
I mean, not that I'm a huge fan of IP laws, but yes?
Like I said, if you provide an alternative to all these blogs and forums (because you trained on them or because you scrape them for RAG) then you are stealing their traffic. Search engines were/are already doing that, but the foundation training
It’s the solution to the second information problem. Hypertext arose from Bush’s Memex, and the information problem it offered to solve. Now, there is simply so much information available on the modern Memex that it is impossible to make any sense of it all. So, we now have LLMs. There are still some issues with them, but they’re good at what they do.
I have mixed emotions about LLMs and AI more generally. I fear the dystopia, hope for some marginal improvement in human life, and I genuinely enjoy playing around with local models. But, I think there may be near term harms that outweigh the gains. We shall see.
Bizarre to say that. When I have it perform work on a bespoke code base on a niche videogame, in a less commonly used language, is that still "regurgitating stuff"?
No, it is impossible for it to have seen this combination of things.
It routinely produces, suggests, and correctly implements novel things that had not existed.
You can see this yourself by learning how LLMs work, or anecdotally using these tools.
LLMs are terrible at generating code for “less commonly used languages”. They require LOTS of data for high accuracy.
I describe it this way: they are good at interpolating from what data they were trained on, but terrible at extrapolating. I agree with the parent that the LLM-generated content isn’t novel, it’s just a rehash of two things it was trained on.
I have wasted quite a number of hours trying to use LLMs to write things for less common languages. Sure they can one-shot some impressive stuff in C#, Python, and JavaScript… but try working in Object Pascal: it’s non-obvious hallucination after non-obvious hallucination, presented confidently enough to make it difficult to see it’s complete garbage, so you waste a ton of time trying to polish a turd.
Creating a new paradigm is a problem with a lot more groundwork laid that working in an existing little-known paradigm. One is creating patterns which only have to be good to be correct. The other has to be correct to be good. They are completely different problems.
That is simply not true. The naive “glorified auto-complete / stochastic parrot” argument may have some merit when applied to generic pre-trained models, which only learn from unsupervised next-token prediction. But the post training through reinforcement learning the frontier models undergo is very sophisticated and they genuinely learn to do novel things that are purely the work of the model being trained (and the work of the GPUs they burn along the way of course).
You forgot the push forward towards more destruction of the planet we depend on to live, and the centralization of wealth in addition to the one of power.
To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1]
I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and energy use is a function of a counties energy infrastructure choices not the existence of demand.
But instead we're going straight to destruction of planet as the exact verbiage, which seems way out of whack.
But we have figured out how to create electricity without destroying the planet. It's true that we need to actually do that, and that we are to a large degree not doing so at the moment. But that's a problem we already needed to solve. It does make it more important to solve that problem, but it also improves the incentives to solving it (electricity is more valuable now).
Yep they think they'll use more than all heavy industry, which they also think they'll make obsolete. The plans are for something like, a DC in every city that each uses as much electricity as the whole state currently does. Yes it's completely insane.
Reduce will never happen unless population falls. Not in a big way.
It should be: reuse, recycle, renewable. First try to reuse and make things more reusable. Then try to recycle. Last, substitute renewable for non renewable sources for things like energy.
You think we’ve built that many data centers next to coal fired power plants that the emissions have gotten anywhere close to the emissions of all the iron smelters and the billions of people that commute in gas cars?
We could triple the data centers since 2023 and run them all on coal or natural gas and then maybe they’d even show up as a significant slice on these pie charts.
Our bubbles have blinded us to the scale of the real problem.
I'm curious what part of the charts would data centers fall under?
I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that.
Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?
A late 2024 international report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... predicts that by 2035, datacenter electricity usage will increase from 2024's 1.5% to 2-4.4% of global usage. Currently about 1/3 of datacenter electricity usage is for AI (0.5% of that 1.5%), though that will presumably increase.
Yes, which is nothing compared to the destruction wrought by oil companies, steel manufacturing, meat production, concrete, energy, and transport.
Which have actually destroyed our environment for over a century. With only a slight bend towards slowing.
And I assure you. If you wanna argue "those are useful", not all of those things are useful, as useful as they could be, as efficient as they could be, or could be replaced today if the will was there with better options.
Data centers are a boogeyman and only cared about by Americans and some Europeans. The other 6 billion people in the world really dont think they are bad, nor have such strong feelings towards AI.
And I bet they feel a lot more animosity towards the military industrial complex and the oil empire financing it destroying our planet.
I'd say the "threat" of local models and user independence is currently (successfully) being fought by cutting off the supply and development of general computing devices and hardware.
The mentioned big few are buying up everything regardless of need and making hardware unaffordable and unavailable for normal people (or smaller businesses). And some of the few manufacturers are already being convinced to stop developing/producing consumer hardware altogether.
And whats left might be taken care of via the rise of attestation. Just start framing local, unapproved models as "security risks" at some point.
Forcing people to go through you by buying up the market supply of a commodity at 10x the production cost is a strategy that will inevitably collapse. More DRAM will get made if prices hold.
Most of the GPUs built in the past year are sitting in warehouses, just waiting for data centers to break ground and for electrical expansions to complete. And Nvidia can’t get China interested in buying their products in the Trump era.
There will be a massive glut of hardware soon enough. OpenAI needs $532billion in cashflow in the next 4 years to keep the “infinite money glitch” going. That’s not likely to happen unless AI makes some 10x value improvements for their customers in the next 1-2 years that we aren’t seeing now.
Creating and updating those local models on a regular basis still requires the massive datacenters, doesn't it? You're assuming that those local models will continue to be provided for free or a reasonable price instead of eventually being monetized.
Only accessible via proprietary ISPs that require a subscription, actively monitor and censor (pirate sites). And managed by ICANN which is based in America (and though nonprofit, certainly influenced by money and government).
Meanwhile, local models package a large part of the past internet, can be stored in your computer and accessed by the most ignorant (but literate) laymen.
ICANN is incredibly corrupt now. They make money selling gTLDs which all have to play by American rules. Having American rules on .org .com etc is an acceptable accident of history - having them on every generic word outside of .us is not.
It's so much worse than this, though. These companies have raped and pillaged every last store of human knowledge: art, transcripts of conversations, newspaper articles, etc., etc. Contrast that with what Aaron Schwartz did and wound up taking his life over. It's beyond shameful.
Despite how the first few trial balloon lawsuits have played out, I think there are still a few shoes left to drop. For example, try asking Gemini (very nicely) to output an image containing your favorite comic book or Disney character and it will eventually do it -- despite the response you'll probably get on the first try saying it's not legally allowed to. In what rational universe did the companies training these models not violate either the T&C of their access to the source material (e.g. streamed content) or aren't they violating copyright/trademark by generating content containing this IP?
Open weight models remove most of the issues you list and require relatively affordable hardware like a MBP with 128gb of ram or even less.
Deepseek v4 flash is by any means comparable to SOTA from 6 months ago. It's more than good enough for AI-assisted coding and there are no reasons to believe that one year from now or so, they won't be even better and faster.
open weight models are released by the same companies who's revenue would be threatened by open weights - they won't continue to undercut themselves by releases free models once that happens.
You probably mean USAGM (US Agency for Global Media) and its affiliated programs (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc) rather than USAID.
USAID was a humanitarian aid agency that focused on programs like famine relief, disaster response, and medical aid in some of the poorest countries on Earth.
It is how these agencies operate. They mask malevolent activity behind good front (“think of the children“, “age verification“ -> censorship/total surveillance. Medical aid -> overthrowing governments).
Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse is what you're speaking of. Not wrong about there being a facade, IMF trap you with wells, but this distinguishes the boogeymen used to give up civil liberties.
It's similar to enshitification drawing attention to the decay cycle. These get used constantly with a good example being KYC is needed to stop money laundering.
The internet is for everyone. I am proud for us for building something so awesome that we get to train an entire replica of human reasoning on top of it. It's sad that most of the "new" internet will be made by these machines, but that's cool nonetheless.
Yes it's billion dollar companies building it, but every technical revolution needs large funding before it becomes accessible. Even the internet itself was way too expensive back in the days. Now we access it from fridges and toasters. Electric cars had to start as luxury purchase, so did phones or even CD players.
Now that we know what quantization is most optimal so that we built optimized accelerstors, how to architecture/harness LLMs for our purpose, now we can start to reclaim it.
Especially now when LLM APIs are starting to get expensive.
Respectfully, this looks like coping with the fact that a fundamentally new technology is discovered but people can’t cope with the immensity of it so they end up throwing in shallow and spread out criticisms spanning sovereignty, USA bad, replacing people bad etc.
It’s my personal opinion and it looks extremely incurious analysis of what’s going on. Even if a person doesn’t like AI, I would expect a curious person to have more deep opinions. “Non deterministic database” clearly tells me this.
There’s not a single coherent critique but just throwing some polemic to see what sticks.
the grandparent commentor described potential future paths of unfettered ai usage. it's not clear why arises the expectation that a discussion of future possibilities must adhere to a contemporary argumentative format (mainly because concrete evidence of future events does not exist). it's your right to interpret this discussion as 'USA bad', personally I think it's very likely that the USA will continue to exercise power until it cannot. do you have any arguments that support ai being unleashed en masse? at the moment it seems to me that students are mentally atrophying as a result of outsourcing thinking to robots, therefore from my perspective it's crystal clear that the current path of 'let it rip' is suboptimal
The USA is terrifying from a non-US perspective now, and it's never been great. We're furious at the states and sick of being dependent on its enshittified technology.
Anti-AI sentiment absolutely and correctly has a "USA bad" steak.
"Respectfully, <insert highly patronizing, incurious, belittling take about everyone who disagrees with me, which is completely divorced from any of the actual argumentation on the anti-AI side>"
Pure tech dimensions of AI are out of scope. The internet is full of tech critiques and praises, what's the point of yet another opinion on it. Can't open linkedin without seeing only AI-generated posts about AI replacing people next to AI dumb. But the political dimension seems completly abscent from the public discussion
It seems to be the opposite to me. There are mostly relatively fact free discussion of AI which are highly political. And rarely you can find some technical discussions. And even then politics will invade those discussions but ego and naive optimism tends to be more driving those discussions. Even on technical matters. NNs are still very much a black box afterall and people tend to project what they want on what they think is happening inside.
Currently it works as standalone player. Addition of MPD client mode opens possibility to play music on a separate device while keeping the UX of the music player that I like.
In dynamic languages things like autocomplete often make it worse, they cannot identify the correct types and locations 100% of the times. So at some point I decided to avoid these and got used to it. To the point where I avoid QtCreator for Qt/C++ projects b/c autocomplete and fancy navigation features become annoying and distracting
A simple IT guy has access to company's finances in such way to move millions. Am I the only one who smells either ridiculous incompetence or plain fraud by the company trying to cover up "something"?
The Soviet Union was just the same old russian feudalism with a new name tag and leadership. In a sense even modern-day russians are still not emancipated citizens like we are in the West.
This is a classic trope of the fully-brainwashed. The bread queues that resulted from collectivised agriculture that couldn't respond to market conditions had nothing to do with feudalism.
The mass-murder of the middle-classes in Cambodia had nothing to do with feudalism.
Communism is a brutal, oppressive system that has to erase individual liberty in order to force people to comply with its absurd, unfair rules. If it was so great, why didn't the Russians just vote it back in again?
Fair point - my argument is that it added a load of additional garbage on top. It clearly didn't achieve anything substantially positive, and it hasn't done anywhere it's been tried.
The headline itself literally repeats Marxists theory: the means of production belong to workers aka proletartiat. Inside the article they oppose this working class to "evil rich CEOs" aka bourgeoisie. I won't even go deeper to unrelated to the article topics like "evil imperialism" and other nowadays popular in the west ideas used by Lenin&co hundred years ago. This crap cannibalizes the very foundation of the success of the western civilization and many people fall into this - that's insane to me
> No one bats an eyelid at the co-operative model in countries such as Germany, “but with these ideas in Texas or Kansas, you’re basically a communist,” says Mendieta, only half jokingly.
This sounds like actual socialism. The kind of socialism that seeks to abolish private property and the concept of ownership. Only personal property remains, and workers controlling the companies they work in as a natural extension. It may not be intended to be socialism, but it would lead to socialism if universally adopted.
On the average, when someone says "socialism", it's intended to be an insult. It also serves as an indicator that the person is not interested in having a real discussion. But this is not it. This is real socialism. The kind of socialism that died as a mainstream option in Europe with the USSR, but which is still somewhat popular in the US.
That sounds like concentrated power in a hands of a few people, government officials who decide what's what. This leads to oppression. And central planning for everything is definitely bad. Plenty of examples from China and former Soviet block.
Our current system (which is not true capitalism in my view) also has concentrated power in the hands of a few people.
So what do you call a system where the majority of people can't be exploited by the 1%?
It’s the opposite. In the 60s and 70s many western countries were semi-socialist. Just look at Britain, the state owned a significant proportion of the industry, housing etc. the unions were extremely powerful (by modern standards). Same in other European countries.
Arguably the US was generally much more left leaning than now, even somebody like Nixon might struggle passing off as a moderate/rightwing Democrat let alone a Republican just based on his domestic economic policies…
Did the Soviet Union ever actually practice effective social policy and embrace control from the lowest working level or did they just run with epilet backed dull grey committees with a promise they'd eventually get to actual socialism and communism post Stalin and all that not socialism stuff?
I'm no fan of the USSR but they're arguably no more socialist than the National Socialism of the Nazis.
is it so insane, in a world of disparity and outsized influence of CEOs and billionaires, where people cannot afford houses? maybe the insane thing was how for hundreds of years we let the rich dictate the rules as if they knew better for having taken advantage of others.
People can absolutely afford houses. They can so easily afford houses that they buy them quickly, often for over asking.
If people couldn't afford houses, they would sit unsold until sellers lowered the price to a price someone could afford. Luckily so many people can afford houses in most areas they don't have to do that.
You're confusing some entities, often private equity or similar corporations buying assets, often to rent, sometimes just to park, being able to buy, and the general public being able to afford to buy. In many desirable metro areas, you need two high incomes (two people in tech or lawyers or finance) to be able to afford to buy anything. What about everyone else?
Why does everyone else need to live in a desirable metro area? That sounds infeasible with so few of them. If there was more desirable metro areas, the prices of those few wouldn't be so high.
> Why does everyone else need to live in a desirable metro area
Because if nothing else (and there is a lot of else) the tech/lawyer/finance folks want to have restaurants, shops, cinemas, street cleaners, utilities etc etc etc etc
It has become out of reach for an increasing number of people all around the world. Look at the ratios of price to annual salaries and many have risen a lot.
> If people couldn't afford houses, they would sit unsold until sellers lowered the price to a price someone could afford.
This is fundamentally not the case in much of China and Taiwan where the wealthy sit on empty homes for years or decades. The housing price in Taipei continues to climb while a large number of units sit vacant.
Apparently there are more people with money than there are houses. So don't tell me people cant afford houses. Tell me that there are so few houses that they are overpriced or something, and only the top 25% can buy them.
I see. And you keep looking at billionaires instead of regulations or the things that make it possible, like housing regulations (talking Europe now, Idk America well enough).
If you really set the market more free, you will automatically have more reasonably wealthy people bc of competition. When thede few billionaires exist due to governments favors we should think what is wrong with some people selling favors to others without providing services to others.
If you start regulation after regulation you create an elite of people and normal people suffering those regulations.
The elites are basically, in this setup, a collusion of sellers of favors (politicians favoring employers) and people who buy those to avoid competition and favor their business.
This is not possible by definition if you see that with bad eyes and watch out permanently.
However, people want more and more regulation bc there are always things that are "wrong" and eventually those things take you exactly to the outcomes you complain about right now. But you want more of it. Guess what you are going to have if you ask more of it: more of that.
There is a sentence from Javier Milei that I think is very correct regarding this matter: "the politician cannot sell you a favor he does not have for selling".
Think of it. We cannot reduce all problems to that sentece but there is a very big part of truth in it.
I recommend you to take a look at the profiles of billionaires there are around the world. Some are very different to others. But the more regulations you have in a country, especially the ones that did not develop first, the less wealth transfer you have and the more money stay in the same people's hands. This is something to think about very seriously: the path to derregulation is a better choice to keep things balanced.
If you choose the other way, no matter how good it looks to you, you will get what you are asking for. Basically, "The great taking". Look for that book if you do not know it yet.
Free markets almost never can survive longterm without (sometimes extensive) regulation.
Historically there might have been a few exceptions to that, but basically always you have a few good years and then the winner(s) who emerges starts abusing their position (even without any regulation that might make it easier for them to do that). Unregulated markets tend to be inherently unstable.
And it’s not so much less vs more regulation, there are two axis and yes corrupt and inefficient governments tend to produce regulation that decrease competitiveness, productivity, fairness etc.
And then you have industries which simply can’t be allowed to be privately owned unless there is extensive regulation (because free competition is almost impossible in those sectors): utilities, banking, transportation etc. sometimes even telecom (e.g. roaming fees in the EU).
> Free markets almost never can survive longterm without (sometimes extensive) regulation.
There is no such thing as "without regulation". Nobody is suggesting a system in which murder is legal and the most powerful warlord gets a monopoly.
But there is a difference between "the government enforces contracts and anti-trust laws and prices major externalities" and "the government micromanages the economy and is captured by the incumbents".
So for example, a free market doesn't need zoning density restrictions. Their absence has no apparent mechanism that would lead to a monopoly. Therefore, a freer market in which the government has no power to impose zoning density restrictions is better than the current one in which that is possible and is consequently making housing unaffordable. Depriving the government of the authority to do that is a viable mechanism by which that form of corruption/inefficiency is avoided.
> And then you have industries which simply can’t be allowed to be privately owned unless there is extensive regulation (because free competition is almost impossible in those sectors): utilities, banking, transportation etc. sometimes even telecom (e.g. roaming fees in the EU).
But even in these industries the necessary regulation is narrow and should be directed to isolating the natural monopoly from any other offering, e.g. roads are a natural monopoly but vehicle manufacturing isn't, so the government provides roads but the private market provides cars.
Conversely, the US has last mile ISPs providing phone and TV service, which isn't adequately isolating the last mile and then we get regulatory capture and corruption. It's not obvious they should even be providing transit, rather than having an entity that narrowly maintains the fiber in the street and does nothing else.
You're certainly right that it isn't just a matter of "more regulation" or "less regulation", but it is a matter of removing many of the existing regulations because they specifically are the source of the high costs and market concentration.
"The government" is a fictional entity. In reality, it's just a bunch of people.
I think the real issue is that free markets and free speech are not really compatible. If people are allowed to express political opinions, some opinions will inevitably become popular. Sometimes that happens because people don't like the outcomes of the market. Then they try to change things by regulating the market. Repeat that often enough, and you get more and more regulations over time.
> If people are allowed to express political opinions, some opinions will inevitably become popular. Sometimes that happens because people don't like the outcomes of the market. Then they try to change things by regulating the market. Repeat that often enough, and you get more and more regulations over time.
This is not caused by free speech, it's caused by an error in the way our system was designed.
The premise was that something should not become law unless it has widespread buy-in. So the federal government had limited, specifically enumerated powers and passing a law required a majority of the House, a majority (or filibuster-proof majority) in the Senate (which was meant to represent the states) and the signature of the President (or a veto-proof majority in the legislature).
But we de facto interpreted out the enumerated powers by reading the commerce clause so expansively, and Senators are no longer appointed by state legislators so the states have no representation at the federal level anymore, which took the brakes off what legislation could be passed. Which severely exacerbated the main defect:
We made it just as hard to repeal a law as to pass it. So we keep accumulating laws there is no longer widespread consensus to keep, because the corrupt influences who want the law only need to control all three bodies once and then the law is stuck for as long as they can maintain control of even one.
It should be easier to repeal a law than to pass it.
Free speech is also the freedom to change the rules. If something becomes popular in the marketplace for ideas, there is always a way of turning it into a law. The exact procedures and thresholds may vary, but the possibility always exists. Because laws and constitutions don't enforce themselves. People enforce them, and those people (or their replacements) may choose to enforce them in a different way.
You say that repealing laws should be easier than passing them. But maybe the opposite idea wins in the market. Then it will be easier to pass a new law than to repeal an existing law. Under free speech, all laws, constitutions, and rights are ultimately temporary opinions subject to the whims of the market.
Some would argue that the freest markets are regulated to prevent collusion, to ensure free and equal access to all relevant infomation, to penalise deliberate falsehoods, etc.
Certainly the OG Free Markets that inspired the first order Invisible Hand model were.
'free market' is such a nebulous term, bandied about en masse in forums where rarely is it questioned what specific type of free market a specific person might mean.
It is not nebulous actually. We are just playing with ideas, and ideas lead to simplification. The idea of free market, in principle is lasseiz faire.
Of course most people do not propose that. My idea is that, as one spanish philosopher said (taken from Hume), that all law (derecho in spanish, not sure if it is exactly equivalent for the meaning in english, since the law tradition in Spain comes from Roman law), so take my translation with a warning. All law can be summarized in two premises:
1. "property is not acquired or lost by violence or fraud"
2. "Deals must be fullfilled. Whoever does not fullfill their deals shall compensate to the side fullfilling it."
The rest is not "law" as such. It is ruling, administration, and other things, but not "law". It is arbitrary in many ways, and I agree this is true for a lot of what we see. For example: there are regulations for safety that will make people die waiting a medication or someone not able to get some transport vehicle for short distances, just because it is forbidden. But you can always find a reason to regulate. OTOH, you regulate the choices and lives of others, do we really have the right to decide for others? I think that is a very paternalistic view of things. But not only that, it often promotes irresponsibility in action: since they regulate, they can be blamed, I do not need to decide. I have seen lots of that attitude at least in my country.
It also promotes more scarcity and leads towards oligopolistic setups. It is a complex topic, but I favor freedom and responsibility over regulation clearly, as long as you do not damage others. In fact, regulations do damage others but people often take them for their intentions and not for their results ... something that is a big shocking to me. It is like it gives them peace of mind even if the reality has nothing to do with the effect they are expecting or imagining.
The translation could be pretty bad, so I apologize for that. I just hope it is understandable.
As such we must be very aware of your first sentence. It is really important that people understand that those who manage us are people like us with their own set of interests.
Some people think it is something like an overlord that takes the perfect, most fair decision and, on top of that, without room for mistakes.
Looking at the results I would say it does not respond to that premise at all.
As such we must be very aware of your first sentence. It is really important that people understand that those who manage us are people like us with their own set of interests.
Some people think it is something like an overload that takes the perfect, most fair decision and, on top of that, without room for mistakes.
Looking at the results I would say it does not respond to that premise at all.
No need to take my words literally. I you will, favor natural right and yes, put a bit of something on top. But this is not happening clearly. There is a lot of subsidizing and regulation. They are giving, literally, prizes to people that do nothing and punishments to people that kill themselves working. On the way, they have been swapping incentives from working hard to not work.
This in itself is a problem. Currently I see democracies as giant clientele systems. I am not far from the truth at all I think, at least in the case of my country (Spain).
> So for example, a free market doesn't need zoning density restrictions. Their absence has no apparent mechanism that would lead to a monopoly. Therefore, a freer market in which the government has no power to impose zoning density restrictions is better than the current one in which that is possible and is consequently making housing unaffordable. Depriving the government of the authority to do that is a viable mechanism by which that form of corruption/inefficiency is avoided.
This is so well expressed. I take it for the future. Concise and clear. This is exactly the kind of things that come to my mind.
I jsut know that compare to 30-40 years ago we have been following this path of increasing regulations and the results are starting to be harmful.
However, some people ask for more of this, instead of less. It is curious when the solution to a problem is throwing more of the problem at it. If it was a transition period of some kind where the effects of some policies cannot be seen yet... but it is years and years and years. The result is high debt and collusion, or that is more of what I see around me, in all Europe. It is a chain of favors and they regulate more and more aspects of our lives, yet we are not better. We pay more, the services are not better either.
I think something is broken here and I am very aware that the result is not giving more control to regulators to even smash us more. It is quite the opposite: leave people alone. At least, this is my experience right now. I can assure that 25 years ago my country had much more balance in most areas and people were more free. I am almost 41 FWIW.
Your whole premise is wrong. Billionaires (equivalent, obscenely rich people) predate regulations. As a matter of fact, both initial regulations on business and socialism, communism, syndicalism directly came as a result and backlash of abuse of rich owners.
Also, you're under the naive assumption that lacking regulations, companies will want to compete. Why wouldn't they just form oligopolies/monopolies? Either due to natural restrictions (e.g. competing in infrastructure is way too expensive, usually), or the richest company/private equity buying up all the competitors to have a free hand at abusing the market.
The housing crisis is caused by government policy voted in by locals who dont want their neibhorhoods ti change so block new housing that would lower prices. Which can just as easily happen in a Socialist country since I assume there is still democracy and people havent somehow changed to not be NIMBYS
Individual companies being owned by their employees isn't socialism. For that matter, the Soviet Union wasn't socialist either - the workers owned nothing, the state owned everything. All the land, all the factories, all the manufactured goods.
Yep, that's what it leads to. But it all began with "good" intentions. They destroyed well-developed empire, took the land from the rich and see where it all now. Trust me, you don't want "to take money from the rich and spread them across poor" in USA, it sucks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization. Pleas, keep being a place where anyone can build a unucorn company and become rich af
Not individual companies, but at the wider scale. Socialism is an economic system, not the specific act of one group of employees owning where they work.
In the same way that China having private companies doesn't make it capitalistic.
PipeWire is drop-in replacement for pshshaudio with additional features (while preserving pshsh part sometimes). Only difference is 15 years ago half of the problems with sound were fixed by uninstalling pulseaudio as it was in early stages full of bugs but still pushed to many distros similar to systemd. Today's pipewire is as easy as uninstalling pulseaudio, installing pipewire, and most of the times it will continue working
To be fair. Pulseaudio in early days exposed tons of audio driver bugs that were since then fixed. Bluetooth audio was barely working back then. Now bluetooth works so well that it makes other operating systems look bad.
Switched to Linux in Windows' "golden age" - XP. Never looked back. There's one thing that reminds me that old Windows - cloud providers. Their configuration in UI looks a lot like group policies on Windows. Every time I have to deal with those IAM permissions in Google Cloud I get flashbacks, except now the UI is much slower
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