UBI doesn't mean no one works. It means no one has to work just to live.

And even if you want to ignore the actual scholarly research on the subject (which is ample), we have plenty of examples of people who would never have to work a day in their lives, and yet they still do so, sometimes even despite millions of people actively hating them for it: the very wealthy, particularly those who inherited generational wealth.

At that point, there's going to be a huge shakeup in the Republican Party, and the American right wing more generally, because from all indications, he's the only thing holding that coalition together, and they do not have a successor who could do anything like the same.

The Democratic Party has been the left-wing party since around the turn of the 20th century. Yes, there was a flip, but it was (roughly) under Teddy Roosevelt. Not Franklin Roosevelt.

They also must pay their employees overtime "by law". And not require them to work when clocked out "by law". And give them a certain amount of breaks "by law".

How many of these laws do you think businesses break on a regular basis?

https://worldmetrics.org/wage-theft-statistics/

https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-...

If the training data doesn't include lots of text of people being asked questions and saying "I don't know", then it's unlikely to respond "I don't know" when prompted, regardless of whether anything in its training data that might actually answer your question.

2. The House's size is also capped, and not directly based on population, which is completely unnecessary in this age of digital communication. There is no reason why we couldn't return the number of representatives to being explicitly population-based—say, 1 representative per 50k constituents, or the like. That would increase the size of the House by about 15-fold, make every representative much more dependent on the votes of their particular district, make gerrymandering much harder (as districts will be smaller and there will be more of them), and make the electoral college much more representative and harder to game.

3. See #1.

4. The European Commission is widely criticized as being the least democratic, most unresponsive, most oligarch-friendly body in Europe.

5. "Representative government" does not have to mean "tyranny of the majority". There are plenty of checks and balances even in the current system that would prevent that sort of thing, provided the enforcement mechanisms weren't entirely operated by and for Trump.

Companies have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in, not just the countries their physical headquarters are in.

That's why, for instance, Apple has to follow the DMA in Europe.

Furthermore, especially for many of the tech companies, where they are located is an integral part of their culture. They are Silicon Valley. You're going to have a very, very hard time convincing any of them to up stakes and move.

And further-furthermore, move where? Europe has, unfortunately, made similar authoritarian noises (eg, Chat Control). China is already more of an authoritarian state than even Trump's USA. Ditto for Russia, and, AIUI, India, though both in somewhat different ways.

If you can't stop them from sometimes telling customers things like "yes, I will give you a penthouse suite at our hotel for only $3/night", why would you be able to guarantee that, with some specific set of tokens, they would produce a perfect and undetectable backdoor customized to the code at hand?

> (And you move out of the US.)

And then everybody claps.

Name me a software or hardware company—one big enough that the US government would actually care to force them to add a backdoor—that would be willing to give up the US market? The only one that's shown the least bit of backbone is Apple, and while I like them and appreciate what they've done in that vein so far, they're never going to move to open source software running their stuff, and they're pretty well embedded in the US, and very, very unlikely to try to move regardless of the headwinds there.

I'm fully with you that this would be a wise and moral thing to do, but frankly, our tech companies are neither wise nor moral. They are self-serving, greedy, and many of them have wanted to become the neofeudal overlords of a new order since before Trump started smashing the old one.

In a nutshell, this is bullshit. Bootlicker bullshit.

In a democracy (which our Western nations are certainly supposed to be, though that's become less true over time), if the people in government are doing things that are counter to the interests of the people, the appropriate response is to replace those people. Protest, contact your representatives and senators, contribute to campaigns that oppose what they're doing, etc.

And, of course, in an authoritarian state, if they decide they're going to add in backdoors to our phones, or ban encryption, or take whatever other draconian measures, then it doesn't matter a huge amount how we, the people, express our opposition to this; it's extremely unlikely that we have just enough collective strength and will to prevent them doing A, but not to prevent them from doing B instead. Either we can stop both, or neither.

A bar? Too small an organization; if they had an ethics team I'd just think they were a money laundering front.

Frankly, most organizations above the size of an average mom & pop operation like a local bar should have at least some formal consideration of ethics, and most larger than (say) 50 employees should have at least one dedicated ethicist on staff. With veto power over operations.

Our society has treated ethics like the exclusive domain of ivory tower eggheads and philosophers for far too long, and look at what it has led to. If nearly everyone knew an ethicist in their daily lives, maybe people would actually have some understanding of ethics, even if they only did it grudgingly.

Sadly, this is going to have to be at least a generational change, as the current people in power are deeply entrenched in the mindset that "managing people" means "ensuring butts are in seats", and that they are neofeudal lords overseeing their techno-serfs, which they can only feel good about if they can go aggravate them in person.

...is going to take another 20-30 years, if it arrives at all.

It's become very clear in the years since the promise of "self-driving cars in six months!" failed to materialise that the level of computer vision and processing required to operate self-driving cars on arbitrary roads (as in, not in very specific areas in the American Southwest, where the weather is very consistent) is much, much higher than we thought.

Until we can be pretty damn well guaranteed that a self-driving tractor trailer is not going to see a road under construction and either continue going straight through—killing lots of construction workers, and possibly causing a massive explosion if it's carrying fossil fuels—or swerve off the road into someone's house, no matter how poorly the correct lane to drive in is marked...

And that self-driving vehicles will be able to keep in lane at least as well as humans can when there's 8cm of snow on the roads...

We're going to need to accept that the answer to "shitty commute" has to be public transport, or remote work.

Sure, if all I'm looking for is "entertainment", I can watch Star Wars or play Final Fantasy or read The Lord of the Rings. And for some people who enjoy gaming, they'd be just as happy with Call of Duty as they would with Battlefield as they would with some version of Halo.

But if I've heard about this new game Breath of the Wild and it sounds really cool, the only way I can experience that is, in fact, to play Breath of the Wild. And the only way to play Breath of the Wild is to have a Switch. And the only company that makes the Switch is Nintendo.

And while some of the other big names in gaming have been moving away from console exclusivity (which is an unqualified benefit to us gamers), the games themselves are still (largely) nonfungible.

Yeah! And let's make sure the customers have the choice of whether flour should have asbestos in it! And whether watches should have radium dials!

Sorry, this only works when you've got a robust market with lots of competition. The console market is almost the textbook definition of a non-free market: only three players of any consequence, each of them giant, multi-hundred-billion-dollar megacorps, and with very few actual distinctions between them.

When one business model is more obviously beneficial to the megacorps—not just in terms of profit, but in terms of control—it's going to tend to dominate, regardless of "consumer choice". Let's make sure that we, the consumers, get to still have choices, shall we? And the only way to do that is with government regulation.

I don't think it's limited to the tech field: it's stronger here, due to the proximity with the tech giants who are enabling Trump's bullshit, but he and all that goes on around him are the real center of it.

More broadly, it's been on the rise for a number of years now, due to the Republican Party doing its level best to eliminate accountability for anything their people do wrong—like, for instance, cozying up to Epstein and his ilk.

They've been promoting a culture of unaccountability, trying to destroy the very idea that we have obligations to each other...as opposed to the masses having obligations to do whatever our leaders tell us.

Treat the ethnic minorities well today.

Lay the foundation for an inclusive, multicultural society now, rather than falling for the same old bullshit about immigrants stealing yer jerbs and using that as an excuse for rampant racism that will reverberate down the line.

On the contrary; it seems to me that caring about its authorship even though the product may be outwardly indistinguishable from something a human could have made shows that human authorship is, in fact, precisely what they value.

Are you trying to make an argument that "if they really valued human authorship so highly, they'd devote their every waking moment to learning what every possible method is to tell when a given work was created by an LLM" or something? Because I would think that was fairly obviously bullshit by this point. For one thing, there's plenty of ways to make LLM-generated works (especially smaller, simpler ones) that are 100% indistinguishable from something human-created. (This is especially true in text formats, where the amount of information, and thus the possible failure modes, available in the output is smaller than in images or video.)