It's also not a novel argument. Why write new music or perform music at all in an era in which recordings are widely available?

Now most people based in the West are relatively safe from infectious diseases and war, we have the luxury of being uncertain about what the chatbots are going to do with us.

I mean, if I had a choice of people to rule superpowers or dish out the AI investment I'd probably pick different options, but in most respects life is pretty cushy and its basics pretty certain compared with most of history. I'd certainly pick uncertainty about next year's employment than certainty I'd be a subsistence farmer but uncertainty about whether my farm would produce enough to subsist....

And that's the formal policies, never mind the arbitrariness of Elon getting so ban-happy for petulant personal reasons even Paul Graham got a suspension for mentioning Mastodon.

You might prefer mass throttling of any links to news sources the CEO disagrees with over throttling of Scott Adams, but that says more about your personal tastes than the latter moderation policy being a more censorious one

Similarly, it is impossible to argue with a straight face that accounts that reference the existence of an ADS-B feed are somehow a more egregious violation than any of Trump's (remember, the guys in the West Wing he was shouting out to were attempting to violently subvert the democratic process), particularly when you know exactly what an ADS-B feed is, what it does and doesn't show, and how many other websites publish this data.

> Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.

I've read a lot of books whose messages I partly or wholly disagree with, but wouldn't cite them as inspirations, quote from them or name my startup or its products after them.

Actually, come to think of it Starship Troopers would be a much better source for military industrial complex startup nomenclature than LOTR or the Culture series...

It doesn't have a lot to say about not voting on tribal, ethnic, cultural or religious lines or voting for candidates to troll, but does have an awful lot to say about the virtues of militarism.

But X banned accounts for non-spam content violations at a much higher rate than Twitter and approved content censorship requests from authoritarian states at a higher rate

But that's separate from the linked article, which was a discussion of an empirical paper that claims to find evidence that "tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich"

A good faith way of addressing the argument would have been to look at examples where evidence appears to contradict this, or potential flaws in the academic paper, rather than dismiss the idea that supply siders believe that tax cuts for the wealthy benefit more than just the rich based on a label used in a blog headline...

(GP, in this context, refers to the "grandparent" comment upthread)

And firms are already incentivised to increase productivity, including by offshoring jobs or replacing staff by robots, because that's their profit margin. And in this case we're not concerned with firms reducing costs in general, but firms substituting capital for labour. This was an improvement for agriculture, but it was an improvement because that labour found more productive things to do...

But if you're a government those decisions businesses make don't help unless the robots or Chinese factories are considerably more efficient at making stuff than domestic labour, because a business decision that at the margin spending a dollar less on domestic labour and 99 cents more on another production input is very slightly more efficient loses the government more in income tax receipts than it gains on anything else, and usually adds to their benefit bill. Also, people don't like their jobs being replaced. (And yet ironically, tax structures are often more favourable to companies increasing the capital input and decreasing the labour input...)

Obviously it's true that you can go too far and end up subsidising firms to keep on employees that aren't doing anything useful, but relatively minor tax breaks which mainly advantage low margin retail businesses don't do that, and they're not going to stop NVIDIA being NVIDIA either. But they might make the $45k outsourcing contract not look a substantially better deal than retaining the $50k employee.

the flip side is that extroverts around the world don't necessarily like everyone giving the impression that their existence is an inconvenience, they just get used to it if the culture implies that seeking interaction with people they don't have a close interaction with is rude or suspicious behaviour...

(as for Estonia it may have assimilated Russian smile-aversion as well as being nearly as culturally introverted as Finland)

So you'd think that a sophisticated tech company that had paid that financial penalty would find it pretty easy to have a simple text filter for "Martin Lewis" and perhaps even an image filter for his very distinctive face which pushed those ads into a moderation queue, particularly if they both appear together in the scam-ridden investment opportunity category and the advertiser is a new one (that's probably not going to stick around under that name for very long). But no, they remained a common theme for years afterwards...

And, as the sibling ad points out, if you report stuff that's obvious scams you get told they've reviewed it and found it to be OK. Plus you get more of it promoted into your feed because hitting the report button is a form of interaction with it...

I actually had some sympathy for Facebook when they were condemned for not moderating fake news from Myanmar they have no real capacity to moderate, or condemned for daring to slap the gentlest of content warnings on antivax stuff in contexts they understand perfectly well... but when it comes to ads they get paid for, which is a much smaller fraction of Facebook content that is unambiguously not protected speech or a matter of opinion, their lack of effort is quite something to behold.

The African confederation is actually marginally smaller than the European one. It also has no shortage of internal disagreements, brings in very little revenue, and the bigger nations are ultimately going to look at where the money is and see that it isn't trying to plough ahead without Europe, Asia or the United States.

CONCACAF was actually one of Infantino's best hopes, a mixture of the US, a few nations that hugely benefited from Infantino's other world cup reforms and a few that have no realistic prospect of World Cup football but would love $40m in return for voting a particular way...

and a whole lot of tedious checking and formatting time that would otherwise be some other paid employee's responsibility

tbh the polished language is the least important bit: AI can do that to an extent, and actually well for some less-discerning funders.

Fortunately the English top division alone makes a similar amount to NHL (from a quarter of the matches) and the English second tier makes a similar amount to the Super Bowl[1], which is why football's governing body doesn't particularly need lessons on how to commercialize stuff from people in the United States who probably also don't understand football's financial centre of gravity, but will happily buy commercialization rights for a quadrennial tournament if sold to them in a backroom deal at a sufficiently low price...

[1]yes, I know the Super Bowl is only the one game. But if you can compare a 1400 game annual league to a 104 game quadrennial tournament, then I can compare an entire season to a single big game :D)...

But the only way they 10x is to start running more FIFA competitions, and that's when they encroach on UEFA's cash cows...

Regardless of rhetoric about "not to be sold", the bigger issue is that this looks like a very bad financial arrangement for a sport that is awash with funds already so doesn't need to sell its future revenues off cheaply or learn how to make money from PE, but probably a good deal for Infantino and chums. Corruption at FIFA is nothing new, but a behind-closed-doors sweetheart deal for a large fraction of their future revenue was really pushing at boundaries ...

And Infantino had become so convinced of his own genius he thought that giving member states a fait accompli, a ticking clock and an indication that most of the money would go to states that voted yes (and a financial deal that would be an attractive bung to the 100 or so FIFA members with no chance of actually qualifying, but shrinks the future revenue stream for everyone else) would actually fly.

Plus UEFA already makes more money than FIFA, could happily organize a rival competition attracting more top teams from the rest of the world and sponsorship money if it came to that, and had a unique opportunity to flex where fans and clubs would be universally behind them...

In addition to them all knowing that a World Cup without UEFA isn't going to happen, they also weren't impressed by being presented with a fixed offer and a ticking clock rather than an opening of negotiations....