AI polls are fake, real polls are fake, and Nate Silver's modeling is REALLY fake.
Nate Silver implied Florida was in play in 2024 for Democrats, then it went +13 R. This is after he spent 9 years clinging to polling which systematically undercounted Republican support due to either sampling bias or shy voters, or were simply outright fraud in other cases (Selzer's Iowa poll).
This point would be more believable if rates of poverty and numbers of ultra wealthy weren't inversely correlated, but they are.
It's almost impossible to be in poverty in the United States unless you're willfully trying to do so. It's certainly impossible to starve. There are free food programs in every city.
Comments like these are usually driven from ideological places or jealousy, rather than a factual linking of billionaires to poverty. Any given US billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs for starters.
Look at evil Jeff Bezos, who created a platform in which basic necessities are sold for margins that are frequently 0%. Previously 'local business' middlemen would charge 50% margins to impoverished locals. Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods. That's merely one example.
this is a very low bar for determining a decent quality of life for a human being.
> ideological places or jealousy
but presumably you are a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"?
> billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs
No, they don't 'provide jobs', they suck up [human] resources that could otherwise have gone to schools and hospitals.
> Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods.
but at what cost to the social fabric (Walmart is probably the greater transgressor there though).
Developed societies tolerate the ultra-wealthy because a) they are an artifact of a free market for capital allocation (vs state control), and b) sometimes having large wealth concentrations has proved a useful 'short-circuit' to normal capital allocation for otherwise unfundable but ultimately beneficial projects.
The key word here is 'tolerate'. If society feels the ultra-wealthy are no longer worth the problems they cause (e.g. hoarding certain finite resources), then society should get rid of them.
I would add that beyond a certain point (a place to live, personal possessions, retirement fund, etc), there is no moral case - in the sense of the natural right of ownership - for their wealth, and we can simply confiscate it. For example in the UK we used 'death duties' to break the aristocracy.
I'd love to know where the $600k that Vitalik Buterin donated to them 3 short months ago went. I don't think they've adequately addressed this question.
Signal's code quality is not conducive to security. They had an extremely bad state management bug that resulted in photos being sent to random contacts in your list (potentially life ruining implications if you're sending private photos).
For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.
Send a GIF to Contact A, Contact B receives random private images? Absolutely inexcusable slop code project. This class of state management bugs should not be possible with a well-architected client, period.
Signal's E2E encryption is more like End 2 Random End.
So 7 months of their users getting rinsed by an extremely serious issue exposing your private photos to random contacts. Seems like slop code to me. Those kinds of state management bugs should not be possible. It indicates code divorced from best practice state management.
Knowing that bug COULD exist, means that you cannot be sure that messages you send in Signal will make it to the recipient you intend given the poor quality. This means the E2E encryption is fundamentally broken, by the way. Because the client is lying to you about the true state of who it's about to send to.
The recipient text has fundamentally zero relationship to the true recipient of the message given that bug.
Having the UI and message sending code reference two different versions of state is incredible incompetence.
This is not true. Building all types of housing increases the supply of affordable housing.
Build a new luxury apartment, and someone moves from a mid tier apartment into it, and someone moves from an affordable apartment into that, and so on.
Price is a function of constrained supply. The type of supply is not important to increase the numbers.
Pushing 10TB of data on the free plan is the moral equivalent of taking 100 packets of free ketchup from a restaurant. Both will rightly get you kicked out.
Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.
It wasn’t wrong every single time. In fact, many of the more successful social programs in the US happened as a response to extreme poverty and economic disruption (the Great Depression).
People need to get it into their fucking heads that things get really ugly and violent under systems of extreme income inequality.
So far, AI is not focusing on solving that problem, just making it easier for tech people to get richer.
> Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.
The scale and the speed of the changes brought about by AI are almost certainly going to be far greater than anything we've ever seen in the past. Scale matters. The entire value of LLMs is proof that scale matters.
They stopped upgrading their network because government was publicly implying they'd do something nationally on broadband.
Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others.
TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
> TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
Allowing other networks to take away the easiest, highest margin customers would break the NBN. It would likely lead us back to an unfit for purpose, "Free Market" situation, that further disadvantages rural, regional, and remote communities.
> Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap.
And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
I disagree, Sol Trujillo became ceo of Telstra in 2005 and immediately started cutting everything to the bone, Kevin Rudd didn't even get into power until 2007 and the NBN wasn't announced until 2009, fairly large gap there
Incredibly ironic to claim US tech has been enshittifying the web while the EU houses enshittification kings Booking.com, Spotify and SAP.
Make no mistake, the Digital Markets Act was a shakedown of US tech. How do I know? Known EU monopolist and enshittifier Booking.com was initially given a gaping and blatant carve-out from the law. Additionally, the DMA has never been used against any European tech, even the most egregious operators.
EU is also the hub for global illegal gambling operators, issuing cereal box licenses to shady operators via Curaçao, which they merely pretend to care about. So moral and righteous!
The handwringing would be valid if the DMA was used against EU tech. It isn't, never will be, and was written to explicitly exclude them.
Nate Silver implied Florida was in play in 2024 for Democrats, then it went +13 R. This is after he spent 9 years clinging to polling which systematically undercounted Republican support due to either sampling bias or shy voters, or were simply outright fraud in other cases (Selzer's Iowa poll).
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