Comment on In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days agoInvesting in dead ender climate terrorist energy is a mistake.
I hope that’s not your opinion of nuclear energy. People criticizing it miss the fact that a grid has to support some baseline.
All things are good and needed, which are not about burning fossil fuels (and sometimes even those, if getting “greener” energy somewhere pollutes more than just taking a canister of gasoline or diesel fuel). And the more diverse energy supply is, the smaller is each particular environmental impact, be it from greenhouse gases, lithium, ruining watersheds when building hydroelectric stations, similar impacts of wind farms, oil spills, escaping gases, toxic liquids, plastics, … .
People miss that nuance. You make humanity sustainable again by diversifying as much as possible, so that any particular kind of harm would be minimized, and so that no particular industry would possess strategic power. Not by dividing energy into holy and unholy and burning witches. It’s just math.
Promising reindustrialization is a lie, and tariffs won’t do it. It will bleed Americans dry while letting oligarchs pillage what’s left.
Promising won’t because promising ain’t doing.
But input is leverage, and leverage is power. Look how “free” input from corporations into Linux gave them control over it. So if reindustrialization really-really happens, it will improve politics of your country. It’s the way it works. When you live off cheap Chinese labor, your economy depends less on your own.
Weaponizing AI to control population, and kill people is the new priority. Putting your hopes in DNC so that they can undo project 2025 is controlling you in a way that doesn’t avert the path to collapse in any way.
Agreed.
The only escape is UBI and peace. Not something a Israel supremacist neocon DNC wants, because UBI is power redistribution instead of wealth redistribution. The binary of AI and automation is either cooperation where abundance and the profits from abundance can be shared, or extermination of useless riff raff that dares to whine about oligarchy and empire.
I personally have doubts about UBI. It requires fiscal discipline that no recent US government had. Otherwise it speeds up inflation. Not significantly if we compare it to corporate bailouts, but still.
Peace is always good. But war is a symptom of problems that still would exist if there were no war.
I’ve recently watched an interview by Bill Joy (the Sun founder) where he mentions how clear water access has done much more to reduce mortality in the world than antibiotics. I think it’s the same with accessible good automation vs “AI” and other hype phenomena. I think non-oligopolized tech industry and non-oligopolized Web would do hell of a lot more for all kinds of abundance than any new magic wand like “AI”.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Nuclear energy is not quite climate terrorism, because it is clean, but it’s purpose is to serve climate terrorists and warmongers instead of being a climate solution. It takes too long to build out, and is too expensive. Baseload was never a necessity. It usually made a giant continuous operating plant the cheapest energy. Batteries and transitioning existing FF plants for standby/peaker use is far cheaper than nuclear, and renewables, batteries, and hydrogen can achieve 100% clean energy with 0 additional nuclear. The insurmountable problem with deciding that you need extra GW of baseload in 15 years, is that you need to suppress renewables to still need it by then. Uninsurable and unbankable, and always overbudget in part because political bribes, in a collapsing corrupt dystopia, is only path to building any.
One of the reasons the US can’t reindustrialize or even build affordable housing, is tariffs on steel/metals and lumber. Forces high material prices in addition to labour. For cars, China’s advantage is not just steel, and factory building, it is automation. Robotics gets developed close to where the customers are, and US industrialization is going to rely on minimal labour to have a chance. While the US is deeply committed to its oligarchy, inviting Chinese expertise in key industries, with their robotics, is a path to a future relevant America. Instead of tariffs, strategic reserves of domestically purchased steel/metal, solar, batteries that may be sold to US industry at a loss, is a path to having domestic supply resilience while encouraging FDI for abundance purposes.
Inflation is a market adjustment between supply and demand. You can escape inflation by substituting goods, and you only lose from inflation if 1. you have too much cash, or 2. your income rises slower than inflation. Slavery is good anti-inflation policy that provides high productivity. If inflation is your most important consideration in life, then slavery is excellent path for reducing it. UBI by empowering people to work less if they want to, means that everyone gets 5 recruiter calls per day, and has a very easy time of finding a good paying job if they want it, and there is huge demand for labour because everyone has more money to buy stuff, and you need to work/sell to them to take their money and trickle it back up to the employers.
So UBI is a massive economic/prosperity boost above and beyond inflation. Eliminates poverty and crime, reduces the need for savings, and so multiplies more money into economy, and importantly disempowers “false promise/prophet heroes” trying to tell you Israel first with “working class angle” politicians vs “pro oligarchy slavery full employment” angle. UBI lowers deficits and debt, because it is just tax credits between rich and poor, without making rich any poorer. Significant program cuts means less “tax collection”. More program cuts means higher UBI. Politicians can no longer lie their way past even an idiocracy that understands “I like money”.
An AI developer can make more money from a pro-Empire AI than a humanist AI. The Empire can also JFK/MLK the humanist, or threaten it with compliance to the empire’s regulations of preventing humanity from prospering on national security grounds. It would be treason if your AI suggests the empire is not pure good, and Israel has done something wrong, and contradicts the CIA/media disinformation plan. As Netanyahu says, if you don’t kill everyone Netanyahu wants dead, then Iran wins. You want to support anti-semitic Iranian/China/Russian/DPRK agent AI development? Netanyahu will say you need one of his pagers.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If you have enough cash for it to grow faster than inflation, you win and those who have less lose compared to you. So your relative power grows.
Inflation makes the poor poorer faster than it makes the rich poorer, actually it doesn’t do that.
And by “inflation” specifically people usually mean devaluation of money due to growth of monetary mass, which itself is a result of closing budget holes with emission.
Eliminates small crime. Superprofits from selling cocaine working together with corrupt officials will not really change with UBI.
There’s never enough money.
Only if politicians act as you want them to.
The problem here is not with what you are describing, but that you are seriously considering treating a computer program as an oracle, that can ask questions about good and evil.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
This is the big lie. Inflation hurts the rich when bond rates are at an insufficient premium to inflation rate. Those who don’t have savings, can complain that their work wages are not rising fast enough, but that is a complaint towards their employer who is raising prices enough to pay higher wages if they weren’t oppressing their workers.
Corporatist/Republican media helped swing election to most genocidal supportive candidate over this lie. But a war on Russia made the inflation self inflicted.
Goal shouldn’t be that profits can’t exist. It should be poverty elimination, easier life for everyone, and inherent resistance to having profits used to rule over you more harshly.
It is not power hungry DNC or RNC who will ever provide UBI. It is candidates who want to disempower Israel first wars and rulership. A campaign for UBI is first and foremost an extermination of the corrupt rulership, replacing it with the empowerment of individuals.
AI, including current LLMs, as a humanist oracle, has the power to make you/us less stupid if its mission/programming is truth. If its programming is to serve the same empire media disinformation, then surely, it will tell you to support a war on Iran. Any assistance to governance or empire will be how to best conduct a war on Iran. If an AI has a humanist instead of empire domination programming, you can trust it to both advise good/productive policy that is also truthful. If individual people are evil, and have pure evil biases, they can still override their personal AI to provide advice on how to support their evil, so as to make the AI most useful to them, but the default must be humanist/truthful.
Regulating AI for “national security domination” is inherently coopting that oracle function. Google/reddit/lemmy has been such a function of filtering up answers for you to digest for many years already.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I don’t understand this paragraph. Maybe it’s correct, but the way you use words confuses me. Inflation means that the same real world items cost more of conditional units, that is, money. The bigger proportion of your interactions is done with money and the smaller frequency is, the more you lose from inflation.
What war on Russia? Russia invaded a sovereign nation, leveled cities, killed civilians in droves.
With superprofits from cocaine, prostitution and other forbidden things going to mafia groups associated with politicians - yeah, one would think such profits shouldn’t exist. Whichever path you like most, you won’t be allowed to tread it while people with the opposing interest have so much power.
So how are you going to do that?
It’s like elaborating in detail what you are going to do when we settle Mars and build safe dome cities, without any plan at all how you are going to make that economically plausible.
No it doesn’t, it won’t ever be smarter than the dumbest human and also however many oracles you consult, you still bear full responsibility for your own decisions.
Once again, treating these technologies as ever possibly acceptable to tell people what to think is nuts. These are glorified predictors. Their role is to fill the holes where you don’t have anything better. These are by definition worse than anything dedicated. And of course they can’t think.