frisbird

@frisbird@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do we punish people when nothing bad happened ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s shocking how, despite all the response, no one has presented a clear general case.

  It’s called risk management. We learn about risk when a bad thing happens. When a bad thing happens, that means it was possible for it to happen. The next question is “under what conditions will this bad thing happen again”. And as it turns out, there is no deterministic answer to this question. It’s all probability.

  So condition X increases the probability of bad thing Y happening by amount Z. When a bad thing (Y) happens, we commission studies to look into all the possible conditions (X1, X2, etc) that contribute to Y and what the probability increase is for each X.

  Armed with this information, we then set about the political process of determining the negative value of the bad thing and the negative value of eliminating the contributing conditions.

  So for example, people get skin cancer (bad thing). The sun is a contributing condition to people getting skin cancer. If there was no sun, less people would get skin cancer. But if we destroy the sun, we destroy all of humanity. So addressing the condition of “the sun exists” is more negative than the bad thing “some people get skin cancer”.

  Following the same example, another condition for skin cancer is that the skin lacks the physical ability to protect against the sun’s harmful rays. We could solve this by forcibly genetically engineering the entire human population, or by forcing everyone to wear a poncho or burka, or by forcing everyone to wear sunscreen. But politically, we have chosen that since skin cancer’s largest impact is in the individual who develops it, and that the social cost of skin cancer is small by comparison, that the negative effects of removing bodily autonomy from everyone are worse than the bad thing “some people get skin cancer some times”.

  So now we arrive at the final component of why we punish people for contributing to the conditions that increase the probability of bad thing happening. Social impact.

  If the bad thing we are analyzing affects a lot of people AND the bad thing happens to people who are not exclusively the people who brought about the conditions that increase the probability of the bad thing, then we, as a society, sometimes decide that the best way to reduce the bad thing occuring is to reduce the probability that it will occur and that it is socially acceptable to punish people who raise the probability because that punishment will reduce the frequency and volume of that behavior and therefore reduce the frequency and volume of the bad thing.

  In the example of speeding, it’s easy. Speeding is totally legal for drag racers on a closed track and no one punishes them for going too fast. They might kill themselves, but that’s on them. But speeding on public roads leads to the death of people other than the driver. The driver could also die, but especially with pedestrians and cyclists, the speeder usually survives but other people die because of the speeder’s behavior. These things also happen when people drive the legal speed limit. In fact, it’s just a reality of living in a society with tons of motor vehicles.

  But the research shows speed is a major contributor to deaths of people other than the driver, and that limiting speeds absolutely results in fewer deaths caused by motor vehicles. In fact, literally every single speed limit set in the world is backed by a speed study that you can challenge with empirical evidence and trigger an empirical review to determine whether the speed limit is set too high or too low.

  We could go to the next step and automate speed governance. We could require all cars be installed with a speed governor, we could put up digital beacons to announce speed limits and require all cars be designed to respect the speed limit at all times. But, we have decided that the negatives of doing that are worse than the number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents where speed was a contributing factor. Costs would be very high, effectiveness would be very low at the outset, false negatives and false positives would be rampant, and people could disable their governor system and then we’d still need traffic monitoring to catch the speeders (although disabling the governor might be punished by jail time and vehicle destruction).

  It’s all math. We do it because the math shows that it works. Reducing the risk factors of a specific negative outcome reduces the negative outcome. And we do it because we do not want to wait for every single human being to have to experience the bad thing to learn to govern their own behavior, especially when that bad thing could be the death of innocent people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's never been about helping people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Forced labor is not new. When the USA amended the constitution in the aftermath of the civil war they explicitly banned private ownership of slaves but made a specific carve out for prison slavery. Immediately after emancipation the states created laws that freed black folk couldn’t avoid and in 10 years the prison population went from 90% white to 90% black. And those black prisoners were leased to plantation owners to work their fields.

  Convict leasing lasted almost 50 years, but not before other modalities of prison slave labor had developed and matured.

  It is in no way a relatively new-ish thing

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's never been about helping people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To be clear, those rules were all ways of criminalizing BLACKNESS in the immediate aftermath of emancipation because the freed people had nowhere to go and nowhere to sleep. And since racism is a system designed to get the working class to do the dirty work of the owning class, it makes sense that laws intended to enforce racism get used against all poor people in relatively short order.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨92% of American adults aren’t going to a doctor because they cannot afford it. The health insurance industry must be dissolved & all of its executives criminally prosecuted for murder, conspiracy, an…⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Which parties change it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Obama wing of the Democratic Party is declaring “war” on progressives. Why don’t they ever bring this energy against Trump? Why do they hate working class people even more?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do I think the Good Cop in the Good Cop / Bad Cop routine is just as bad as the Bad Cop? That’s not the question. The question is why, after all this time, and everything you know, do you still think that cooperating with the Good Cop is in your interest. It’s not.

  The Democratic Party and The Republican Party are two fronts for the fascist elite of the Eurocentric empire, they have a single shared purpose. They collaborate on that purpose and take up oppositional positions in the public sphere to maintain and divide the loyalty of the masses.

  Democrats winning has done absolutely nothing to stop the march of fascism. In fact, Democrats actively participate in the never ending fascism that birthed and sustained the USA for its entire existence. Don’t forget, not only did FDR put anyone vaguely asian-looking into concentration camps, the government stole their private property as well, while they were also building the racist redlining program into the banking industry.

  The Democrats can’t save you because they have no intention of saving you. They are active collaborators in the whole fascist system, and part of their role is to get you a coffee and apologize for the bad behavior of their partners. But they’re not doing that because they intend to fix it. They do it because it gets you to support them and ignore the alternative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many people regardless of whether their reasonings are justified or not pinpoint South Park for ruining a generation of millenials?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Part of the problem, like the problem with Team America, is that the ideas still propagate even if you’re mocking them. The same is true of The Office, making fun of misogyny and racism by acting it out while trying to play it straight is very similar to acting it out earnestly. It’s not a defense to say it’s parodic or subtle or sarcastic.

  More than anything, South Park was dominated by the shock factor. The content wasn’t particularly insightful, educational, or complex. It was mostly absurdism and shock, both fundamentally predicated on doing things other people weren’t willing to do because it was taboo or uncomfortable.

  Did some young viewers come away with enlightened sensibilities? Probably. But RATM achieved the same goal without reproducing the messages of the movements that they were fighting against.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Obama wing of the Democratic Party is declaring “war” on progressives. Why don’t they ever bring this energy against Trump? Why do they hate working class people even more?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with the DSA isn’t that they don’t align with the corporate neolib agenda. It’s that the DSA seems to abolish the institutions that liberalism relies on for its power. It is not in the interest of the Democrats to support the DSA except in so far as it allows them to sheepdog proto-revolutionary energy into dead ends. That’s how they use Bernie and in the last decade or so it’s how they used the DSA.

  Until people understand what liberalism is, this confusion will continue. Liberalism is what made Thomas Jefferson want to split from the crown. It’s also the philosophy that allowed him to argue against importing slaves from Africa to increase the price of the slaves he sold from his “breeding plantations”, or rape farms as they might be more rightly called.

  Every conservative in the US today, with a couple rare exceptions, is a Liberal, and every Democrat in the US today is also a Liberal. They differ on how far liberal values should extend, but they rely on the same power system: private property, profit, corporate personhood, common stock, police, genocide, and ecocide.

  The DSA will only be a part of the Democrats insofar as they are a) ineffective or b) abandon their anti-capitalist pole. Outside of that, the NYT is doing the same job it always has done - protect the ruling class from the masses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Obama wing of the Democratic Party is declaring “war” on progressives. Why don’t they ever bring this energy against Trump? Why do they hate working class people even more?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The rich passing our money back & forth⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The money being passed around by the rich is 100% our money. We made them those profits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could machines develop consciousness just like we did?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  LLMs are zip files, not analogous to brains. Model training is a lossy compressiom algorithm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between Woke and Political Correctness?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Political correctness was about language and word choice, primarily aesthetics.

  Woke comes from the black community about being aware of root causes of various problems and particularly how those root causes relate to class, race, patriarchy, and other forms of systemic and systematized forms of manipulation by the elite against everyone else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what's the deal with Data centers and why do we all of a sudden need massive ones built all over everywhere?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Because NVidia made a whole bunch of GPUs that are specifically for parallel processing massive amounts of information and floating point math, which is what is needed for machine learning, model training, LLMs, and everything else we call “a.i.”

  They took on a huge amount of investment in 2024, raising $25B in debt to fund more production. In the last 3 years they have sold a ton of hardware. That hardware was bought by people with a ton of cash or a ton of credit.

  How much did they sell? In the last 3 years, something like the equivalent of 12GW of GPUs have been sold by NVidia alone. In the US, we have about 30GW of data centers, almost all of them were already full. So in 3 years NVidia sold about a third of the total capacity of the country.

  Those cards have nowhere to go to be powered on. They are sitting in warehouses right now. People have spent hundreds of millions on GPUs from NVidia and they are sitting in boxes doing nothing. Because there’s not 12GW of available data center space for them to go.

  It took the US something like 30 years to get to 30GW of data center capacity. Even we assume doubling every 10 years, it’s going to take another 7 years to get the next 30GW.

  And that means building a shit ton of data centers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Before web browsers we basically had 2 other renderings: terminal text and email readers. Prior to the WWW, most content you could consume on internet was text only email and text only forums. These formats did allow for attachments, though, so you could get images, audio, and video that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your thoughts on people who say hate speech is free speech?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The American model of free speech is anything but. It’s a narrative cover over reality.

  The US government has always and will always choose what speech is unacceptable and repress it. They have been doing so for centuries. They have killed so many people for speaking. They have entire departments dedicated to media manipulation and censorship. They have vast financial incentives organized by the government to limit speech. There have been at least 2 open purges of communists and a third purge is burgeoning as we speak.

  The American model is not actually that the government should have the power to limit speech but rather that the government will limit violent speech if it goes against the government’s goals and will protect violent speech if it supports the government’s goals. That’s why white supremacist hate speech is protected in the US - no because America is a shining beacon of free speech but because America is shining beacon of white supremacy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not about whether or not you’d be fine with it. It’s an explanation for why bosses want everyone back in the office. Yes, there’s an emotional narcissism to management across the US, but I don’t think that’s enough to explain the RTO phenomenon. It’s more likely driven by the fact that a collapse of commercial real estate value would destroy so much value in the economy that every executive would lose millions, and some would lose billions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Letting those businesses fail means allowing commercial real estate values to bottom out, and that means all the securities that are backed by the value of those assets drop in value. It would be a massive financial destruction event.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s commercial real estate value

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think that the MK Ultra program actually shut down?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The release from Gabbard covers 30 countries. Some of the Ukrainian sites were former Soviet labs. Some were not. All of them, it turns out, were housing deadly and dangerous agents, the extent of which was classified, and some were engaged in gain-of-function research on highly dangerous pathogens with no oversight. That’s what we call a bioweapon skunksworks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think that the MK Ultra program actually shut down?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pass

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re craving for connecting is interfering with your connecting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think that the MK Ultra program actually shut down?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, absolutely. Gabbard literally just revealed the existence of over 100 bio labs in foreign countries, including Ukraine. There’s literally nothing the US government isn’t doing to try to advance every aspect of their fucked up agenda. Epstein himself was convinced he was breeding better humans and he was literally protected by US intelligence

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why are all social medias based around western values?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason homophobia is rampant in Africa is because of the West. European colonizers were the first to criminalize same-sex relations in Africa. Prior to that, there were small pockets of homophobia and transphobia, but Africa was predominantly genderfluid and sexually fluid, just like everywhere else in the world before Westerners came and fucked it all up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. All of that money should be returned, plus interest and penalties, and THEN reparations needs to be paid and that’s JUST France. The US stole immense wealth from Haiti and needs to return it, with interest and penalties as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This exactly. Once you start actually engaging with history in earnest, and breaking down the narratives we’ve been fed our whole lives, it becomes impossible to see the world in the same way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think Haiti is paying reparations to France any more. I believe Citi purchased the debt from France, and Haiti was paying Citi the reparations until 1947.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, what the hell would it mean to you for one country to “care about” a continent? You’re basically doing the meme:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Holy shit? You think this history is whataboutism? The OP said “I don’t have a dog in this fight [because I am from Africa]” and the commenter said “[you should have a dog in the fight because of China’s behavior]”

  Hello? Reading comprehension? How does establishing that OP should have a dog in the fight because of Western history in Africa become “whataboutism”?

  This is thought termination at its finest

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you literally just going to ignore the entire other half of the post asking about why people are anti-western and saying they don’t have a dog in the fight because they are from Africa? Are you that committed to attacking your political opponents that you can’t even see the words that aren’t about your desired debate position?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyone who disagrees with my worldview is a tankie

  Who’s the tankie? The person saying that China hasn’t bombed anyone in over 35 years or the person saying “I don’t know why they hate the US so much” when the US attacked over 15 countries with tanks, bombs, drones, and missiles over the exact same time period. Might need to check yourself

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  China looks less bad in comparison because it hasn’t dropped a bomb in a conflict since 1989. It hasn’t fired on boat since 1988. The US criminal justice system manages 10x more people than the Chinese criminal justice system with more than double the recidivism of China China doesn’t engage in structural adjustment programs like the IMF does and they forgive billions in loans unlike the West. There are grandparents alive today who were subsistence farming when they were 5 and are now experiencing consumer robotics and self-driving cars. China looks good because of reality, not just because the US is recently doing bad things.