Unfortunately, the solution to the paradox boils down to “Might Makes Right”. The bounds of tolerance aren’t set by a consensus, but by whomever has the Power to Yeet.

And while this game seems satisfying early on (Yeet the Nazis! Yeet the Tankies! Yeet the Radical Centrists!) you do get into a cycle of purity where you’re yeeting anyone who questions whether the last guy who got yeeted deserved it.

That leaves us with the age-old Martin Niemöller verse:

“And then they came to Yeet me - and there was no one left to Yeet back on my behalf”.

What is the appropriate degree of tolerance? How do you prevent it from expanding to include people who would dissolve the institution? How do you prevent it from collapsing into a state of cult-like obedience to authority? It’s a balancing act and one that the individuals with the power to silence fringe communities rarely have an interest in performing.

This is, unfortunately, much bigger than one guy one the internet in the last week. We’ve been hapless bystanders in the Culture War for… centuries.

You’re going to need to provide some citation on that one

I linked to the podcast which has citations to the research in the show notes.

All of the above you would know if you weren’t intent on being a disingenuous twit.

Take it up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Decay Theory of Immediate Memory. You’re trying to turn a human into a Ship of Theseus, but at best all you’re doing is imperfectly copying and replicating the information therein. We run into the same problems with computer memory, and the only real working solution is to make multiple perfect copies at discrete intervals as backup.

That’s simply not possible at the cellular level at this time. Nor would backup/restore of cellular data be a practical solution, particularly as it regards the human brain, any time in the foreseeable future.

You’re doomed to die, just like everything else that’s existed to date.

It’s much bigger than “Republican voters”. You’ll find plenty of blue states with students drowning in debt and “business-friendly” politicians espousing the exact same “it wouldn’t be fair” anti-debt relief rhetoric.

These people are against their money going to other people

It’s more strategic. Student loan debt is a mechanism for controlling the employment prospects of college grads.

Public debt forgiveness becomes a method for funneling students into low paying, morally hazardous jobs (prosecutors, police, the public side of the MIC, education in underfunded neighborhoods, bureaucrat in a corrupt or underfunded agency) where you’ve got an incentive to keep your head down and do the work rather than organize your office or resist deplorable government policies.

Private industries, similarly, offer the better salaries doing the more morally repugnant work - mining and chemical manufacturing, big finance and HFT, pharma, automotive, credit and collections - which draws in the most talented people to apply their talents in the worst ways.

You’re constantly asked to sell out your principles for a paycheck/debt relief, or the most invasive and obnoxious applications of technology. You’re never going into business for yourself to challenge a corporate behemoth or pursuing public work that both benefits people and pays well. You’re never going into activism or politics without a corporate paymaster.

Ever notice how many SCOTUS judges and Senators are in the Federalist Society or from the Heritage Foundation relative to the Sierra Club or the ACLU? A big part of that is simply about the money.

Hehe

He’s a cat’s paw for conservative activists. Specifically, he’s close friends with Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager with too much free time and a chip on his shoulder, who has made “anti-DEI” a focus of his investment strategy.

Robby whines about DEI, Ackman starts moving money to put downward pressure on the stock, people get scared, and Ackman looks like an investment guru for effectively manipulating the price of securities.

The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate

I agree, you had a lot of tech folks. But I think this undersells how many tech-proficient artists you had. Lots of people who knew just enough to get a website off the ground (or just knew who to ask for the answers) and then spent the balance of their time doing music or webcomics or long form prose.

I think the thing that’s strangling the web now more than every isn’t even “AI” or “bots” or “evil foreigners” so much as “sales and marketing people”. They’re fucking everywhere. Filling up my inbox. Spamming my invites list in every form of social media. Blowing up my phone. Grabbing every spare inch of screen space on every commercialized website.

If AI really was just a tool for artists and developers, I am convinced it would be an enjoyable addition to the Internet ecosystem. If the only bots were written by Slashdot and Stack Exchange forum flunkies, we’d have a plethora of useful little scripts and automated tools.

But because everything has to be marketing, and the shit that’s being marketed has to be as high margin as possible in order to capitalize on economies of scale, we are in an endless blizzard of shit I would never want and certainly never asked for.

Just a maelstrom of trash bombarding everyone who isn’t in a cubby hole like Lemmy.

it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we’ll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet,

That last bit feels more likely than not, given the degree to which we’re churning up every acre of undeveloped real estate. We’re arguably already past the point of collapse.

But the idea that this will cause unemployment really hinges on the theory that AI can be cheaper and more ubiquitous than human labor. I’ve seen no evidence to support this.

On the contrary, AI is phenomenally expensive and inefficient. It’s a luxury (of sorts) that we’re subsidizing with longer working hours and a lower standard of living.

Modern AI is just another form of massive waste creation. When the bottom falls out of the market, it’s going to have to be one of the first things on the chopping block precisely because it is so resource intensive despite yielding so little

I suspect we’ll create a bunch of revisionist fantasies about how great 21st century AI was, a century from now when we’ve forgotten what it looks like. But in the meantime it’s not going to render us unemployed. It is going to bloat the economy with busy work jobs. Both on the front end fixing all the fuck ups that unmanaged automation creates and on the back end, as we scramble to clean up the mess it leaves behind.

T Rex only known organism to lick its way to the center of a Tootsie pop

Imagining a TRex with enormous bunny-shaped ears

clone is impossible

It’s possible in the sense that you can get near identical genetic replicas of the parent organism.

But the side effect of this process is in line with historical experiments of inbreeding. Most notably, you get a high instance of progeria, which is the opposite of what you want when aiming for life extension.

You are acting as if it is an unsolvable problem.

It is an unsolved problem. Whether it is solveable (either theoretically or practically) is an unanswered question.

But there’s a real possibility that “anti-aging” is, at its heart, a war against entropy that we can’t win.

The best we can do may be to archive the information of a subject and pass it on to an inheritor. And we’ve already got a good handle on that, by way of schools and libraries and making babies.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s a trick to indefinite cellular repair and replacement. It’s just not anywhere on the horizon. If it exists, the closest we’ve come so far is hypothesis. Nothing we’ve tried has successfully undone aging, even at a single cell level.

The best time to stop taking Altman seriously was ten years ago.

The second best time is now.

Pagliarulo says it’s now joined Fallout and Elder Scrolls on the podium

Pouring one out for Fallout and another for Elder Scrolls.

“New Thing Is Best Thing” is just the statement sales guys make when they’re selling the New Thing.

They’re going to re-release Skyrim for the thousandth time next week and claim it’s also the best game they’ve ever made.

Well when paper money is continually speeding towards zero value

Zeno’s Monetary Policy

That’s 18 people who own about a tenth of the US GDP.

Okay, sure. But that’s bad analysis. GDP is annual and net-worth is lifetime total. That’s also global wealth, not US-domestic (four of them aren’t even American).

Agree with the sentiment, but we should really be talking about global wealth not national income.

Something needs to be done

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done

Now you’re obligated to get a dog named Tonic.

Gaza is a cautionary tale for that

Just like with Vietnam, it seems the measure of success is in blood. Since the population of Gaza has been decimated - quite literally 1 in 10 Palestinians are now dead and we’re expecting tens to hundreds of thousands more dead before the end of next year due to famine and disease, nevermind war - while the Israelis report minimal casualties, they believe they are “winning”.

We have seen this in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam…

The lesson of these wars to the political class is that they win reelections, they generate enormous profits, and they never seem to bother the median voter over the long term.

Israel has had a scope on the head of every Arab and Persian peace activist in the region. The only folks who seem capable of surviving are the ones armed and willing to fight back.

If you want a bit of a deeper dive, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape gets into the science of aging and known workable remedies/treatments.

The good news is that Billionaires will not be living forever any time soon.

The bad news is that we’ve got a cellularly defined terminal limit and there’s nothing we can do to simply reset the clock. “Cloned Bodies” for animals are dysfunctional bordering on nightmarish. The human brain’s plasticity isn’t something you can renew with a pill or a potion. Blood Boys don’t work. There aren’t trivially replaceable components in the human body.