Well, to be fair, I would also be in favor of banning lobbying entirely, which I recognize is also problematic - then you have laws being written based on sub rosa back room deals, since lobbying is to a certain degree "human relationships in the context of power dynamics" aka politics.
Banning lobbying would be effectively a ban on all political speech. Because that's what lobbying is: political speech. For example, yesterday I sent a bunch of letters to my elected politicians talking about the Rio Grande Plan[0]. That makes me a Rio Grande Plan lobbyist. Louis Rossmann spent several years traveling across-country to speak about right-to-repair[1] laws. That makes him a right-to-repair lobbyist.
What we actually are angry about is the presence of money in politics. American political campaigns burn money like nothing else, which is akin to being in a government meeting where everyone is shouting over one another, like to the point where people are bringing in loudspeakers and megaphones. If that example were a real situation, it would be entirely legal to go and have police officers take away the megaphones, and tell people to quiet down and take their turn.
But because money is involved, SCOTUS says that, no, shouting over everyone else with a big pile of cash is TOTALLY protected speech. Any money at all that is to effect political speech is inherently protected. And so we have campaign seasons that burn billions of dollars, and people who are basically not listened to, because all the anti-bribery law that was supposed to stop the election fundraising arms race got thrown out over a decade ago.
[0] A citizen-led plan to reactivate Salt Lake City's historic train station and reroute our regional rail service over to it.
[1] Laws that would make it easier to purchase repair parts for broken electronics and prohibit the use of digital locks to prevent the repair of said electronics.
I have questions here, a lot of lobbying is done by:
a) trade organizations (we're all the onion farmers in Nebraska and want to make sure the Nebraska legislature doesn't pass laws that negatively impact us and promote laws that help us)
and
b) activist organizations (we're a coalition of organizations that protect water usage in the Mississippi delta and want to pass laws that promote conservation in those states)
Those groups often choose to retain professional lobbyists but will also send groups of interested parties to lobby who are not professional lobbyists.
Do you also ban trade organizations and activist organizations in this case? Do you carve out exceptions for them and just ban the "freelance" lobbyists? Most lobbying is meeting with legislators and talking with them about issues, educating them. How do you ban that without making legislators effectively useless (or if you're cynical, even more useless)?
I can't really think of any "wholesale all lobbying forbidden", but at least for specific industries there are a couple. "WHO FCTC Article 5.3" which is about limiting the influence of tobacco companies is probably the first that comes to mind, and the most famous example. Singapore I think recently done some legislative changes around lobbying as well, but I'd confess to not knowing much about it, maybe someone here could fill out the blanks if they have the knowledge already.
Maybe not possible in the specific country you're thinking about, with their specific implementation of "freedom of speech", but it's hardly the only one, and not all of them are incompatible with outlawing lobbying (if the US one even is, I dunno).
If you try to ban lobbying you will incidentally criminalize basically all political speech. White papers are a form of lobbying, providing testimony is a form of lobbying, running an ad campaign is lobbying, speaking with your congressional representative is lobbying.
This notion always puzzles me. It's not a complex idea.
Just like, say, banning GMO bananas. But such regulation is a whole text which may need to define or refer to definitions of "GMO" and "banana", specify what's banned, exemptions, enforcement authority, penalties, and so on. Maybe 10 pages of legalese. It requires time, expertise, research. But it's still just a ban on GMO bananas.
Or a programmed UI button to show a message. Simple. The specifics of the execution are a separate matter.
It's not "indescribable", but no one will describe it to you ad hoc and expecting it is silly.
Running a government and banning the representatives of your economy from talking to you is insanely stupid.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with lobbying, it is an essential part of the government and can not be legislated away, without crippling the entire country.
The post-war partisan environment was pretty unique in American history for its civility and substantial overlap between the two parties. The late 19th century had a level of partisanship comparable to today, though much of it was filtered through ethnic and religious identities in a way that would be unfamiliar to people today. In many ways, our modern political environment is a reversion to the mean. I wouldn’t bet money on social media specifically being the primary driver of this change (though I do think the collapse in barriers to sharing information has allowed for partisanship identity to be formed along ideological lines, rather than geographical or cultural lines, in a way that is unique.)
What if multiple teenagers were convinced to not commit suicide by AI? The story says that ChatGPT urged the teen to seek help from loved ones dozens of time. It seems plausible to me that other people out there actually listened to ChatGPT’s advice and received care as a result, when they might have attempted suicide otherwise.
We simply don’t know the scale of either side of the equation at this point.
And what if someone sold heroin to a bunch of people and many of them died but one of them made some really relatable tortured artist music?
Like all tools we regulate heroin and we should regulate AI in a way they attempts to maximize the utility that it provides to society.
Additionally with things like state lottery systems we decide that we should regulate certain things in such a way that the profits are distributed to society, rather then letting a few rent seekers take advantage of intrinsic addictive nature of the human mind to the detriment of all of society.
We should consider these things when developing regulations around technology like AI.
If a therapist tells 10 people not to kill themselves, and convinces 5 patients to kill themselves, would you say "this therapist is doing good on the whole"?
You can just ask "What flavor of ethics do you prefer; utilitarianism, deontology, egoism and/or contractualism?" instead.
From what I can gather, a lot of ML people are utilitarians, for better or worse. Which is why you're seeing this discussed at all, if we all agreed on the ethics it would have been a no-brainer.
It seems like a misunderstanding of utilitarianism to use it as an excuse to shut down any complaints about something as long as the overall societal benefit is positive. If we actually engage with these issues, we can potentially shift things into an even more positive direction. Why would a utilitarian be against that?
I don't think anyone here tried to use it that way, but it's useful to have some framing around things. It might seem macabre to see people argue "Well, if it killed 10 kids but saved 10,000, doesn't that mean it's good?" without understanding the deeper perspective a person like that would hold, which essentially is a utilitarian.
And I don't think any utilitarian would be against "something with some harm but mostly good can be made to do even less harm".
But the person I initially replied to, obviously doesn't see it as "some harm VS much good" (which we could argue if it's true or not), and would say that any harm + any good is still worth considering if the harm is worth it, besides the good it could do.
>I don't think anyone here tried to use it that way
That's certainly the impression you gave with your response. You didn't engage with the clear example of harmful behavior or debate what various numbers on either side of the equation would mean. Your approach was to circumvent OP's direct question to talk philosophy. That suggests you think there are some philosophical outlooks that could similarly sidestep the question of a therapist pushing people to kill themselves, which is a rather simple and unambiguous example of harm that could be reduced.
"We have AI therapists, most of the time it helps but sometimes it convinces the patients to kill themselves instead. Is the AI good or evil? Should it be allowed to continue to exist knowing it will inevitably kill again?"
Sounds more like the plot line of a 60s sci-fi novel or old Star Trek episode. What would the prime directive say? Haha
I think a therapist telling teenagers to kill themselves is always bad and should lead to revocation of license and prosecution, even if they helped other people.
Besides price signals, what other tools are available to communicate local knowledge through an economy? I can’t think of any that are particularly effective
I have a quick question if I may ask but your whole journey and even the article starts with the "I’M ADDICTED TO DOMAIN NAMES" / Addiction to domain names.
So I am wondering was there anything specific that caused this "addiction" (in a good way?) perhaps and has the addiction stopped after www.vidaliaonions.com/ or is it still continuing?
What mainly caused it: I kept getting laid off, and that nonsense infuriated me. So I was actively trying to find ways to save myself. Great domains, via the expiry marketplace, slowly became an unfair advantage I could lean into and compete with larger companies, just because I owned this unique .com domain. Hope that makes sense. I've written a few essays on my experience being laid off, if you're bored and wanna read: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/how-on-earth/ ; https://www.deepsouthventures.com/on-being-laid-off-unplanne...
oop, didn't see your 2nd question... yes, I still monitor expiring domain names... it's a very sticky habit, and ruthlessly fun... it's sortof like my morning paper.
Oh at this point I am trying to stop myself from getting into it since I know that I would get sucked into it like you too :) since I wouldn't have the funds to buy websites anyway and with things like PPP (Power purchasing parity) working against my favour it would be hard.
I did buy fossbox.cloud for less than a $ per year (81 cents iirc) when I wanted to build my own cloud with its own nice-ities.
Currently its just hosting some simple python servers and nothing much because I feel extremely lazy to host anything there because of lack of time mostly due to the fear of studies or similar but yea (read my another comment here for more context, sorry if it got long)
Let me know if you want the domain xD, I will transfer it to ya for free so that people like you can work in cloud industry too perhaps xD. We need people like you working in vps/cloud industry and maybe I can try to better explain some other things too!
Imagine if this domain of fossbox.cloud supercharges your journey into vps provider/cloud provider xD (let me know what you think, maybe we can collaborate which can be insane haha, 100% tell me more about your thoughts on the whole thing please!)
Also another question but how much do you think a domain like fossbox.cloud is worth? Not that I am selling it to someone to be honest but Did I make a profit xD?
I had seen your comment 5 minutes after you sent it but decided to read both of the articles and think about it
You are one of the few people who can say that they declined the offer at google and I am sad that you didn't get the bean bag :<
Now on a serious note, I feel like there are some immense similarities between your story which happened 20 years ago and what's happening now with the AI hype
> It was a gut punch face slap. My replacement, who’d only been there a few months, avoided the hatchet (cheaper salary, I presume). I would have stayed and worked for free if they would have asked. They didn’t.
I am also like you, perhaps the thing which interests me is that for me coding/tinkering with homelabs/servers are just things which I want to do even as independence or even for free :)
Shame that the company didn't work out. In retrospect, its all good now but that does feel like an action of mismanagement from the company's part because you clearly loved the company and who knows what might happen with the person you trained for months and how much they loved the company or benefitted the company ykwim
You write really clearly and I really appreciate it a lot and I feel like this sense of flow guiding us to where we are is definitely true :)
I recently spent a quick chunk of my month or two thinking about a problem that I solved for myself but it felt like that it could have abuses to the point that maybe most large cloud providers/providers might shut things down or would be an hassle. So I thought of an cloud provider which can understand the idea of things similar to the fact that there are different instances and dont shut down the servers due to complaints or anything
I wanted to build a cloud where saas providers wouldn't have to worry about servers. The servers can be deployed for the people themselves and have hourly pricing for what they use instead of how most saas stuff work nowadays of fixed pricing.
I am not sure but this idea required me to build my own cloud of sorts or build on another and I am just a 17 year old guy so I thought that most major cloud providers are really kind of no go so I looked at more hidden cloud providers like upcloud and scaleway and so so many others and I think OVH could be good for that idea or upcloud is good too but the thing is that upcloud has some nicer features like auto-scaling in vps's/a really good support system that I liked.
Well I still didn't have a credit card but since I wanted to buy vps's or similar. I started looking at lowendtalk and black friday and started talking to vps providers on lowendtalk and here and I think that its a very resource/cost intensive process and I just didn't feel right about reselling
Then I started feeling like how to build my own cloud. I found WHMCS + virtualizor and they were paid and so I started tinkering even more and just today found incus and started to self host incus and I bought myself some domain name and some cheap netcup server to play with things.
All while I was preparing for one of the toughest exams (JEE) so that definitely took a hit but talking to vps providers about finances and etc. makes me feel like right now is just not the time about it and the best thing I can do is to familiarize myself more with hardware stuff and buy cheap laptops and create homelabs with incus and play with hardwares too and get a job at IT/any related perhaps. Lets hope that any company looking to hire can take hackernews points into account too :)
I am still in school and I feel like coding is something that I can do too (Although vibe-coding hell is real so I am probably gonna learn it and give it time) and then contribute to real projects along the way
Honestly I still don't know what I want to do with my life but I feel like working at such providers or any similar things where I can do things like this, maybe perhaps even working at any massive hyperscaler perhaps if I "grind" extremely hard from here on out for career opportunities.
This is also the reason why I got interested in your story of domains because the vps providers usually provide domains too and I wanted to know the finances of it and why you got addicted and other things so once again thanks for telling me about it
Its funny but I used to be a coding -> finance -> started using linux ..... -> extremely coding oriented (both software and even appreciation of hardware nowadays)
I find your story really inspiring because one of the issues I felt is that I will always be judged by the degree I have and things like these don't really matter but your story is something that I resonate with a lot in my own way and I am super happy that you are now doing things which you are satisfied with. I wish to do something like this in my own way. I just want "enough" and I don't know if it would be jobs/business which would be the key to that (I hope jobs personally) but I am keeping an open mind on the whole situation and sorry for the long message
But your articles are something which have just resonated with me unlike none other right now. I am going to join the newsletter and have a merry christmas and a new year from here on out. Wishing the best for you, your family and your business and have a nice day Peter!!
I think I might take a drop year perhaps just to study JEE again to focus to get into a good college since the competition here is immense if things don't work out but from here on out, I do wish to keep these ambitions in check as they impact my studies but I study so that one day these ambitions/hobbies can be my job :)
Although I love the idea of a business and I might start one from my extra funds of jobs perhaps but the thing is I just want a job one day of things which I enjoy doing because I thought about it from sides of finance in the sense that retirement/financial independence would just mean doing things I like and I can have something like this in the IT/CS industry and I am young enough that I am still in school and even right now I can spend 1 year again to just prepare to get a good college which can play a massive role in my country atleast to get a job.
I wish the job market was less of a fear mongering pester right now where I feel like I need a degree for which I need to study things like chemistry (No offense chem, but you just don't tinkle me the same way containers do) and the immense competition and everything makes me feel like odds are definitely stacked against me but we don't know how it pans out but hopefully I can carve a niche for doing the things I enjoy as a job one day and get highlighted from this "passion" that other people name so. My mother says that I should stop doing these things and focus on my studies and she's probably right but man oh man I can't really explain it to anybody how I feel sometimes but its something that I am gonna have to figure out I suppose. Probably gonna go back to studying. Took a one hour long break :) writing it and thinking about it but well worth it.
She has worked as a staff editor in newsrooms, most notably at Tablet. It’s not accurate to say her career has solely been in the opinion section.
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
Her upward trajectory has been facilitated mainly through pleasing select silicon valley billionaires by echoing their views back to them in her ironically named The Free Press outlet, which they also helped found.
This really is the future of journalism. Just make content that a few deranged billionaires like and rise up and up and up and up. CBS doesn't have to care whether ordinary people like it. What matters is the asshole with billions of dollars.
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
Hundreds of comments and the only one speaking the truth is downvoted. Bari Weiss is unqualified and the only reason she was put into this position is to be a useful idiot for Israel.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization. Businesses always just follow the money, but for a long time American policy makers had made it difficult to invest in China, from regulatory uncertainty to restrictions on dual use technology exports to high tariffs.
It really was an intentional decision, largely on the part of the Clinton administration, to make investing in the country easier and improve the economic well being of Chinese citizens in the hopes it would inevitably lead to democratization. Clearly, those hopes were just that though
> Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization.
I'd say "in the hopes it would satisfy the political-donor class." The desired liberalization of the PRC was... not necessarily a falsehood, but not the main reason either.
Weird example. The redditor only identified the perpetrator of the shooting because the police pulled video surveillance from all across campus and widely distributed it. He wouldn’t have been able to associate the vehicle with the suspect without those images.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06393452
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