It probably also means that companies will not do it: It seems impossible to keep the tariff this high for years, and Trump will only stay in office for a few years...
Trump has been replacing anyone who would realistically force him out with flunkies as his first order of business. No one is getting rid of him in a few years.
His term ends in a few years. At that point he’s either replaced, maybe with the same kind of person (the US people have showed their hand with these elections), or he stays in place somehow.
Are you hinting at the second scenario? Then we’ll get to see what US democracy is about, or if those people hoarding guns to fight an undemocratic or abusive government were just overcompensating, as it looks like today.
Trump’s term ends with a high probability of a Democrat being elected to clean up his mess, as happened in 2020 and 2008. He will almost certainly lose congress in the midterm unless he can somehow suspend the election (all bets are off if the constitution falls).
Or his exec order asserting that the 2020 election was stolen and targeting former CISA head Chris Krebs for not lying to that effect in his security evaluations of the voting systems.
I really don't want MAGA people watching who I vote for. I'm sure you see logic in that? Also, I love vote by mail, I appreciate it as much as the residents of red state Utah who also appreciate that.
lol so you are ok with the party you oppose skipping votes for your party because it happened behind closed doors and poll watchers / challengers are not allowed in.
And yet it democratic voting areas it’s democrats who are blocking poll watchers and challengers or are suspect of voter fraud when they don’t close voting or have suitcases randomly show up and quickly shuffled in.
It’s only democratic areas who don’t want voter id.
It seems that these tests had a rule about not using generative AI from the start. So it would be more like someone entering a fingerpainting contest and using a paint brush.
EDIT: Oh, I misread, that was the USACO competition which had the explicit rule.
Non-voting representatives, possibly. "51st state" is just a marketing term, the reality would be a territory ala Puerto Rico or Guam, thought likely with more limited rights.
Expecting companies to actually license copyrighted material instead of mass infringement is fairly reasonable given they've demanded the same for decades from the populace.
"China's not going to respect those laws" is kinda beside the point. If they suddenly decided to cut everyone in the nation's pay in half - or double it - that would have no bearing on what is right for you or I to do.
OpenAI is talking about spending half a trillion US dollars, they have the money to license data.
In music, there is compulsory licensing and companies that use recorded music are able to make the economics work.
It needs to be repeated that these are not simply "tokens", they are the product of millions of individual people that are being appropriated for the financial gain of a very few other people.
Going with the flow here, does that mean if I build a little script that downloads just enough movies, songs and books from the internet I don't have to obey the current law, because it is a) too expensive, and/or b) impractical?
I'm sure you already see the folly of that argument.
Anyhow, flowing on, the allegedly totally inefficient governments of this world routinely contact millions and millions of legal entities, and many of them are poorer than Microsoft, Google, or even OpenAI, yet they somehow manage. So it seems to be practical.
Of course, that does not answer the cost thing, we all know governments just print more fiat money...
So we have been told that IP is indeed property and the property owner has a right to compensation for use. Nobody ever told me that I just have to be blatant enough to be scot-free. And I guess Sony, Warner Bros., Atlantic et. al. didn't get the memo either, or why would they sue a single university student for 4.5 million dollars? [1] This seemed and was much too much for a single university student to pay. So "too expensive" is off the table, too. Weird world.
[1] the Tenenbaum case. Tenenbaum was lucky but still broke afterwards.
If it's impossible to do it legally, then they shouldn't be able to do it. Violating one person's rights is illegal, but violating a billion's rights for profit is fine?
I'm in support of them being able to do it, but the right avenue is by working and lobbying hard to change antiquated copyright laws. Being able to disregard copyright only if you have enough billions of dollars on hand is the worst outcome. It's literally laws that only apply to the poor.
Be careful where you're going here. If you maximally/strictly interpret copyright law, the Internet Archive (including Wayback Machine) is largely violating copyright all the time. (WAY beyond the ongoing dispute with the publishers over the lending library.) Most web content is non-permissively licensed.
If that's the standard, then it is worth noting that we are talking about companies that are trying to do something that literally (as far as can be proven today) can't be done (build an AGI).
Contacting millions of people is something many businesses on earth do.
If these companies are already engaged in trying do do something that quite literally can't be done (again, as far as can be proven today), it's not out of line to ask them to at least try to do something that many other companies actually do in practice (pay lots of people).
It's important to be very clear that this is something that could be done, but that the AI companies do not want to even try to do.
Then you can't use it. Or maybe it's time to abolish copyright. Turnabout is fair play: if copyright binds me, it also binds you. If it doesn't bind you, it doesn't bind me. Anything else is pure corruption.
> If they suddenly decided to cut everyone in the nation's pay in half - or double it - that would have no bearing on what is right for you or I to do.
They literally did exactly that relative to the salaries of the rest of the world, and everyone took them up on it.
In retrospect, keeping China a weak communist nation was so easy. There was even internal dissent in the late 80s. It simply required refusing to make trade deals. US and worldwide wages would have been higher, discontent would have continued fermenting, the party would have remained relatively weak, human rights would not have been so easily sold out to the lowest bidder, the US would probably not have lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in a decade (3x the number of jobs in SV), and we blew it.
The economic liberalization of China and its participation in global markets has led to the fastest and most widespread reduction in poverty in human history. Even if we could have kept China in the dirt, it's extremely questionable if that would be the right thing to do.
The US government shouldn’t care about the right thing to do, only what’s good for the US people. It’s easy to say from a position of postwar supremacy that countries should be somewhat altruistic, but now the US pays the price, and will continue to do so.
The thesis at the time was that through engagement and free trade we could gradually (over decades) transform China into something closer to a free-market multiparty liberal democracy. That policy obviously didn't work — in fact it has been a complete and utter failure — but even in retrospect it wasn't completely crazy or stupid. It could have at least partially worked if someone other than Xi Jinping had replaced Hu Jintao. Unfortunately a lot of major geopolitical trends come down to random luck and unpredictable individual personalities.
Now we have to pivot and focus on containment in Cold War II.
China isn't meaningfully communist. In general them stealing our jobs is probably a good thing on the whole. It's a complex issue, and I would be happy if we were pressuring China hard because of it's human rights abuses but global wealth inequality going down is something to be celebrated, protectionism sucks. I know it's complicated, but I can't be too mad about our wealth being "stolen" to lift people out of poverty, it's something I think we should be doing willingly.
I think for my viewpoint to be internally consistent it needs to happen internationally as well as domestically.
ofc this is all a pipedream anyway, there's barely an appetite for lifting the people in the tenderloin out of poverty and I'm trying to convince people that we'd all win by tending toward a "humanity vs the universe" viewpoint that's based on the idea that all the folks on the planet deserve to have it good.
"when you're used to privilege, the loss of it feels like oppression"
It will hurt to fix this, but I don't think it needs to hurt that much I think it would hurt a lot less if we were actually trying to make it happen rather than occasionally being dragged kicking and screaming in that direction.
(i do not have any meaningful ideas how to bring about this kind of change, (maybe a fake giant squid alien in manhattan? :P))
> In retrospect, keeping China a weak communist nation was so easy.
This is extremely naive, and fallacious.
As policymaker, you do not know beforehand how countries are going to develop over a 40 year period (not even your own country :P). Thus the only realistic option would've been a catch-all sanction regime against... possible future geopolitical rivals? Non-democratic nations? States with different cultural values? No matter which you pick, sacrificing trade like that would've been extremely expensive and limiting for US growth (might've included India, Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Europe, Russia, depending on what criteria you pick).
You might have seen other countries jumping at the opportunity, filling the gap and benefitting immensely in the process, like the EU, or India, Russia, Japan, some pan-African Union... The only certainty in the outcome is that the US in such a scenario would NOT be as wealthy as it is today.
Capitalism doesn’t care about rights or how much you get paid — the only relevant metric is how much money you make so this was inevitable in capitalist America.
> Can you enumerate some of the things that they could do,
Biden had a very long time to do a lot of things. You can get a lot done with a bit of creativity and a willingness to cause a few constitutional crisis'.
If your first primary goal with a product line is that it will turn a profit per sale from the start, then you kinda have to start with the cost of goods sold as your baseline. If a customer pays you less than the product or service costs to provide, then by definition you priced it wrong for that initial / first step goal.
You can make up whatever goal you want and succeed or fail at it, that doesn't have any bearing on the vibes-based pricing being how to price things. What you'd need to somehow show is that a) you can even sell the product at that price, and b) that setting the price be higher or lower wouldn't result in greater total profit.
Naturally, you do want to make profit from each sale, but first off, can you, and secondly, how much? If it's something that took years of R&D to develop, then you'll want to amortize that over a longer period of time, and not try and recoup that the instant you have something to sell. If you're dropshipping someone else's product, then you can't price it all that high because your competition is also going to be pricing it with fairly low margins. (Or they're not, and you can undercut them.)
Interestingly, in support of vibes-based pricing, and in direct contraction of Econ 101, sometimes raising the price on something increases it's percieved value, as being too cheap makes it seem like a worse value or lower quality.
More than made up for in 'savings' from killing off Medicare. But realistically, you don't really need to balance a budget sheet when you can just print more of that principle currency on demand.
It's hard to tell how much of it is machiavellian plotting now that his "side" is in power and will benefit from a tighter crackdown on dissent, versus how much of the changes are just due to Elon getting more and more upset with getting constantly dunked on and hated on Twitter and social media.
At this point he's managed to make "all sides" hate him, except for maybe the Tesla fans and crypto cadres, and maybe that's finally starting to wear on him.
It could also be Elon finally realizing and reckoning with what we all already knew about social media, but he doesn't seem like that kind of person.
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