garte

One basic economic law is that the market tends to concentrate into monopolies and regulation has to work against it. So it's kind of what Capitalism does best and it's in its genes.

> It also doesn't help that it's easy to lump 'the left' with 'everything I don't like re social issues' because the institutional left is basically neoliberals who prefer to talk social politics to avoid talking about economics.

That's actually a great analysis, thanks for that!

"Hail capitalism because we're only civilized under the influence of game theory!"

I think we're living in a highly individualistic society and what little high trust remains is outside of the logic of markets.

You should have seen the dark age... if everyone fended for themselves there we wouldn't be here now. You know how much you depend on your peers without any of the affordabilities of today's age?!

you know what happens to you if a jet engine moves your car out of the way? you have the accident inside your car by yourself, you become the accident. physics states that all forces will be equal.

there needs to be some form of energy input to analyse the co2 to another molecule. the logical input would be the sun. but why not use the sun directly via solar instead of going the long way over fossils?!

you know who _own_ the means of production more than ever? the rich. they control your labour environment. they control politics. so you're the opposite of independent from them.

in about 15-20 years when all office jobs are gone and we're only talking to machines there is going to be "ai alignment and safety specialists" doing the same jobs in smaller offices for less pay than customer support does today. they'll be fixing "misaligned" models and penalizing citizens for deviating (see credit scores, penal system today) all from the comfort of their home.

they'll be more afraid of terrorism, black people and muslims than ever. and lets not get started about socialists!

however you spin this it is going to deteriorate your average job opportunity at least in the us. the us will be where China was 50 years ago: worse workers rights, worse political participation, more low income jobs working for "miltech superintelligence corp".

what hegseth does to your military, amazon-ifying it is what is also happening within your political system stripping you of your civil rights.

at least china had an economical goal furthering the nation state. maga has... what? sucking up to elons, zucks, bezos and other super rich weirdos in the hope of resurrecting the big american empire again. it's devastatingly stupid, really.

_any_ end-product that does not pay its suppliers acts this way. that's just another wording for a thiefdom.

> This is because Europe, and everyone else in the western world, is obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.

Either you're an American which would prove the "most Americans are ignorant about their imperialism and their own militarized society" or you aren't and aren't watching that many news the last 10 years... either way that's not a very... thoughtful comment.

it takes at least 20 years to build a nuclear power plant and it takes another 20 to build it back. it costs a multitude of resources and money to build, maintain and tear down compared to renewables.

nuclear has its role currently but it's not the future.

What I'm wondering these last few years is whether American "politics" has anything actually political to discuss like ensuring the pension system is still intact in 30 years, improving access to a solid education (and even more so: what does that mean?), drug prevention, transparent election processes, tax and debt management... Over here in Europe you only hear about "US politics" like guns and cars or DEI ... stuff that you could bicker over after all the actual politics were decided upon.

Is there actual politics? Or is it all for show?

(This is relevant to corruption because I think a populace is a lot more receptive to ignoring corruption if the politics is emotionalised and people are entrenched and you don't talk about stuff that actually would benefit you but you have to decide on how to act on it)

you know: you're the work horse of this conversation right now. you add nothing of value to it.

there are other factors at play like AMOC halting and breakdown of habitats that are codependent with other habitats. you dont get to pick and choose regions since earth is a huge interconnected system itself.

stop drinking the tech kool aid and start with degrowth.

the question is how europe and the us will manage degrowth. atm europe is ahead while the us is acting like a spoilt child calling for more cars and ac.

This polemic is quite sad. Wars are only cool in movies. And - apparently - in US politics. The reason the EU shirks talking about war is because it actually lived through it. And it wasn't cool.

The US is waging wars far from their borders (of which they all lost since about 50 years) while the topic in the EU is self defence within their borders, that's a different ball game.

A third of the US economy is propped up by waging wars. That's not even being imperialistic that's just a very costly and damaging social service program that costs a lot of lives.

It is often hard to put an economic value on research in general. That makes the whole "labor market" highly different from the rest of the world.

LLMs conduct strikes on children which a human may not have done. so wow, you got a frontier model but you lost something there in the process.

> Even if it were true it's not the taxpayers responsibility to import all the degenerate murderers and rapists from all over the world in the hopes of civilizing them.

That's just not how any of this works and I think you know it. You're just being obtuse, although I don't know why.

1. As long as these are measured they are not a problem: Switzerland - and most of the EU countries - do simply not have a problem with poor people leeching the welfare systems, but rich people not paying their share: tax evasion by the rich is a problem going into the billions while social security fraud is around millions.

2. That's also measurable by crime stats and Switzerland is really tough in re-patriating people that broke the law.

3. That is something you cannot measure and where you cannot guarantee freedom or fairness in a society. What if I were to deem you too stupid to vote because you're advocating for a fascist mindset that might overthrow the democratic fundamentals? You wouldn't want that, I suppose.

So there's nothing to be done that's not already been done.

From a logical standpoint there really is only one rational step you can take: you have to leave because you are a migrant.

And that's exactly where all of this thinking falls apart: in an equal, democratic society no group should be able to decide who's a good or a bad citizen. There's only the laws of the country that should count and everyone has to obey.

You should soften up your idea of "migration" because there is no inane biological quality in humans that make them good or bad.

99% of "immigration problems" are because of poverty and inequality (both too little or too much money can influence behaviour) and not because of some sort of gene that makes human behave badly.

This does not make sense. How can you differentiate between "good" migrants (apparently you yourself) and "bad" ones? Shouldn't you remove yourself because you're a migrant to increase the quality of life for the "natives"?

^-- This!

There are so many other leavers to pull than this weird and random initiative: stop urban sprawl, extend public transport, curb automobile traffic, extend public spaces, reduce private property rights (Stichwort "Seeanschluss") to name some.

I'm still kind of hoping we're going this way instead of something like this initiative.

Technology is not onthological. Meaning it's not a means for itself but it's given meaning and power by shaping and using it.

We do not have to tame technologies, we have to tame rich people who only want to get richer.

Europe is a lot more diversified than the US (subtract the whole AI / internet tech sector and US treasure bonds and you get a lot less volume than Europe) and spends more in social security which is good for the economy as a whole.

The US has inflated numbers through soft power influence throughout the whole world but that makes its current course only more self-destructive including bond yields when they come crashing down.

As I said below:

Cozy small time agriculture in the west is a small part of your general food supply. The rest is in places you do not want to live and is called monoculture. A huge part of your food supply is not produced "in the countryside" in either Denmark or most of the West.

It all starts with oil and energy. Nothing else matters as much. So getting off oil and producing energy in other ways is at the forefront of our struggle as a species and if you deny this progress because it hinders the view from your detached house porch I get the impression you have not really realized the situation we are in.

Cozy small time agriculture in the west is a small part of your general food supply. The rest is in places you do not want to live and is called monoculture.

All "raw materials" you mentioned are not produced "in the countryside" in either Denmark or most of the West.

It all starts with oil and energy. Nothing else matters as much. So getting off oil and producing energy in other ways is at the forefront of our struggle as a species and if you deny this progress because it hinders the view from your detached house porch I get the impression you have not really realized the situation we are in.

Thanks for your thorough response, I appreciate it.

My point was less that "everything comes from the city" but that living in the countryside has massive externalities that get deposited elsewhere as I mentioned.

So it would be kind of fair to at least start accepting some externalities - like energy - to be actually part of your living reality.

In essence: you need energy, get it yourself and don't NIMBY your way out of the consequences of "living in the countryside".

You know that all that "nature" you desire is synthetic? Living in rural areas without actually working there is as far from a natural state as it can be: the whole lifestyle is based on subsidies by cities and technology: your concrete, your car, your heating, your power, groceries... it's all getting brought to you by fossil fuels and plastics.

So maybe accepting some part of that technology to stand on your "natural" grass in your front yard might be necessary to at least offset _some_ of the costs you're imposing on the environment living your lifestyle.

Great article, most of all the latter parts about what autopoiesis means regarding computers.

I mostly agree. In a technological society jobs and money are kind of virtual. The productivity gained by technology in the last 150 years made lots of work redundant and we've been managed by economists to still organise around wage labour. This is nothing new with AI. We could have abandoned wage labour 50 years ago during the 70ies and got neoliberalism instead. So we'll get more of the same with AI I guess.