jaco6

The best method is, as always, an anti-privacy method.

Simply track all citizens' writing patterns throughout their life, from cradle to grave, then diff with any given text's signature--you'll know if it was human written or not.

Better--opt in--install a "personal text signature" on your devices, sign things that you wrote yourself with it.

But I suppose that's just like the image provenance chips on cameras.

Either way father fascism is more with us than ever, praise him!

Once you become a heavy user it no longer reliably triggers appetite, maybe because you get better at recognizing the hunger is fake and focus on other aspects of the high.

I see lots of warranted skepticism about the capabilities of this tool, but the reality is that this is an incremental step toward full automation of white collar labor. No, it will not make all analysts jobless overnight. But it may reduce hiring of said people by 5 or 10 percent. And as people get better at using the tool and the tool itself gets better, those numbers will grow. Remember that it took decades for the giant pool of typing secretaries in Mad Men to disappear, but they did disappear. Gone forever. Interestingly, anger about the diminishment of secretarial male white collar work in Germany due to the spread of the typewriter a few decades earlier was one of the drivers of the Nazi Party’s popularity (see Evans, the Rise of the Third Reich).

AI’s triumph in the white collar workplace will be gradual, not instantaneous. And it will be grimly quiet, because no one likes white collar workers the way they like blue collar workers, for some odd reason, and there’s no tradition of solidarity among white collar workers. Everyone will just look up one day and find that the local Big Corp headquarters is…empty.

I agree it’s becoming a common sentiment among the online pseudo-intelligentsia, but it’s still rare on a population level, so I will keep spreading the sentiment. I think it’s important, mainly on an economic level (I believe economic growth is impossible without population growth), but I speculate the decline of family-having is at the root of some of our other social-psychological malaises: loneliness, substance abuse, mental illness, increasing interest in extreme politics. Tech people should be most interested in family as an answer to social woes because currently people are blaming either social media and tech for social dysfunction,or the collapse in family-having, or both. If family is the answer then lots of tech will be exonerated.

I understand the point of your comment—why do Germans who see few migrants care about it more than Germans who see many migrants?

The answer is that parts of the country that have enjoyed homogeneity the longest are the most upset about having that homogeneity violated. If one lives in Berlin, which has been heteregenous for a long time, the introduction of mass migration was less upsetting. If one lives in a village or small city that was 100% German for a long time, and now has the pleasure of “welcoming” strangers with a higher crime rate, alien social customs, and different appearance—your response is different.

Not really strictly an economic problem. If it weren’t for widespread dissatisfaction with open borders and pseudo-asylum, millions of AfD voters would be voting for center right or center left parties of the mainstream coalition. The coalition has immolated itself on a pyre of fake compassion for migrants—actually a quest for cheap labor.

Polyamory is just code for: a group of mostly bisexual women orbiting one wealthy and attractive male.

For the man it’s good because he would otherwise be married and constantly tempted to cheat, as any very high value man is when he is married. For the women it’s arguably also good because they would have to get the high value man to cheat, or they would be the wife of the high value man who gets cheated on.

In the future, it will be increasingly normal for high ranking men to be polyamorous and have “polyamorous” partners, while lower ranking men will continue to be monogamous.

There will be plenty of women who will choose to date only the lower ranking men. But I find it hard to believe that many powerful men will choose to commit to only one woman and deal with the moral and practical difficulties of infidelity that powerful men have had to deal with for thousands of years. Instead they will just date from the pool of “polyamorous” women, that way they don’t have to cheat. Women will go through “polyamorous phases”, where they sleep with a powerful man who is sleeping with other polyamorous women. When they get bored of it they will switch to being monogamous and not speak of the polyamorous phase.

Two things:

Even the “cool kids” are staying inside and using their phones all day. Cool used to mean you were at the party, now it just means you have a high snapchat score.

Other thing is genuine fear of accidental fentanyl consumption. They’re making fake Xans with fentanyl in them, fentanyl is being found in coke powder. Plenty of people aren’t taking the risk with street drugs anymore. Jelly Roll said so in an interview, he’s a big recreational drug user but doesn’t trust the supply anymore. Good job dealers!

We shouldn’t confuse sympathy for the killer’s motives with sympathy for his action. Many people dislike the US healthcare system, from numerous angles—medical, capitalist, socialist, insurance theorist. It’s terrible all around. That said no one actually thinks that killing executives will be a sustainable way to effect change. Even if a whole series of killers mowed down 10 healthcare CEOs in a year, all that would happen is that healthcare executives would get hazard pay and big security details. Most people, even the folks, understand this. A US jury will not nullify, especially after shown pictures of the man’s family.

The concerns about it being a foreign power seem misplaced. Shouldn’t the main concern with drones be domestic terrorism? A civilian could easily buy a small fleet of drones, equip them with small IEDs or sarin gas, and fly them into otherwise secured areas with large crowds. Are there any procedures in place to prevent this?

We need to wake up to the reality that solving the obesity crisis (if it is actually something we want to solve—enough healthy people may be happy with paying double for healthcare) may require measures perceived by modern liberals as authoritarian or cruel.

I think this because measures like what we did with tobacco—-public health demonization of junk foods and junk food consumption, banning advertisement of junk food, warning labels on junk food, and high excise taxes on junk food—are unlikely to ever be accepted by the healthy population that has no problem restricting its junk food intake to stay below BMI 30 (60+% of the population). They won’t want to pay double for chips just because obese people can’t stop themselves from eating two bags instead of one.

The only alternative is to charge the obese population on the back end—when they pay for healthcare. Obese people would be made to pay a health insurance surcharge to compensate for the additional healthcare resources they consume. This measure will be decried as “insensitive” and “cruel.”

Alternatively we could do both.

By the way—ozempic et al are unlikely to solve the crisis as some hope. Studies show average long term, sustained weight loss of 10-20 pounds. Good, but not enough to help people who are hundreds of pounds overweight—a sizable portion of the obese population that costs the healthcare system so much.

Asylum seekers start off their stay in Europe as fraudsters. Why does it come as a surprise that they proceed to commit other crimes?

It would be easier to simply deport immigrants, most of whom are committing fraud by claiming asylum under false pretenses.

I’m troubled by the implications of your comment—you seem to be suggesting that no amount of funding increase can bring about racial equality in testing scores. Is that what you meant to suggest?

Whether we ultimately outlaw facial recognition or not is unimportant. Cameras and data are now so cheap that soon we will be able to track every public movement of every person in the country, making crime impossible. Once you leave your house, a street camera will see, and trace the movements of you or your car into the city and as you go about your business, with or without your face. It will follow you until you return home or check into a hotel or fall asleep in your car. Your address is public information so this isn’t a privacy violation. The current cost of storing 24 hour footage of the entire urban street area of the USA is just $100 billion annually, far less than the current total of $300 billion spent on criminal justice.

This will bring an end to crime and herald a massive revival of public trust and socialization.

How it it racist to conclude that reducing immigration inflows and thus housing demand would reduce the cost of housing?

Sewage, heating, and power plants are included in GDP figures. Government spending is a GDP subheading. And such things certainly create value. I derive significant value every day from my warm, insulated, suburban bathroom.

Furthermore, your assertion that the defense industry doesn’t provide value is questionable. Until you can convince the various state governments of the world to unite in a global superstate, defense spending is a necessary deterrent to invasion and exploitation by other states, so it is, in fact, valuable.

And while I agree that suburbs aren’t the ideal form of urban organization, they aren’t actually the cause of all the social ills that you imagine them to be. Depression and addiction are driven by loneliness, and loneliness is almost as high in urban societies as suburban ones. Obesity may be slightly aggravated by car dependence, but it is still historically high and a major problem in the walking/public transport countries of Europe.

So no, the demon of suburban car dependence does not provide the explanation for all ills.

You’re right. If I were European I’d be wondering why we don’t team up with Russia in our own alliance and leave NATO to the Anglos.

I don’t care if you, an idiosyncratic individual, don’t tip. 95% of my customers tip, so weirdos like you have no effect on my average income.

Probably similar to the relief that the belief you will wake up from general anesthesia provides prior to surgery.

Catholic theology actually justifies the belief in Hell by arguing that an eternity of suffering in Hell is a blessing, because it admits the one benefit of existence itself, while total annihilation has no redeeming factors whatsoever.

How is immortality selfish? Selfishness requires taking from other “selves” who have unmet needs of their own. But there’s every reason to believe a society of immortals could either function perfectly well without producing new selves, or that it could choose to reproduce at a slow rate sustainable with its ability to extract resources to support itself. Any new selves that were born would be provided the same opportunities that we provide new selves in the present day—breastfeeding, education, healthcare. How would that be “selfish?”

Is it selfish when a centenarian lives past 100? Is each additional year of life obtained by a centenarian “selfishly” stolen from some hypothetical unborn self?

You’re being defeatist and ignoring the evidence presented in the article—even hospice patients want to live longer. You, too, will desire to live before (and hopefully: if!) you breathe your last.

This is because the entire goal of the sentient consciousness is simply to preserve itself as long as possible. DNA has the essential goal of replicating itself in reproduction. Consciousness, by contrast, appears to have no goal other than self-preservation. People sometimes choose to sacrifice themselves, but usually only when death is inevitable and they wish to save someone else from it (Lily/Harry Potter and Medal of Honor type situations).

Very well, you think that preserving the brain, or even preserving the nervous system, is futile. But what of total biostasis, preserving the entire organism, just like the archaebacteria that live for thousands of years in ice or other extreme environments by slowing their metabolisms to a crawl?

To me, excessive negativity about the possibility of immortality smacks of weakness and defeatism. You either love life and want as much of it as possible, which makes you a friend of humanity, or prefer death, which makes you an enemy of humanity. I take a stronger line than the neuroscientist in the article. “Death positivity” like that of Viktor Frankl, anti-natalism, even faith in magical spiritual resurrections—all are anti-human viewpoints, only excusable in the past because they were copes with the inevitability of death. Now that we have reason to believe it can be averted, we owe our potential future selves every possible effort to save them from oblivion.

I work at a Dominos and we of course accept and expect tips on delivery, because without tips the drivers would make <$5 an hour after paying for gas and their vehicle’s depreciation.

But at checkout for carryout orders the card terminal also now opens a tip menu. I would never tip on this screen because the employees are already paid a true hourly wage, albeit a low one, not a server rate that is below minimum wage.

Furthermore there is no way for the customer to know if the employee they are tipping is even one of the bottom paid line cooks or a manager or driver who are already making $20/hour at my restaurant—what most servers make after tips. I am a driver and sometimes accept payment for carryout orders and end up receiving credit card tips that should really go to the line cooks. When we aren’t busy I make an effort to reach over and click “no tip” for the customer, as checkout employees at other restaurants sometimes do for me, but sometimes it’s busy and I get tips anyway.

As others have said I think doing away with tips altogether would be best but it seems unlikely that will ever happen. A compromise would be to somehow ban “customer facing” tipping for things other than delivery—no tips at cash registers, only for “pay at the table” establishments.

The service was intentionally left unnamed to avoid driving traffic to it.

Tech employees don’t engage constructively with tech criticism because of self interest.

That Africans are less intelligent than all other races is undisputed scientific fact.

It’s the modern hatred of hierarchy at work. People today so desperately want to believe in equality that they deny the plain and simple truth of intellectual hierarchy.

The problem is actually worse in the world of work than in school. Even workplaces like Amazon warehouses would greatly benefit from IQ testing of new hires, with fast track promotions for those in upper percentiles. It doesn’t happen because of beliefs about racial and social equality. Dumb people end up running places out of nothing more than inertia and fear of acknowledging excellence.

The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.