The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
Everything is biased. There is no view from nowhere. What you perceive as bias-free is just a reflection of your own bias.
With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
> With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
Nazi ideology justified sterilizing and eventually killing the disabled. Arguing that less taxpayer money going to subsidizing the disabled amounts to Nazi ideology is quite an inflammatory leap. It frames lack of not taking on the responsibility to provide for another as equivalent to murder, and hence, those who reject social democracy as Nazi-like mass-murderers.
There is unfortunately a lot more to it than that.
There has been a significant amount of dehumanisation of disabled people in the British mass media and by some politicians, and talking about them as a "drain on society".
Remember not only are many disabled people taxpayers (or former taxpayers), but they are also the relatives, neighbours and friends of taxpayers.
GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying. You cannot create an open system in line with FOSS principles and be compliant with laws that mandate centralized control. That's why this project began with an architecture that prefaces dependence on the backdoor key holders, and is now going even more pronouncedly in the direction of asymmetrical power relationships, by becoming an entirely centralized bank. This is the only way it can remain compliant with the laws in question.
If you want to maintain FOSS principles and provide people with monetary technology, you need to be noncompliant — whether in letter or just in spirit — with the law in most of the world, where the law limits people's access to financial activity, in order to fulfil a public policy of empowering gatekeepers.
There is no backdoor. There may be bugs (point those out, we'll fix!), and there is the very clear and documented statement that the receiver of funds is subject to legitimization based on the legal requirements under which the exchange operates. That is not a backdoor. Backdoor implies secrecy, we have no secrets other than our private keys. ;-)
If you don't like the word backdoor, use a different one. It doesn't change the point I'm making. In any case, backdoor does not necessarily mean it's secret. There are known backdoors and there are secret backdoors. This is a known backdoor.
My understanding is that you (the buyer) connect to the exchange to get tokens, and the seller later connects to the exchange to get money for your tokens. The exchange doesn’t know where, how and when you spend your tokens. Where’s the backdoor?
(And I think the exchanges aren’t expected to be run directly by the state, but that’s probably irrelevant to the topic at hand.)
"3. Auditability - enable the state to tax income and crack down on illegal business activities
As a payment system must comply with local laws in order to operate legally, GNU Taler must be designed to comply with these requirements. GNU Taler must provide an audit trail for investigators operating under the law. Furthermore, we consider levying of taxes as beneficial to society, and fair taxation requires income transparency. Thus, GNU Taler must enable authorities to track income."
There is a third party — the exchange — that records everything that the merchant receives. It's explicitly designed not to be peer-to-peer. This exchange acts as a gatekeeper and the state's delegate, for the purposes of gathering financial information on private citizens.
Yes, but that is by design. Taler promises to protect the buyer’s privacy, not the merchant’s. That is very explicitly stated.
When you say ‘GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying’, that implies to me that it provides secret means of accessing private information to a third party. That is not true, since the party in question is directly involved in the system and there is no expectation of privacy guaranteed via technological means. Calling that ‘a backdoor’ is very misleading.
There is such an expectation for the customer, where it would make sense to speak of a backdoor if there was one, but there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and since it’s all libre software, anyone can verify this.
Perhaps the word "spying" implied the wrong thing. I did not intend to imply that this is in secret. This is an overt surveillance system that uses a known backdoor, not a covert one that uses a secret one.
The important detail being that this surveillance only concerns merchant income, not customer payments. Omitting that is bound to give people the wrong idea whenever you call it a ‘surveillance system’. :-)
(And I still doubt whether the term ‘backdoor’ really makes sense in this context.)
This is a tool for creation. So if it's giving one party a competitive advantage over another, that suggests it gives people creative powers. This is very much unlike a weapon where another party having a more effective weapon imposes only negative costs on you. Another party having more creative powers has significant positive externalities that benefit you.
I don't think you understand the value that people actually look for in creative media.
First, people seek authenticity. In written content, people want to know there is a real human author thinking about every word, and in photos, people do not want to be deceived by deepfakes. It's much harder to tell in a world of AI slop, hence the rise of apps like Pangram. This is a significant negative externality.
Second, people who invest their time learning creative fields seek recognition for all the hard work they have put in. Now their skills are devalued, again because of slop. This is another negative externality.
Having more pictures and videos is nice in some ways but your head is in the sand if you think it's all roses.
My initial statement might not have been clear: when I use the word creative, I do not mean it in this narrow sense of creative arts. I meant in a sense of creation, producing valuable goods and services for others.
Even if we're talking about creative arts, if people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated content and human-generated content, then how are they being harmed by the AI-generated creative content?
Assuming they value them equally and they prefer to have more content, AI is strictly a positive for people.
It harms people in any area that values authenticity because it creates a market for lemons. People will get halfway through a substack post before they realize there is no human behind the words. Again, this is why apps like Pangram are becoming popular. The end result is that people end up paying a tax to find the same value as before.
"Strictly a positive" is also a strange choice of words when the technology is ripping out the livelihoods of so many creators. I would accept "it has tradeoffs, but is a net positive over the long run". But the former is objectively false.
You can't use a product that you think is bad for society? I use my car everyday even though I would rather not because it's destroying the environment. I don't have other choices though, It's either that or I don't work
ChatGPT is now used by 1.2 billion people on a monthly basis. This is not an embedded product that people are being forced into. They are navigating to the website to use it.
But in many cases people are being forced into it. If you're a student in a college class of 20 where 1 person is using ChatGPT to cheat, you better bet you're going to start cheating too, unless you want to end up lower on the grading curve.
I would also add that the infrastructure that Robert Moses was able to get built in New York, massively improved logistics in the city, which massively improved job opportunities. A lot of later problems, like the flight of higher-income residents to the suburbs that was caused by the crime wave of the 1960s, is falsely attributed to those projects. And those projects are arguably not nearly as harmful as claimed to those specific communities. The owners of the property were compensated, maybe not always perfectly at the appropriate level, but it wasn't some highway robbery.
And in terms of the black communities that were disrupted, there were many more black communities that were helped by the improved logistics.
I've been to city hearings for a new condo development in an area with high levels of substance abuse and a lot of social spending generated by that, and it was dominated by NGOs who received a significant fraction of their operating income from the government and they almost unanimously opposed the development and the development eventually got rejected, so this dominance by private developers wasn't my experience.
The October 2 headline is cherry picking. The preceding yoy quarter was inflated by the tax credit rush before it expired. Q3 was also higher than Q2.
You've also cherry-picked an instance where Tesla reported weaker than expected growth but you've omitted the times where it reported stronger than expected growth.
As for shrinking margins, that's largely due to growing R&D spending. That's not necessarily or even normally a negative thing.
The growing investment into AI and autonomy is part of a very long standing trend that has been declared for about decade. It's not an indication of desperation (beyond the ever-present desperation that companies always feel with the heat of competitive fires under their feet) or some failure of some previous plan.
I want to add one final point, and that is that every company's position is precarious, including Tesla's. So if that is what you're saying about Tesla, I would agree.
Where I would disagree is in the insinuation that its position is any more tenuous or precarious than any other company's.
Markets can change. Consumer tastes can change. Research and development efforts can fail. competitors can emerge. All these things hold true for every company all the time. And it holds true for Tesla. So, being a cynic when it comes to the prospects of a specific company is very likely to prove prescient. The only point I would disagree with you on is the idea that Tesla's position has recently degraded. Its position has always been precarious, and it has succeeded despite that, not because of some comparatively superior past position.
>A car that is dropped that ejects a significant fraction of its mass in any direction is going to alter its trajectory but that won't change much: it's going to come down, and sooner rather than later, it isn't 'hovering' it is just very temporarily staving off the inevitable.
People are under helicopters all the time. SAR for instance. So whether you are supposed or not doesn't matter, for some people that's their day job and they are not overly worried that it is going to fall on them because they know it can hover.
Economics is the science of how scarce resources are used, produced and distributed. AI is in its developed form is post-economics, because it turns what used to be economic resources into free resources.
The concern over what will happen to people who can no longer earn economic resources from their occupation misses the point. Post-economic abundance is already the ultimate goal of an economic system. And in so far as AI eliminates jobs, it does that by moving us to that post-economics paradigm. People are going to be orders of magnitude better off.
Imagine we lived in a world where oxygen was scarce. There were oxygen merchants that sold you oxygen so that you could breathe. And then suddenly the planet transformed and oxygen was plentiful. It became a free resource instead of a scarce resource.
Everyone would be better off. Even the oxygen merchants, while being harmed in one narrow sense, would be vastly better off in general.
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