I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
It's hard to document on the major platforms because neither X nor Meta provide easy access to streaming APIs that researchers might use to verify such claims. Last time I looked X was about $60k/year, for example.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Does it not bother you it's entirely fact-free? No source, no info what exactly is on Y-Axis and provided data ends in the future at the time of the posting?
You made an account 4 minutes ago just to post this? Of course, it is obvious what they meant. The AfD voters are real voters, but they can still be driven by hate stirred up by (among other things) Russian bots.
By the way, the 40% was in one particular Bundesland (Saksen-Anhalt). In the polling for the national elections they are around 28%:
The Dutch government could protect its sovereign interests apart from the USA - for example by legalizing decompilation and antagonistic interrop with American software, or reverse engineering of American hardware, or suspension of copyright and trademark protections for American businesses. Dutch Mickey mouse cartoons for everyone!
There'd be short term economic repercussions when America throws a tantrum, but whose fault is it that this could significantly harm the Dutch economy? Better to rip off the band-aid.
> Psychologically they'll believe they earned that 20% raise through hard work.
Well, it's not just that. They've been telling us for decades that wages are alternatively a direct reflection of the value of our labor to the company, or, a price set by the market, depending on which is cheaper for the corporations.
Kind of like when people say that UBI would simply instantly raise the price of all rent to match. Oh, really? The supply of rentable units will suddenly have decreased? The demand will suddenly have gone up? No? Odd that the "market set price" responded then.
The only reason it would go up by the same amount is greed of "the market" profits are unevenly distributed so it would make sense to even things out a bit (at least undo the gains made over COVID and the last few years by those profiting the most from inequality).
Because people have more money, making more expensive things more affordable. Demand isn't a single number "I need one apartment." It's a curve: at $0/month I will live with my parents. At $800/month I will live with a roommate. At $1200/month, I will rent a 1 br. At $1500/mo, I will rent a 2br. At $2000/month I will not rent anything because I do not have $2000/month. etc. And actually, it's a curve representing how many people are willing to pay for a thing (or how many things they want) at a given level, not how many apartments do you, one person, need. Now give everyone $2000/month, and their ability/willingness to pay will increase. Maybe you figure now you can move out of that dodgy neighborhood into something nicer. Except the person who could already afford the nicer apartment pre-UBI isn't going to downgrade to the dodgy one, and they get UBI too, so they'll just pay more to outbid you (they would move upmarket themselves to make room, but it's turtles all the way down). Of course every sector of the economy knows this, not just landlords, so in reality prices of everything will rise rather than rent capturing it all.
This still doesn't make sense to me because people will often stay in the same place that they may not like that much specifically because the landlord hasn't raised rent that much, even if they can afford to move. They can't justify it. Or California landowners that don't sell because of whatever that rule they have is that figures property tax against original price or whatever.
It doesn't seem liquid enough to justify an increase in cost of rent the instant minimum wage goes up or UBI is implemented. My point is that a lot of these "markets" are really just price controllers setting price as they please, and landlords particularly feeling like they're special and get to lay claim to some arbitrary percentage of people's income. Which, for structural reasons, they can do.
The point is they can't set the price as they please; they can't set it higher than demand supports. If right now landlords all just agreed at raise prices by $2000, many units would go unfilled as people don't have an extra $2000, so under no circumstances could they possibly pay that (they may find alternative arrangements like roommates or parents or living on the street).
If you give everyone $2000, then landlords can successfully raise prices because now people can pay that much, and as mad as they'd be about their UBI going straight into the hands of businesses, they're unlikely to go homeless or stop buying food to protest it, so they'll pay it. That ability and willingness to pay is called demand.
Your argument is oversimplified. Landlords may be able to extract more money from people who net benefit from UBI, yes, but they will be able to extract less money from those who take a net loss from the policy. (I’m skeptical that landlords will actually be able to extract more because I believe most low income people who can afford rent now are likely unable to afford the means of subsistence in total, but this aside doesn’t affect the argument I’m making here.)
So the inflationary effect will probably be limited to low-income housing, which is already heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars in the US, arguably even more inefficiently than the situation under a hypothetical UBI. It will probably be coupled with a deflationary effect at middle-to-upper income housing, depending on the nature of the benefit and the structure of the taxes used to fund UBI. If the policy is structured competently, there’s no reason that it is necessarily inflationary as a whole.
Well, sure, if you put enough tax pressure on the middle/upper-middle class, then that might have a counterbalancing effect of some sort, but generally speaking, the upper class aren't spending their money on things that people are worried about when they talk about inflation, so to the extent that it's "inflation-neutral," it'd be exactly the phenomenon people claim happens with inflation reporting today: "No, no, inflation didn't happen! See, rent and food and healthcare and education became more expensive, but luxury vehicles and McMansions are cheaper! For the overall basket of goods there was actually deflation!"
Anyway, my point was rather to address the fact that the other commenter didn't seem to understand what "demand" means.
> because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell
I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.
What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"
There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.
I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.
When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.
Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.
It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."
> What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
That was not premise of fascism. Certainly not Hitlers one, he himself was self-taught and did not framed himself as highly educated. He considered himself better then educated people. The origin of his superiority was not "smart" it was "strong will and power itself".
It was not the original premise of feudalism either. That was was about military might, basically.
And origins of liberal democracy are not "smart based" either.
I'm a bit confused by the percentages. 6 billion people aka 75% of the population? What are we talking about, as if we expect 8 billion people to use or care about LLMs? A quarter of the world is under 15, what percentage is about 75? What percentage, for various reasons, has no reason to care about LLMs? What percentage is more concerned about the amount of calories in their next meal before everything else?
It just seems weird for Karpathy to throw around these numbers calculating percentage against the entire global population.
I mean, you know the answer, surely? In the USA, the more money you have, the more power.
It's what leads to a sort of cheat code that the Bay Area investment scene has discovered - if you burn capital quickly enough to grow your revenue fast enough (even hamstringing profit to do so), and in doing so generate more investment interest and more capital attention, you eventually become Too Big To Fail, like Uber did, or the AI companies are doing now.
It's morally expected, not required. And because that's the spirit of FOSS. It's just considered bad form to extract, profit, and not give back.
I don't know any FOSS folks that think they're "giving people a gift" alone. It usually goes deeper than that. Maybe some kind of anti authoritarian, anti establishment, or anti capitalist ideology, or a strong care for user freedom, or a desire to participate in the FOSS community.
I always thought of ideology as a bit of a formalized "ism" type package. But I suppose you are correct, a habitual way of being is still a thought program of some sort, conscious or subconscious.
On that note, many of the American readers here are probably eligible for the Taiwan Gold Card Visa. Especially anyone in SF, basically having a Github and an American software engineering salary practically guarantees you to get it.
It's an unrestricted work visa: 3 years, unlimited in/out, no requirement to get a job in Taiwan (or work at all), total allowance for remote work for foreign companies, lower tax rate, and eligibility for the state-subsidized national health insurance program after 6 months in the country. How'd you like to pay 10$ for an xray after being scanned and seen by a doctor within 30 minutes of walking into an ER? That's our life here!
We have lots of tech folks from all over the world here and regularly have co-working meetups, hackathons, fireside chats, and talks. Also our food doesn't have toxic chemicals in it :)
Most of my tech friends are remote software engineers. Mostly French and American, and most either working full time for some SF tech company (usually Taiwan hours), or freelancing.
Every once in a while I meet someone that's keeping to USA time zone work hours but they usually don't last. I've been working USA / UK gigs for 5 years now keeping to my time zone without issue. Sometimes gotta catch an 11pm meeting, not bad. For software engineering it kinda doesn't matter what time of the day works get done? Companies: for me it's all been startups, two YC ones and a couple random other ones.
There are some hardware folks I know out here and they are both way busier and way more successful than us hordes of coworking software engineers that chill at cafes all day. Also I know a couple that gave up their tech jobs and started a hotsauce company, they're doing pretty well. People get up to all sorts of stuff out her. I even made a restaurant play. Not recommended!
It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.
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