Can the experiment be summerised by saying that training the model is a kind of probabilistic pre-calculation that converts the Stockfish expert system into a different, rather distinct representation that is worse than Stockfish, but still quite good?
It is a very visible indicator of the quality of the whole. If the spelling is frequently not correct, which a reader can detect relatively easily, how many more mistakes are hidden in the content, which a reader can not detect easily? Are these completely independent variables? I do not think so. Therefore, I also assess the reliability of an article based on the frequency of careless mistakes.
What is an even larger warning sign, are cliches used to spice up an article. Ars Technica is hardly to blame here, but the Smithsonian magazine is full of it.
My mother[0] was a scientific editor, and she was brutal. She was a stickler for proper English, as well as content accuracy.
She once edited a book I wrote. It was humbling as hell, but it may be the only "perfect" thing that I've ever done (but it did not age well, and has since gone the way of the Dodo).
Why should the army leave a dead elephant on the road? They would butcher it themselves and take the meat with them (and the tusks). The locals may have found some large bones for their living room decorations (and may be some skin, if they were lucky).
Because they might be in a hurry to reach that mountain pass before the snow comes. Or to meet other goals set by the general and if already stocked up on supplies, it would be quite a burden to also carry an extra elephant (which was likely also carrying things before it died).
Quite unlikely. For an army on the move, especially one that had to cover such a long distance, a considerable portion of the troops was assigned to procure provisions anyway.
The odds are very low. It all depents on the people. So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive. The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power. There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people. If people turn away from liberal democracy, that's another matter. But then everything is lost anyway.
35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII.
It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.
> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again.
It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.
> It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary)
So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.
Hell of a solution.
Surely the better solution to issues like Hungary is ensuring we get more democracy to Hungarian people, not giving authority over Hungary to someone else the Hungarian people can't elect.
> So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.
Not really, and the example of Hungary shows that it would not be that effective for that purpose.
The EU is a union of nations, not really of people. It was built so that nations play nice with each other. Each member state still does more or less what it wants within its borders, as long as it does not jeopardise the union.
In that way it’s not perfectly democratic, because there are layers of indirection between the citizens and the institutions.
Commissioners are nominated by member states and approved by parliament. So they are generally aligned with the politics dominant at the national level and palatable to MEPs. Von der Leyen is there because she had support from the German government and was from the dominant block in parliament. It’s not direct democracy, but it is not a faceless blob either.
US Supreme Court Judges are not elected. Although I hesitate to use this as an example currently, given how well the US separation of powers is (not) working, the point stands that all democratic systems need some kind of "damping" influence to survive. If successive national governments were hostile to EU bureaucrats there are options open to them to restore sovereignty — e.g. exit the EU, or force change in appointments by coordinating with other EU governments. The fact that senior positions in the EU are unelected does not in itself make the system un or anti democratic.
> it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.
what's the difference? The EU relies on national gov't to enforce rules. Until the EU becomes a sovereign entity with standalone enforcement mechanisms, it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN.
National governments are often at odds with the commission. France was regularly threatened and fined for its energy policy, for example, which was not pro-business enough. All EU regulations are the result of horse trading in the council of ministers and the commission, the member states are not helpless victims or perfect enforcement forces blindly applying what the president of the commission of the day wants.
>it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN
It's not the same. EU will cut your funding if you don't follow their rules. UN is not finding any EU countries, but the opposite, we all pay to fund the UN.
Maybe in theory, but the idea that nations that trade doesn’t go to war is a naive one, it has happened plenty and will happen again.
As for the structure of voting etc, it’s just a matter of pushing until people give up.
Indeed, which is why entanglement goes deeper than simply trade. The emergence of pan-European companies like Airbus makes the cost for one country to go alone much steeper. Same for the establishment of EU-wide supply chains. There are also incentives to play nice in the form of the customs union and the single market. The moment you leave, you’re on the wrong side of a trade barrier.
The EU is built on rules that uphold liberal democratic principles, agreed to by national governments in a flush of post-WW2 clarity, and which tie successors to the same principles. There are exit mechanisms, but they impose large costs (i.e. Brexit).
You're saying nothing concrete in particular.
What rules? How do they inhibit change?
The only thing I can think of which is actually difficult to change is the echr and i see more than a dozen mostly liberal governments queueing up to change it (to little effect so far) over migration issues.
There are rules about election conduct and free operation of courts, to give two examples. Both of which Hungary skirts on occasion but the EU does apply some pressure.
Sort of correct but also playing with words. Most, many.
There's a divide between generations and geographies to start with. Younger vs. older generations see things differently. Westerners vs. Easterners (especially those who remember the communist times) see things differently.
It's very hard to say what many and most people are doing on either side of the Atlantic. Until a few short years ago you wouldn't have imagined enough Americans would vote for the leader they did, knowing exactly what they're getting, and yet they did. So people aren't always forthcoming about their views and beliefs.
In Europe for anyone who can't remember the "hard times" it's easy to fall into the trap of believing things will stay good forever. The US hasn't had equivalent "hard times" relative to the rest of the world for as long as any person in the US has been alive and a few generations more. So they too can easily believe things can't turn sour, which is why this recent and swift downturn caused so much shock and consternation. But the US also always had a lot of preppers and people "ready to fight the Government" (that's why so many have guns, they say). It's a big place so you expect to have "many" people like this.
> Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.
It's a bit ironic that most of those people voted for Trump, who is now doing exactly that. But I guess they think it's ok as long as the government is coming for others, not for them (at least not yet)...
While I love the premise that he is choosing arbitrary groups to go after and we just haven't been chosen yet, no, he campaigned on this and was elected for exactly this. This is what the people want.
They’ll give you a small handful of examples, of which a number occurred in the UK (famously not a member of the EU), most of which were actually arrests for incitement, and of the remainder the majority were thrown out before ever going to trial, or subsequently on appeal.
Very few of the cases they present will have involved citizens being murdered in the streets by the government for exercising their absolute right to free speech.
The UK has more arrests for social media posts than any other country in the world, including authoritarian countries like Russia, Belarus, etc. Germany is the third highest. Both have thousands, not "a small handful".
In 2023, UK police forces made around 12,000 arrests under the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. These laws cover sending messages that are "grossly offensive, threatening, indecent, or menacing over communications networks" (which includes social media). Prosecutions resulting tend to come from a small subset of serious crimes - stalking, incitement to hatred, endangering minors etc...
This was gleefully misinterpreted by Musk, Steven Forbes and the rest of the right-wing braintrust as "12,000 people were arrested for saying politically incorrect things."
Germany at third highest is equally in the realm of complete fantasy. The Tagesschau debunked it and concluded that the German numbers make no sense. There is no statistic in Germany for the number of arrests, but the number of people investigated is lower for the period claimed and not all led to arrests so the number is simply a fabrication.
Finally, the notion that China or Russia would self-report less cases than the UK and expect the figure to be believed is farcical. There isn't even something comparable to the anti-activism laws or the HK47 in the UK.
Do you have a citation for this? I can't find anything showing that 2022/0155(COD) has passed the EU Council or Parliament (nor can I find any scheduled votes). [1]
The most recent related information I could find was some movement to extend the temporary derogation of the ePrivacy Directive, which expires on 2026/04/03, to 2028/04/03 but even that did not seem to have passed yet. [2]
The very fact they're trying to extend the temporary derogation hints to me that they think it'll take some time yet to pass Chat Control (if at all).
It's substantially neutered from the original proposal, with most of the scary parts taken out. I'd count that as a win as far as how antidemocratic the EU commission is.
Given how many world leaders form the west had absolutely the most vile chats with Epstein about doing despicable things to people, I'd totally want chat control but only for our leaders. They certainly proved that's who needs it the most to keep us safe.
Their reaction and opposition to ChatControl (or near complete lack of both) would indicate otherwise? They could hardly care less about privacy.
National governments which have openly declared that believe they have the right to unlimited access to any private communication hardly lost any popularity or faced real consequences.
> So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive.
In some areas, sure - like GDPR.
In other areas, absolutely not - like chat control.
As another commenter pointed out, it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK, while violations by corporations are quickly shutdown. It’s like the opposite of how it works here in the US.
The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.
For the conservative (and sometimes not so conservative) non-experts things like this sound like an easy win. So every new generation of politicians has to be educated about it again.
The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.
This is a truism, but not that helpful. I have to be lucky every time I leave the house not to be murdered, but it doesn't substantially change my behaviour. Rather than freaking out or catastrophising we just need to focus on asserting and celebrating and educating citizens in our shared values (murdering is bad, privacy is important).
Nah, I think in this metaphor we need to lock up Mr.Stabby McStabFace instead of just allowing him to go without punishment for his repeated efforts to legalize face-stabbing.
>it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK
Once you give people an outside boogieman(Putin, Trump, Covids, etc) or a self inflicted false flag crisis(surge in violent crime rates for example) to shake them up to their core and put the fear in them, you can then easily sell your intrusion of privacy in their lives and extension of the police state, as the necessary solution that protects them.
When you start lose control of your people because their standard of living has been going downhill for 2 decades and they realize the future prospects aren't any better so they hate you even more, you can regain control of them by rallying them up on your side in a us-versus-them type of game against external or internal aggressors that you paint as "the enemy". The media is your friend here. /s
This isn't an EU or US exclusive issue, it's everywhere with a government issue. The difference as to why the EU people seem to be more OK with government intrusion compared to the US, is that EU always has external aggressors the government can point to as justification for invasiveness and control, while the US has been and still is the unchallenged global superpower so it has no real external threats ATM, meaning division must be manufactured internally (left vs right, red vs blue, woke vs maga, skin color vs skin color, gender vs gender, etc) so that the ruling class can assert control in peace.
Either way, we all seem to be heading towards the same destination.
Sure, but I am talking about government-mandated surveillance through legislation.
Also, your police aren’t afraid to go the extra mile to quash dissent. Look at what’s happening in the UK for example with Palestine Action. The only difference is that they are less armed and better trained.
Oh boy, did I hurt your feelings or something? If you call this pedantry, I'll gladly be a pedant in your perception. I'll call you ignorant in return though. And since you are an ignorant (notice how I can also take an adjective and ascribe it to your whole personhood?) you probably won't know what the difference between Europe and the European Union is anyway, so there's little hope for a fruitful discussion.
> Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage...
The problem with this phrasing is it makes it sound hyperbolic, but it is important to remember the world is large and there are always, in a literal and normal sense, multiple major crises going on at any moment.
People who don't pay much attention to politics sometimes get confused about why crises elevated by the corporate media get ignored. A big answer is becuase they are elevated for political reasons, usually the crisis is fairly routine in absolute terms.
>there are always, in a literal and normal sense, multiple major crises going on at any moment
True, but my point I wanted to draw attention to, is HOW these crisis are handled now, not that there's many of them.
Every crisis now seems to be exclusively used as a vehicle to justify taking away just a little bit more of your freedom and anonymity, or implement more fiscal policies that will leave you footing the bill but just so happens it will be enriching the wealthy as a side effect.
Because such policies shoved out the door in times of crisis, don't pass through the lengthy public debates and scrutiny regular policies have to go through, so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak and fast-track some nefarious stuff in.
I'm not that old yet, but I don't feel like this backdoor was misused to this extent in the past, like pre-2008 I mean (except 9/11 of course). It definitely feels like politicians have gooten of taste and are abusing this exploit now more with every little opportunity.
>Didn't really stop them passing whatever rules they wanted during Covid, did it?
>Or today with Russia and Ukraine situation. Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage to deflect accountability and bypass the wishes of the population, for our own good of course.
>Why do you think Germans supported to tie themselves to Russia's gas and destroy their nuclear power.
You see you might get called a bot, Russian troll, or MAGA a whole lot less, if you didn't pull out ALL the topics those groups are playing at once. There is plenty to criticize about the EU institutions, but man that is a very odd focus.
Two things can be true. While the user you're replying to has a weirdly focused agenda and insistence, some of the points raised are definitely valid.
I do not agree with the overall conclusion that "EU bad". But there are some pretty bad things going on, and the trend is definitely concerning. If you wait until you're on fire, you waited for too long.
Strong static type checking is helpful when implementing the methodology described in this article, but it is besides its focus. You still need to use the most restrictive type. For example, uint, instead of int, when you want to exclude negative values; a non-empty list type, if your list should not be empty; etc.
When the type is more complex, specific contraints should be used. For a real live example: I designed a type for the occupation of a hotel booking application. The number of occupants of a room must be positiv and a child must be accompanied by at least one adult. My type Occupants has a constructor Occupants(int adults, int children) that varifies that condition on construction (and also some maximum values).
> The number of occupants of a room must be positiv and a child must be accompanied by at least one adult. My type Occupants has a constructor Occupants(int adults, int children) that varifies that condition on construction (and also some maximum values).
Or, you could do what I did when faced with a similar problem - I put in a PostgreSQL constraint.
Now, no matter which application, now or in the future, attempts to store this invalid combination, it will fail to store it.
Doing it in code is just asking for future errors when some other application inserts records into the same DB.
Using uint to exclude negative values is one of the most common mistakes, because underflow wrapping is the default instead of saturation. You subtract a big number from a small number and your number suddenly becomes extremely large. This is far worse than e.g. someone having traveled a negative distance.
To add to this: I think that what appears to us to be stagnation in scientific interest was due to the fact that Ptolemaios was so brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, the empirical quality of his cosmology in terms of predictability was not surpassed by Copernicus, but only by Kepler about 100 years later.
There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.)
With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and gravitation to solves this, more or less.)
The Ptolemaic system is an adhoc form of Fourier analysis (circles upon circles). These are universal approximators (another universal class are the neural networks) of (preferably smooth) periodic functions. So with enough epicycles one can fit any complicated periodic motion. But it will not help extrapolate the motion of Pluto from the motion of Jupiter, it's a data fit description, not a causal description.
This is also why I worry about the recent trend of using DNNs in astronomy. We may go Ptolemaic with them.
Yes I have wondered about that. I feel the same about Attention based networks, may be we are not using the most befitting coordinate system to understand them.
In recent weeks, one of my clients has seen a significant decline in conversions from Google ads, leading him to suspend most of his advertising campaigns.
Have others here observed the same thing? What exactly is going on here? Where is online advertising heading? Will we soon see AI overviews with explicit or hidden advertising?
After nearly two decades of complaining loudly about deteriorating quality of Google search results and Ad injection, Google puts in AI summaries and provides 1-shot answers to >50% of queries, annihilating the advertising business in the process and TFA is complaining about that?
This is a win! I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts...
I guarantee that the minute enough people wake up and cut their advertising spend with Google, then they'll change tack again.
I wouldn't want to be hanging my career on "SEO marketing" right now..
Linux is the objectively best choice for a significant number of use-cases at the moment (not all of them). Using Linux and communicating that doesn't necessarily make you a "Linux guy."
Obviously, using Linux when a better solution exists for whatever you're trying to solve equally applies. While it may not be unhealthy, it certainly isn't a good idea.
2% is a lot! There's only fifty things you can invest 2% of GDP in before you occupy the entire economy. But the list of services people need, from food, water, shelter, heating, transportation, education, healthcare, communications, entertainment, mining, materials, construction, research, maintenance, legal services... there's a lot of things on that list. To allocate each one 1% or 2% of the economy may seem small, but pretty quickly you hit 100%.
Most of you have mentioned is not investment, but consumption. Investments means to use money to make more money in the future. Global investment rates are around 25 % of global GDP. Avarage return on investement ist about 10% per year. In other words: using 1% or 2% of GDP if its leads to an improvement in GDP of more than 0.1% or 0.2% next year would count as a success. I think to expect a productivity gain on this scale due to AI is not unrealistic for 2026.
> Most of you have mentioned is not investment, but consumption.
It's ongoing investment in the infrastructure of civil society. These sorts of investments usually give you indirect returns... which is why it's usually only done by governments.
Is it? I am using AI daily, but would rank it dead last compared to food, water, shelter, heating, transportation, education, healthcare, communications
Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more and make top 1% unbelievable rich while everyone else looking for jobs or getting 50 year mortgage, seem very bad idea to me.
This problem is not specific to AI, but a matter of social policy.
For example here in Germany, the Gini index, an indicator of equality/inequality has been oszillating about 29.75 +/-1.45 since 2011.[1] In other words, the wealth distribution was more or less stable in the last 15 years, and is less extrem than in the USA, where it was 41.8 in 2023.[2]
A century ago people in the US started to tax the rich much more heavily than we do now. They didn't believe that increasing inequality was necessary - or even actually that helpful - for improving their real livelihood.
Don't be shocked if that comes back. (And that was the mild sort of reaction.)
If you have billions and all the power associated with it, why are you shooting for personal trillions instead of actually, directly improving the day to day for everyone else without even losing your status as an elite, just diminishing it by a little bit of marginal utility? Especially if you read history about when people make that same decision?
I don't think that is scalable to infinite iphones since the input materials are finite. If your all your friends get 100,000 iphones and then you need an ev battery and that now costs 20,000 iphones now and you're down 5k iphones if the previous battery cost was 5k iphones. On the other hand if you already had a good battery, then you're up 20k iphones or so in equity. Also, since everyone has so many iphones the net utility drops and they become worth less than the materials so everyone would have to scrap their iphones to liquidate at the cost of the recycled metals.
It can be, but there are lots of reasons to believe it will not be. Knowledge work was the ladder between lower and upper classes. If that goes away, it doesn't really matter if electricians make 50% more.
Its not really a matter of some great shift. Millennials are the most educated generation by a wide margin, yet their wealth by middle age is trailing prior generations. The ladder is being pulled up inch by inch and I don't see AI doing anything other than speeding up that process at the moment.
> If some one were to say to you - you can have 10,000 more iPhones to play with but your friends would get 100,000 iPhones, would you reject the deal?
I'd think about how many elections he can buy with those iPhones, for starters.
>Both that inequality increases but also prosperity for the lower class? I don’t mind that trade off.
This sounds like it is written from the perspective of someone who sees their own prosperity increase dramatically so that they end up on the prosperous side of the worsening inequality gap. The fact that those on the other side of the gap see marginal gains in prosperity makes them feel that it all worked out okay for everyone.
I think this is greed typical of the current players in the AI/tech economy. You all saw others getting abundant wealth by landing high-paying jobs with tech companies and you want to not only to do the same, but to one-up your peers. It's really a shame that so much tech-bro identity revolves around personal wealth with zero accountability for the tools that you are building to set yourselves in control of lives of those you have chosen to either leave behind or to wield as tools for further wealth creation through alternate income SaaS subscription streams or other bullshit scams.
There really is not much difference between tech-bros, prosperity gospel grifters or other religious nuts whose only goal is to be more wealthy today than yesterday. It's created a generation of greedy, selfish narcissists who feel that in order to succeed in their industry, they need to be high-functioning autists so they take the path of self-diagnosis and become, as a group, resistant to peer review since anyone who would challenge their bullshit is doing the same thing and unlikely to want too much light shed on their own shady shit. It is funny to me that many of these tech-bros have no problem admitting their drug experimentation since they need to maintain an aura of enlightenment amongst their peers.
It's gonna be a really shitty world when the dopeheads run everything. As someone who grew up back in the day when smoking dope was something hidden and paranoia was a survival instinct for those who chose that path I can see lots of problems for society in the pipeline.
I think you inadvertently stepped in the point — Yes, what the fuck do I need 10,000 iPhones for?
Also part of the problem is which resources end up in abundance. What am I going to do with more compute when housing and land are a limited resource.
Gary’s Economics talks about this but in many cases inequality _is_ the problem. More billionaires means more people investing in limited resources(housing) driving up prices.
Maybe plebes get more money too, but not enough to spend on the things that matter.
It’s just a proxy for wealth using concrete things.
If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?
Land and housing can get costlier while other things get cheaper, making you overall more prosperous. This is what happened in the USA and most of the world. Would you take this deal?
I wouldn't be able to hang out with them as much (they'd go do a lot of higher-cost things that I couldn't afford anymore).
I'd have a shittier apartment (they'd drive up the price of the nicer ones, if we're talking about a significant sized group; if it's truly just immediate friends, then instead it's just "they'd all move further away to a nicer area").
So I'd have some more toys but would have a big loss in quality of my social life. Pass.
(If you promised me that those cracks wouldn't happen, sure, it would be great for them. But in practice, having seen this before, it's not really realistic to hold the social fabric together when economic inequality increases rapidly and dramatically.)
More to the point, what does research into notions of fairness among primates tell us about the risks of a vast number of participants deciding to take this deal?
You have to tell us the answer so we can resolve your nickname "simianwords" with regard to Poe's Law.
I don't know how nobody has mentioned this before:
The guy with 100k will end up rewriting the rules so that in the next round, he gets 105k and you get 5k.
And people like you will say "well, I'm still better off"
In future rounds, you will try to say "oh, I can't lose 5k for you to get 115k" and when you try to vote, you won't be able to vote, because the guy who has been making 23x what you make has spent his money on making sure it's rigged.
You’re missing the point. It’s not about jealousy it’s basic economics - supply and demand. No I would not take the deal if it raised the demand in something central to my happiness (housing) driving the price up for something previously affordable and make it unaffordable.
I would not trade my house for a better iPhone with higher quality YouTube videos, and slightly more fashionable athleisure.
I don’t care how many yacht’s Elon Musk has, I care how many governments.
What if you could buy the same house as before, buy the same iPhone as before and still have more money remaining? But your house cost way way more proportionally.
If you want to claim that that's a realistic outcome you should look at how people lived in the 50s or 80s vs today, now that we've driven up income inequality by dramatically lowering top-end tax rates and reduced barriers to rich people buying up more and more real property.
What we got is actually: you can't buy the same house as before. You can buy an iPhone that didn't exist then, but your boss can use it to request you do more work after-hours whenever they want. You have less money remaining. You have less free time remaining.
If you’re asking me if I’m an idiot who doesn’t understand basic economics / capitalism, the answer is no. If you’re asking me if I think that in the real world there are negative externalities of inequality in and of itself that makes it more complicated than “everyone gets more but billionaires get more more” than the answer is yes.
Just being born in the US already makes you a top 10% and very likely top 5-1% in terms of global wealth. The top 1% you're harping about is very likely yourself.
> Just being born in the US already makes you a top 10%
Our family learned how long-term hunger (via poverty) is worse in the US because there was no social support network we could tap into (for resource sharing).
Families not in crisis don't need a network. Families in crisis have insufficient resources to launch one. They are widely scattered and their days are consumed with trying to scrape up rent (then transpo, then utilities, then food - in that order).
And so many people in the US are already miserable before yet another round of "become more efficient and productive for essentially the same pay or less as before!!"
So maybe income equality + disposable material goods is not a good path towards people being happier and better off.
It's our job to build a system that will work well for ourselves. If there's a point where incentivizing a few to hoard even more resources to themselves starts to break down in terms of overall quality of life, we have a responsibility to each other to change the system.
Look at how many miserable-ass unhappy toxic asshole billionaires there are. We'll be helping their own mental health too.
It is not really obvious to me that happiness should be part of the social contract.
Happiness is very slippery even in your own life. It seems absurd to me that you should care about my happiness.
So much of happiness is the change from the previous state to the present. I am happy right now because 2026 has started off great for me while 2025 was a bad year.
I would imagine there was never a happier American society than the year's after WW2.
I imagine some of the most happy human societies were the ones during the years after the black plague. No one though today gains happiness because of the absence of black plague.
To believe a society can be built around happiness seems completely delusional to me.
Yes the very fact that billionaires exist mean our species has failed.
I do not believe that there is a legitimate billionaire on the planet, in that they haven't engaged in stock manipulation, lobbying, insider trading, corrupt deals, monopolistic practices, dark patterns, corporate tax dodging, personal tax dodging.
You could for example say that the latter are technically legal and therefore okay, but it's my belief that they're "technically legal/loopholes" because we have reached a point where the rich are so powerful that they bend the laws to their own ends.
Our species is a bit of a disappointment. People would rather focus on trivial tribal issues than on anything that impacts the majority of the members of our species. We are well and truly animals.
It’s implied you mean that the ROI will be positive. Spending 1-2% of global GDP with negative ROI could be disastrous.
I think this is where most of the disagreement is. We don’t all agree on the expected ROI of that investment, especially when taking into account the opportunity cost.
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