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Xemu: Not Too Much Lead

https://youtu.be/MKTN2OiR2R8

I read a pretty convincing article title and subheading implying that the best use for so called “AI” would be to replace all corporate CEOs with it.

I didn’t read the article but given how I’ve seen most CEOs behave it would probably be trivial to automate their behavior. Pursue short term profit boosts with no eye to the long term, cut workers and/or pay and/or benefits at every opportunity, attempt to deny unionization to the employees, tell the board and shareholders that everything is great, tell the employees that everything sucks, …

I’ll let others address the “enshittification” angle but I thought I’d point out that “shareholder value uber allies” is a relatively recent … “innovation” … in economic theory, brought about by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Milton Friedman in the last half of last century:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-made-chicago-school-so-influential-antitrust-policy

The rethinking of what the boards of companies are supposed to do (from maximize stakeholder value to maximize shareholder value) and how they can operate (from requiring justification to approve mergers to requiring justification to block mergers) really took off with them, and exploded when former union boss Ronald Reagan found “religion” (because Nancy’s pussy was just that good) and ruined the economy for workers.

Lots of other people contributed, including Clinton after he “won” the 1992 election with 40% of the vote due to Perot splitting the Republican vote. His campaign of fiscal conservatism but without less bigotry became the model for the Democratic Party for the next two decades.

Anyway, Biden’s FTC is finally working to help workers again, which might even release the death grip of the Chicago School from our economy. We’ll see after November I guess.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/fact-sheet-ftcs-proposed-final-noncompete-rule

I’m sure this will come if the wrong way but if you’re genuinely concerned about discovering diversity of thought, you’re going to have to tell us what your positions are for example.

I’m all for finding diversity, but so often what people who post these are looking for is an echo chamber. Like if you’re really wanting to be challenged, and you’re a conservative, go to https://socialistworker.org/ and read up.

But if what you’re concerned about is the nerds in Lemmy seem to be left leaning, that’s just the nature of smart creative people. We value skills and creativity over hierarchy and structure.

Yeah I’d try it once. I mean I’m sure I accidentally tasted it when my wife was lactating but I never took a big swig.

Don’t get to excited about 1%

https://youtu.be/F200wpEpJ4w

NdGT points out that 1% difference in DNA has within it somewhere the difference between chimps and humans. Think about that 1% between us and the post humans that come after us, or aliens that are out there already.

Also it looks like she’s reading Revelation so that’s on brand

The answer is “vote” but not just once. Not just for federal elections. Every election, you should be there. Show up to candidate forums and bother your current electeds.

Every government is like a ship of various size, it takes a while to see the turn even start, let alone have the course actually get corrected. The bigger the government, the harder it can be to get long lasting positive change accomplished. (This isn’t a “small government is better” thing either, it’s just how large organizations work.)

If you can, run for office. If you can’t, find someone you trust who can and support them. Not just Congress or president or governor. City council, county government, school board, on and on…

Unchecked, unanswerable power corrupts. On lemmy everyone is free to create their own sub. Heck they’re free to create their own instance. That makes the “power” of moderators pretty tame.

Compare that to the power a corporate CEO has over the typical employee. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s redefinition of the primary responsibility of the directors of a corporation to be “maximize shareholder value” instead of “maximize stakeholder value.”

Even in (small d democratic) politics, at least an aggrieved voter can run to replace a corrupt, abusive politician. Not many companies, probably no publicly traded ones, have a mechanism for the workers to replace the management. That’s where major corruption by power can be witnessed.

It’s easy to focus on the negative, especially because that sells more toilet paper and beer on TV (and Internet sites).

But as Mr Rogers instructed us, when you see bad things going on, look for the helpers. There are a lot of people out there working to put the seams back together even as others are picking at them.

So far, the seam fixers have been winning. I think they’ll still win. For all its downsides, there is a huge upside to globalization: the wealthy people have more to gain from a mostly peaceful planet than from a mostly war stricken planet. Now, there’s profit in that “mostly” that is - to my way if thinking - bad. It’s something that (small “d”) democratic people should push back against.

Like, think about the American bullshit in Iraq and Afghanistan. We actually stopped being at war in those places in the recent past. We don’t have large deployments of active duty troops out there killing poor brown people. That’s good.

Biden also seems like the most likely guy to strongly resist the inevitable calls for war from the military industrial political media complex. Not only does he have personal experience with the loss that comes from war. He has decades of experience in government which makes him less likely to be hornswoggled by generals who want to blow shit up. (If he can purge all the white supremacists from the military that will also help.)

Don’t only look at the bad news. There’s good news out there, too.

I love how all the people talking about how semi auto guns have been around for X years and blah blah blah completely ignore the massive uptick in production, sale, and distribution of those guns in the past 30-40 (or so).

People have more or less been able to buy assault style semi auto rifles for a long time, but they only “recently” (I guess 30-40 years might not be so recent?) started actually buying them in large numbers. Mostly thanks to the NRA, if I had to point a finger.

The problem is that a really angry or disturbed or whatever person with access to a high rate of fire weapon and lots of ammo (because they’ve been told that next election Jack Johnson or John Jackson will be taking their guns) can literally just pick it up and go kill half a dozen or more people in 30 minutes. There’s nothing we can do to intercept that. (And “good guys with guns” have a terrible track record, including cops.)

We even had a little experiment in the 90s where people were buying a lot of these and then we banned them. Mas shootings (4+ victims according to the FBI if I recall correctly) had been going up but then they went down until …

W and his Republican stooges (or maybe he was the stooge?) let the ban expire, mass shootings started ticking up.

The drivers that lead people to mass violence probably are the “root” of the problem, and I would guess hypothetically that if we could snap our fingers and solve those it wouldn’t matter how many or what type of guns there are out there. The problem is that we aren’t even trying to fix those problems, and the Republican Party is actively making them worse, AND we’re making these literal weapons of war easily available to everyone.

Considering that the Muskrat can apparently be the full time CEO of 3 companies simultaneously you might be surprised.

CEOs think they’re different from us normies, and have a lot in common with other superstars CEOs such that their interests seem more shared.

It’s complex, for sure, but yes to some extent the “back to office” CEOs care that the commercial property market stays “healthy.”

It’s simple supply and demand. If lots of white collar workers are WFH, then hiring new people doesn’t require more office space. If you can grow your company without leasing office space, or by leasing a smaller office, demand for office space goes down.

Office space owners who use that for income suddenly don’t have (as much) income. So maybe they lower lease rates to attract new tenants. Well, now tenants stuck in higher rate leases start doing the math on penalties for breaking their existing lease vs the new prices.

If remote work stays popular or grows (hint: it’s growing), this CAN result in a race to the bottom on commercial real estate leases, which makes them less valuable investments, which could lead to a massive sell off.

All of this makes CEOs itchy. So they try to justify return to office policies. This just chases their best people into the arms of competitors who will support WFH (and naive pay more without high office space leases to pay).

I think the era of regular office work for white collar workers is over. Maybe a couple days a week for client meetings. But why not just go to the client site?

Office work was killed by COVID. Good riddance.

You’re falling prey to a common trope from religionists: an ambiguous usage of the word/concept “belief.”

I trust what experts in fields outside those I’m deeply familiar with because generally speaking people like them have gone to the trouble of demonstrating what they claim is actually true in the past. That makes it rational, in my opinion, to trust claims that they make today and in the future within their field of expertise.

So to some extent I get the religious commitment of people who have directly experienced what they consider to be miracles. It’s rational, in a way, to become religious after experiencing what you consider to be a miracle.

The vast majority of religious people have not directly experienced a miracle the way I’ve directly performed scientific experiments that validate others’ reported results. They’ve heard about miracles. They’ve read about miracles. That’s not the same, and I’d argue it makes their religious beliefs irrational.

Now, what would probably happen if people were only religious after directly experiencing miracles? I bet religions would just fade away and eventually people who experienced “miracles” would instead contemplate then as unexplained phenomena that could probably have AB explanation rooted in the physical world, and also but become religious.

In a world where religion is encouraged and celebrated, of course people who experience what they consider to be a miracle will first turn to a religious explanation. But if we imagine no religion…

You’re kind of arguing against the foundation of human society. If we’re all required to “do our own research” about things, where does that requirement end? How can I buy food if I have to do my own research on what’s healthy or what’s dangerous? What about my tap water? How can I put gas in my car? Use electricity? A computer? A phone?

Somewhere along the way you have to trust the systems that have been built by the people before us to function, and for people who work in those fields who are experts to use their expertise.

Obviously oversight & verification is also important. It’s important that people earn trust and work to maintain that trust and get booted if they violate that trust.

But it’s foolish to just stop trusting experts out of nowhere. It’s extra foolish to stop trusting experts specifically because they say things you don’t like to hear. As far as I can tell, that’s been the accelerating project of the Republican Party since at least the talk radio explosion following the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. Maybe longer if you go back to Moon landing deniers and their ilk.

“Supposed to do” is kind of vague, but many people have answered the “legally required to do” already.

If you or someone you love dearly were in an ambulance heading to the hospital to deal with an emergency medical condition (or waiting for one to arrive & provide transport to the hospital), what would you want everyone in the path to do? Whatever the answer to that is, do that. For me, the answer is, “as quickly and safely as possible make a path for the ambulance.”

Is that pulling over? Stopping? Pulling into a parking lot? Continuing to drive until one of those options is available? Depends. Are you on a crowded road with no way to pull over? Then stopping will impede the ambulance. Don’t impede the ambulance. Are you the only car on the road? Then slow down and move to the right (in the US).

I’m not sure “this was used in a crime” is the sort of thing that can be legislated or sued over, if that makes sense. I think the more reasonable standard for successfully adjudicating criminality is people’s or their constructs (corporations) acting negligently in the production, marketing, sales, and distribution of “things that can be dangerous” or “things that can be used to commit crimes.”

The huge issue most of the responses in this thread have is that they say “you can’t sue someone for making something just because the end user did a bad thing with it” oversimplification of how basically the entire world works.

The only reason manufacturers of anything have plausible deniability on being partially responsible for crimes committed with their wares is the strong likelihood that they could not have known the end user would do that.

If I hand craft a knife on and sell it on the Internet to someone who sends me a message asking “hey is this knife good for stabbing my bitch ex?” there’s a decent chance a good lawyer could get me for negligence at a minimum and possibly accessory to a crime. Because a reasonable person might conclude that knife would be used for a crime.

There’s a reason a Remington settled the lawsuit from the Sandy Hook families for $75 million: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/us/sandy-hook-shooting-settlement-with-remington/index.html

They were never going to be liable for making the gun (particularly since gun manufacturers have a special law protecting them). But they clearly determined there was a decent chance they’d lose in court regarding how they marked, sold, and distributed guns, so they decided shelling out $75,000,000 was a better business decision.

If there’s a company making screwdrivers out there and they’re aware there’s a screwdriver murder problem in a city and they manufacture and distribute their screwdrivers to that city and put up billboards and take out magazine ads glorifying how good their screwdrivers are in a fight… they ought to be liable. Not because a screwdriver can be used to hurt people, but because they should reasonably be aware that in that city their screwdrivers had a good chance to be used to hurt somebody.

Imagine being such a good communicator that between sitting down to talk to your semi estranged daughter or buying a tech platform, you choose the latter.

Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to “finishing what daddy started.” In 2002-2003 the W’s cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.

It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that’s why he got all paranoid.

With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would’ve been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.

Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don’t know what the best “after” would’ve been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could’ve helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.