Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner, personally, in the very short term?
Because that's the choice people are making these days. It's not really "partisan political posturing" to divest from countries running pedo blackmail rings on the world, or arming genocide, or bombing hundreds of schools. Targeting journalists, then lying about them to try and justify it. Pulling the plug on incubators. Targeting entire families with shoddy AI. Bombing civilian power plants and ambulances and hospitals and so on and on.
There's nothing partisan or posturing about saying "fuck all that". That's just your duty as a human being, the basic bare minimum. That duty doesn't get discarded just because you run a company or have evil competitors trying to race you to the bottom.
When companies are complicit with committing heinous atrocities at scale, and screwing up the world economy for their own gain, I find very little 'merit' in that. Is 'meritocracy' a purely financial term in your view? Do 'respect for life' and 'trust' and other nebulous concepts (which don't immediately affect the balance sheet) have merit?
> Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner
No. Optimal for employees and customers, which is, in turn, optimal for society.
Making technology choices based on political ideology rather than merit is bad for the interests of both employees and customers.
The hyperbolic statements in your comment suggest your worldview comes from an online echo chamber. With respect, I think you'd benefit from consuming news from a variety of different sources. Think critically about the biases and agendas of the media.
War is an ugly business. Outcomes are rarely so pure that we can single out "good guys" and "bad guys". But hopefully once you've examined the facts objectively you'll see that the Israeli government is more ethical than Hamas, and you'll see that the American government (yes, even Orange Man Bad) is better than the Ayatollahs of Iran and their IRGC.
> The hyperbolic statements in your comment suggest your worldview comes from an online echo chamber.
No, nothing hyperbolic whatsoever. Everything I said is trivial to source.
If you believe otherwise then you might follow your own advice - this is all well documented stuff. You can even see the video of those premature babies that were left to rot by Israel, if you don't believe me.
No, I'm not saying that to shock you; it's an important documented fact. Like the prison rapists being celebrated on national Israeli TV, or the zip-tied teenagers run over by steamrollers, or the ambulances shot up and buried in a shallow grave, or Hind Rajab being used as bait for another ambulance, or any of the other thousands upon thousands of well documented atrocities which the US has helped to arm and enable.
> I suspect none of your favourite media sources mentioned the illegal cluster munitions that Iran used to destroy an Israeli kindergarten (among other civilian buildings) on Saturday
A kindergarten! Wow. That really is atrocious. Were there 100 schoolgirls in it, like the elementary school America blew up? Your source says no, but you seem really incensed by this property damage.
Is that worse though, in your view, than the 498 Iranian schools [0] targeted in the last months? Is it worse than destroying just about every school and hospital in Gaza?
> War is an ugly business
Being at war doesn't excuse war crimes - especially when the war begins because you don't like how well negotiations are going so you bomb a school killing 100 little girls, while killing the leader of a country with his grandchildren and torpedoing an unarmed ship.
> hopefully once you've examined the facts objectively you'll see that the Israeli government is more ethical than Hamas
To say this after the last three years requires something fundamental to be missing within you. I can not help you find it again. I wish I could; I truly do.
> you'll see that the American government (yes, even Orange Man Bad) is better than the Ayatollahs of Iran and their IRGC
Even if that were true, by whatever undefined metric you're defining as 'better', how does that give you the right to commit hundreds of war crimes and atrocities to change their government?
You might want to read up on recent US history btw - and how we're perceived right now [1]. There are many very good reasons why the world considers the US to be the greatest threat to global peace, stability and democracy [2], [3]; not just since "orange man" but since 2003 [4]. Iran never even come close.
Thank you for being honest about where you get your news from (the links at the bottom of the post). This helps explain your worldview.
(non affiliated - not an advert) I would recommend trying Ground News, which helped me understand the biases within sources, and helped showed me the blindspots in news coverage that I'd missed.
I'd like you to cast your mind back to the acts that started these two horrendous wars - Gaza's genocidal invasion of Israeli towns where they massacred teenagers at a music festival, paraded raped women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of onlookers, and forced young people to watch as their parents and siblings were blown up with hand grenades.
This isn't hyperbole. This isn't a politicised Western interpretation (a la "truthout.org") - this is an account of the videos shared by Hamas themselves, which were shown to Western journalists.
Hamas had to be stopped by force, and I support Israel's right to defend its own existence. If Hamas wishes to use human shields (as it has outright admitted it does), then the tragic collateral civilian deaths are the responsibility of Hamas.
And in Iran, the systematic rape and torture of young people and LGBT people. The massacre of 30,000+ peaceful protesters. And the outright genocidal intent of its leadership ("Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews").
The Ayatollahs had to be stopped before they built nuclear weapons. There will be tragic collateral civilian deaths, but fewer in the long term than if the IRGC are allowed to continue roaming the streets unchecked.
> Thank you for being honest about where you get your news from (the links at the bottom of the post). This helps explain your worldview.
What a weird leap to make. Nope, I just searched to find those; with a search engine.
> I would recommend trying Ground News, which helped me understand the biases within sources, and helped showed me the blindspots in news coverage that I'd missed.
I know Ground News; thanks though. I assume you're unaware how patronizing you're coming across, but trust that my media literacy is not the problem here.
Now, if you can point to where anything I said is falsifiable, great and thank you. Otherwise, maybe drop the insinuations and assumptions.
> I'd like you to cast your mind back to the acts that started these two horrendous wars - Gaza's genocidal invasion of Israeli towns where they massacred teenagers at a music festival, paraded raped women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of onlookers, and forced young people to watch as their parents and siblings were blown up with hand grenades.
You think everything started on October 7th? ... You think there was evidence of mass rape? You have credible evidence of these young people "forced to watch"?
Do you also still believe in the 40 beheaded babies, the baby in the oven, the boobs being cut off?
... And you are out here questioning the media literacy of others? Physician, heal thyself.
> This isn't hyperbole. This isn't a politicised Western interpretation (a la "truthout.org") - this is an account of the videos shared by Hamas themselves, which were shown to Western journalists.
There is no widely verified reporting that the videos shown to journalists contain:
* Women being paraded through Gaza streets after rape
* Crowds cheering raped victims in public processions
* Families being forced to watch grenade executions of relatives
Yes, there were some videos shared by Hamas of them doing murder and other bad stuff. But that's not what you claimed.
> Hamas had to be stopped by force, and I support Israel's right to defend its own existence.
Very few people thought Israel had no right to respond to October 7th by force.
Responding with genocide? No. No they do not have the right to do that.
> If Hamas wishes to use human shields (as it has outright admitted it does), then the tragic collateral civilian deaths are the responsibility of Hamas.
A, Israel uses human shields too. They have done for years; long before October 7th. Not to mention their long history of mass rape, child abuse, torture, false flags, terrorism etc.
B, Even if human shields are used, the attacking force must still distinguish civilians from targets; avoid disproportionate harm; take precautions to minimize civilian deaths.
There's simply no way to claim that's what Israel has done and believe it without some form of lobotomy.
> And in Iran, the systematic rape and torture of young people and LGBT people. The massacre of 30,000+ peaceful protesters.
The 30,000 figure is widely disputed, and Israel have openly admitted to having had agents there stirring up that specific trouble.
And if you want to bring up systemic torture, you're going to have to explain why that's ok for the US and Israel - but not Iran. Myself, I'm consistently against torture.
> And the outright genocidal intent of its leadership ("Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews").
Calling it “genocidal intent” in a strict legal sense is debatable and probably overstated. However, killing tens of thousands of children and bombing entire cities into rubble; bombing 500 schools in Iran and basically every school and hospital in Gaza, etc - that's more than genocidal intent. It's genocide. So I'm very confused how you think Iran is somehow worse in this comparison.
> The Ayatollahs had to be stopped before they built nuclear weapons. There will be tragic collateral civilian deaths, but fewer in the long term than if the IRGC are allowed to continue roaming the streets unchecked.
A 40 year old claim, with absolutely no evidence. Let's try comparing that to Israel's nukes, and their 'Samson option'. Or, try comparing it to the only country ever to actually use nukes during war. Again, I just don't see how Iran comes off worse in this comparison without massive baseline racism and ignorance of history.
... There's a good chance that I'm wasting my time here, but hey - maybe some of this will stick with you. Try sourcing any of it on Ground News, if you like.
Gaza lost a war it started. The civilian casualties could have been avoided if it hadn't started the war.
Iran is losing a war it started (by attacking Israel with hundreds of missiles, attacking civilian shipping, sponsoring terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis who commit regular attrocities).
These wars are "total wars." Total war is the only option left to Israel and its allies, because as long as Hamas and the Ayatollah regime exists (with their written and well-documented aim to "annihilate" Israel and Jews), then Israeli civilians face an existential threat. The last remaining Jewish nation faces an existential threat. This is a direct consequence of the rabid anti-semitism that's inbuilt into Islamist regimes.
You are not happy for Israel to win its total wars.
Were you happy for the allies to win WW2? From my PoV, 70K UK civilians lost their lives, vs 2M German civilians. The civilian death toll was massively one-sided. But it was Germany that started a total war, and I hope you and I can agree that it was Germany (with its genocidal anti-semitism among other appalling characteristics) that deserved to lose the war.
Defending the idea that large-scale civilian harm is acceptable is where your argument, such as it is, becomes truly dangerous.
Aside from all your debunked claims, and aside from your ahistorical misunderstandings of very recent history... Trying to justify "total war" against a mostly civilian population - ~50% of whom are children - is so, so far beyond the pale that I truly do not know how to reach you. For that reason, I'm out of this conversation.
In 2016 the UK demonstrated that there is a way for the public to vote down the corpus of bad EU legislation.
Of course our national govts have been pretty woeful ever since, but in 2029 we will have the opportunity to vote for genuine, dramatic change, with strong options on both the left and right side of politics.
Regarding the creeping surveillance state, Reform UK have explicitly stated they will repeal the awful Online Safety Act.
This is how we wrestle control back from the establishment.
The UK has shown that they can vote down bad EU legislation, and pass a lot of pretty awful legislation that's worse than anything the EU ever produced
But I'm sure voting for Nigel Farage one more time will fix everything
Interesting you blame Farage for the bad legislation passed by the Tories and Labour? Why is that? I thought he was one of the most vocal contrarians to Tory and Labour policy?
And people who think they are strong and will solve anything.
These populists thrive on anger and hate. Solve the problem and those are gone. And the problems aren't the ones they champion anyway.
I have to say Labour is putting on a shit show too though. They were supposed to be new and refreshed, instead they are Tory-Lite on steroids. Worse than Blair or Miliband ever were.
Have you ever stopped to wonder why ~26% of the electorate might be angry though? Personally I don't like seeing 100,000+ undocumented young men of fighting age rock up in dinghys on the Kent coastline and get free hotels, food, phones and ultimately housing.
Housing is in short supply and the sight of it being reserved for unemployed economic migrants is making me pretty angry.
The housing problem has nothing to do with immigrants and everything with structural mismanagement and prioritisation of the settled middle and upper class who wants to see their house value go up and up. And also their NIMBYism concerns (again, a new housing estate nearby might drop their house value)
The amount of housing actually taken by immigrants is minimal and releasing those wouldn't fix anything. Most of them live in squalor and doing jobs regular English guys wouldn't touch, in particular for the exploitative pay. You want your 2am burger delivered for a quid. Or the puke cleaned up in the metro. Who's going to do that these days?
But now it's being weaponised for political gain. They're making you mad at the wrong people. The people who are causing it all are the ones you're voting for.
Not true. In the UK, the only party that would repeal the heinous “Online Safety Act” are Reform UK, which is headed by notorious Euroskeptic MP Nigel Farage.
They won’t need to enforce this rigorously. They’ll just need to show some scary examples of people being arrested or having computers seized for using illegal forms of encryption. The mainstream media will go along with the EU, demonising these dangerous individuals, who must have been up to something nefarious if they were using technologies sanctioned by the EU
My 2016 Model S LCD panel developed the well-known fault of delamination and leaking some kind of sticky fluid.
Turns out the early Model S vehicles used consumer grade LCD panels that weren’t designed for the prolonged high heat you get in a metal and glass box left outside in the sun all day.
Tesla since upgraded their vehicle screens to proper automotive-grade LCDs which are excellent.
My point is, automotive-grade hardware is higher spec than regular consumer computer hardware, hence the high prices.
As an aside, I upgraded my whole computer and screen from MCU1 to MCU2 and it was worth the upgrade.
Credit to Tesla for building a retrofit computer upgrade for old vehicles. Thats a non-trivial thing to engineer and I appreciate their effort. Other car manufacturers would prefer you were compelled to buy their latest vehicle instead.
This is a fair argument but it’s rapidly becoming a non-argument.
LLMs have come a long way since ChatGPT 4.
The idea that they’ll always value quick answers, and always be prone to hallucination seems short-sighted, given how much the technology has advanced.
I’ve seen Claude do iterative problem solving, spot bad architectural patterns in human written code, and solve very complex challenges across multiple services.
All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.
> The idea that they’ll always value quick answers, and always be prone to hallucination seems short-sighted, given how much the technology has advanced.
It’s not shortsighted, hallucinations still happen all the time with the current models. Maybe not as much if you’re only asking it to do the umpteenth React template or whatever that should’ve already been a snippet, but if you’re doing anything interesting with low level APIS, they still make shit up constantly.
> All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.
I don't believe VC-backed companies see monotonic user-facing improvement as a general rule. The nature of VC means you have to do a lot of unmaintainable cool things for cheap, and then slowly heat the water to boil. See google, reddit, facebook, etc...
For all we know, Claude today is the best it will ever be.
The current models had lots and lots of hand written code to train on. Now stackoverflow is dead and github is getting filled with AI generated slop so one begins to wonder whether further training will start to show diminishing returns or perhaps even regressions. I am at least a little bit skeptical of any claim that AI will continue to improve at the rate it has thus far.
If you don't really understand how LLMs of today are made possible, it is really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it is just a matter of time and compute to attain perpetual progress..
My mental model is that coding by hand is similar to horseback riding, sail boating, etc. These skills are still enjoyed by people and in some circumstances they are invaluable.
Removal of hereditary privilege is a good thing in principle.
However, given the Labour party just gave children the vote, cancelled local elections in conservative-leaning areas, and now they're removing the (traditionally conservative-leaning) hereditary peers, it's starting to feel a lot like the Left are gerrymandering our democracy.
They gave 16 year olds the vote, and 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Your framing of all three of these is obviously intended to mislead.
> 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
That's a separate argument.
My point is Labour's change to the rules is very politically convenient for themselves. In the most recent polling, 32% of 16-17-year-olds would vote Labour, while only 17% of the overall electorate would vote Labour.
> They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They allowed individual incumbent councillors to choose whether elections were cancelled. This was politically convenient for the Labour and Tory parties because the Reform Party is new, and while it's polling well ahead of Labour, it doesn't have many incumbent council seats.
When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.
> They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power. So the question is if it's good policy, and so I argue it is, if someone can be living by themselves, working in the army or as a full-time apprentice, married, and having a child, they should be able to vote.
> When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.
Yes, it's absolutely bad that the government isn't making sure these things are legal before doing them, just as with the Palestine Action proscription. It's also hardly a sign of it being gerrymandering, why would they bother when it's going to give them basically zero advantage, given it would only achieve getting a council that will have no time to actually do anything? The obvious conclusion is they thought it was a waste of money and effort to hold them, but if you have to fight a legal battle over it, it won't actually save any money or effort as that has a large cost, even if it is legal.
> Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
> The BBC understands ministers have offered the Conservatives the chance to retain 15 hereditary members of the House of Lords as life peers.
So it's not specific names as it hasn't been finalised, but 15 of them. I accept I misremembered when I said "all", but the point stands: not gerrymandering.
> No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power
You're reinforcing my point.
Minor parties (who might collectively be popular with the electorate) will never be able to change the voting methodology to their advantage because FPTP keeps the incumbents in place, and only the incumbents have the power to choose the voting system. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
Similarly, in this case, allowing children to vote helps the incumbents stay in place despite their party, and their leader being deeply unpopular with the electorate overall. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
This "logic" doesn't track at all. Enfranchising women may have benefited the party, does that mean we shouldn't have given women the vote and doing so hurt democracy? Of course not.
Just because something benefits a singular party doesn't make it antidemocratic. Expanding the franchise is more democratic, not less. A party being rewarded electorally for doing something good is the system working, not failing.
There are reasonable arguments to be made (in my opinion) that 16 is too young but you aren't making that argument, the one you are making is completely invalid.
There is no reasonable definition of "the Left" that includes the British Labour party. The only one that fits would be "to the left of the British Conservative party", but that's as arbitrary as redefining it "to the left of Reform UK" and then starting to call the tories "The Left".
> Labour, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party. It sits on the centre-left of the left–right political spectrum
Centre-left doesn’t mean the Left. It just means it’s to the left of the other centrist party (Tories). Just because they lean left doesn’t mean they are the Left, Radical Left, Commies etc
You do know that actual political scientists don't use left vs right to describe parties. They use terms like libertarian, socialist, etc. They do that because left vs right change from place to place and time to time. From the POV of the US, Labour are communists. In France perhaps they are center or center left or even center right. Even the things you call left vs right don't remain consistent. There are policies in the 50s which were considered left but now would be right and visa-versa.
PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
> PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
Have you looked at actions rather than manifesto? There's very little change in policy actions from the previous non-Labor government, so it doesn't track unless you see the tories as left wing. Which is clearly more extreme.
Carbon taxes are huge, and they are 100% politically imposed.
And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
I believe in climate change, and I believe in doing something about it. But being disingenous with the public is only going to create resentment and resistance to Net Zero.
> And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
There’s nothing unreasonable about this: fossil fuels have huge costs associated with them that are invisible to the consumer. They’ve just been getting pushed off onto other people forever.
By all means, calculate an arbitrary uplift on the price based on your own definitions of externalities.
But don't expect me to take you seriously when you directly compare a raw price of renewable energy with an uplifted price of fossil fuels.
Especially when your quoted price for renewable energy ignores the cost of grid upgrades, storage infrastructure, and externalities associated with mining materials to manufactur solar panels and wind turbines etc (as happened recently in UK parliament when the energy minister did a very dubious comparison between energy prices)
All people who run companies should relish their competition behaving sub-optimally.
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