Isn't flock's whole thing that they extract information from the pictures they have?
Like, say I have an interview in your office and you step out for coffee. I take a picture of the applicant list on your desk. That doesn't make the list of applicants "my data".
Well, maybe not. A reasonable person might not think that about that applicant list. I bet you could make a different argument for taking a picture versus memorizing the list too.
The legal system thrives on specifics of a situation, so simply asserting that the list of applicants is or is not "yours" because you can see it seems like a gross oversimplification. The specifics of how you came to be there, what your relationship with the officeholder is, and so on probably matters a lot in that situation and I think there might be some unwritten rules or social norms that you'd be expected to follow as well.
Both are good sources of energy. If you're going to make the argument that "nuclear is unsafe so we shouldn't do it" though, it's relevant to keep in mind that since we've had nuclear power, dam failures have outpaced nuclear by many times in terms of deaths / TwH (1).
Edit to add: Before anyone jumps on for this it's important to note that without the Banquiao disaster the rates are about the same. Still means "nuclear is unsafe" is kind of a red herring.
I'm not going to go to bat for Mao(1), but I think you're underplaying the body count that capitalist countries have had - this is kind of easy to do because a lot of the damage that we do is obfuscated behind proxies. Besides the obvious and direct war crimes like Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, and now I guess Iran again, there's the second order stuff like Israel's Bad Neighbor Syndrome (which we have enabled financially for basically the duration), Pinochet who we put in charge, heck - pick any country south of the border and we've done some damage there at least once. Then there's the spiderweb of damage that flows out to the global south continuously through NAFTA and similar foreign policy. I suppose the principal difference is that we externalize a lot of our violence (and somehow are shocked when it comes back to bite us that we trained Osama Bin Laden).
Nobody's asking for Maoist China, I think mostly we're clamoring for something closer to Norway. I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to settle for UK-style socialized services but even those folks get lambasted for being "too far left" too so whaddyagonnado.
1 - I think he and 'bolshevism' are a bit of a strawman here anyway, as I've not heard a ton of pro-Mao people but a TON of people who identify as leftists - they are not the same thing
> I think mostly we're clamoring for something closer to Norway. I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to settle for UK-style socialized services
Norway is a Saudi Arabia-style petrostate just with white people aesthetics (Saudi Arabia is also socialist). A better analogue might be Sweden/Finland, also tiny socialist Lutheran countries but with no massive oil reserves.
I write this while currently living in Finland. Your understanding of European socialism is stuck in the early 2000s. Things are going terribly here (and also in the UK). The welfare states throughout Europe are all in various states of slow collapse due to the public sector eating the private sector and climbing government spending as percentage of GDP not seen since the USSR (we're well over 50-60%, communist China is only at 35%). Deficits are ballooning.
Our unemployment rate is 3X that of the US and still climbing. We have no growth in the economy, no population growth, and no productivity growth. Pensions/benefits have been overpromised and will require decades of pain to resolve. Things are bleak and similar throughout the rest of Europe. I would update my priors if I were you.
Furthermore, the only reason socialism ever appeared to work here was due to us being ethnically homogenous and tiny. Government's lack of competitive pressure can be somewhat overcome by social pressure from the government official being your neighbor Pekka. It's harder to grift when everybody knows who you are and can see your new Mercedes. The US is not tiny and not ethnically homogenous.
Our system isn't even working here anymore, and it absolutely would not work in a massive, diverse, low-trust society like the US. You would do much better to lean into your strengths than to chase early 2000s European socialism, which was in fact a mirage brought about by a one-time economic boom due to the fall of iron curtain and EU integration.
all fair points - but what strengths? We've proven ourselves incapable of the most basic social goods for decades now. All the metrics that you might point to as "hey the US is doing fine" (GDP, deficit, sector growth) are concerned specifically with how the state is doing and desperately unconcerned with it's citizens, which I think is a principal issue here.
I think I'm arguing from a position of the quantitative numbers and you're arguing from qualitative vibes, hence why there's a disconnect.
But here's why its important to look at the quantitative reality of the numbers going forward--they are going to absolutely change the qualitative populist vibes.
In 30 years, even if the AI bubble pops and US growth rates normalize to something low like 2%, the US will have a GDP per capita of $130k in 2050. Meanwhile with 0.8% growth (very optimistic for Germany, may be much worse) the average German will earn roughly $75K with far worse demographics ballooning their deficits even further unless they dramatically cut social benefits or cause massive inflation to inflate away social debts.
I can guarantee your vibes of the situation will change over the next 30 years as European nations continue falling behind the US in economic power. The US will have massive optionality to improve its healthcare/education system with this extra wealth. Europe will have the opposite problem, deciding which benefits/services to cut next with a growing welfare burden combined with a not-growing private sector to fund it.
As far as strengths? I think having the next economic revolution be centered in your country (AI) is pretty valuable no? If it raises productivity and GDP growth by even 0.5%, I can guarantee the US will also capture that better than Germany/Europe will given its technophobic culture.
I think I see where we're coming at this from different angles.
If you're going by the numbers and the 'strength of the state' - then yeah, we're doing great. However, neither I nor anyone I know happens to be a part of the class that's holding the baton with all that stuff.
My concern is specifically about how well the citizens are doing, in aggregate, taking into account whether they have democratic control over the reins of governance, whether they are afforded the opportunity to be meaningful contributors to the greater good, education, freedom, enfranchisement.
GDP / capita is meaningless if most of the 'capita' never sees a dime. TBH the structures and institutions that make up a country are just a bunch of bureaucratic role playing from where I stand - they're meaningless without the 'we' of 'we the people'.
This right here is the crux of the issue. I don't even trust my own computer without fairly deep introspective tools, and what we're given for 'leadership' is 'this totally outdated and opaque system of voting for corporate shill A or corporate shill B is totally trustworthy! You obviously cannot think that you could get by without some asshat running your whole society so be thankful'.
Direct democracy, liquid democracy - whatever you pick that removes the middle man will be a marked improvement from day 1. We do not need these people deciding what's best for us. I'm not sure we ever did.
It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast.
and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.
I think you've misunderstood the term 'petrodollar'. Petrodollars are the American currency in circulation abroad because we bought other people's oil (principally Saudi), not exported our own.
The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.
I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.
No, it's the US dollars circulating globally because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated, giving the US control over the entire global financial system.
> because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated
This was sort of true in the 1970s only because we ignored the Soviet Union and its allies, which included a lot of petroleum production. It's totally untrue now, in a world where America exports oil. (I traded contracts in Connecticut in the early 2010s. Oil was priced in all sorts of currencies. British and Norwegian oil, for example, is sold for local currency.)
Thankyou for pointing this out. People get very weird about how the petrodollar works, it's more about convenience than force. Like the "eurodollar" of financial clearing. In general people overlook how much America (and to a lesser extent the UK) export "stability as a service". Which becomes jeopardized if the leader is unstable.
> Can british and norweigian buy iranian oil in currency other than dollars?
Both Russia and Iran are heavily sanctioned by the U.S. Neither sells its oil for dollars by default, though either will accept them, of course.
Note, too, that pricing and settlement are different. If I’m Russia selling oil to India, I can “sell” at $50/barrel and accept payment in rupees or rubles. (Indian refineries were not paying Russia dollars for oil.)
Fascinating. I've read 5 posts about this and they're all either "anthropic is dropping their ethics" or "anthropic is fighting the facists" - and whether due to echo chamber or other perhaps more nefarious dealings (some of which I cannot posit due to forum rules) the posts below all of them are more or less in accord with one another which is a rarity for political discourse on HN.
Like, say I have an interview in your office and you step out for coffee. I take a picture of the applicant list on your desk. That doesn't make the list of applicants "my data".
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