danans

> But I think you'd struggle to argue that the caste system doesn't result from Hinduism.

The "Hindu" caste system results from the history of social hierarchy in the Indian subcontinent. What you are calling "Hinduism" is a relatively recent construct that has emerged as a response to religions with more centralized/uniform doctrines and institutions. There are belief systems categorized under this "Hinduism" label that overtly reject caste systems (and have done so for centuries), while others overtly uphold it.

Other societies also have caste systems, just differently rationalized than the one present in some belief systems that fall under the "Hindu" banner. I'm not excusing any of these systems whether Hindu or not - they are all a blight on humanity - but they are also a feature of many societies whether or not they use the particular term "caste".

Some clear examples of excluded/oppressed castes outside of the South Asian context are the Burakumin in Japan, the al-Akhdam in Yemen, and the Mestizos with more indigenous ancestry in Latin America.

> or the caste system (unthinkable in Islam or Christianity, a base part of reality in Hinduism), etc.

The historical prominence of the slave trade in both the Christian and Islamic worlds should make it quite clear that it was hardly "unthinkable" but instead very rationalizable.

Rigid systems of social power hierarchy and oppression based on ancestry, perceived race, and occupation (which is a lot of what the worst part of caste is) were very much features of Christian and Islamic societies, even if their religions didn't codify them.

> I would be very surprised if the manufacturer would sell you one without you agreeing to indemnify them.

Why would anyone other than a fool agree to indemnify Tesla against liability for a vehicle whose driving behavior is controlled by Tesla?

> If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government,

Ironically, in this narrow way, the US is becoming more like China: authoritarian control in the functioning of corporations. In the case of the current US administration, it ends up being poorly thought out policies like broad tariffs without industrial policy to support them, and shallow nationalist stunts like this.

> then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start democratically regulating them directly - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.

The only way this happens is if Congress claws back the power it had ceded to the Presidency (which the current administration has even overstepped). That will only happen when US voters start electing representatives who are not controlled by those corporations. We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.

Why would they do that? Their goal is to stay in the good graces of the administration, to avoid financial or legal retribution.

If you think conscientious resistance is anywhere on the agenda of these corporations, I'd refer you to the inauguration photos and donation list, and the various acts of public supplication by their executives.

I don't even think it's wrong for them to do any of that - at least now the mask is off - but people should stop looking to corporations to take moral stances, despite their attempts over decades to convince you to attribute morality to them.

> However, to me if somebody controls what you do with your electricity I.e export or curtailed, you don't own the the work product of your system.

They are controlling/charging for the use of the infrastructure. If you want to export power to, for example, the AI datacenter down the road, that power has to flow through the utility's lines, transformers, substations, etc. all of that incurs a cost to that infrastructure, including additional maintenance and faster depreciation and replacement times.

It's like the roads leading to your house - you pay for those also, via some form of tax. And if they are congested to an unsafe level, your access to them can be similarly metered or curtailed.

Also like roads, electricity distribution is a natural monopoly - you aren't going to have tons of companies stringing up independent power lines - for safety reasons at the minimum, which is why it's good if it's run by an accountable municipal agency, rather than an unaccountable for-profit corporation.

As an aside, I always found the clown on the Matrox boxes creepy - never made me want to buy the graphics card.

> They kinda do via net metering tariffs and curtailment.

They don't own your system through net metering. If you have net metering you are using the grid as a battery, which has a cost - the infrastructure to support net metering isn't free. For a long time residential solar customers (like me) were being subsidized for the upstream load we put on the grid.

> Now if one could get spot prices and sell your power then...the system gets more interesting.

They are running a pilot of this in California (PG&E): https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...

It's currently restricted to downstream only customers. They plan to admit net metering customers to the pilot in the future.

Even outside of that, anyone can enroll a home battery in a demand response program to make money by supporting the grid during peak hours.

> your own solar, wind, and fossil fuel generation.

The OP was clearly talking about on premises primary power generation for datacenters.

The utility doesn't have a way to own my residential generation.

Sure, I was being charitable

> Its not necessarily the best thing that big companies have a business model of taking advantage of poor, or relatively poorer, people, particularly attractive young women. See our global Epstein class and global Weinstein class.

I agree. But are those kinds of abuse a requirement of a system that raises the voices of poorer people, or is it that we have permitted them?

I don't know if Taylor Swift endured similar hardship in her rise, but if she didn't as other replies have suggested, she's an example of how the system should treat those who are less privileged than she was.

> Don’t you still see this with hip-hop to some extent?

To some extent yes, but I suspect that is declining also as the genre becomes corporatized.

Less likely, for many reasons - including the more crowded marketplace for talent, but also a culture that is more corporation generated over time.

To me, apart from her amazing music and philanthropy, what Dolly Parton represents is something that was (emphasis on past tense) at one time truly exceptional about the United States - that someone from a very humble background (poverty in East TN) could have a tremendous impact on the culture of the world - the other example in entertainment being Michael Jackson (from Gary IN).

Admittedly the US music industry was among the few where this phenomenon happened, although definitionally very few reach pop stardom.

In contrast, much of the world exports only its "elite culture", not the culture of common people.

Another impact that doesn't get discussed as much when the primary discussion is around job elimination is the downward pressure on software engineering salaries. Of course it's a different scenario if you are working at a frontier AI company, but outside of that, software engineers are becoming cheaper (relative to inflation) while they simultaneously get more productive due to LLMS.

The energy efficient tires for my Chevy EV are $800 for a set of 4. You're paying the luxury car parts tax.

> Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired.

I'm not arguing against the electric grid. In fact, I'm an advocate. The grid has different failure and restoration modes than local generation and storage.

Unless you actually have no grid connection option at all (or it's prohibitively expensive) it makes a great deal of sense to pair a solar+battery system with the grid.

Done smartly, these systems can actually support each other.

> All the costs that go into producing from a given source (capex and opex) divided by the total power generated

... total energy generated.

} What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it?

How is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor.

Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.

> Powered entirely by batteries, X1 used approximately $5 worth of electricity during its first flight

It's fun to look at the arithmetic behind this to pull out the assumptions. To lift a 25000 lb mass 1100 ft in the air requires just over 10kWh, but that's assuming no air resistance or friction, so let's triple the energy needed to 30 KWh.

Let's add another 10 kWh for forward distance covered (assuming it was mostly gliding). Then let's pad it up to 50kWh for anything else. If they say that was $5 in electricity that implies an electricity price of $0.10/kWh, which is possible with utility scale solar.

I'd guess the actual flight time was only 10 of the 27 minutes, 30 kWh used over 10 minutes is 300kW of peak power.

300kW seems very low compared to equivalent jet powered planes, which output an order of magnitude more power for a 30 seater plane. Even if the electric drivetrain is far more efficient than a jet engine it stretches credulity.

Which of my numbers is off?

I've seen examples of non-hiring: new teams that are staffed at half or quarter the headcount that they would have before LLMs. Are those job losses? Maybe not. But they are much lower hiring relative to the amount of software engineering output.

> And you think the vast majority of people do not have access to the overwhelming majority of those things? The evidence suggests the opposite.

The comment I responded to asked:

> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?

I didn't say we are there now.

Responding to the parent's question about a dystopian future scenario, I said that those are the resources that will become controlled by the few if "society breaks down" due to technofeudalism.

> Gemini read out loud "setting an alarm for 7am tomorrow morning". But it was bullshit, it doesn't have the power to set alarms, it was just gaslighting me.

The Gemini on my Google Home has the ability to set alarms. Maybe it's a permissions issue on your device.

I remember that website. It was a cool experiment, but I mean conventional motorcycles with standard fairings.

Land, housing, water, energy, food, medicines, healthcare, security, and proximity to influence. I'm sure I forgot a few.

> Electric motorcycles are on the way too, though the range isn’t there for my riding patterns yet. A small battery pack charged from French nuclear grid electricity would eventually make the per-kilometer carbon math very hard to beat.

I'd love an electric motorcycle to replace my previously owned motorcycle, though household rules say it can't happen until the kids are grown up, and for many of the same reasons as in TFA: environment, fun, etc.

One issue with electric motorcycles is that they are inherently disadvantaged by the fundamentally poor aerodynamics of motorcycles coupled with the fact that battery range doesn't scale down as well as it scales up - due to space constraints and fixed minimum weight overhead for inverters, etc.

This would be compounded because my use case would be longer distance pleasure rides, not daily commutes.

> Commuting to work in peak hour, zipping past all the gridlocked traffic on the motorway (filtering is/was legal) and then cresting over the Auckland harbour bridge on a sunny day... Absolute bliss.

Former motorcycle commuter here. The risks while commuting in a motorcycle in urban traffic (at least in the US), are significantly higher than riding for pleasure. I found that untenable after a while and resorted to the bus/train, and saved motorcycling for the weekend.

Everyone's tolerance is different of course, but after a week of lane splitting commuting I didn't feel like riding the backroads. It took the joy out of it for me.

> Could capital owners try to capture it all? I'm sure. But it's not a natural result of the technology,

Unless the capability to create high productivity enabling AI is in the hands of every person, or the control of the centralized means of that AI production is with a representative government (as opposed to capital-controlled government), it is a natural result of current AI technology for capital to capture all the productivity gains.

> it's just whether we choose to allow it or not.

It will probably some combination of the above. Capital will still have disproportionate but not absolute control over the technology, but popular discontent and anger, hopefully channeled through electoral process and not violent revolution, will force sharing the productivity gains with broader population.

> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?

Society won't break down (in the chaos sense) and resources will still be allocated. Power abhors a vacuum as they say. It's just that resources and power will controlled and distributed in an openly feudal way.

Technology's egalitarian objectives will be replaced by overtly oligarchic ones.

Tech fandom will be replaced with other identities constructed to gain access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.

> Question stands, if anyone can offer a good equivalence for something similar today.

Then no, it's not possible for the average worker, largely because the advance of technology raised the bar on labor, requiring more (and increasingly expensive) education, all while that 60s worker and their generation, caught in a Reaganite zeal, pulled up the ladder behind them in housing and destroyed public goods.