grafmax

Here’s an example of actual research not your claims which seem to be fabricated from whatever you can free associate:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716220981864

What’s the homeless rate in the luxury enclaves you mention? I couldnt find reliable numbers. Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship - such enclaves can have their own housing dynamics (such as small populations and vacation homes) which don’t negate the larger trend we see when we examine many locales such as large cities and so on. So no, cherry picked counter examples don’t negate the larger statistical relationship between homelessness and inequality.

And attributing homelessness to “enablement policies” is another hot take. It’s just as plausible that enablement policies are enacted as a response to homelessness not a cause.

But at least now we seem to be beyond blaming homelessness on individual traits.

No I am saying your just so story of why homeless people are homeless does not explain why places with more wealth inequality see more homelessness. Why would this be if your sounds-good-to-you explanation were the actual factor driving homelessness?

The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits. Societal factors produce and reproduce it. It’s greatest in areas of high inequality for example - a fact not explained by individual traits.

Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction.

Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.

From the Russia POV invading Ukraine was a response to NATO expanding there. An imminent invasion of Europe seems outside of Russia’s geopolitical goals.

But Europe’s leaders on the other hand do seem invested in escalating this conflict, a lack of finances notwithstanding.

Let’s say prices go down until houses are sold at cost. Even at cost people with little money won’t be able to buy houses.

More housing supply doesn’t house people who have no people to pay for those houses. It’s a wealth inequality issue we just don’t want to face.

I think you are conflating the content of these prompts with the purpose of heretic. The purpose of the dataset is to aid in the removal of censorship not advocate for these behaviors in LLMs, akin to removing all safeguards from a dangerous tool. Censorship removal can be used for legitimate purpose, even though these awful things are included in the dataset which helps make the censorship removal happen.

Extremely lonely people being exploited by sociopathic corporations for profit. Sounds like a baby and the bathwater scenario to me.

But a false dichotomy isn’t it? Authoritarian communist vs techno-fascist?

> far more oppressive means than even the GOP dares to dream about

That seems to be exactly what they are dreaming about. Something like China’s authoritarianism minus the wise stewardship of the economy, plus killer drones,

At least the current moment, the increasing turn to using autonomous weaponry against one’s citizens - I don’t think it says so much about humanity so much as the US. I think US foreign policy is a disaster but turning the AI-powered military against the citizenry does look like it’s going to be quite successful, presumably because the US leadership is fighting an enemy incapable of defending itself. I think it’s unsustainable though economically speaking. AI won’t actually create value once it’s a commodity itself (since a true commodity has its value baked into its price). Rates of profit will continue to fall. The ruling class will become increasingly desperate in its search for growth. Eventually an economy that resorts to techno-fascism implodes. (Not before things turning quite ugly of course.)

> Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.

Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.

Given their self-imposed labor supply issues, notably the awful working conditions, I hope the workforce there figures out how to effectively organize against this cesspool of a corporation.

Sorry to disappoint you stranger. What I said applies to both mortgages and rent. And housing can be decommodified to our common benefit - for example, Vienna - it’s not some impossible goal. And on a wider level if you ever wonder why China is outcompeting us in many sectors it’s in large part because they have invested in their economy instead of letting rentier capitalists run rampant. It makes the workforce cheaper to employ. We on the hand are suffering a deepening housing crisis..

Right wing populism is a failure so all populism is a failure? But they advocate opposite economic policies.

Even the example of Venezuela blames populism and omits the role of sanctions.

Rentier capitalism is term that has been used to include mortgages for decades. It’s not my term. Mortgages and rent parasitize the working class. Rent extraction (broader than just literal rent) is nonproductive cashflows from the working class to the wealthy. You may cheer this on, that’s fine with me. I’m just calling a spade a spade.

1) Costs of maintaining a property are productive but typically less than 50% of what rent pays for. The rest is purely extractive going to rentier profit and mortgage (what I’ve been talking about).

2) Less than 40% of households are fully owned. The rest have mortgages or are rented.

Groceries and other necessities are produced. Rent and mortgage payments are based on selling access to resources - nothing of value is produced through rent extraction. It is a purely parasitic process economically.

There is indeed a case to be made for universal access to basic necessities but the case against rent extraction is more basic than that.

To your point about people preferring renting to owning who have the option of both, I am not directing my argument against this case but the general case instead - most people do not have the option of affording housing except through the rentier capitalist avenues of rent or mortgage. It is these people who are being parasitized by this form of economic activity.

These leases generally are not a contract between equals. One party owns extra housing. The other owns none and gets charged for this fact. It’s institutionalized exploitation. Legal, sure. People being unable to pay for a basic necessity while others have so much that they can profit off it - its not unreasonable to call this “sad”.

There’s really nothing lazier than making money simply by owning more than others. Such a person doesn’t have to produce anything of value. They can simply just use their outsized wealth to buy something others need, then charge money for access to it. This drains cash from those who have no other option than working for a living while their own coffers grow. Not just lazy, this actively makes the economy less efficient by increasing the cost of living and necessitating higher wages from employers simply to finance parasitism, which means value-producing businesses become less competitive also.

Our society prioritizes the narrow interests of rentier capitalists over the working class. Unfortunately this means the US is losing international competitiveness across more and more industries. For one thing rent extraction ultimately gets financed by employers through higher wages, thus productive business loses out to business from a region like China where costs of employment are lower. Rather than making economies more efficient like productive business is supposed to do, rentier capitalism means cash flows from the debtor to the creditor class, which forms a feedback loop as the creditor class is able to use this cash to buy more assets and extract more rent simply by expanding its circle of ownership.

Hey maybe the problem isn’t the means of production (the data centers), but the mode of production.. capitalism.

Problem is billionaires have co-opted our government. Their interest is in channeling money from the working class into their hands through rentier capitalism. That is contrary to widely structuring income.

Rent extraction hurts them in the long run. Because working class income gets absorbed by various forms of rent, they are more expensive to employ. Thus we fail to compete with, say, China, which socializes many costs and invests in productive industry. We are left with a top heavy society that as we can see is already starting to crumble.

People spin up ablated models for pennies. You don’t need advanced reasoning for this crap. OpenAI has 8 billion plus in burn. I guess it’s all effectively paying for brand awareness?

It’s standard practice for VC companies to enshittify after building a moat, relying on user lock-in. What’s remarkable is how quickly they’ve had to shift gears. And with this rapid pivot it’s questionable how large that moat really is.

I realized they jumped the shark when they announced the pivots to ads and porn. Markets haven’t caught on yet.

There are polls for different aspects of OSA but not the OSA itself. For example protecting kids online is popular (big surprise). Yet no polls I can find that frame the OSA itself or the OSA with its trade offs. Seems like the standard practice of asking leading questions so that pollsters can frame popular opinion in some already-decided way.

Obeying in advance makes them stronger.

Precisely, mine is a moral not legal argument against shallow moral appeals to “sovereignty”.

The UK is much like the US in that democratic processes are co-opted and undermined by special interests to the point that governments engage in suppression of free speech and mass surveillance against their populations. (What’s unique to the UK is that it’s government is largely subservient to the US in the international dragnet.) We are all human and share the same human rights regardless of our nationality.

Strange that this is framed as a national sovereignty issue not an issue of UK government’s overwrought free speech repression and its utilization of corporate bullying to that end. This is exactly the thing we don’t want democratic governments to do - congeal with corporate power against their people. Appealing to legality when the laws are themselves unjust is not a defense. The online safety act is broad and vague and not in the interests of UK citizens, so sovereignty appeals are completely disingenuous here. When we talk about sovereignty what we are really referring to is the power of the UK government over its people and the subservience expected of entities like 4chan to that end.

We see these exact same mechanisms in the US and that’s precisely why we should not manufacture rationalizations for this kind of policy - the societal decline as a result of this cynical trend is clear.