hollerith

There was certainly a vast gold rush around the internet with massive attention from almost everybody in journalism or in business and almost every retail investor -- at least in the US (where I was) -- but it differed from the AI hype in that there was no vision of utopia or at least not any that resonated with more than a very small fraction of the population.

The closest the internet got to becoming the focus of hopes for a great transformation of society (or the focus of an ideology or comprehensive narrative) that I saw was a conversation started by John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (published Feb 1996) and the crypto enthusiasts. Both conversations consisted mostly of libertarians (with the crypto conversation also having anarchists), which as everyone knows only ever made up 4 or 5% of the US population (but a much larger fraction of internet users in the 1990s).

Also, Teilhard de Chardin's books (written in the 1950s and 1960s) inspired people with a grand vision of the human future and in particular predicted the creation of a "noösphere" which was much like the global internet, so Teilhardists wrote some about that. But the Teilhardists were never more a tiny tiny group, much smaller even than the aforementioned crypto enthusiasts. Almost not worth mentioning.

Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?

No. Although millions of words were written during the 1990s about the singularity (referring to it using that word specifically IIRC), even then it was always AI that was expected to bring about a utopia, never the internet. And the discussion was restricted to a few mailing lists (the extropians list, Yudkowsky's SL4 list and ISTR a transhumanism list), one or two books (e.g., Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition), Omni magazine and maybe Wired magazine.

Sounds like the government (which owned the entire system during Beeching) should have kept at least a right-of-way (if they have that concept in the UK) instead of selling everything.

appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense

I think it is more that teenagers and very young adults and people high in the trait of "openness to new experiences" are more susceptible to nonsense and more attracted to new intellectual movements, of which the rationalist community is one.

Also, I expect a rationalist to be lower in conscientiousness than average (because the conscientious people are too busy to devote a lot of time to reading long intellectual texts) and low conscientiousness makes violence and other transgressive behavior more likely.

That addresses the extinction risk caused by climate change, but not the extinction risk caused by an AI's turning out vastly more capable than expected, then the lab's losing control over it.

Is that really true? It's not super high status, for sure, but many police departments in the US require every officer to have a bachelors degree. And the pay is higher than average.

Interesting. Can it run a mainstream browser?

Can you show us a proof of correctness you've written?

That's the model they mean

You have incorrectly summarized the position of Rayiner and me.

Let us oversimplify and assume all spending by individuals is either consumption or investment.

Rayiner and I advocated for taxing consumption, but leaving investment untaxed. (And then I suggested that a tax on consumption could be implemented as a tax on income where any spending on any investment is fully deductible.)

You seem to be advocating something different.

For the sake of completeness, we should include a third category of spending, namely, spending necessary to earn money. If we don't leave that untaxed, then an individual can get himself in a situation in which he owes more taxes than he actually earned, which is an undesirable property for any tax system.

But there is a lot of spending, particularly by high-income people, that is not investment and is not spending necessary to earn money. Examples: expensive country-club memberships, yachts, $5000 dresses. Rayiner and I are calling that consumption.

Some spending is necessary just for the average person (i.e., almost everyone who doesn't have rich parents or a rich spouse) to maintain life. The tax system should refrain from taxing this kind of spending (and the US system approximately does in that individuals earning less than about 40K per year almost always owe zero federal income tax).

401Ks would be yet another category of spending that should probably remain untaxed / deductible.

spends zero words to explain how a progressive consumption tax might possibly be implemented.

The implementation could consist of a tax on personal income, but any re-investment of that income is deductible, plus a tax on luxury items and products whose main purpose is status-signaling.

"Asian people have pretty much not done that except for two teeny tiny indiscretions that each killed more civilians than all of Europe's and America's colonial incursions combined."

A lot of us rely on Linux containers' being escape-proof?

I would have hoped that only a few of us are so misinformed as to do that.

China is currently occupying Tibet, which never consented to the occupation and has invaded Vietnam 30 times. It ruled Vietnam for about 2 centuries starting about 600. China eventually had to leave Vietnam, but many other groups ceased to exist as a consequence of Chinese expansion. Here are some:

the Baiyue were a vast umbrella of diverse, non-Sinitic indigenous coastal tribes who inhabited Southern China and northern Vietnam.

The Xianbei were an ancient nomadic Proto-Mongolic people from the northern steppes.

The Di and Jie were two of the ancient "Five Barbarian" (Wu Hu) nomadic tribes of northern and western China during the Han and Jin periods.

The Dian Kingdom were an ancient, sophisticated indigenous southwest culture located in modern-day Yunnan province.

The Tujia were an indigenous group of the Hunan-Hubei region. Centuries of inward Han migration and intermarriage have resulted in the Tujia becoming culturally and structurally indistinguishable from their Han neighbors.

In the US, the state government has absolute power over the municipal and county governments in its borders, which is a very simple legal structure. For example, the NY state legislature can override any law made by the NY city government and can even replace the NY city government with whatever entity it wishes.

Maybe, but I wish people in these conversations would sometimes point out that China is also dependent on imports to continue to make the stuff it makes.

China is a heavy importer of petroleum, food and fertilizer. A modern economy needs petroleum to grow food and to deliver food to consumers. Although China is wisely trying to replace that dependence on petroleum with electric vehicles, it has not yet succeeded. If there's ever a sustained shortage of food, Chinese young men are likely to start revolting and rioting like they've done dozens of times in Chinese history in response to food shortages. China relies on foreign nations for approximately 75% to 80% of its total iron ore consumption, making it the world's largest importer. Despite having had semiconductor manufacturing self-sufficiency as a top national priority for many years, it is still the case that Chinese smartphone manufacturers rely heavily on Samsung and TSMC for the SOCs that go into those smartphones -- and MediaTek (Taiwan) and Qualcomm (US), not Chinese firms, design most of those SOCs.

Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan argues that the United States is the only major global power fully capable of national self-sufficiency. I.e., if global trade is ever disrupted by world war, the US would be able replace its missing imports much faster than China would be able to.

Why? Is human extinction not permitted by the laws of physics?

It makes no economic sense for AOL to stay in a steady state after having been thoroughly disrupted by newer products.

Yes, there are examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue a particular technology tree.

For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)

And there have been successful world-wide bans.

For example, following the invention of recombinant DNA technology, scientists convened the Asilomar Conference in 1975. They established a voluntary self-moratorium on certain types of genetic engineering until strict laboratory containment protocols were created.

In the 1980s, bioethicists, theologians, and researchers established a hard ethical line between somatic editing (treating an existing patient's non-reproductive cells) and germline editing (altering future generations).

No one has performed the latter form of genetic engineering except for Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. (Chinese society used to be more ambivalent about the technology than the West is.) In response, Beijing heavily tightened its laws, classifying heritable gene editing as a high-risk medical technology subject to the penal code, and He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison.

I wasn't making a value judgement. I was just curious.

CEO of Mercedes was born in Sweden to Swedish parents; has blue eyes. CEO of Adidas has a Norwegian father and grew up in Norway; has pale skin, reddish-blonde hair and blue eyes. CEO of Bayer was born and raised in the US. Last name is "Anderson". Has pale skin and blue eyes. Two of them could pass as German (at least until they started talking): most Norwegians don't really look like Germans and the CEO of Adidas is no exception.

Now let's do the top 5 companies in the US (by market cap). CEO of NVidia was born in Taiwan to Chinese parents and immigrated to the United States as a child. CEO of Google was born in India to Indian parents, came to the US after college. ditto CEO of Microsoft. CEOs of Apple and Amazon are a white men who grew up in the US.

Because they've been living where they're living now for about 1500 years, speaking the same language or more precisely speaking a group of closely-related languages, descended from the same small initial population.

I've been living in the US for over 60 years and don't recognize the country you are describing.

We should try our best to improve our society. Sometimes that will mean doing things that are economically inefficient. Your example of Stanford professor Nir Eyal is an excellent illustration: by advising corporate managers and product designers how to fulfill their role in our economic system more efficiently, Nir Eyal made our society worse.

We should expect more from our elite professors. Nir Eyal should've known better than to make a career out of studying how deliberately to addict users. But we should also expect our professors, politicians and policymakers to understand the basics of our economic system and to understand when a proposed change to our society sounds good or feels good, but has severe adverse effects on economic efficiency that outweigh the societal benefits. Those aren't the only proposed changes we should avoid, but they form an important class of them.

Our society has a finite capacity to do projects and to run industrial processes. We want that finite capacity to provide as much quality of life as possible (and as much expansion of our capacity to do projects and run processes as possible), and achieving that is a thorny intellectual problem, which for many centuries in our society has been solved mostly by lawyers and judges knowledgeable about corporate law, stock markets, corporate managers, accountants and investors. This entire ecosystem is predicated on the assumption that investor will try to maximize their return of investment, which is strongly correlated with profit margin.

Our society uses return on investment (which is correlated with profit margin) to decide what projects and what processes our society's workers will focus on.

So for example, if I can make twice as much money as a software developer as I can as a musician, that is strong evidence that my doing the former kind of work will benefit society about twice as much as my doing the latter kind of work.

Still, there is a difference of degree. The engineering cost of making one city's electrical grid compatible with the consumers of a different city's grid were much lower (even if one grid was AC and the other DC) than the engineering cost of moving from AWS to a competitor because electricity is not that complicated.

Also, I doubt anyone was referring to electricity as a commodity in the early days before the industry developed standards.

Do you mean raising sheep for wool? The UK has never grown a significant amount of cotton.

The UK for one. By the time it became a democracy, it was already stable, peaceful and the wealthiest country per capita that had ever existed.

AOSP is just as open-source as desktop Linux (and desktop Linux subsystems reconfigured for use on a phone) is, and has vastly better security.

People sometimes say, "maybe desktop Linux lacks in security, but its privacy is first-rate," which IMHO is silly because if your OS can be completely and totally pwned by your visiting a web page, your opening image file or your using some IDE to inspect some source-code repo, how much privacy do you really have?

GrapheneOS is just as free from data collection by megacorporations as desktop Linux is and has about 1000 times better security.

The police erased fireworks explosions in my neighborhood in the Bay Area.

Two years ago, I heard thousands of explosions in the month of July, same as every year. Then last year, the police posted signs reminding people that fireworks are illegal and that they would begin issuing fines to violators. The number of explosions was about 30% of usual (i.e., still many hundreds of explosions). This year I've heard exactly one explosion (on July 03).

I unambiguously welcome this change. You mention safety, but fireworks are also hard on neighbors with PTSD.

Is littering also in your opinion "an important component of the American zeitgeist"?

Bicycle theft?

Why not just retract your "we really need to renormalize beating up nerds again"?