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Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.

None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.

I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.

Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.

This is why, here at GloboCorp, we kill an Excel monkey at the office right after the daily standup. The open office plan makes it so that the whole team hears the screams (and some lucky team members catch a little splatter). Death creates some unexpected synergies. At GloboCorp, our employees learn that death is inexorable. Does one fear the rising of the sun? No. One simply accepts that the sun will rise. So too do our valued team members at GloboCorp simply accept that they will be checking functions until they are reduced during a daily teambuilding exercise.

No one at GloboCorp asks themselves if they will live the rest of their lives as Excel monkeys, because we answer that question for them every day. The answer is Yes, you will fill out the little cells, and then we will kill you. We provide effective solutions to the problem of being. We transform existential dread into acceptance and peace and high performance.

It's a digital picture book for "adults" that operates on the same principles as picture books for children.

It’s a guy asking to make an end-run around the constitution and the APA regulatory framework based on a flimsy sci fi premise. Naturally it provokes a negative reaction.

This reads like an AI with an overflowing context window wrote it; or in the alternative it’s a list of statutes written by an arrogant and delusional king. It is this type of arrogance that will lead to an unfavorable reaction by Congress.

You can prompt up some really cool commercial-grade art within the limitations of the models.

Getting more precision and consistency in the images requires additional technical configuration and actual artistic skill such that it more resembles using Photoshop and similar software. But what can be done with prompting is a lot more impressive than what can be done with rudimentary Photoshop skills and a big photo library to work from.

We fought what, two wars for this vassal? Deleting an account is a pretty minor favor compared to that.

That's more or less how it works. To actually have the system carry out your intention it would have to use significant hardware resources (and even then who knows if it would actually work). Alternatively you would need to break up the work into chunks that the hardware allocated to you by the system would not be overwhelmed.

A lot of people don't realize this because the work that they are having the AI do does not need to be either true or false. It just has to output media that seems like it fits. The system probably took many shortcuts to keep the resource use low while outputting something plausible but false.

And frankly this is sort of fine as long as you know what it's doing and what the limitations are. Hypothetically if you broke up the task into multiple steps that the system can actually ingest properly it might reduce the time that the task took overall, maybe even significantly, but not down to one prompt.

Much like a lot of LLM usage burns tokens so that mediocre people can hallucinate that they're doing something brilliant, Yudkowskyism is just a lot of empty verbiage for the purpose of building a sex cult around a plump gnome. Reusing his nonsensical and poorly defined terms but failing to get the benefit of the sex cult really misses the point of the entire exercise.

Many actions have a negative value. If I give two toddlers ball-peen hammers, release them into a window store, and then close the front door while I wait in the parking lot, was my action likely to create value or likely to destroy value?

The best way to understand European policy is that at a high level they want to establish a quota system both within Europe and globally.

The problem with creating a quota system is that you have to be able to punish countries who cheat on the quota. Europe doesn't have the capacity to do this except internally. The regulatory superpower idea only really makes sense with the physical power to compel obedience and extract taxes.

In the US we solved these issues like the bankruptcy code with federal law because the federal government is the supreme physical power on the continent that all the states obey for reasons of self-preservation and because they are bribed to obey. US federal transfers to individual states are also much, much larger than the largest EU transfers to member stats and the EU is not a central military or police power either.

This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics. They are already dependent on US military power but they do not receive the full benefits of becoming member territories.

Why would that be bad? Why is more better?

All of this is work, more work, admin work, things I would pay an assistant to do. Why would I want to be a system administrator when I can just not give my children systems that I need to administer?

This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.

I have heard phoned in homilies from some priests but this is not accurate in the United States based on my travels and weekly local attendance. Sorry that you had a bad experience.

Yes because that is how regulations really work and what the purpose is. In practice all companies both tiny and massive do everything that they can to use the state to quash competition and to reduce the risks of litigation.

Software in general has been subject to light touches in part because most of the damage that software can really cause is economic and not personal injury. The lines blur when the companies release products that cause mental injuries to users that courts interpret as physical injuries; or if the software reasonably contributes to someone e.g. going crazy and killing another person.

No one would seriously think of holding Microsoft liable if a kidnapper uses Word to draft a ransom note. But if CoPilot tells you to microwave a baby and you do it, many judges will want to take a close look at the operation of that software service irrespective of voluminous contract disclaimers. The only way the Microsofts of the world can escape that type of liability is with comprehensive regulation.

Regulation would be preferable for OpenAI to the tort lawyers. In general the LLM companies should want regulation because the alternative is tort, product liability tort, and contract law.

There is no way without the protections that could be afforded by regulation to offer such wide-ranging uses of the product without also accepting significant liability. If the range of "foreseeable misuse" is very broad and deep, so is the possible liability. If your marketing says that the bot is your lawyer, doctor, therapist, and spouse in one package, how is one to say that the company can escape all the comprehensive duties that attach to those social roles. Courts will weigh the tiny and inconspicuous disclaimers against the very large and loud marketing claims.

The companies could protect themselves in ways not unlike the ways in which the banking industry protects itself by replacing generic duties with ones defined by statute and regulation. Unless that happens, lawyers will loot the shareholders.

I own two SUVs because they are useful. Can't we be critical of ourselves and some of the consequences of our own choices?

If the medium is the message, the SUV communicates that there is only space for the nuclear family members, speed and comfort is of the essence, and the road is the only acceptable avenue for transportation. The sidewalks are for homeless people, jogging athletes, and eccentrics.

Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.

Fair use is a case by case fact question dependent on many factors. Trial judges often get creative in how they apply these. The courts are not likely to apply a categorical approach to it like that despite what some professors have written.

The WSJ effectively became a lifestyle tabloid. Its devolution has been shocking.

I think the real reason is that it’s an entirely different media experience than the current types. Most modern games are either gambling traps (microtransaction hell) or extremely high fidelity products that leave nothing to the imagination. In McLuhan terms they are hot forms of media, but the old ones are cool in that they invite imaginative participation. Hence the popularity also of intentionally retro looking contemporary indie games.

Evidence doesn't mean overwhelming proof. My post was confined to 1989-1990. I didn't make the claim in your post. Homer Simpson also doesn't work in a factory; he's a nuclear engineer at a power plant. I dunno what you're trying to get at here. There are at least as many problems with trying to use statistics as evidence as there are with using anecdotes and fictional references.

I would also trust 100 fictional cartoon characters before I would trust anything said in a pirated article written by Noah Smith about anything. If Noah Smith said that grass was green I would assume that it's blue.

No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His mom never worked in any capacity. My friend played baseball on a travel team and eventually he went to a private high school.

A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.

Resisting production isn't unethical, but telling your client to commit fraud is illegal, unethical, and waives attorney-client privilege.

Generally that lawyers in tech can be both good and bad, but that both the culture at west coast tech companies and how they handle their attorneys often leads to ethical issues that just do not happen in more buttoned down industries elsewhere. In particular many tech companies are just more protective of employees for no discernable purpose. An investment bank faced with a similar situation as the DC v. Meta case would have blamed and terminated the employees and attorneys involved, and trussed them up for prison if needed to protect the company. An oil company accused of faking environmental studies would throw the guy who doctored them under the bus.

This also serves the public interest (although some may disagree) because it preserves a productive company and provides a powerful incentive for management to grind individual corporate criminals into meatballs to protect itself and shareholders.

Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.

The other stupid thing that Meta did was commissioning these studies in the first place. What is the company doing? How does this benefit shareholder value? Is this a jobs program? If you did not like the answers they might give you, you should never have paid a bunch of academics to do these studies in the first place. The company sells digital fent to the masses. Of course it's bad for kids. You don't need a study to tell you that.

There is a conservative case for this in that the 30 year fixed mortgage, combined with all of the foreclosure protections both old and new, amount to a government benefits program. Historically, this type of mortgage was developed to promote family homeownership. The mortgage systems have continually blown up in "crises" in part because it's a product of policy more than it is a market product. This is partly why investors both corporate and small flipper types actually do cause serious distortions: the US housing market is a welfare program first and a market for bundled land and houses second.

No one wants to abolish this welfare program (you would have an easier time abolishing Social Security), but also the government wants to keep the trappings of a market price system. It is easier to have serial crises and to blame some guys for the predictable explosions every time, adjust the laws to create enormous numbers of lawyer billable hours nationwide, and then set the stage for the next crisis and the next round of patsies to be blamed. Fortunately, this time we have AI to write all the think pieces about what it really means.

Try to drop a foreign phrase into MS Word to add a little color and watch it go completely berserk.

I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture. Those concepts do not really have much to do with the law of agency.

Lawyers don't come up with good ideas; their role is to explain why your good ideas are illegal. There's a good argument that AI agents cannot exercise legal agency. At the end of the day, corporations and partnerships are just piles of "natural persons" (you know, the type that mostly has two hands, two feet, a head, etc.).

The fact that corporate persons can have agency relationships does not necessarily mean that hypothetical computer persons can have agency relationships for this reason.

There are so many other ways to make money that don't involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make more money that are far less harmful to society.

There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.

By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.