rickydroll

You're right, I didn't include stuff at the beginning, for example, the theft of IP in textile manufacturing in the late 1700s. The US government didn't recognize copyrights on foreign literature which let US publishers reprint things such as Gilbert, Sullivan's operettas and Dickens novels

Then there is Alexander Hamilton's advocacy for importing foreign technicians that bring back IP and reproduce it here in the states. Best of all was the patent act of 1793 which like with the literature copyright ignoring, let us citizens patent inventions from the other side of the pond.

The founding fathers definitely had the right idea on IP.

Cut and paste is a UI failure; it only works kinda if you have fully functional hands. If your hands don't work right, or you have tremors or other mobility impairments, your chances of succeeding with cut and paste drop off significantly.

The Emacs mark-and-point UI works for everyone: fully functional hands, partially functioning hands, or even speech recognition. It also solves the problem of copy, cut, and paste described in the article.

Stealing IP is how American industry got started. Goose: gander, pot: kettle.

It is what built and sustains the movie and music industries. See: work for hire and 100+year copyright length

The tech industry: see: copyright and patent assignment from discoverer to corporation.

I know that corporations forcing me to assign patents and copyright to them was an incentive to take published works from "software practice and experience" and other technical journals, use them as the core of my work, and disclose that source to the company I worked for. Didn't stop them from applying for patents, however.

I think the discussion of copyright needs more refinement. We need to separate the discoverer's need for acknowledgment of development effort from the rent-seeking core of copyright.

Very much this. I also chose a different pseudonym from place to place. However, a bigger chill to my online speech is fatigue and ack of joy in participating online. I think the last place I felt community online was on Usenet.

This could be modified to be very useful for folks with less-than-ideal hand ability. I don't have much fine motor control in my hands. Hitting one of the modern tiny targets usually involves clicking a few times around the target until I finally manage to randomly twitch the mouse into the right place. Something like this, where the target changes shape to improve targeting ability or increase the size of the click zone, would be wonderful.

On my desktop, On Firefox, I just got a uniform blue screen. On Chrome, I could turn left or right, but that was all. The W, S, and C keys didn't work.

While I do use mapping programs for directions, I more often use them for a more accurate estimate of time and traffic density. I haven't looked very hard, but I haven't seen any OpenStreetMap data or equivalent that shows "Real" travel times and traffic density.

Having created and debugged human-written code with silent bugs, vulnerabilities, or unnecessary performance issues since my first day on the job, and pointing you to myriad companies with bugs and vulnerabilities that existed pre-AI, all I can say is "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

s/politicians/coporate exec/ is just as true.

The difference is that we can get to the moon

Not only cloudflare's cut of the action, but your ISP, your mobile carrier, Internet exchanges, the service provider on the far end.

Seriously, everybody will have their hand out.

At first glance, it looks like a parallel-universe Linux version of JumpCloud.

Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.

Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.

Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.

When you have billions, you have so much margin for loss that it would not materially affect your life; if you lose 80% of your wealth, you can still survive and continue rebuilding it. Whereas if you've got 1 mil in your 401k and you lose 80% of that, well, you're f-ed for retirement.

Thank you. I hadn't even thought about the prices of property. To get an idea of what property costs would be in an area I'm familiar with, I looked on Zillow at properties around a couple of train stations in Weston.

Looking at one of the train stations in a lower-priced section of Weston, properties within walking distance of the stop go for roughly $2 million per acre, according to Zillow. Given what happened to the properties around the Green Line extension, I would expect those properties to sell for at least twice their Zillow listing price.

I thought about what it would take to get me to sell. I think it would take multiple millions, with a sub-5% mortgage, to get me to sell. It is kind of hard to put a value on it because I have established mini-orchard and berry patches.

How many housing units and parking spaces can you fit into two acres? Unless the units are heavily subsidized, I don't think any of them will be considered "affordable" because condos in the area sold for around half a million dollars seven years ago, and so I'd expect these to go for at least $750,000 to a million.

The Massachusetts law requiring cities/towns to build high-density housing around commuter rail stops neglected one thing. There's no open space. To build high-density housing, the city or state would have to buy out the existing landowners, demolish the existing property, and then build anew.

They also neglected the effect of travel time on behavior. Back in the day, I was commuting from a rich suburb to Cambridge, and to get to work on time, I had to get up early to accommodate a 30-minute commute to the train station, wait for the purple line and the red line, and then walk three-quarters of a mile. When I saw how little traffic was on the road, I said, "F it," and drove to work in the same amount of time as it took me to get to the train station.

In the Biolab space, it was a little overbuilt, and now it's tremendously overbuilt because of the killing off of NIH grants and subsequent reduction in investment in the biotech sector. I suspect the reason they don't drop the rent is that it would cause a bit of unraveling. You drop the rent; that changes the valuation of your building, which may mean you're underwater on the loan, the bank calls the loan, et cetera, et cetera. Then, similar properties would suffer devaluation and a similar unwinding. And if you agree with the contagion theory of deflationary environments, it'll all unwind all the way through your 401k and other investments. Sadly, the billionaires would be untouched.

Before we go pushing money into private insurance, we need to define why. We need to understand why the public ones are inadequate and who/what drove those decisions.

A public health care system should be independent of politics. Unfortunately, as the latest administration has shown, even if you designed it to be independent, such as the CFPB, it doesn't matter with an autocrat in charge. On the other hand, private industry does not have all that good a reputation for not effing with your healthcare.

Yes, it does conflict with my own concept of personhood. I forgot to add that to my comment.

I was trying to show that it is not "merely a legal expedient", that corporate personhood had a specific purpose, and that it differed from a real person. I think that the confusion about legal personhood in corporations comes from how lawyers explain its existence. A couple of lawyers I've had explained it as, it's just like a person in the law, except where it's different.

The problem is that we haven't created a clear enough distinction between a natural person and a legal person. In many cases, corporations have rights but not the responsibility. For example, they have speech rights, but they don't go to jail when the corporation commits a crime. The judicial inequalities between ordinary people and rich people are even greater between natural persons and corporations.

Beep boop. It comes from recognizing that, yet again, humans are way too full of themselves and are not as unique as they think they are.

If they weren't on the public grid, they would just slap in a bunch of gas turbines and run one of the noisier, more polluting sources of electricity. I think it would be better if we required them to replace the power they used, but do so on the grid so that it benefits everyone.

I think it's time to put data centers on a power budget. If they want to make more money, they need to become more efficient and eliminate AI fraud, waste, and abuse.

A corporation is a separate entity. They hire people to work for them, but any liabilities incurred by the Corporation are rarely passed through to the workers. If you pay attention, it's more likely for a worker to go to jail or be held responsible for a screw-up by the legal system than one of the suits at the top.

I used to think that until I did a little digging into it. Specifically, corporations are considered legal persons because they are separate legal entities, thereby creating a wall between your personal affairs and your business. It protects your personal assets from any liabilities, debts, or lawsuits.

Also, since it's a separate entity, its lifetime is not tied to the owner. So if the owner dies, their shares are inherited by somebody else, and the company keeps operating.

It helps in raising money for business operations. A corporation raises capital by issuing and selling shares of stock. However, if a physical person did that, I think it would be called indentured servitude.

If corporations can be people, there is no reason why AI can't be considered a person.

Here in the states, putting Romex in conduit is considered a code violation. You're supposed to use THHN wire in a conduit.

I wish professional electricians use pigtails and wago lever nuts instead of wire nuts. Working an old house, I've had to cut way too many wires almost too short just to add another neutral or ground.

I have seen some homeowners who shouldn't own a screwdriver or a hammer try to do minor electrical work. It was not pretty.

I've often thought that it would make sense to have a DIY electrician's certificate, proving that you know how to do basic home wiring, such as outlets, switches, ceiling lamps, basic solar (DC and AC), installing new wire, load calculations, and connecting to breakers in a service panel

I have no problems pulling a permit and going through an electrical inspection.

I agree with you on closing the loophole. However, I would count any money taken through this loophole as income. Another limit I would remove is the current limit on Social Security/medicare taxes. It doesn't matter how much you make; you should pay that tax.

I believe you're blending two important points. First, I believe AI systems may be showing nascent signs of consciousness as an emergent property, but based on the philosophy of "fake it till you make it", I think that's the way to bet. I'm also not going to go so far as to say it's going to happen Real Soon Now, but I think it'll happen sometime. Sort of like practical Fusion being 20 years away.

Second, I'm with you on the malfeasance of our billionaire class. They are driving more than just AI. They are driving whatever they can to steal wealth from ordinary people and acquire it. I'd give some examples, but quite frankly, you could throw a small stone and hit a number of them. We need to find a way to throw a large stone and hit them where it matters.

I see them as a bunch of toddlers with way too much power.

That's called "theft". In a free market, transactions are mutually agreed upon. Equal wealth for equal wealth.

It's also called a Transaction with asymmetric information, or being in a position in an economic system where you cannot accumulate assets because the system is stacked against you.

I also think you're confusing wealth with value. Wealth is what you have; value is what you have is worth. You may have 50 billion in stock, but its value is what you can get away with Borrowing, spending, and dying.

Your statement presumes that "value" is some construct independent of the market. The only "value" in commerce is what someone is willing to pay for it. There is no other useful definition of value.

But it is independent of the market. A company's stock is worth all of its assets divided by the number of shares. Anything else, such as anticipation of future earnings or expected losses, is a projection into the future. They don't exist until that moment arrives when the numbers have changed.

I learned a long time ago that the money's not real until the customer's check clears. We should be applying the same logic to valuing stocks and other financial instruments.

As for how wealth is created, I buy a canvas and some paint for $50, and paint a masterpiece that Ritchie Rich buys from me for $10,000. I created that wealth. Taylor Swift figured out how to turn her song skillz into a billion dollars. She created that wealth. Musk figured out how to turn hunks of metal into rockets that are quite profitable. He created that wealth. And so on.

Elon Musk learned how to scam investors by selling them fantasies, projections, and wishes to raise money. But here's another way to create wealth. You ask for a loan. I give you the money and charge you interest. I did nothing, I made nothing, I just put an entry in a ledger, and all of a sudden, poof, wealth has appeared.

Now that is a complex topic. But I'll make a simple take on it. When there is more cash than things to buy, then the value of the cash diminishes. We call that "inflation". Wealth creation does not cause inflation.

When too much money is chasing too few assets, and there is anxiety about the future, asset prices rise independent of fundamentals. Traders make increasingly poor decisions and take riskier bets to increase their portfolios' value. I've heard finance people describe this as the PE ratio as too high.

As for private equity, nobody is making you invest in it.

If you have a pension, pension funds are one of the bigger investors in private equity, and you have no choice but to ride along with the fund's choices. The private equity industry is drooling at the thought of making a similar forced choice regarding employee 401 (k) plans.

I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

There are numerous times when humanity's been debased. Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and the infinite number of animal behaviorists who have defined and documented consciousness And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects. (I just love the bumble bees taking time off from work to play with balls).

It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special as they thought they were And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?