But there’s almost always a small seed of truth they build the crazy off of. Like how every pearl starts as a tiny piece of sand.

This reminds me a lot of chiropractic medicine; there is a core of validity too it, but many modern practitioners have hidden it deep inside a boulder of manure.

At first I was concerned about these huge tech companies stealing all of human knowledge and using it to make a fortune and drive everyone that created the knowledge into poverty.

Now I see that they are stealing all of human knowledge to make LLMs, giant digital babbling talkers. It can’t work how they want the way they’re doing it, so it doesn’t matter what data they consume. They seem to lose money on every LLM query, even if you’re paying for the highest tier.

When they stop subsidizing the cost to cash in, the already lukewarm interest in LLMs will cool further as costs rise.

Shower response: I don’t like that they’re gobbling my data, but at least they’re choking on it.

Its true that there’s no way to enforce a law like that directly, and I don’t think that I agree with the requirement to carry documents at all times, same as you.

There is some use for laws that are not directly enforceable, though, just not in this case. For example, a government may reasonably want to limit citizens’ ability to operate a vehicle carrying a hazardous chemical. They may not be able to justly stop him and check for things with no reason, but if that is discovered because he got in a wreck, they can then punish the illegal transport crime.

I know its often repressive or at least unhelpful to make laws that aren’t directly enforceable, but there is some room for them. It is important to disallow legal overreach of law enforcement trampling civil liberties trying to enforce those laws like you pointed out, though. That’s something that my country (USA) unfortunately has a checkered history with, as have a lot of others.

ETA: To be clear, making it illegal for a person to not physically have something at all times seems patently absurd, regardless of how loosely enforced. All of the reasonable requirements of being a legal resident are met by simply being registered with the government of the country you are visiting.

I can understand why some would think that, as I once did.

Physical therapy is similar in that it matters very little why you have pain. You can improve or eliminate the symptom by appropriately exercising the affected areas.

Similarly, the behavioral treatments can take advantage of all humans’ natural adaptability to teach them to model and normalize more socially healthy behaviors.

I’m totally out of my depth in these fields but I have been convinced through firsthand experience via physical therapy. I’m sure it is not a catch all solution to just attack the symptoms, but it does have positive observable results and it therefore seems at least noteworthy.

I like it even better than “kiss my ass”! It often strongly insinuates that the writer thinks that all the respect that is due is none.

The people that were societally oppressed in the USA during the middle class boom were in their bad situation due to other societal ills, not the taxation structure.

I’m not saying that the entirety of US policy was good then. Clearly there were many societal ills, including widespread gender and racial discrimination in housing and hiring, terrible literacy rates and targeted violence against ethnic minorities in the rural south that persist to this day, and religious bigotry was widely accepted. The economic structure, though, successfully allowed for personal wealth while limiting it, and created an undeniably huge middle class. The fact that many citizens didn’t get to participate in it was due to those other non-economic social problems freezing them out.

Also, mid-20th century USA is a single example of a system that was brought up to illustrate the point that there were more than the false dichotomy of choices presented. Surely there are way more ideas out there than status quo or status quo + UBI.

UBI has no precedent for working, and I, some rando online, have already identified a potentially disastrous problem that undermines it that I’ve never heard any convincing solutions for.

I love gaming out problems and solutions, but it is important not to fall in love with our ideas. Getting upset when holes are poked in them or ignoring these weaknesses aren’t going to prevent our opponents from exploiting them. If a plan has intractable problems, there is no shame in making new plans that may avoid those problems.

I don’t think there is any reason to think that those are the choices we will actually end up with. Those are just the choices being presented. I believe there are are other choices available that don’t involve me having to trust a band of thieves that have done nothing but show me they can’t be trusted at every opportunity, but they don’t want to present those choices because they would result in them having a lower concentration of wealth and power.

For example, in the USA where I am from, we once had a hybrid capitalist model with a graduated taxation system that essentially limited the maximum individual wealth by taxing all earnings over a certain amount at near 100%, making it functionally impossible to accumulate much more wealth than that. This resulted in wealthy individuals and businesses reinvesting their excess profits in themselves, their people, and their communities because they would not get to keep those profits anyway. That then created one of the most robust economies and largest per-capita middle classes in the planet’s history.

This is something that we already know for a fact will work because we have already tested it, and it is but one of probably thousands of possible economic models not being presented to the public.

Reimplementing that system or many of the other ones that don’t involve giving the thieves all the money and trusting them to divvy it up fairly are less likely to go wrong. We then need to make sure they are more resistant to being dismantled than previous systems were, so they don’t get destroyed like those were.

Taxes are redistribution of the capital of the general populace of the governed area. UBI is different in that it proposes a special tax only on the capital class where wealth is concentrated, which is then used to supplement the incomes of the general populace, with the most future-utopian thinkers envisioning UBI replacing income and work entirely some day in a super-automated future.

The point of great concern to me is that people bought in to the idea will not resist the ownership class’ attempts to consolidate resources and capital into fewer and fewer hands, because they believe those are stepping stones on the path to UBI. Then, when the capital class has got all the resources and control all the production, what force on Earth can make sure they follow through on the redistribution?

That last question is rhetorical. If someone’s got all the money, food, and weapons, there is no such force on Earth.

Edit to add another note: Observe how the capital class already actively seeks to avoid taxation at every turn, and are typically successful. I believe a government to successfully implement UBI, it would have to be somehow completely free of corruption from moneyed lobbying.

Be careful what you wish for. UBI assumes a small group in power will, while having all the resources in their hands, fairly distribute them to everyone and never use them as a bargaining chip to force our compliance with whatever actions they’re trying to take.

The whole UBI idea seems like a trap for the general public to accept the notion that it inevitable that a small oligarchic group must have all the resources consolidated to them, to stop us from working towards a true egalitarian economy.

There is no time I am aware of in history where a large group in power distributed vast resources to the community without being compelled to do so by threat of force.

He also had to write* it.

*alternative spelling

When pressed for further detail, Hegseth added, “It’s not Opposite Day!” (probably)

I’m sure some of them are pieholes.

It didn’t seem at all like an argument to me or an attempt by the OP to persuade anyone of anything. I read it as a description of their thought process as to how they arrived at the conclusions they did in their own life.

While some might find that enlightening if open to it or threatening if they disagree, it didn’t strike me as an attempt to talk me into their (non)religion.

Based on his description, it doesn’t have to have an interaction. But, if it doesn’t interact with the material world at all, then there could be no connection or interaction at all between a body and a spirit. That means that you could not ever see or feel spirits in any capacity, and a physical human could not have a soul “attached” to it or associated with it in any way, even if the soul did exist.

If there were no interaction at all, it could never be detected and might as well not exist to us. If there were an interaction, you would expect to be able to detect evidence of it or at least one of its side-effects to indicate that something is there.

He is not saying that we’re so awesome that we surely would see something if it was there, mind you. He’s saying that what we can see already pretty well covers what is happening, so any other phenomena we want to say are happening are not detectable by any means yet devised and our world model works without the need for an outside unknown variable like spirits or souls to make the math add up.

Philosophically speaking, a phenomenon that is completely undetectable and does not influence or interact with anything in any way can be argued to be not happening, full stop. Things in this category fall into the realm of belief/faith, because that’s the only realm things that can’t be measured can exist in.

It will take at least until they take a wholly different approach to “AI”. Until they make something that has some concept of what it is saying, you’ll continue to get things much like you get today–a probability-based response that amounts to a series of symbols it thinks are a good reply to the series of symbols you entered. It has no way to validate itself nor even a concept of validation of output, so its validity will always be in question and the complexity of what it can do limited.