> When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction".
This is an excellent frame to think about this. When we look at the increasing financialization of consumer spending (subscriptions, buy now pay later, rebates, club discounts, etc.), we can think of it as disguising value extraction as value creation.
I have to wonder, too, if this partially describes why "Make America Great Again" has been such an effective slogan. The greatness that most Americans long to return to is a time where a larger middle class was able to more easily pay for health care, housing, and other needs.
In the United States, stochastic terrorism is neither a statutory offense nor a term of art in criminal codes; it is an analytic label used in scholarship and practitioner writing to describe probabilistic risks of violence linked to rhetoric. Recent legal and critical surveys stress that usage is heterogeneous and contested, and that the concept's value lies in describing a structure of communication and harm rather than in supplying a justiciable element test.[7]
By contrast, U.S. incitement law is anchored in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which protects advocacy short of speech that is intended to produce imminent lawless action and likely to do so. Stochastic accounts often concern non-directive, cumulative rhetoric whose effects materialize unpredictably, making the Brandenburg imminence and likelihood prongs difficult to satisfy absent clear exhortation.[2]
The goal of those pushing the “stochastic terrorism” scam has always been either outright criminalization of the speech or (at a minimum) public-private coordinated suppression of the speech. Don’t fall for it.
I know I feel enervated by the videos I see from MN. More and more by at the speed of my scrolling.
And, video instances depict the behaviors of agents who, in the moment of encounter, are able to rapidly escalate situations.
I would argue the latter is agents learning tricks and shortcuts from other agents on how to dominate. The more unrestricted and unaccountable they are, the more individuals are emboldened to learn and strive for the approbation of their superiors. They have a quota.
It’s unsettling to think that humanity has lost knowledge it once had, but it happens all the time. Anyone here know how to harness a horse to a buggy?
Speaking as someone who lives near Amish country, with friends who enjoy carriage racing... Yes, lots of people do.
It's not certain that much knowledge has been lost, although much of it is in "endangered" status of preservation. There's a kind of silk netting made from the hairlike tufts of a certain species of clams, only practiced by two people IIRC.
Some lost knowledge is being rediscovered. A well-known example is making Damascus steel; it's now so ordinary you can order it online.
What? We build skyscrapers and supersonic jets and computer chips with nanometer precision now. We haven't "lost" anything. This is just blind worship to some ancient, primitive knowledge that never existed. The past 10,000 years has just been normal people living normal lives.
And, yes, I feel confident that with a few weeks, a rope, and a really good reason - almost any American could strap a horse to a buggy. It's not rocket science and countless humans have done it before.
I think your take makes sense. Thanks for laying it out. I worry about the containment aspects of this. Sure, the capex for this is coming off corporate balance sheets, but a bad event could wipe away a lot of stock market value, which would trigger a deep recession given that AI spending is really the only thing keeping our economy afloat at the moment. It feels like we’re in a doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t moment. I see breadlines in our future whether or not we achieve AGI. The only question is whether or not we’ll have to deal with some added existential risk.
I came here with a similar thought. Given that we don't have a really precise definition of that transition from living to dead, I wonder if this could be it.
Some parts of the dead mice still emit in that spectrum. There won't be a clear and distinct "the lights went out" moment but a gradual fading, so you'll have to define some threshold to translate from radiation distribution and intensity do dead/alive. I don't think an image of photon emission will help pronounce someone dead.
This is an excellent frame to think about this. When we look at the increasing financialization of consumer spending (subscriptions, buy now pay later, rebates, club discounts, etc.), we can think of it as disguising value extraction as value creation.