> hasn’t been amended in any meaningful way since 1971
Already inserting subjectivity into the discussion to support it's premise. I'm not going to like this article.
> It’s always been hard to amend the Constitution. But, in the past half century, it’s become much harder
Yes, systems find stability, turbulence finds a local minima. Of course a lot more happened early on than later, if you expect a flat, linear, normal distribution of changes to something over time you don't know enough about what you're talking about to be talking about it.
Maybe the constitution has lasted 200 years precisely because it is hard to modify. A constitution should be harder to change than just passing any old piece of legislation. If it's just as easy as passing any law it's not a constitution, just another law.
If you think it's hard to amend the constitution, just wait until a constitutional convention convenes in DC in the next 5-10 years, we are almost there, something that hasn't happened since the Continental Congress, it's going to happen soon and it's going to be very interesting. I hope they ratify the equal apportionment amendment.
A state has an asset. They can assess the population of a certain animal, assess its growth rate, assess the impact it can have, both to human populations and to the ecosystem, and determine how many need to be culled each year to prevent negative impacts.
Now it has a choice. It can get people to pay to do it for them, or of can tax you and pay someone to do it. They can consider the animals assets or liabilities.
A government that would turn something very valuable from a source of revenue to an expense is an incompetent government full of bumbling idiots that have no business governing a territory of natural resources or a population of human beings.
Its like fish bait. You set these feeders out to get them to hang around an area so that when you're ready to hunt you have an easier time finding them. Hunters don't feed anything near the amount of food mass needed to increase the wild population, this idea of an ecological imbalance due to feeding is wildly inaccurate, its like saying fishermen increase fish stocks with fish bait.
> this idea of an ecological imbalance due to feeding is wildly inaccurate
That is likely the case. General farming on behalf of human consumption is likely to be an order of magnitude greater impact on whatever "ecological imbalances" you care to measure.
Humans have been "imbalancing" ecologies thus for a long time.
XMPP/Jabber with OMEMO encryption, it runs on federating servers.
Session is a fork of signal that doesn't require phone numbers, there's some cryptocurrency something or other in there I don't quite get, but I don't believe you need it to send messages.
There's Tox, another p2p sort of thing.
Then there's threema, wire, and a bunch of others im not all that familiar with.
> Session is a fork of signal that doesn't require phone numbers, there's some cryptocurrency something or other in there I don't quite get, but I don't believe you need it to send messages.
This is not a fork of Signal. It was originally designed to use Signal protocol under the hood for encryption and key management but does not anymore[1]. They appear to be going a different direction now with the service using cryptocurrency nodes to route the service[2]
If you and everyone you talk to are hosted on servers you trust, down to the physical provider, yes.
EDIT: if the person you're talking to is hosted on Google, Google has all the metadata. Even if one person is hosted on Google and is part of a room you're in, Google has all the metadata in that room.
In 2022 e2ee is the standard for messages but not metadata, and unfortunately Matrix doesn't tackle it, so no, you can't expect 100% privacy.
But the backend of Signal doesn't store who talks to who, so Amazon can't have that information. It also doesn't store what groups exist and who is part of it.
Why do these people always frame a reduction in housing prices as a bad thing and a turnaround to upward price pressure as a good thing? This housing market has been crazy for over a decade and progressively so, a cool down is much needed and IMO the only way to avoid future collapse. A place to live and throw a ball around with your kids should not be out of reach for average people on an open market, prices are distorted and if the forces causing the distortion don't get fixed there will be a crisis.
I think it's a psychological quirk related to loss aversion[0]. Essentially, we view a house as belonging to the owner the moment the ink dries on the mortgage papers and losing a house is objectively a painful thing. Most people don't see the other side: people like me who never owned a home to begin with. I've likely missed out on 100's of thousands in gains by not buying homes with low fixed rates in 2008-2020, but nobody writes sob stories about that. The prevailing narrative is that all the gains from the crazy housing market belong (in some just sense) to the people who happened to buy at the right time.
> A place to live and throw a ball around with your kids should not be out of reach for average people on an open market, prices are distorted and if the forces causing the distortion don't get fixed there will be a crisis.
One of the major forces that causes inflation in the market for single family homes is the broadly held desire for "A place to live and throw a ball around with your kids".
This is especially the case in cities that saw huge price increases during the pandemic and now are seeing major price declines as demand dries up.
The medicine, however much it may be needed, is being delivered by making the very people who have the aforementioned desire less able to purchase because of higher rates. It will be a great opportunity for all or mostly-cash buyers, though.
It's a bit more complicated though, interest rates are part of that function too.
Low prices & low interest rates: great for new entries to homeownership, but would require a surplus of housing
Low prices & high interest rates: great for those who buy property with cash (wealthy people and corporations)
High prices & low interest rates: great for existing owners
High prices & high interest rates: generally bad for everyone except those able to offload existing housing thy own
It's because for many Americans their house is by far their largest asset. For some it's their only meaningful asset and basically is their net worth. A decline in housing prices is a decline in wealth.
Now I am not saying that is a good thing, quite the opposite. Many many problems stem from this reality. But that's where the fear comes from, and fear gets clicks and eyeballs.
It is because fear sells, frame it as a bad thing and you get more clicks, anyone else complaining about it being the fault of capitalism or blame it on the NIMBYs or whatever just have an axe to grind.
I agree on a personal level as someone hoping to buy a home at a reasonable price in the near future, but you have to remember that most of the wealth of middle America is in the form of real estate. Sure, it's good that we're undoing excess, but that process will be painful for the economy as wealth effects are removed. It is a bad thing in the short term, even if it is better in the long term.
Why? Isn't the distinction somewhat arbitrary? A lattice or scaffold is indistinguishable from a crysralling structure only due to it's scale, but when a large, rigid ststructure is built it functions on a larger scale as a sort of material.
Well of course they have useful applications in mind. But it does demonstrate something interesting: computation occurs naturally, on the "bare metal" of the universe, and systems can be built that perform computation that do not require an abstraction or purpose built computing device.
Replace pencil and paper with a camera then if it makes you happy, although I don't think the quality of the images make a single bit of difference.
Why should only the few have access to such a technology? Because some people will use it for naughty things? And that's what we are talking about here, about whether a minority should have permissioned access to a new technology, and particularly one that cannot directly actually cause physical harm. I can glean motivations surrounding all this from that observation alone.
The digital camera is still several orders of magnitude slower and more expensive to operate than DALL-E or SD.
Side note: if you're a materialist, you should believe that psychological harm is physical harm. It's obvious that being able to publish images of someone doing things they themselves find reprehensible could cause lots of trauma.
Well thankfully I'm not, but even if I were I think that's a bit of a stretch. A materialist acknowledging an effect he cannot quantify or directly observe is not much of a materialist.
I didn't say they shouldn't have access, re-read what I wrote. I was responding to the specific claim that AI-driven art generation is essentially the same as pencil drawing.
Your point about photography is also comparing apples and oranges. There are fundamental differences here down to scale and accessibility of techniques that means anyone will soon be able to deep fake anything instantly.
Fwiw, do I think this technology should be controlled by big tech? No way. Do I think this is Pandaora's box? Yes. If we don't reconcile the tricky tradeoffs between radical democratisation of this technology on the one hand vs heavy handed control on the other, we are in hot water. Tldr... it's complicated and it is not zero sum.
I think even the phrase "negative externalities" is overstating it. There's a big difference between "I push this button and now the woods behind my house are destroyed" and "I push this button and I have what looks like a photograph of some important person naked." Photo generating AIs are not a big deal IMO. We might be talking about these things more generally but I doubt we are talking about McNukes here.
The problem with extremely powerful forces (like new technologies) is that you can’t always predict what effects they’ll have.
This is doubly true with regard to technologies that seem not only powerful, not only adaptable to new domains, but also rapidly improving on both of those dimensions. I don’t know what is the right level or type of limitation, but there is nothing confusing or weird at all about wanting to be careful with such a technology.
If technology keeps advancing (it will), new developments will approach “looks kind of alarming” status faster and faster. This is because they will also approach “could destroy everything we know and love” status faster and faster.
At it's core, the argument for caution can be articulated as "utility and availability of this technology must be limited to incumbent actors in the industry for our protection" and that's very fishy. It's particularly fishy considering this technology cannot even so much as break a fingernail or cut a blade of grass. Is it consequential? Obviously or neither one of our arguments would exist. Does it have the potential to hurt people? Only if those people let it. To me it's overblown moral panic that's suspiciously convenient for the big players in the industry and software in general.
The scenario that worries people is less "photograph of some important person naked" and more "photograph of you naked". State of the art image tech is more than capable of allowing people to create convincing porn of their enemies (or creepy crushes). I don't know if that genie can be put back into the bottle, but it's hard to complain that researchers aren't interested in providing the genie as a service.
If someone wants to crank it to what amounts to a high tech doodle of me doing naughty things to myself I don't see how that's any of my business. There are people in the world how put real legit porn of themselves on the internet, I'm sure they'd find this fearmongering about fake pictures and videos of themselves on the internet laughable. It is the closest to inconsequential you can get, posting yellow pages information on twitter is far more damaging.
Already inserting subjectivity into the discussion to support it's premise. I'm not going to like this article.
> It’s always been hard to amend the Constitution. But, in the past half century, it’s become much harder
Yes, systems find stability, turbulence finds a local minima. Of course a lot more happened early on than later, if you expect a flat, linear, normal distribution of changes to something over time you don't know enough about what you're talking about to be talking about it.
Maybe the constitution has lasted 200 years precisely because it is hard to modify. A constitution should be harder to change than just passing any old piece of legislation. If it's just as easy as passing any law it's not a constitution, just another law.
If you think it's hard to amend the constitution, just wait until a constitutional convention convenes in DC in the next 5-10 years, we are almost there, something that hasn't happened since the Continental Congress, it's going to happen soon and it's going to be very interesting. I hope they ratify the equal apportionment amendment.