I feel like if Musk’s company is found guilty, it can’t just be “okay pay a little fine”. It needs to be like, “Undo the damage you did, and also pay a fine to help people deal with the damage.” And if it’s impossible for them to fix the damage they did, they can get fucked. We put people in jail for decades for smoking weed, we can put some corporate grade polluters in a cell.

will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?

Seems unlikely.

As to your broader point about the tools themselves not being bad, the root problem remains capitalism, or “a few people have unaccountable power over many”

People should keep right except to pass, typically.

Over short distances, the difference between going 40 and 30 or even 20 are miniscule. I’ve still had people lose their shit when I wouldn’t blaze through a school zone. Just chill out bro, the fast food will be there all day.

But I live somewhere I don’t need to drive anymore, and I’m happy with it.

I feel like the current AI stuff has been net negative. It prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, but then didn’t produce quality results.

Adams is trash.

I hope zohran wins the election.

I haven’t! Seems similar to Falling Down

A friend and I were talking about what’s wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren’t any consequences for minor infractions. We’re all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.

Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like “I should follow the rules” or even “I should do what’s good for society.” But many people chill out at the toddler level of “I don’t want to be punished.” So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they’re doing just fine.

But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I’m not going to call the cops. They wouldn’t even come, for one thing, but I also don’t want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.

I don’t know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local “guardian angel” volunteers that patrol and “Deal with” people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don’t have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than “you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole.”

Ownership will abuse labor as much as it can. Sometimes to make more profit. Sometimes for murkier reasons. I think some management are just stupid and they’d hurt the company to follow their unfounded feelings.

Labor should organize.

I read the headline as Australia was arming their journalists and I was confused by the escalation.

There was a post recently saying the total sum of wage theft, including conventional theft and the results of suppressed wages, totals to like $50 trillion over the past few decades.

Shit’s bad. But other than the rich, people in the US have like no class consciousness.

On the one hand, yes. On the other, I don’t want them to stick around doing evil for a long time. Maybe something immediately debilitating that takes a long time to finish?

Classic RPG. My half orc “beat with an ugly stick” master of time magick and backstab lives on fondly in my memory.

Also my extremely pretty elf, also a master of time magick.

Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar’s number? The monkeysphere? It’s hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they’re more removed from us.

Like you probably don’t really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you’d be more careful. Wouldn’t want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.

That’s fine. That’s all of us.

But I think there’s degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.

Somewhere between those two points I think is “I’m going to build software to spy on people”. Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of “I don’t want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don’t know”.

This post is getting long. I think you’re right that it’s not as simple as “doesn’t care about other people” but I think that’s a factor.

this is a question I often want to ask the pearl clutchers.

I think some of them don’t have an answer because they actually support the regime, and they’re going hard on “non violence” because they don’t want people to fight back

Some probably haven’t thought it through, and don’t have an answer.

Some probably have an answer that’s a variation of “too late”. You know, after they came for the unionists, the jews, the catholics, the mexicans, and there’s no one left to stand with them.

You know how scam emails intentionally include mistakes because they want to filter out smart people? Same idea.

Reasonably smart people will see this and go “this is garbage”. The idiots will go deeper, and become loyal gop voters.

He was a pretty smart guy, so I’m pretty sure he understood the ramifications. This isn’t like a plumber working in a building that happens to house an evil company. This was directly working as a high ranking software developer at a shitty software company.

Palantir is pretty awful. I knew a guy who took a job there, a bunch of years ago. When he said where he was going, I asked “But what if they work on something really shitty? Like spying on people?”. He was like, “Meh”, with a big shrug.

He was friendly and kind to the people around him, but I guess he just didn’t care about anyone he didn’t know personally right now.

I feel like most of my friends follow the news, but I bet you’re right that most people are just in a haze of screaming cucumbers.

I’ve already posted this a few times, but Ed Zitron wrote a long article about what he calls “Business Idiots”. Basically, people in decision making positions who are out of touch with their users and their products. They make bad decisions, and that’s a big factor in why everything kind of sucks now.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/ (it’s long)

I think a lot of us have this illusion that higher ranking people are smarter, more visionary, or whatever. But I think no. I think a lot of people are just kind of stupid, surrounded by other stupid people, cushioned from real, personal, consequences. On top of that, for many enterprises, the incentives don’t line up with the users. At least wikipedia isn’t profit driven, but you can probably think of some things you’ve used that got more annoying with updates. Like google putting more ads up top, or any website that does a redesign that yields more ad space, worse navigation.

Someone posted the other day something like “A stupid person is someone who creates net negative gains. For example, they hurt themselves and others, and gain nothing from it.”