Agree. In the US in particular congress is by far the worst of the three federal branches. Most long term, strategic problems are due to their inaction whether taxes, current account deficits, operationally effective border control, gun laws. Even abortion: it was undone in the judicial branch but the same coterire of supporters know bans will never succeed as as an amendment .. so that's left in the air too without even the attempt to count votes publicly ... that's how chicken they are now that they've caught the bus.
Like a floundering company, the US congress spends most of its time in these modalities:
- trying to convince you they're not part of the DC establishment
- Fund raising off cultural divisions, and exasperation of same for the same goal
- blaming the other side
- blaming congress' culture as polarized hence can't get anything done
- US electorate laboring under the delusion that changing the president is a solution -- maybe helpful at the margins -- but fundamentally unable to permanently circumvent law.
- the far left and right are equally culpable in culture fights while the right is more criminally culpable in how it uses its agency.
And that's exactly right: we're sick of it.
In a floundering company with no product, poor quality control, cost overruns, disdain from existing customers, and non existent cross functional coordination
the first thing upper management must do is fire the people unwilling to stop whining, blaming, and take responsibility.
The focus must emphasize customer satisfaction through quality of service/product. In short the BS had to stop. Second focus must emphasize cross functional coordination. In-fighting is a fireable offense. No complicated product is made by one team. It takes coordination.
(I can name any number of examples from books to personal experience where this was done in US corporate history to get people to understand the old way is out).
Right now the US congress far left and right like the BS; it serves their goals. The middle 4 std deviations over the center stand around with their head down, hands in pockets, hoping nobody notices them. It's institutional incompetence.
In the world of belief systems untied to natural law and empiricism, even the Bible reminds: faith (beliefs) without works is nothing but cheap symbolism.
The problem is that the number one job of every politician is getting elected. Politicians have discovered that by refusing to rock the vote and shaking some hands they can consistently win as incumbents. That means that there is little incentive for them to actually pass laws. Combine that with the filibuster which is an easy excuse for why they never pass laws and we arrive at the current situation where no matter who you elect they cant pass any laws.
They realized they could use the government to protect their interests. After years of praising open-source, they also realized that they don't really like competition. Queue up Peter Thiel's Zero to One and his praising of monopolies.
Cf. with the posture that OpenAI is taking towards government and government regulation.
When Sam Altman went to congress, his message was that AI is dangerous, and therefore the government should regulate it. When asked how smart AI had to be before it should be regulated, he said that AI which is sufficiently advanced to be able to persuade people is dangerous--we don't want bad players and their machines influencing elections, do we?
This is beautiful. It looks like a very nice, bright line the government can use to help it decide what the regulations should be. And how very public spirited--statesmanlike, even--of Sam Altman to ask for government regulation of his own company.
But it achieves two very important goals for OpenAI:
1. Every time you use ChatGPT you want it to persuade you! If you didn't want it to change your opinions about something, you wouldn't have asked it a question. Therefore, the government regulations will apply to any OpenAI competitor.
Anybody competing with OpenAI already faces huge barriers to entry. But he just made it even harder. Competitors, by law, will have to hire a phalanx of lawyers and compliance officers, whose full time job will be to make programmers jobs harder.
2. The more we are talking about regulating dangerous AI, the LESS we are talking about the fact that OpenAI just stole the IP of virtually everybody who has ever copywritten anything!
To the point that we don't talk about it any more at all. Sam Altman has accumulated all of the IP of the information age, for free, and is now in a position to sell it back to us.
It's a paradigm example of how corporations should lobby governments. Business schools and law schools will be doing case studies of this until the end of time.
Those tax dollars go back to California and country. Amazon does everything in its power to not pay taxes or help society. It really shows little Amazon is taxed at, if at all.
I don't see how it's anti-Chinese, if anything China is being pretty proactive for banning iPhones in secure environments. They all run closed-source software made by a PRISM-connected company in a FIVE-EYES nation. It should probably be the first thing to go when you're searching for wide-open gaps that foreign intelligence could/would abuse.
You are mistaken. Reagan's tax cuts, which included cuts for the lower class, decreased tax revenue and put more money in the average person's pockets.
Presidents after Reagan started to pillage the lower and middle class for more tax revenue. Notably George H.W. [1]
Taking what you say as accurate and complete just for the sake of argument, those tax cuts also meant that people had a greater non-tax financial burden. They also had adverse social consequences that increased costs for everybody.
The wealthy certainly did get great gains out of it, but it was at the expense of the non-wealthy because the tax cut they received was tiny and didn't offset the increased expenses.
> Only thing to truly stop it is by having in-person interviews like we used to do pre-COVID.
The AI-connected-earpiece approach DoNotPay planned to use for their “robot lawyer” thing before they attracted attention for unlicensed practice of law could, in principal, still work for that.
I can't dispute this, but since you shared an anectdote I will also. I haven't seen this in any of the communities I visit personally. Do you mean bot accounts which are passing themselves off as real people and karma farming? Or bots that self identify as such to fill a legit need?
not out to defend reddit here, it also feels to be going donwhill to me, but this is not something I've personally experienced on the site yet
