BraveSirZaphod

This behavior is literally millennia older than capitalism.

This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don’t usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

Flying is also dramatically cheaper and more accessible today than it used to be.

If you want the fancy treatment from back then, pay the prices people paid back then and buy first class.

Info that is publically broadcast, that technically must be publically broadcast, that isn’t necessarily personally identifiable, and is only linked to a user-chosen pseudonym probably isn’t going to be found to have much of a right to privacy.

I kinda touched on that under coincidence, which is admittedly stretching it a bit, but I also think “universals” is a bit of an overly strong name for the phenomenon.

But it is true that there are some underlying elements of human biology and psychology that can cause some interesting effects as well, though I think people have a tendency to exaggerate them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

This is a pretty classic example of it.

To expand on this, in linguistics, when you notice a similarity between two words, there are three main possibilities.

1. Common ancestry. The English word “house” and the German word “Haus” are obviously similar, and this is because they both descend from Proto-West-Germanic, with the source word being something like hūs around 1700 years ago or so.
2. Borrowing. The English word “chef” is a direct loan from French “chef”. It’s pretty common for the borrowed word to specialize its meaning somewhat. French “chef” merely means “boss”, while English “chef” specifically means “boss of a kitchen” (who’s probably from France because no one wants to eat English cooking).
3. Pure coincidence. This dog example is the classic one, but it really does happen, and not exactly infrequently. There are only so many sounds in human language, and across all languages, you’re bound to get some random collisions. There is the special case where both words originate from a phenomenon like onomatopoeia or infant language ability (think mama, papa, etc).

The first two are fun because they’re evidence of some kind of historical connection, which can sometimes stretch back further than the historical record. Sanskrit in India having a lot of similarities to Greek and Latin is the classical example there (and controversial if you’re a Hindu nationalist). Coincidence can be disappointing when you think you’ve discovered some exciting historical connection, but the dangerous bias that has to be kept in mind is that generally, if you’re looking for something, you will find it.

They are literally self-professed radical communists.

And like, more power to them, but they’ll be the first to tell you that they are proud extremists

I’m not going to engage with a response that’s completely lacking in any semblance of good faith.

Sure, but if the knife enthusiasts group is also promoting to you a “Slashing Children With Knives Enthusiasts” group, I think it’s worth criticizing.

And it is absolutely worth hiding from people who want to use it if the group in question is hosting pedophilia.

Speaking as a gay guy, there is an astroturf effort from the alt-right to try to paint the LGBT community as being so “inclusive” as to also include literal pedophiles, as if it’s just another sexuality or kink, and I’d rather prefer to nip that squarely in the bud by drawing a very hard line.

There is a practical difference in the time required and sheer scale of output in the AI context that makes a very material difference on the actual societal impact, so it’s not unreasonable to consider treating it differently.

Set up a lemonade stand on a random street corner and you’ll probably be left alone unless you have a particularly Karen-dominated municipal government. Try to set up a thousand lemonade stands in every American city, and you’re probably going to start to attract some negative attention. The scale of an activity is a relevant factor in how society views it.

You can believe whatever you like. The companies that disagree have no obligation to service you. Go find services that don’t require phone numbers if this is important to you; they do exist.

Not really, no. Freedom of speech is very strongly ingrained in our Constitution. The only legal restrictions on it are essentially direct threats or incitement of violence.

“Go kill this Jew” - Absolutely illegal.

“Go kill the Jews” - Illegal

“The Jews should be killed” - Borderline based on circumstances

“The Jews deserve to die” - Borderline, but probably protected by the Constitution

“The Jews deserved the Holocaust” - Almost certainly protected by the Constitution

Honestly, I would love to see a Wikipedia-style social media platform take off, but I really don’t know if the finances could work out. Wikipedia already struggles, and it’s obscenely useful. I don’t think nationalization is really feasible for social media - at least in an American context - because it would be subject to the government’s legal limitations on regulating free speech, which are extremely minimal. A federally run platform would not be able to remove literal unironic Nazism, which is probably going to be a bit of a turn-off to normal people.

Genuine question: given that running a platform like that costs money, and that money must come from somewhere, what would you actually do if you were in charge of running it? You either take money from advertisers, or you charge users directly, and I’d hazard to guess that if you’d nuke your account upon seeing ads, you probably wouldn’t pay actual money to use it.

So what do you do?

Wage growth in the US has been most pronounced in the lower end of the market. Growth-oriented businesses like tech are a lot more sensitive to interest rate spikes, since their entire model is to borrow a ton of money to pay highly skilled workers a lot to “disrupt” an industry and achieve very rapid growth.

That isn’t necessarily contradictory with still struggling, since inflation exists. If you suddenly make 10% more money but everything costs 10% more as well, you are objectively making record wages, even though your buying power remains the same. Per that report, inflation-adjusted wages have actually grown on the lower end of the job market, so the average low-wage worker’s buying power has actually increased, but general statistics don’t always translate over to real-life experience super cleanly, and of course, a slight improvement from a bad financial situation doesn’t suddenly put you in a good situation.

so why not just lower the profit margins?

Probably for the same reason you don’t casually decide to go to your boss and say that you voluntarily want a pay cut.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages

Average hourly wage at the start of 2020 was $24. It’s now $29, which comes to about $10,000 more each year, and is an increase of about 21%. That growth has been concentrated in the service industry, but the data is pretty clear regardless, and the general trend applies to basically all sectors. Inflation in that same time period is 18.1%, so it simply is a matter of fact that the average worker has greater buying power today than they did in January 2020.

That’s an average, of course, and may not necessarily apply to you individually.

Inflation drives all the numbers up. If money inflates to half the value but you maintain the same profit margins, you’ll make record profits despite the finances having functionally remained exactly the same.

Workers are also making record wages. It doesn’t mean much if you don’t consider how much the money is actually worth, as we’ve all been discovering over the last few years.

Okay, this is an honest question.

Why do you care? How does it matter at all to you what apps your friends use? How does it affect you?

I can totally understand people valuing their privacy strongly and refusing to use mainstream corporate social media. I can also understand people who don’t care about that and decide that they get more out of it than they give.

Given that people posting on a social network that you’re not on has essentially no effect on you at all beyond a vague bit of FOMO, why does it matter?