You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated profit to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:
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I think that most of the right's defense of monopolies stems from cynical, bad-faith rationalizations - but there are people who've absorbed these rationalizations and find them superficially plausible. It's worth developing these critiques, for their sake.
@pluralistic In regards to "The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit" I can only say WTF? Boston Dynamics had created human like (and dog like) robots, and they work.
As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes - like space colonization - have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.
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Residents of 21 cities in Utah have access to some of the fastest, most competitively priced broadband in the US, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/month. It's uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading and downloading. And it's all thanks to the government.
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Geometry hates Tesla, and physics hates Starlink. Reality has a leftist bias. The future is fiber, and public transit. These are both vastly preferable, more efficient, safer, more reliable and more plausible than satellite and private vehicles. Their only disadvantage is that they fail to give an easily gulled, thin-skinned compulsive liar more power over billions of people. That's a disadvantage I can live with.
@pluralistic That is some really good alt text for the modified Utopia cover. The blog was slow to load the image and it made me look twice for the beehive and lit optical fiber spray.
@pluralistic When I was a schoolkid, Honeywell had a stand at the local show/fair with a female appearing robot (actually a woman in a shiny bodysuit). The imposture was revealed after the show was over. Plus ca change
The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" - instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:
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Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.
Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:
When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own:
@pluralistic The cup was too thin, the lid didn’t fit, and she was scalded terribly and it took more than 3 surgeries to repair the resulting wounds. McD’s had cups so thin that when they handed them to you, they pinched and their lids fell off. I remember those.
When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.
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That's illegal in nearly every other kind of labor market. But if we're willing to entertain the possibility of getting a new copyright law passed (that won't make artists better off), why not the possibility of passing a new labor law (that will)? Sure, our bosses won't lobby alongside of us for more labor protection, the way they would for more copyright (think for a moment about what that says about who benefits from copyright versus labor law expansion).
But all workers benefit from expanded labor protection. Rather than going to Congress alongside our bosses from the studios and labels and publishers to demand more copyright, we could go to Congress alongside every kind of worker, from fast-food cashiers to publishing assistants to truck drivers to demand the right to sectoral bargaining. That's a hell of a coalition.