It’s so predictable too. Did someone do something indefensible and you don’t want to face up to it? Try blaming the victim today! Ask your propagandist if victim blaming is right for you.

The phrase “synthesised expert knowledge” is the problem here, because apparently you don’t understand that this machine has no meaningful ability to synthesise anything. It has zero fidelity.

You’re not exposing people to expert knowledge, you’re exposing them to expert-sounding words that cannot be made accurate. Sometimes they’re right by accident, but that is not the same thing as accuracy.

You confused what the LLM is doing for synthesis, which is something loads of people will do, and this will just lend more undue credibility to its bullshit.

Also, you’ll talk to me after it’s a solved problem? Why would I be interested in that? You have no interest in helping solve it now and I see no reason why you’d magically become useful after the fact.

If you can demonstrate that you even understood the concept of decentralised torrent-like hosting then I’ll pay attention to whatever else you had to say.

What are you talking about? I don’t think you understood the concept of decentralised torrent-like hosting.

I’m currently talking to a peertube hoster about server costs, which I may be able to justify to host my own videos plus a little extra to pitch in for others who can’t justify the expense. Plenty of professional creators could easily justify it as an exit strategy or backup for youtube.

These conversations are happening, just not with you, presumably because you’re just being negative about it and not actually doing something, so why would anyone bother to bring it up with you?

Take out the phone part and allow users to host videos in a decentralised way on their home computers and it’s a genuinely good idea though. I have a server running with plenty of storage and reasonable upload speed. I could easily dedicate a terabyte or so, as long as I’m not the sole hoster.

It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than dedicated hosting. The only issue is legal problems when someone is unknowingly hosting abuse material, which is something that happens from time to time on all services like this, and an individual could be done for distribution without the protection big centralised services have. You’d just have to hope mods are on top of it.

Actually something like a debrid service but for peertube might work. You can get huge amounts of storage for cheap because a lot of it is shared, you might ask them to host a huge torrent file, but most torrent files serve multiple users, so the cost is distributed. Peertube could work a similar way if it were more mainstream.

If the judge said it then it would have been established fact in the case. This can be established by evidence and found as fact in the case, or it can be part of the agreed facts of the case, in which case the court doesn’t waste time hearing evidence. All it takes to become agreed fact is for the defence to present it as part of their case and for the prosecution to not dispute it.

In that context the finding of fact by the court is more than enough for the paper to report on it, and the two versions presented by you of it being said by the defence and by the judge, are entirely compatible with one another. Nobody is going to demand to see the boy’s medical history to verify an uncontroversial point like this. That would just be a waste of time.

The papers presented it as stated by the defence and the judge, they said nothing false or misleading, and I don’t see any problem with that part of their reporting.

Now, if you have an issue that it was reported because it casts autistic people in a bad light, the issue becomes whether you think it’s something the papers should leave out. Well, the defence considered it important, and it became news. Not much we can do about that after the fact.

Federated communities that make decisions on consensus, with the fundamental rule that “those affected get to decide”.

There’s a lot more to it and there’s a lot to unpack in just the above paragraph, but if the only alternative you can imagine is a global military dictatorship then it’s hard to know where to even start explaining it to be quite honest.

With your username I’m not surprised you’re in cybersecurity lol.

And I never said all managers are bastards. I said that they act that way as a group.

Ultimately the incentive structure reinforces PMC workers who toe the company line. It could never be any other way in a capitalist framework. Yes, it’s possible for knowledge workers to operate outside capitalist organisations, but they are going to have a harder time with less money. The bulk of the work will always be done where the money is. You see this very clearly in FOSS circles - the work involves people who are either too tired from their 9 to 5 to put a lot of effort in, they’re the sort of person who can’t work in a capitalist org, or they’re paid by a capitalist org which will have certain demands on their work. The result is that FOSS tends to be rough around the edges which inherently reinforces the belief that only top-down capitalist structures can make polished software.

You’ll find knowledge workers in general are going to be hard to unionise. They are better compensated and privileged so they have more to lose, and they have to adopt the ideology of their bosses to some extent in order to reproduce it in their work. We’ve seen union action with actors and writers for a long time, and it seems to be bleeding over from them into the videogame space. I hope it will keep spilling over into other technical spaces, but I don’t think we can rely on that happening to fundamentally change the character of that class.

I thought I’d have to explain this part - the technical knowledge workers are also managerial, but in a more indirect way.

All three of the professions you listed make decisions about the function of the systems that workers use every day. They are responsible for taking the policy decisions that are made to serve the owning class, and giving those policies shape.

They literally design our environment, and as the Well There’s Your Problem podcast points out, engineering and other technical decisions are political. The preferences of the bosses are built into them.

I guess this is pretty unpopular though. I guess there are a lot of knowledge workers on this platform and they don’t like being compared to cops.

Sure, they are technically part of the working class, but they’re similar to cops. Cops aren’t the owning class, they take down a salary, but they’re also class traitors.

The middle class - aka professional managerial class - as a group fulfill a similar role of keeping the rest of the working class in line in exchange for certain privileges. They just use paychecks and memorandums rather than guns and laws.

Also like cops, they provide an ideological shield for capitalists. Cops are overtly the “thin blue line” between “order and chaos”. The middle class are a shield for aspirations. People are encouraged to identify as middle class so they think they have something to lose if they were to upset the status quo.

So it makes sense to identify this group, but too often it’s as a shield. Like the implication in this article that a housing crisis for the middle class is a huge problem, but who cares about the housing precarity that’s existed in the working class since its inception? Well one reason it would be a big problem for the ruling class is that they would lose their buffer. If it’s just lords and serfs and a sharp distinction between them, then overturning the whole thing is a lot easier to contemplate.

Thanks, I don’t think it’s worded quite right though, because “in exchange for” implies the vote itself does something. The reality is that people are convinced to give away their power because they believe in the piece of paper.

The oiece of paper itself is almost worthless.

I only say that because I’m sure someone will want to split hairs over it.

People are indoctrinated to believe that because votes are involved the process is somehow magically subject to meaningful reform and input from the masses.

A process where people were meaningfully enfranchised wouldn’t need to rely on something so abstract as votes. Voting is a process by which people are convinced to trade in their actual power in exchange for a piece of paper.

How the fuck did you read that as anything but a joke? Like seriously, how? What did you think I was saying with that comment?

EDIT: And just to be clear, I am an anarchist and I think it’s absurd that any state has the hubris to tell anyone that they’re not allowed to die. FOH.

There is no ethical suicide under capitalism.

(I know, you don’t believe my source)

That’s literally not what I said, I said something direct and specific, something you can read in the first paragraph of that source. I believed what they were saying and I repeated it to you. I read your source back to you and you misunderstood.

This is the problem - you clearly aren’t engaging in what’s being said. If you did so directly and specifically, then maybe you could get farther, but you dissolve things into nonspecific drivel, to the point it’s just either wrong or meaningless.

It’s like if I asked you, “What’s 2+2?” and you replied, “The nature of addition is involved in the very definition of numbers, which comes from set theory. Entire books have been written on this subject before we can even define the number 2 and I couldn’t possibly cover it all, it’s just so complicated.”

Like sure, maybe that’s all true, but motherfucker, what is 2+2? You go broad and vague and mysterious with things that sometimes have simple answers.

Maybe that’s why you feel it’s pointless having conversations online. I certainly don’t find that, but I try to stay focused on the points and deal with things directly, and when someone is wasting my time I tell them so and I disengage.

Again, you seemed responsive to what I was saying at first, but when you’re talking about the limits of the “speed of language” in response to a request for details, you are clearly looking for an out. I wouldn’t spend this much time talking about this with someone if I thought it was a waste of time. I’m making the effort to give you this feedback because you’ve shown the ability to be responsive and I don’t sense any ill-will. But if you find that “this always happens”, then maybe you need to take a good look at why, and what it is that you’re doing that might cause that.

“We” haven’t “reached the end of the useful period of conversation”, you have reached the end of your capacity or willingness to engage with what I’m saying, and I’ve laid out very clearly how you’re displaying that, and instead of engaging with the points, you fell back into passive-voiced vague notions about human working memory and the speed of language, drawing on sciency language to lend credibility to some absurd notion that nobody could possibly be expected have this conversation, but you just made that up.

We’re not at the limits of human mental capacity, you’re doing specific things that I’ve pointed out, with details, and instead of engaging with what I said in any specific way you’ve done more vague waffle that says nothing.

And if you didn’t even check what you were sending me, why are you so confident about everything you’re saying?

My sources gave very specific numbers -which I directly highlighted with quotes - about the state of the housing supply compared to the unhoused population that you completely ignored in favour of economic rationalism.

This is precisely the kind of thing orthodox economists do, and this is how economics students are taught to think. It’s a real shame, it looks like your critical thinking skills have been pretty badly sabotaged by miseducation. I’m sure you’re intelligent in many ways, but intelligence is domain specific, and if you don’t learn the kind of rigour it takes to think critically, then you won’t be able to.

Your link isn’t talking about actual housing supply, it is talking about affordability. If you think that addresses my point, you don’t understand what I’m saying. Like on a fundamental level, you don’t get it.

And you keep throwing up vague, unsourced opinions like:

Speculation happens, sure. I don’t buy that it drives things way out of equilibrium in the long run. As far as I can tell from a skim, neither do your sources.

Like, okay? You don’t buy it, but you’re not going to bother much more with it, you’re not going to make an argument, it’s your opinion so you can just handwave anything I say away. If you’re not convinced, fine, don’t be, but there’s literally nothing for me to respond to here.

This is incredibly frustrating. I don’t even know what your point is anymore, you seem to just be knee-jerk arguing with every point no matter how weak or irrelevant your response is, and you seem content to throw up smokescreens of details rather than actually engage with anything in a substantive manner.

You seemed responsive for most of this, so I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but this is going in circles and you’re not actually taking on board anything I’m saying. Just focus for a second, deal with the speculation thing. Make a point. If you can’t do that, I’m not going to keep giving you the benefit of the doubt.

It’s like reverse propaganda. They come into a comment section with this tone and just announce how utterly unhinged and disconnected from reality they are in their support of Russia.

Right, so the quantum field model is designed to solve the assymetry paradox, but it’s just unconfirmed speculation. It’s a hypothesis, barely a theory, not a law. It’s discussed honestly for the most part, unlike the way orthodox economics discusses supply & demand. Just because you can find something roughly analogous in a hard science doesn’t make the problem substantively the same.

And do you really think supply & demand isn’t taught as a law? We hear the phrase “the law of supply & demand” bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?

And you actually think housing speculation doesn’t happen on a wide scale? Like… what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you’re denying that housing speculation is real?

https://www.urban.com.au/expert-insights/property-speculation-to-continue-boom-but-will-a-bust-follow
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26457/w26457.pdf

The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble. I really don’t understand where you get off saying speculation isn’t a thing.

Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.

Here’s a quote that confirms what I just told you:

Even more disturbing are the figures comparing vacant homes to the homeless population of a given country. While Canada ranks lower on this list at 13, it is still not a ranking that we should be proud of at all. It would take just 9% of the over 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada to give every homeless person in the country a place to live.

Like sure, there might be a housing shortage in the market but not in reality. In reality it’s a hoarding problem. We know from the pandemic that governments could house everyone if they simply made it a policy priority, but they don’t.

And as for the “lab politics” of economics, I’m glad you’ve been able to see that issue, and I think that’s a good term for it. The lab politics doesn’t come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.

Social sciences are a little different, usually capital can kind of just ignore the policies proposed by social scientists, even if they can cause minor problems for them.

For economics though, when someone like Marx comes along and points out that capitalists are stealing value from the working class and that working class can unite to overthrow their oppressors because in reality those oppressors create nothing and they depend on us, then that has real teeth. That causes problems, of the revolutionary variety. The ruling class has to respond to that, so they will use their influence to fund think tanks, sponsor economics departments that are friendly to them and torpedo institutions that say things they don’t like.

Richard Wolff talks about this:

Sure. I’m a product of the elite top of the American university system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford in California to get my master’s degree. And then I went to Yale to get my Ph.D. So, by the normal standards of this profession, I’m the elite product of these institutions.

I was always struck that as I went through these schools, studying history, politics, economics, sociology—the things that intrigued me—I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx. And I remember telling that to my father, who looked in stunned disbelief at the very possibility that an educated person going to such august universities would not be required to at least read people who are critical of the society, simply as a notion of proper education.

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/25/watch_extended_interview_with_economist_richard_wolff_on_how_marxism_influences_his_work

Just like kings used to, they have raised up their own class of priests to proclaim to the commoners that their power and wealth is justified and good, and we should all bow to their blessed interpretation of the mystical movements of the market. That’s why they don’t do science, and they quibble on the minutiae of the interpretations of long-dead texts, just like the priesthood did, because they can’t work in the realm of science, because it would destroy their entire project.