Before Google, web search was a toxic stew of conflicts of interest. It was impossible to tell if search results were paid ads or the best possible results for your query.
Google changed all that, and put a clear wall between organic results and ads. They consciously structured the company like a newspaper, to prevent the information side from being polluted and distorted by the money-making side.
Here's a snip from their IPO letter [0]:
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.
Anthropic's statement reads the same way, and it's refreshing to see them prioritize long-term values like trust over short-term monetization.
It's hard to put a dollar value on trust, but even when they fall short of their ideals, it's still a big differentiator from competitors like Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI.
I'd bet that a large portion of Google's enterprise value today can be traced to that trust differential with their competitors, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar outcome for Anthropic.
I agree. Having watched Google shift from its younger idealistic values to its current corrupted state, I can't help but be cynical about Anthropic's long-term trajectory.
But if nothing else, I can appreciate Anthropic's current values, and hope they will last as long as possible...
> They historically had the best political coverage of DC
And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.
Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?
There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.
If your claim is that the Post had a viable business available to it as a sort of GoFundMe project for the political opposition, this makes sense. Otherwise, it's hard to see how an org with 2500 employees but without much more national appeal than Politico or the Atlantic was going to compete long term.
I don't know how to quantify "national appeal", but the Post had about 2.5 million paid subscribers in 2023 and ~800 newsroom staff, while The Atlantic had about 1.1 million paid subscribers and ~200 newsroom staff.
Now the Post is down to ~2 million paid subscribers and 500 newsroom staff.
I don't think the Post was known as a slanted project for "the political opposition" during red or blue administrations, but it's got that reputation now.
My claim is that this new slant is responsible for the bulk of the paper's loss of paid subscribers. There's a market for rigorous, fact-checked reporting. Degrading that makes the business worse, not better.
What's the other national American newspaper --- not newsmagazine, 95% of what the Atlantic runs isn't reported --- besides the WSJ that's doing well right now?
Other than the NYT and WSJ, the only national example I can think of is The Guardian's US operation, but that one is supported by a trust plus recurring donations from readers.
There are some good regional examples that show people will still pay enough for rigorous, old-school, fact-checked journalism to make it sustainable.
Seattle Times: ~600 employees (not sure how many in the newsroom), marginally profitable after paying legacy pension obligations, nine Pulitzers.
Guardian US: ~110 editorial staff in the US, no subscribers but ~270,000 recurring and ~170,000 annual one-time donations, one Pulitzer but maybe that one should be shared with Snowden.
404media: tiny, 5 people, but solid investigative journalism, national distribution, and some pretty impressive scoops, and it makes a profit from subscriptions.
Keep everyone precarious and fearful, stringing together multiple bullshit jobs to make the rent, always one car repair or health scare away from the abyss.
Let owners/exploiters suppress the wages they pay workers in the name of efficiency.
Encourage owners/exploiters to relentlessly raise the prices workers pay owners/exploiters in the name of shareholder value.
Then say "there is no alternative", our civilization is predicated on systematic exploitation to survive, and if you try to change it now "everyone will die".
The owner/exploiter class is going to replace labor with capital like they always have.
The worker's enemy isn't the automation that eliminates work, the worker's enemy is is the owner/exploiter who weaponizes automation in their class war.
> Why is everyone so worried about poison going away?
Hello, aloof galaxy-brain.
If you weren't aware, we live in a capitalist economy. In capitalism, if you don't have money you are in a state we call "poor," which means your life is difficult and your living standards bad. Most people rely on having a job to make money, and usually need a well-paying job to be comfortable and secure.
AI isn't going to change any of that. It's not going to make energy, or land or housing more abundant, in fact it will probably make all of those things more scarce.
If the future doesn't have "jobs," there will probably be a holocaust of workers before we get there. IMHO, that's more likely that some kind of utopian techno-socialism.
One farmer works full time to grow enough food to feed everyone.
One carpenter works full time to maintain housing for everyone.
The other 18 people work full time reciting incantations to the gods to prevent their destruction.
The farmer and the carpenter are too busy growing food and maintaining housing to recite incantations all day.
So each of the 18 incantation reciters spends an extra two hours every week to recite incantations for the farmer and the carpenter to prevent their destruction too.
Then a magic stone is discovered that can recite the incantations by itself, the gods are appeased, and nobody has to work full time reciting incantations any more.
How can the islanders possibly survive now that 90% of them don't have full-time jobs?
The farmer and the carpenter are no worse off, but they think it's unfair that they must continue working full-time while 90% of the residents don't work at all.
Perhaps the farmer and the carpenter should destroy the magic stone so that everyone will have full-time jobs again.
Or is there some other way the islanders can survive after 90% of the work has been eliminated?
Here's mine: the island has a leader/owner, he takes the stone for himself. He tells the 18 incanters that they're obsolete, and lectures them about how the future is glorious and its all their fault they can't change with the times. Then he allocates more of the resources to himself. Sure, he doesn't "need" more, but it's abhorrent to pay moochers who are providing no value to him. He owes them nothing. The moochers die off, slowly or quickly, it doesn't really matter.
If the islanders are ever to band together and liberate themselves by seizing the magic stone, then they must first stop praising the owner for making them work, and they must stop plotting to destroy the magic stone that could liberate them from their toil.
They can try, but it will be very difficult when the owner has mechanised autonomous killer bots that never sleep and won’t stop until every single incanter has been wiped out.
> If the islanders are ever to band together and liberate themselves by seizing the magic stone, then they must first stop praising the owner for making them work, and they must stop plotting to destroy the magic stone that could liberate them from their toil.
Dude, your story proves nothing. It's a fantasy. It doesn't map to the society we live in, or any realistic social change. The islanders didn't do anything before the "magic stone" to change their situation ('cause that ain't the first stone, there have been dozens before it), and they're unlikely to do anything different afterwards.
Also, if you think about your story correctly: the "magic stone" doesn't liberate the islanders, it destroys their power to make change.
It seems like LLMs will result in "service abundance" sooner than "material abundance." Both since progress in robotics seems to be behind that of LLMs, and because the US doesn't even manufacture most stuff anymore anyway, so we aren't self-sufficient in that sense.
We'll reach a strange situation where "service jobs" are commoditized while hard labor becomes the bottleneck. Worse, the US had transitioned to a service economy and devalued hard labor, and that also seems unlikely to change. Maybe the people going on about the permanent underclass were onto something.
With AI, you'll be living in a box under the street, but it'll be great because you'll have an AI therapist available 24x7 to talk to about your problems.
I'm pretty sure. If our society was capable of that kind of adaptation (less/no jobs), it would have done it by now. In fact, the impulse has been in the other direction. AI's not some magic thing, in this way it's no different than any other labor-eliminating technology.
> I think the future will be here faster than we imagine
Yeah, but that future ain't going to be the utopia promised by AI's salesmen. They're salesmen, and they're saying whatever they need to say to get you to buy in.
It will have to eventually. If the current rate of technological advancement continues, it is only a matter of time before every job will be automated. What would we do then if there is no UBI?
Die (say the exploitative elite). What is your answer to that? Don't try fighting them because they control the government and power. (Just saying it from their pov.)
As for it having permanence, I don't think it's a given, even if it's statistically likely for the majority. People have worked themselves out of poverty for ages.
Because life would be so much better if people still had to spin wool and weave cloth by hand, and grow their own food by digging in the earth with no tools.
Use whatever means necessary to stop powerful people from exploiting you and stealing the fruits of your labor. If that struggle involves monkeywrenching their machines, so be it.
But like any tool, the machines themselves can be used for good or evil. Breaking the machines shouldn't be an end in itself.
The 700m people suffering from starvation or malnutrition while we produce excess food would probably rather be digging in the earth with no tools if it meant they got fed.
The Luddites wouldn't have been destroying machines if they had insurance that they would also benefit from the machines, rather than see their livelihoods being destroyed while the boss made more money than ever.
Like the OP, you misunderstand the entire point of the Luddites. Breaking the machines was not an end, it was the tactical means to help illustrate their broader point of how the owning class can arbitrarily ruin their entire lives and livelihoods with absolutely zero recourse or consultation with the impacted people. This is a defining feature of capitalism, and that was their issue.
Your strawman about spinning and digging with no tools is just that, and is irrelevant to the core issue of capitalism.
If the core issue is ending exploitation by capitalists and not about breaking machines, if you don't want to return to a world without automation, if the machine is just a strawman, then why do you describe yourself as "anti-AI" instead of "anti-capitalist" or "anti-exploitation"?
It seems like you identify yourself with the strawman instead of with the core issue.
I am anti-capitalist and exploitation. And I don't think any anti-capitalist person can be pro-AI, not the way it's currently constructed. But people on a startup forum tend to lose their minds if you say you're against either :)
Being anti-AI is not a straw man, it's the logical conclusion of being against exploitation and hierarchical domination. Discussing that nuance here is difficult, to say the least, so it's simpler to say anti-AI.
If equities are "too big to fail" then governments will do everything in their power to ensure prices continue to go up.
If the right price for equities is 30% of their current value, and if achieving that price means the regime will fall in the next election (or sooner due to civil disorder), then the regime will not allow that to happen.
A regime that controls its own currency has nearly unlimited power to prop up whatever asset classes it wants to, from bonds to equities to housing.
Doing that has consequences like inflation which people don't like, and could cause them to vote the bastards out. But the regime could also print even more money for direct deposits into voters' bank accounts before an election.
So it seems like equities have limited downside until there's a regime change.
When the Fed purchases bonds, that reduces interest rates, and lower rates make asset prices go up.
The Fed purchases the bonds with cash created out of thin air with a journal entry. That newly created cash is used by private actors to purchase assets, which makes asset prices go up.
The Fed could purchase equities directly, but it doesn't have to own them to influence their prices.
The international "rules-based order" is a good idea when most nations play by the rules most of the time, and when the most powerful at least pretend to follow the same rules as everyone else.
A world order based on rules makes it possible to live at a much higher level of abstraction.
Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief. But these wispy and unreal ideas that everyone believes in make it possible for most people to live longer, healthier and less difficult lives.
The "rules-based order" was always partly mythical, but as long as everyone kept pretending, it mostly continued to function.
But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.
People will find out that life in the real world is a lot poorer and more miserable than life at the top of the tower of abstractions, even if your brokerage account appears to double.
I generally agree with your comment except the 'back to the real world' part. This is just the difference between a world with the gains that cooperation give verses a world with just the maximized minimum return that distrust leads to. A trusting world is the real world we have seen for decades. It is a real world we can choose to keep pushing for.
Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right.
Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is more real than any other.
A system that is closer to physical, tangible reality is more "real" than one built on many layers of concepts, beliefs and ideas.
Just as "real assets" like buildings, machinery and metals are more "real" than abstract assets.
Abstract assets like shares of a corporation, intellectual property, cash in a bank account, promises to deliver a commodity in the future, and other intangible concepts only exist because we collectively believe they exist and trust each other to follow rules.
There are real weapons and prisons at the bottom of this stack of abstractions to force people to comply, but it's mostly collective belief, trust, culture and tradition.
When we devolve from a rules-based order to might-makes-right, those layers of abstraction between us and the weapons evaporate, and ordinary people like moms and ER nurses get gunned down in broad daylight by agents of the state asserting raw power.
Abstractions like law and due process evaporate, and the "real world" underneath is nasty, brutish and short.
These are the same. They are the same because someone has to enforce the rules. The reason why this entire discussion is so obtuse is because you refuse to accept this. If I was wrong and they were different, you wouldn't treat the US and others (say China) by the different moral standards. To bring this back to an individual level, this is the same as saying police don't deter crime. You wish these two concepts were different so you let your political bias blind you to reality. That doesn't effect reality though. Police do deter crime and whoever (the US) enforces the rules based order has to do so (from time to time) kinetically.
> Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief.
> But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.
Many have absorbed and believe the argument of the might-makes-right crowd that their vision is 'real' and their enemies' vision is 'imaginary'. Unless people believe in what they seek, they are lost.
There's nothing imaginary about it; that theory is paper thin and doesn't survive simple examination. Obviously, humans are social animals that live in groups, have powerful intellects, and therefore have tremendous ability to cooperate and work together toward greater good; we've done it many, many times. Freedom and democracy have appealed powerfully to people worldwide, in a tremendously wide variety of cultures. That model was created by people who had experienced WWI and WWII; they knew more of your 'reality' than probably you or I ever will, and with that knowledge and experience they created this order.
And the greater good long predates that; religions and similar ethical codes based on the greater good long predate modern democracy and the rules-based order. Rules-based orders predate it. The Gospels in the New Testament are an easy, very familiar example, from 2,000 years ago (and a significant basis of modern freedom and democracy). Similar is true for abstractions like law, government, justice, etc.
We all are biologically the same, essentially, as the best of humanity and the worst - both are in all of us. It's our choice, our moral choice, what we do. That is also a fundamental that long predates the post-war order, democracy, the Englightenment, etc. Inevitability is a cheap tactic long used by those whose ideas are undesireable and don't withstand scrutiny.
Our choice is easier than those who survived WWII, and their predecessors. Our ancestors gave us the tools, the institutions, etc. They had to build them from nothing for a skeptical world.
About religion, I don't think we can say "always" or anything near to that.
I agree that religions commonly use the god/god's will as the reason, but I don't think we should take that at face value. It's the argument to trump all others - rulers often claim to be chosen by the will of the supernatural - but not the reason the rule was made, which is a product of the cultures involved.
And humans often come to the same ethical conclusions: The rules against murder and rape, the priority on justice and fairness, as examples, are universal across cultures regardless of religion (look up 'cultural univerals').
The source of truth in fascism is not popular support or inquiry, thus they always need to channel some privileged connection to reality, or claim to voice the true will of the people and authentically represents the pure will of the nation.
Its a farce, of course, but one that can sometimes muster enough support to keep the signs in the shop with just a bit of intimidation and violence to back it up.
In practice the US could already do whatever it wanted in Greenland/Canada etc. The options for the motivation behind the theatrics I see.
1. Instill fear in the vassals->support for militarization rises there->they become more useable as proxies against RF/China
2. Just another Trump silliness
Buddy if you think financial crashes were bad today, you should see what happens when banking is not regulated (great depression). Or, if you think war is bad today, you should see what happens when the world becomes multipolar and countries start carving up the world for territory (WWII).
Like please, read a history book.
I'm sure I agree with you that there are many problems with this system but life without it can get so much worse. The green agenda? 4G? That's the worst thing you can imagine?
Actually, what you're listing above is just another set of beautiful (to you) abstractions. No, "banksters" are not "100% parasitical". The percent is definitely less than 100. But, you know, as they say: the devil is in the details.
Definitely less than 100? What do you know about it? How is what they've accomplished not monstrous crime so total, and we haven't even properly named it? It's systematized, bureaucratized, anti-human. "Clown World" is the meme, but that is not sufficient.
The rules based order is mostly a fabrication of recent history. Perhaps between the fall of the Soviet Union, China becoming more open, and the general peace and prosperity it seemed like it existed.
Politics between countries has always been around interests. Countries have no interest in giving up their sovereignty. They may pretend to respect these "rules" when it suits them and then ignore them when it doesn't. Everyone is focused on how "bad" the US is but a) the US has always more or less done whatever it wants b) Russia and China (and many others) have never even pretended to play or accept these "rules".
Canada's Carney whines about "international order" when just a few years ago China simply abducted Canadians in response to the supposed "orderly" arrest of the Huawei CFO to be extradited to the US. So Canada basically abducts the CFO of a major Chinese company and China abducts Canadians in retaliation and that's a rules based order to who exactly? And we can put together an endless list of an endless number of countries. So when exactly was there ever a rules based order except as a tool for countries to bully each other and for the poorer dictator led countries to try and get a seat at the table because they can vote in the UN general assembly.
> Russia and China (and many others) have never even pretended to play or accept these "rules".
This false. They have pretended to play by the rules, and when breaking them, to at least manufacture some pretext, or to deny it was a state activity at all.
One example I can give you is that when invading Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union convinced a few Czechoslovak politicians to write a letter inviting the forces for "brotherly help", thus manufacturing a case that it's not really an invasion. They didn't have to do it, the force differential was overwhelming, but they did it because they could point at the letter on international stage.
All this may seem a bit pointless but binding them in international structures brought interesting fruit in the wake of Helsinki conference on human rights. After that they were forced to at least somewhat follow the signed documents which lead to significantly better conditions to dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. And there are many examples like this, when pointing at international rules actually made things better. So let's not throw that away.
And you just fabricated this whole thing. By the way, if that was an attack by Ukraine on Russia, then you just accepted that Donbass is part of Russia, and has been for some time.
>> Canada's Carney whines about "international order" when just a few years ago ...
> They have pretended to play by the rules
@YZF is unwittingly agreeing with Carney. The rules-based order is partially a fiction. Relevant snips from Carney's Davos speech.
"The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source."
"For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection."
"We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false ..."
"This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes."
When the US invaded Iraq, it at least pretended it was following the rules. It appealed to the UN for approval, it justified the invasion in the name of freedom and democracy.
It was all bullshit, but at least the US sustained the myth of a system of rules and a moral order.
But the US no longer pretends. It invades Venezuela and publicly states it was all about oil.
So even the pretense is gone now, and the benefits that came from pretending are gone. That's the "rupture" Carney is talking about, that sustaining the myths is not longer useful, so it's time to stop pretending.
I'm well aware Carney also says it never really existed. So I don't think there's an "unwittingly" here. My issue with Carney is that he's whining about it.
He's the first world leader I've seen who publicly tells other leaders to stop complaining that the false thing is false, that pretending the false thing is true hurts everyone except the hegemon at the top. Taking concrete action to build a replacement system it is kinda the opposite of whining.
He is simply negotiating with the US. That's it pretty much. He's trying to get the best deal for Canada. That's always been how things work. It's just politics. There is really nothing new here other than perhaps the more aggressive and public approach of the Americans. What used to happen in closed rooms is just getting a bit more light and the current US administration thinks that it can/deserves to get a larger share of the pie.
Incorrect. The rules based order was first attempted after the first world war and then created after the second one. These are lessen that have been bought with blood. Lots of blood. Megaliters of it. The incredible stupidity of throwing that away is absolutely disgusting.
The "rules-based international order" was a fiction popularized by US policy makers who wanted to quietly substitute it for international law, so they could violate said laws, while still vaguely gesturing at moral authority.
"In the 1940s through the 1970s, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and decolonisation across the world resulted in the establishment of scores of newly independent states.[67] As these former colonies became their own states, they adopted European views of international law.[68] A flurry of institutions, ranging from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) to the World Health Organization furthered the development of a multilateralist approach as states chose to compromise on sovereignty to benefit from international cooperation.[69] Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing focus on the phenomenon of globalisation and on protecting human rights on the global scale, particularly when minorities or indigenous communities are involved, as concerns are raised that globalisation may be increasing inequality in the international legal system.[70]"
Laws aren't fictitious just because people/countries break them. No one writes a law thinking "that settles that, no more embezzling." Laws simply tell you how that system works: you embezzle, FBI arrests you, you get tried, etc.
Also the US always made a big deal about not joining various treaties, with their reasoning explicitly being "we actually plan to do a lot of things that would violate that treaty." In that sense, that shows the US actually had respect for those institutions.
Also, the west benefited from this arrangement. Most western countries could benefit from the rules based order, and when they needed a little pump, the US broke some rules and brought home a treat for the home team. You might argue this undermines the whole enterprise, but my counterargument is this is the longest period of relative peace and prosperity humankind has ever experienced, so although it wasn't perfect, it was a huge improvement.
Ofcourse people break laws. But they are enforceable and the authorities have absolute power to enforce them. Putin can get away doing whatever the f he wants but nobody in Canada can get away with breaking any law they want whenever they feel like it, for example. That's the difference between the very real Canadian laws over Canadians and "international law" over nobody. Now Canada can pass a law that is in line with some international agreement, but it's still the law of Canada. Other laws don't apply in Canada. Canadian laws don't apply in other countries. And that's about it. If we had world elections, world government, world police, world courts and world laws, with all countries giving up their sovereignty to those institutions then we'd have "international law". Until then we don't.
International law is different, but everyone knows the scenario where like, the ICJ tries and imprisons Putin is remote. Almost as remote as Trump being tried for treason tho....
I'm not sure "everyone knows" applies here. This is one of these situations where the language is intentionally confusing. Because most people when they hear about laws have certain assumptions about what those are and how they work.
In this case this assumption is completely disconnected from reality. So yes, neither Trump, nor Putin, nor Starmer, nor Macron, nor any US citizen, and likely no citizen, or government of no country with any sort of power (India, China) or with a patron country with power isn't subject to any "international law". I.e. doesn't exist, it's just a word salad to manipulate the masses.
Rich and powerful people go to jail all the time. SBF? Ghislaine Maxwell? Maybe that boundary is pushed but at least in theory in the "western/democratic" world you can't get away with breaking the law simply by having power (and yeah Trump and such - but in general). So sure, there is some erosion of rule of the law in the western world, but it's still a thing.
But you are right that people assume that. They also assume the rich pay no taxes. So they "assume" a bunch of nonsense. Some once told me assume makes an ass of you and me.
I think people think the US is supposed to follow this thing called international law, or at least they'll express some outrage when it doesn't.
The manipulation is that people believe in this thing called international law as something that anyone has to follow where in practice no country would ever let international law supersede its laws if it went against their interest and there is no mechanism to force this. You keep seeing news about this and that being against international law (be it Israel or the US or Russia, would be the typical use case) and people actually think this is a real thing, like there's some law book somewhere that applies universally to every country. Very few people have the real and correct understanding that these are just norms or treaties or agreements that countries decide to follow or not on a case by case basis as per their interest, i.e. not a law in any real sense of the word.
Well but I think those instances are like, "wow this dude actually went to jail? how badly did he fuck up?" or whatever. Like, a counter example is like, one person went to jail for the financial collapse of 2008--to the surprise of no one (though, a fair amount of justified outrage). Rich people also frequently pay no taxes, like famously Amazon.
But, I don't think people have a detailed understanding of these things. I do agree they're at best fuzzy about what international law is (I am also fuzzy on it). I just don't understand what's manipulative about it. Like, what are people induced into doing based on the premise that the US follows international law? I think anyone operating in that sphere (international shipping, piracy outfits, aid organizations, criminal syndicates) is probably savvy enough to know the US will just blow you up and lie about it for thirty years.
Laws are enforced by sovereign countries that have police and courts etc. "International law" has "laws" (well very few if any) with no sovereignty. That's what makes it fiction. It's just newspeak to make people think that there are laws that exist outside the system of countries, and there aren't, at least no binding ones that countries can't and don't override. That's not a law.
Ofcourse laws, like any other human constructs, are invented by us and don't have independent existence.
When I drive to work here in Canada the "international police" stopping me for violating the "international traffic laws" is really not a concern.
I acknowledge that the 20th century was marked by much bloodshed, but this wasn't limited to the world wars and it continues violently into the 21st century.
If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined?
Why is the American military budget so much higher than the combined military budgets of all other countries?
> If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined?
It's the other way around. Rules are tools of peace. No peace, no rules. But if you want peace then you have to be ready to wage war. It's called deterrence and the EU is learning this just now, again. That's also one reason why the USA has been called the world police... because it was true.*
If nobody enforces the rules any more, things break down and we close in on violence. It is plain to see on the global scale, e.g. Russia's war against Ukraine, and also the domestic scale, e.g. ICE's violence against their own citizens in the USA.
> Why is the American military budget so much higher than the combined military budgets of all other countries?
The US military budget is about three times that of the EU or China's, or about a third of all military spending on the globe. Obviously, this is much higher than any single entity, but not all other countries combined.
* Frankly, being the world police has had a lot of benefits for the USA. Why they are abdicating this position to run a protection racket instead is for wiser people than me to answer.
You're confusing rules with treaties, agreements, and balance of power.
Yes- When there is one super power in the world and it says if you don't behave a certain way we're gonna bomb the heck out of you, or boycott you, you get a certain behavior. Even then you might get some actors (like North Korea, or Iran, Yemen, Russia, China and more) that have no problem openly defying and challenging the super power to some extent.
When the balance shifts and you have other blocks with more power that feel comfortable in defying that super power (like China or Russia today) then you see that changing.
There are no "absolute" rules. There are power dynamics, countries, interests, politics. Rules can exist only within a structure that can enforce them, like a country.
Whether or not a 'LIO' exists is not that interesting to me. What is interesting is what actually exists and what has happened in history. What actually exists is an enormous shock after, for instance, world war one where the question arose how it is possible that basically an entire generation of young men was slaughtered. E.g., every small village in France has a memorial of the fallen soldiers during world war one. For many decades after the war commemoration were/are still being held. It used to be that competing for territory was just the normal thing countries did. Then, it became clear that this has a potentially enormous cost in human lives. The obvious conclusion for people who are not sleepwalking through life and through history, is that any political leader who advocates for a change in country borders and does so much as hint to violent means of doing so is totally deranged and immoral. A similar shock has gone through the world after world war two, which, for instance, lead to the creation of the declaration of universal human rights. Among the decent public, it is also concluded that a violation of human rights is deranged in immoral.
I agree most countries, certainly western countries, have realized that waging the kind of wars like WW-I and WW-II is not a good idea. But there have been a lot of war and killing anyways since the world wars and there have been a lot of new borders redrawn and countries formed. In more recent times we have Putin invading Ukraine and the general instability of the post cold war Eastern Europe.
So the calculus has changed for many reasons. But "new order" is not one of them. The so called new order was a result of the calculus changing, not the other way around. Countries fight for power in other ways and other societal changes also influence their decisions. I.e. you are confusing cause and effect. Now we have different dynamics, not a collapse of world order, things have shifted very slightly. "The end of the world as we know it" gets a lot of clicks on social media but it's not like we're suddenly having WW-I all over again and it's not like that order you thought was absolute really was. It's just that's how the alignment of interests landed.
This is straight-up Baudrillard simulacra/simulation.
The moment you say "Dao" (or "Agile", or "methodology"), you've already moved from the thing-in-itself to a sign living inside a sign system. That sign can be useful, but it can't be identical to what it points at.
> “The Agile that can be PM’d is not Agile.”
That’s exactly the stages of simulacra in miniature:
- Faithful copy: "Agile" names a set of lived practices that correspond to reality.
- Masks/denatures: cargo-cult rituals distort it (standups-as-status-reporting).
- Masks absence: the org performs Agile theater to hide that genuine agility is gone.
- Pure simulacrum: "Agile" becomes a self-referential brand/signifier (certs, metrics, tooling) that relates primarily to other signs ("Agile maturity model", "story points velocity"), not to any actual working output.
Isn't that also what yields human society cycles ? generations cannot explain their learning well enough, at best the authority lives in inertia for a while and then it evaporates. All new generation misinterpret the past, and the problems reappear.
For a reductionist, it might be better understood as - step outside of your usual mode of thinking. Remember that you don't know everything. Or just - take time to stop and smell the flowers. Try to spend more time noticing and less time analyzing.
There are things that are difficult to communicate directly in the reductionist mode of thought - and are intended to have meaning at multiple levels of abstraction. You have to think a bit more laterally.
Jean Baudrillard is a fraud/charlatan. Semiotics is a fake field. Him and all his friends (i.e. Foucualt, Derrida, DnG, Althussar, etc) are at Chiropractors/ Homeopaths for the mind and at worst actual useful idiots for western intelligence agencies.
They're hair-trigger inactive otherwise. They don't bill CPU unless they're active. The idea is that there isn't really any uncertainty about when it's running; when you stop interacting with it it stops metering.
This is a new shape for a cloud computing thingy and there'll be snags this week with it, but we don't make our money by billing people for stuff they don't want. We've always gone out of our way not to nickel-and-dime casual users and we're trying hard to find new ways to lean into that here.
(Destroying a Sprite you're done with is a perfectly reasonable move; they're disposable.)
My read of his response is that, even though the sprite is in a running state, that doesn’t mean it’s in a billable state given you aren’t connected; that’s not said explicitly, and I’m making an inference, and so it would be helpful if you let us know if you are billed for these hours.
I think the idling feature still needs some work. I created one over the weekend that hasn't idled once, and I've run several tests with sprites that have nothing in them—just `sprite create` and log out, just to see what happens (which unfortunately is nothing, left alone it keeps on running as well.)
I love the idea and most of the execution, I've really enjoyed getting my first sprite configured just the way I want it. It just needs the idling feature to work as advertised before I think I can use it as cost-effectively as it promises.
Get a console in your sprite. Run “screen”. Run a loop in there : while date; do sleep 1; done. Detach screen and exit the session. Wait a few minutes and go back into the sprite. Reattach screen. You’ll see a gap in the timestamps.
They do suspend even when they say they are “running”.
Google changed all that, and put a clear wall between organic results and ads. They consciously structured the company like a newspaper, to prevent the information side from being polluted and distorted by the money-making side.
Here's a snip from their IPO letter [0]:
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.
Anthropic's statement reads the same way, and it's refreshing to see them prioritize long-term values like trust over short-term monetization.
It's hard to put a dollar value on trust, but even when they fall short of their ideals, it's still a big differentiator from competitors like Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI.
I'd bet that a large portion of Google's enterprise value today can be traced to that trust differential with their competitors, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar outcome for Anthropic.
Don't be evil, but unironically.
[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/default...
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