The goal should be to run up the score of the popular vote as much as possible even in the face of anti-democratic shenanigans like gerrymandering or statistical voter suppression, e.g. how the SAVE act would make it harder for women (who lean Democratic) to exercise their right to vote (because it will require more documents for people who have changed their last name to prove their identities).
Manipulating the election and perpetuating minority rule rather than responding to popular will has its limitations. We need to be prepared for a second civil rights movement.
The USA has never had a leftist president. No president of the USA has ever sought to end capitalism.
I think you know that, and that you are alluding to that with quotation marks. But I'm not sure how the person you are replying to is using the term "left." I feel it is important to clarify when discussing how the Left views immigration.
I don't want to speak for European countries. Never lived there, and I think people living there should be responsible for deciding how they navigate such issues.
In the USA, where I live, there is not much of an ethical or cultural defense to prevent immigration. The dominant culture, white people, are themselves immigrants. To deny others the right to live and work here is selfish at best. If some people are allowed here and some people are not, the only logically coherent next step is to return all land and resources back to Native American hands. If we do not have the stomach for such a bold transition, then the next best thing is to welcome everyone. To do otherwise means allowing and denying people a life here on extremely arbitrary, hypocritical reasons (and usually racist reasons, frankly). So, at least in the USA (and I believe more broadly, North and South America), the political Left must necessarily be pro-immigration if they wish to be anti-racist.
Speaking even more broadly, Leftists have generally be in favor of internationalist cooperation (a la the famous song The Internationale). But how exactly that relates to immigration policies is debatable.
Legal immigration to the US for an every day person is nearly impossible. You can’t just decide one day that you will move to the US and try to make a life there. European countries are orders of magnitude more open than the US.
Nothing in the article is suggesting that we do not need cars and trucks.
It does make a compelling case that specifically large trucks and SUVs are causing preventable deaths. And I certainly find no reason that we need very large trucks or SUVs.
Yea, depending on where you live in the USA, you practically need a car of some sort. Yes, there are cities where you can get away with not having one, but the vast majority of Americans would have to make a huge lifestyle sacrifice to not have a car. Some people need trucks to haul things, but NOBODY needs giant-grilled zero-visibility monster trucks or monster SUVs where you can't even see a person standing in front. You could get rid of these atrocities and not kill cars/trucks in general.
Having any car or truck is a choice. People lived before the automobile. They do provide benefits, just as SUVs and trucks provide benefits. The Amish live without cars, so too could we if we chose to. In fact, the Amish could make the same claim about all automobiles that you make about preventable deaths attributed to larger vehicles.
> Is your point that taller trucks and SUVs provide considerable benefits over shorter ones? What are those benefits?
Ground clearance. In some parts of the US and for some use cases this is non-negotiable. It would be like buying a car in Texas without an air conditioner. There is a Japanese automaker (Subaru) that traditionally caters to this market almost exclusively in the US.
I won't buy a vehicle with less than 8 inches of ground clearance for safety reasons.
The mountainous parts, particularly if you aren't driving on the interstates. You can end up in a freak blizzard in the passes from September through May. Some roads do not have frequent, regular snow clearance in winter. Localized torrential rains from thunderstorms temporarily dump debris on or wash out the road surface. In the western US, unpaved highways are relatively common in some areas. Random unexpected road closures can send you down ranch or forestry trails intended for 4WD trucks because there are few practical alternatives.
When I lived in the area, I regularly rescued people stranded on roads in the Sierra Nevada mountains around Lake Tahoe that found out the hard way that their vehicles were unfit for the changing road conditions. Nearly getting stranded myself a couple times over the decades informed my vehicular requirements.
I currently live in the city and but rarely drive there. Almost all of my driving is done across the western US. I require the vehicle I own to be able to safely navigate all of the road conditions I am likely to see there.
A less common reason is that the nice paved roads are not always the fastest way between two points. I used to regularly commute to a town in Nevada where using the nice paved highway around the mountains took 30 minutes longer than taking an old mining road straight over the mountains. Everyone that lived in the area took the old mining road. That would have been sketchy without decent ground clearance. A lot of locals just drove old Subarus.
For normal people AWD and high ground clearance will work. Good range also strongly recommended but these vehicles usually have that by default.
A large 4WD will handle conditions a Subaru will not but a Subaru is fine for getting around the area if you typically stay off most ranch/mining roads. It is illegal to maintain the ranch/mining roads for historical reasons, so they get a bit spicy.
I believe that you don't need one, and I know that I don't need one, but I think it's a little rich to make that a blanket statement for the species. There are people who have jobs, lives, and live in places unlike your own experiences.
I'm not sure what the need is for a very tall pickup truck that can also hold a family five? But maybe there is one. Perhaps there is also a need for an excavator that holds a family of five, idk. If a real need is demonstrated, then sure, please do not ban the manufacturing of an excavator that has the necessary hook-ups for modern child carseats simply because I, a commenter on HackerNews, made a statement that was a little too sweeping for the needs of past, present, and future human beings on Earth and across potential settlement across the universe and dimensions beyond.
But most people do not need a very large truck or SUV. Vehicles with hoods closer to the ground and better lines-of-sight are safer for those around them, while having practically no impact on the utility of said vehicles as they drive on roads and highways in the USA.
Is the concern that we'd marginalize parents and kids? As a parent of little kids, that's a concern that wasn't even on my radar. I had no idea that that was a major concern of people. Wild. I'm not saying it is a fabricated or unfounded fear, I just don't have that concern at all for myself.
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
The concern is that if the birthrate drops low enough that having kids becomes unusual, it causes societal changes that create a negative feedback loop that will continue pushing the birthrate lower and lower. If the number of elderly far exceeds the number of working people (which is already locked in for South Korea), you then have to figure out how to restructure society around this while maintaining social order.
You can see this in a microcosm at churches - the ones full of families and exploding children will continue to have such; and the ones that are newly wed or nearly dead will chase families with children away even if entirely unintentionally.
If it happens on a societal level it's tremendously powerful.
I personally control my life by spending almost all of my income, after bills, towards expanding the elaborate tower-defense-like automated weaponry on my plot of land. If I must leave my fort, I always drive my T-34 into town (I'm saving up for a Sherman).
A lot less people would be mad, yeah. In my own area, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to galvanize activity and get write-ups in the local news. The focus, generally, was on how it would raise electricity costs for the county and use up variable water resources right as we are facing water shortages here.
A lot of people here are in precarious financial situations, they do not want to see any costs go up. Inflation at the grocery store, high gas prices, high mortgages/rent, and a lousy job market have people on edge. I don't know if the average Joe is worried about AI leading to a dystopian hellscape, but he at least doesn't see AI providing any benefit to making ends meet.
Turned out not be a data center, but just the possibility caused a stir.
Yeah, and it should be. But the USA, at least in this current moment, builds regulations catering to corporations and the rich over people's general needs. So the regulations that are on the table at the national level are ineffective.
It's easier for normal people to influence local regulations, but local regulations just push the problem somewhere else. However disdain for AI is so widespread that this is actually kind of effective.
disdain for dumping industrial sludge into rivers is quite high too. if you don’t demand regulated domestic production it will just get moved to the least regulated place with the best underlying economics, I imagine you know this though…
Yeah, I agree with you! Regulation of that kind of environmental problem works better the more land is covered. National is best, statewide is meaningful (if you are in a geographically large state). Local is better than doing literally nothing, but it does have the nasty side effect of pushing the problem out of people's sight :(
Maybe I'm a big idiot, but I think nuclear disarmament is a good geopolitical strategy. The USA has treaties in place pursuing that end on a global scale.
I understand that the war between Russia and Ukraine, and now Iran and Israel/USA has set back the slow progress that was being made on nuclear disarmament. I don't understand your claim that nuclear disarmament caused a war, though.
I guess the argument is that if Ukraine hadn't willingly handed over the 3rd largest nuclear arsenal in the world after its independence, Russia would have not started a war against them.
That’s so far from obvious. The most concerning possibilities for me — like kids not learning how to struggle or problem solve on their own — won’t be resolved for many years.
If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.
> helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
I keep seeing this and I'm pretty envious! You must have a different form of ADHD than I do. For me, trying to use AI to build anything is terrible for my attention, it turns everything into a miserable slog because it's so hands off.
AI helps me get into flow state because I can have a rambling conversation with a chatbot and work through ideas and what abouts. eventually it helps me forget to a place where flow is easier to maintain.
I like this argument/reasoning more than any I've encountered so far. Thank you! Enabling the disabled is definitely a positive and this is a strong argument for the "pro AI" column.
I think another argument for AI is that it can help pull out patterns and information that are normally hidden from human cognition because we can't encompass that information and keep it in mind.
I think one place we should apply this is to the financial system. Use it to detect fraud, tax manipulation games and Other b**** pulled by the 1%ers.
With luck, it might even help us find methods of reducing their influence and power.
Two points on that:
1. This would require hardware to be affordable by mere mortals. That hardware is not financially beyond our reach yet, but AI is making the cost of buying good computer parts very expensive. The big corporations are working against the goal of local LLMs in a major way just by soaking up most of the hardware on the market. And I don't even think that's intentional - they're just too hungry to consider otherwise. They can pay high prices where normal people cannot.
2.Local LLMs would have to be designed to be very convenient to use. As it stands, the big players are making their online models very convenient instead, and that let's them charge a subscription. It's a proven business model that our society has gotten used to (even if we grumble a bit). Even if the hardware were cheap, local LLMs are mostly for businesses, with a few hobbyists running it in their basement because they can.
It's extremely hard for me to imagine local LLMs being a threat to the powerful in any way.
Asbestos is the miracle material it is advertised as. It really is great insulation, and really is absolutely fireproof. Thousands of industrial uses are readily apparent.
Despite this, because of its other effects, the cost to clean up and stop using asbestos is greater than the sum total of any benefit from all mined asbestos worldwide.
Even a miracle technology can still be a net disaster.
I don't understand that this argument. Why does the net improvement of the technologies listed imply that AI will also have a net improvement? Are you just arguing that there's no such thing as technology that is harmful on net?
We could have had this same argument about social media 15 years ago before hard evidence showed it's not quite the net benefit to society it was touted as.
You presume there is hard evidence that AI is good for society. In reality, the inverse is true.
Now you understand why anti-vaxxers ignore evidence. Because it doesn't fit with your worldview and you're too narrow-minded and selfish to consider that your viewpoint might actually be wrong and bad for others.
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