stabby_cicada

A managed economy could happen and would be highly efficient, especially because running a nation is a collective endeavour. Individuals fail but groups have memory.

Yeah. Imagine how prosperous the United States would be if the current administration was running it as a managed economy.

If we can't dream big, all we can do is maintain the status quo. And the status quo kind of sucks.

One in ten houses in the US are vacant.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/

"Society" has more than enough housing. We just distribute it poorly.

The idea is, we abolish the concept of private property, but retain the concept of personal property.

Personal property being stuff that's used by one person, or ome family, or one small group, and ownership rights come from that use.

So a car would be the personal property of the driver or drivers who use it - the same as a computer or microwave or toothbrush would be the personal property of the person or people who used it. You drive it, you fuel it, you repair it, and that's what makes it yours.

How to produce and distribute goods (like houses and cars and toothbrushes) without a system of private property, purchase, and ownership is a major site of leftist contention 😆

This is hardly unique to AI. When I used Reddit, r/bestof (a sub that reposted the "best" comments from Reddit threads) was consistently full of posts that confidently, eloquently, and persuasively stated bullshit as fact.

Because Redditors as a collective don't upvote and award the truest posts - they upvote and award the posts that seem the most trustworthy.

And that's human nature. Human beings instinctively see confidence as trustworthy and hesitation and doubt as untrustworthy.

And it's easy to project an aura of confidence when you post bullshit online, since you have all the time you need to draft and edit your comment and there are no consequences for being wrong online.

Zero surprise an AI algorithm trained on the Internet replicates that behavior 😆

As always, the poor are human shields for the rich.

Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.

The general idea is recognizing a right to "personal property", which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of "private property", which you get from buying something.

Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build one giant fortified survival compound, as he chooses. His property, his choice, whether it benefits the community or not.

In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community, so no one person or company could accumulate land to the detriment of everyone else.

Landlords hate this idea.

Here's a really super basic summary:

https://www.workers.org/private-property/

And here's a long complicated discussion:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property

do you guys just enjoy joking about it all?

Yes.

Morale matters.

Humor is a weapon.

Preaching to the choir is an important part of a pastor's job - because who wants to hear the Word more than true believers do?

Online circlejerks are powerful community building tools - they reaffirm true believers' loyalty, strengthen the commitment of moderates, and expose visiting lurkers to the movement's perspective and the passion of its members.

Let's not forget how racist circlejerks on FB and Reddit and the chans memed Trump into office in 2016.

Jerking about problems can't be all a movement does, of course - but an online movement that doesn't share memes, and in-jokes, and news that supports it, and similar kinds of community building, is dead on the ground.

As usual when it comes to climate impact, the US will be fine. Three out of every four calories of corn is used to make ethanol or feed animals, both of which are ridiculously inefficient uses. Hell, corn syrup is in everything because the US grows so much more corn than it needs that we practically give away the corn syrup.

Soybeans are even less efficient - less than 3% of the American soybean crop is actually eaten by human beings, despite soybeans being a complete vegetable protein and one of the healthiest foods out there.

In other words, the United States could lose 9/10ths of the land growing corn and soybeans and still feed itself with plenty to spare.

All that land is only under cultivation at all because the United States can't stand the idea of giving up one foot of the land it stole in the name of manifest destiny. Because if we weren't using land for corn and beans in the Midwest or grazing cattle in the Great Plains, people might start asking why not give it back to the indigenous peoples we stole it from.

So yeah, America will be fine.

It's the rest of the world that's going to suffer for America's climate crimes.

Taking away a billionaire's private jet, as cool as that would be, won't cut your electric bill. Shitty Euro bakery curtains will 😆

I mean, how many people fact check a book? Even at the most basic level of reading the citations, finding the sources the book cited, and making sure they say what the book claims they say?

In the vast majority of cases, when we read a book, we trust the editors to fact check.

AI has no editors and generates false statements all the time because it has no ability to tell true statements from false. Which is why letting an AI summarize sources, instead of reading those sources for yourself, introduces one very large procedurally generated point of failure.

But let's not pretend the average person fact checks anything. The average person decides who they trust and relies on their trust in that person or source rather than fact checking themselves.

Which is one of the many reasons why Trump won.

Oh fuuuuck no.

You're not good enough at controlling your thoughts to be less useful than the pornsick social media addicted ai drones with 10 second attention spans that would willingly participate in this.

I remember a fantasy novel from the Myth Adventures series where the good guys went undercover as conscripts in an enemy nation's army. They ended up assigned to logistics and decide they could effectively hamper the enemy army, while keeping their own cover, if they messed up ten percent of their supply orders. And they got medals for efficiency because a 90% success rate was so much better then every other logistics unit 😆

Anyway, that's what I think of when I hear your suggestion. The average competent human being reading this and recognizes how dystopian this bullshit is, even trying to fail, is going to give better data than the kind of fucking idiot who thinks this is a good idea and participates willingly.