Earth was also running out of carbon dioxide, was basically none left when we humans appeared. It used to be so much carbon dioxide in the air making it easy for plants to grow, but when its all buried underground not much complex things can evolve, the earth has almost never been as life poor as when humans appeared.
That puts a timer on any planet as well, without intelligent life all the building stones for life will keep getting buried and then life will basically end because life doesn't find a way to dig it up from thousands of meters underground.
> But most people are not like that. In most issues, they are exposed to multiple viewpoints they could plausibly adopt. The choices they make are ultimately their own
Yes, but most people also come to the same pretty naive conclusions separately and then it looks like they just copy each other. It is pretty hard to tell the difference between low effort thinking and parrots.
> Why is China evil exactly? And why are they only evil since they started mathing/outpacing US financial dominance?
You don't know about Tiananmen Square massacre? People thought China was evil even when they were dirt poor after their failed communist experiment.
You probably meant "threat" here instead of evil, and then it is obvious why nobody saw them as a threat when they were poor and weak, but now that they are big and strong people see them as a threat since they haven't exactly left their evil ways behind.
What about the 17 coup d’état’s (regime changes) the US did? Or it’s “involvement in 17 to over 36 major wars and hundreds of smaller military interventions depending on how involvement is defined”?[1]
“The most severe of the US’ acts of aggression have resulted in some 13-23 million deaths in at least 28 nations. Direct US military actions in at least 16 countries have caused around 7-13 million deaths. US-supported or -instigated armed conflicts in 19 countries have led to some 6-10 million deaths. There are countries where the US has engaged both directly in combat and indirectly through active military support.
These figures still do not include casualties from all the governments the US has supported militarily in their domestic conflicts against supposed insurgents and other political opposition. Many tens of thousands more have been killed by client states with US support and using US-funded and -supplied war materiel, such as in the Philippines.”
[1] sorry that was Gemini, because I lost count at twenty ‘wars’ somewhere on the other Wikipedia for ‘military conflicts’
Look at what's happening in the most recent years, who's dropping bombs on civilian markets, who killed hundreds of children in the Iranian conflict saying "oops", or who's actively supporting an apartheid in the middle east, who's kidnapping foreign leaders because "reasons", who's supporting repressive a dozen of repressive regimes for its own interest, etc.
I'm not stating that the Chinese dictature is anything we should long for, but I'm tired of this psy ops to treat them as an enemy or threat.
We should pay much more attention at the shit that happens in our countries on a semi regular basis.
That already happens though, typical policemen are much more tracked by the police than even criminals are so they have the least privacy in every scenario. You never get more privacy in the same situation if you were an on duty cop instead of a civilian.
That is not very many cases considering there are millions of stalkers in the US alone. That is like saying police shouldn't have cars since they sometimes kill people in car accidents.
Police should have a higher expectation of safety with motor vehicles because if they kill someone, they're not getting punished like you or me.
It's the same way with guns. If a random dude brandishes a gun, that's bad. If a police officer accidentally shoots someone, probably nobody goes to jail. So, because of that, we should encourage the police to be more careful. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
The reason people are so concerned about police using Flock for nefarious uses is because, if anyone can get away with it, it's the police. That's what makes it scary.
To me, it's like a bad shoot. How many unarmed, completely innocent black guys would you be able to shoot because a less than qualified officer "thought his apartment was hers" for instance?
I obviously don't know, but I'm betting the black community, at least in my country (USA), wouldn't countenance anywhere even close to 81 black guys getting shot over nothing like that before we'd hear from them.
I had no idea it was 81. That's a level at which it makes me genuinely wonder why there aren't more protests?
There's way too many departments out there being run like frat houses. This is serious work. You got woman problems you can't separate from the job? Get out, or your leadership should be running you out in a well run department.
That they lost control to some guys that had to travel around entire Africa to get there shows how incompetent and backwards thinking they were. It would be impossible to conquer 100m happy and productive people with just 1000 people even if the 1000 had a bit better guns, especially since the 100m happy and productive people easily could just reproduce the new modern guns.
That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies, both in refusing to adopting the superior European technology and by continuing to oppress their own people to such a degree that their people didn't really care much about a foreign power replacing their old tyrants.
> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies
Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.
They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.
You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.
Technically India and China were both conquered by Central Asian Warlord societies before Europeans arrived. In India's case by the descendants of Timur, and in China's case due to severe political and environmental issues at the end of the Ming Dynasty. These warlords arguably had even fewer resources and greater militarism than later European conquerors
That was centuries before European colonization began. They recovered, and by the 18th century, were the most prosperous, productive regions of the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009485
I see your point, yeah they would manage without others going in and bossing them around. They had everything in place to transition to a modern society unlike some of the less developed parts of the world, so Europeans meddling with them didn't really help.
They would likely follow a similar path as Russia or Japan, Russia is pretty far from western Europe already so ideas took longer to get there so they modernized much later, and we can see how that turned out. Russia being so oppressive and rotten were very vulnerable to any sort of modern ideology and fell to communism, that sort of transition was inevitable for these countries, Russia tried to delay it and it was forced upon them, Japan saw the writing on the wall and made the transition deliberately etc.
> Wait 1-2 months, Anthropic will come up with a shinier model and Googel will look obsolete again. I too struggle to see the moat - yes Google is able to serve their own A.I traffic but as far as I can see - at a loss. Prices keep going down because open source models. We'll see.
Google makes AI profits, its in their breakdowns. And Google has been releasing models every few weeks now, they have a faster iteration pace than the competitors, so they fixed that, they wont be behind in coding models any longer.
> Google makes AI profits, its in their breakdowns.
What "AI profits" exactly. Their capex is through the roof. What they're actually earning is in cloud , their own AI is lossy for sure. Who is paying for Gemini? Not many people.
> there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.
Capitalism means separation of violence from capital, if capital controls violence then its not capitalism because there can only be a free market when guns that can't be bribed with money protects it.
For example in communism capital control violence, that is why its so bad, since when capital controls violence it no longer need to produce good results to thrive, it can just use force, which is how every communist regime acted.
In anarchy capital also control violence, so its not capitalism, since without a state to prevent capital from hiring thugs to force others into submission you don't have a free market, whoever has the most thugs wins.
> It probably does work good however Switzerland got dangerously close to "something happening" this year with the 10M referendum. And it was very close, with major parts of the country showing an absurd level of ignorance
Switzerland already voted against immigration once before in 2014, EU punished them for it and they walked it back quickly. No larger catastrophe happened.
That puts a timer on any planet as well, without intelligent life all the building stones for life will keep getting buried and then life will basically end because life doesn't find a way to dig it up from thousands of meters underground.
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