VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
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User ID: 411
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3mo ago
By giving it to the partisan opponent
No. The White House wouldn't run the algorithm. It would just need to be divested to a western acquirer. Didn't read the rest of your post since it started off on such an ignorant and/or dishonest foot.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3mo ago
the proposed solution (expropriating PRC influence) doesn't imply the implied result (better Social Media quality)
The point isn't to make the media high-quality, the point is to make it not be controlled by our geopolitical opponent. And the latter is 100% achievable.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
The point is that an unpopular Republican who barely squeaks through in a blood-red state is not an obvious choice to win over the more liberal neighboring state, even though they are neighbors.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
The issue is that people enjoy trashy media, especially children, and that good parenting is hard.
No, the issue is that China controls the main media source for a generation. I don't even know what to make of the rest of your post, which doesn't even mention China. Were you trying to completely change the subject? It almost seems like a cognitive analogue of face-blindness, where people who really like TikTok mentally short-circuit when presented with the simple fact that China controls the algorithm that decides who sees what content for a big slice of America, and start reciting unrelated talking points.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
In the sense that both are proposing extralegal violence in defense of enlightenment principles.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
He absolutely was before he went senile, e.g. in the Obama years.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
But if you squint, doesn't it kind of follow the same logic as "the second amendment protects the first amendment"?
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
OK, I disagree, but regardless, that doesn't explain why it's an advantage.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
Yeah, all fine, but I am thinking of those as idiosyncratic procedural glitches. I mean, suppose that the state convicted him of some dumb white collar crime that he was definitely guilty of and tried to jail him via impeccable process. Obviously it's untenable for an elected president to be jailed by New York State. But what theory would the Supreme Court use to prevent it? Straight-up vertical separation of powers? It would be fun to find out.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
Not if they can't get slots at the airports they need.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
It’s less of a moat in many cases than people think; the experience of euro budget airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet shows that consumers are happy to go to airports 100 miles out of town for fares 1/4 of the legacy airlines. Startup costs are extremely low with the leasing business the way it is. I’m skeptical that looser competition laws would dramatically worsen the situation for consumers.
Then why did USAir/AA raise fares?
I take your point on Euro airlines, but suspect that the Euro airport/airline system is different in some fundamental way.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
I'm convinced it's something about his personality/charisma. Bill Clinton had a similar effect on the black community. It's like the affable alpha male politician who looks like he's having a blast whenever he's campaigning.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
And why should he?
Because the status quo is that our greatest geopolitical adversary controls the media programming that influences a generation of Americans. It's horrifying that we let this state of affairs persist, and the antithesis of America First.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
This is staggeringly ignorant on many dimensions. To pick one at random, Mark Zuckerberg would happily manage his market cap down to $20MM and compensate his employees with cash if it meant he could rely on his sole shareholder vote to retain control and consolidate the entire tech industry into a behemoth that bestrides the world. Your proposal is a road to Soviet style serfdom, and not even a long road.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
Correct, their actual moat is airport slots and routes which are now meticulously tabulated when DOJ considers airline merger agreements after US Airways / American Arlines merger empirically resulted in higher fares.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
The opportunist will follow Trump for as long as it's in his interests to do so,
It hardly seemed obvious on January 6, 2021 that it would have been in Trump's VP's own interest to engage in a Scooby-Doo-esque scheme to steal the Presidency just because the incumbent had a mental break after losing the election.
If Vance had a Damascene conversion to Trump as a consequence of Trump gaining power, one should consider the possibility that he'd have had the inverse conversion as a consequence of Trump losing power.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
But law professorships are worthless sinecures that do and produce nothing of value. His stint as a community organizer was unironically much more important and impactful.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
Democrats don't think he governed horribly. Obamacare was a generational success for Democratic policy goals and more than makes up for the rest. The biggest problem of the Obama administration is that he left the economy perpetually understimulated, letting the nation languish for years in a sluggish recovery from the great financial crisis and leaving the door open for Trump to adopt a more expansionary fiscal policy and revitalize the economy.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
Maybe run for president in the future, but not now.
The whole reason that Trump is winning right now is that 1/ Obama thought this way when picking his VP in 2008, and 2/ Biden thought this way when picking a VP in 2020. Choosing a VP is monumentally consequential for your party. You need to make sure you are choosing the right guy if you care at all about the future of your party. And how can you think you have taken the measure of a man to know where he will be in the next decade or two when he's already a completely different man from what he was a decade ago?
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
The biggest mystery to me about Marco Rubio is why anyone likes him. He's weird looking, short, not charismatic, seems perpetually nervous, not particularly articulate, seems not to have ever had an original thought in his life. He seems most famous for 1. dramatically failing to out-Trump Trump in the 2015 Republican primaries, 2. short-circuiting in Chris Christie's gravitational well and repeating the line "let's dispel with the myth that Obama doesn't know what he's doing" at least three times, 3. drinking too much water in some SOTU response, and 4. trying to pass amnesty for illegal immigrants. What is the case for Rubio? I am perplexed at Florida Man's improbable success.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
There's no reason to think he can. He was a below-value-over-replacement candidate in Ohio, winning by less than all other concurrent Republicans winning state elections in the same cycle. It's like expecting that Ted Cruz would have an advantage in winning over New Mexico.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
All of the airlines would merge within a week under that regime, and then we'd all be paying monopoly rents to Amalgamated Airlines for the rest of our lives whenever we wanted to travel more than a hundred miles. And all of the other industries too. A 10% tax on deal consideration wouldn't even rate.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
The left seems to hate him more than any of the other potentials.
Why is this an advantage? My second biggest complaint about Trump's first term is that the left's nonstop ear-splitting hysteria impeded a lot of the stuff that a normal President would be able to do, and created a lot of collateral damage too (e.g. burning a bunch of cities, engaging in ritual defamation of the police, getting totally deranged on race relations). Generally politicians aim to energize their base, not the other side.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
4mo ago
it would have been completely reasonable for Biden to try to negotiate a pardon for Trump a la Ford pardoning Nixon in return for a back-to-normalcy sort of proposal.
I suspect Trump would reject his overtures.
But more to the point, the President can't pardon state charges. That would have to be Governor Hochul, who does not seem so inclined.
You suggested that they'd control it directly, which is false
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