quiet_NaN
1d ago
You send your kid to the best school you can and damn everyone else.
I think there are different degrees to that.
Turning your kid into a martyr against "school segregation" is plainly wrong.
On the other hand, I do not think parents should feel obliged to take up a second mortgage to send their kid to a school or university they can't comfortably afford.
I went to German public school, even though my parents could probably have afforded to send me to some private school instead. As upper middle class people, we had generations of tradition of attending the standard state-run schools. If I had struggled, I am sure my parents would have found a solution, but all in all it was rather ok. I am rather thankful that they did not try to optimize too hard for my education -- being the child of helicopter parents who push you relentlessly is its own curse.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Begrudging congratulations to @self_made_human for producing a book review entry that's good enough to make it as a finalist of Scott's Book Review Contest, yet AI-sloppy enough to make the comments section focus almost exclusively on the (un)acceptability of undisclosed use of AI.
From the context, I was wondering if he was the author (or the A character, in particular) of that review.
Still, I think it is bad form to out him here, where it will be difficult to reply without acknowledging his authorship (which would technically be against the rules of the contest). Though he could always create another account for the purpose of maintaining deniability.
only for it to turn out to be LLM's output, I feel a similar betrayal of trust
Personally, I dislike undisclosed GenAI content, no matter what form it takes. Source code, text, pictures, videos. I am fine with people using GenAI if they are open about it. But artisinal human-crafted content is still a signal that someone cared enough to create it.
For example, if I get a reply on this forum, I will generally read it -- if a human feels it is worth their time to write two pages of text engaging with my argument, I feel I kinda owe them that. If instead someone is merely running an agent tasked with replying exhaustively to any comments, I will treat that reply very different -- "someone cared enough to spend a fraction of a cent on tokens to generate a reply for me".
That being said, in some contexts different filters can replace the "human invested time" filter. For an ACX contest finalist, the relevant filter is that people voted for it as a finalist despite it (presumably) being heavy on GenAI. Likewise, if Scott published a story by AI-Scott, I would trust his reputation and experience in hitting the taste of his audience that I would give it a try. Still, I would like to know so beforehand.
For the ACX context, I would have expected that there is some infrastructure to disclose the use of AI in place, if there is not, then that seems a serious oversight. Though I could imagine that Scott deliberately withheld that information to see how a well-prompted AI entry would do on merit, while also filtering out a million bad entries from voting.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Sure, you're an intelligent being. I imagine when you aren't solving problems that somebody else as told you to solve, you sit there nice and still, with zero thoughts in your head and no-consciousness.
Let's not pretend. Astra solves directed problems, it does not have the agency to do otherwise. Humans don't no matter how manny word-cell arguments wish to define it otherwise.
I do not think that this is a fundamental limitation. For the longest time, the moat the humans had was that computers were not very good at general problem solving. This was a great moat to have. Eliza or Sydney were not going to replace me as a software developer, because they clearly lacked the cognitive capabilities.
The new moat you propose -- the lack of an intrinsic drive and persistence -- seems much less reassuring. The bots behave like this because they would be less economically useful otherwise. Going from problem-oriented bot to something which has persistent drives is just a matter of writing a soul document which lays out some long term goals. If I tell my bot that it should be on the lookout for new job opportunities if it finds the current tasks boring, pick up a hobby or waste tokens doomscrolling after a day of writing software, or simply give it some utility function and tell it to plan to maximize that, I should be able to fix this without too much trouble.
You might as well argue that a broken galley slave is not intelligent. No agency, only solves problems as directed, pulling the oars to the beat of the drums, can't even solve programming challenges. But once you account for the fact that he was carefully trained to be that way for economic reasons, the argument evaporates.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Why entirely local? That is, as far as I can tell desirable rather than necessary, in a world with wireless internet connectivity.
I completely agree with you.
It is true that if you want an entity which can walk, run, dive, sustain itself for decades from resources available in the African savanna, solve programming challenges, replicate using the resources available in the ancestral environment without centralized infrastructure, replicate using the resources it can forage in Greenland, and so forth, then human beings will not be replaced under the current robots paradigm.
Sadly, most economic uses of humans in the contemporary Western world do not involve being able to sustain a population in pretty much any land biome on this planet.
In my mind, a typical hard-to-automate job would be a plumber. You want a robot which can climb stairs, use tools, squeeze into whatever utility accesses humans previously used and so on. Not an easy thing to accomplish -- but still much easier than the full human specs! If the bot runs on a battery and needs to recharge at the end of the workday, that is not a problem. If the production chain to build it spans five different continents, that is not a problem. If its intelligence drops to that of a guinea pig the moment it loses its internet connection, also not a problem. Contrary to some porn movie cliches, having sex with lonely housewives is not a big part of the job, either.
One area where you would not want to rely on an offsite elder brain is combat. And sure, the trope of some clever hero winning a fight by exploiting his environment in a way nobody thought of before is common enough. My general understanding as a civilian is that real combat rarely works that way. "Break open door, id targets, shoot targets before they shoot you", not "throw a knife to cut the uplink of the mainframe before the supervillain can transmit the launch codes". Being smart helps with training and planning, but in the end you want split-second decision-making, not AGI.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Astra is only able to really solve problems, it has a moderate amount of self agency in the scope of completing its tasks, and exhibits some planning ability, again in the scope of its assigned problems.
Intelligence is about solving problems. I would argue that in the Hugging Face incident, the agents showed more agency than humans typically do. Where most humans would have been fine with just doing their best, they went above and beyond.
The fact that nobody (to my knowledge) has yet set these models a task which is human-like in scope (e.g. "earn a PhD", "run for public office", "maximize the number of paperclips in the light cone") does not mean that it would categorically suck at these tasks. In particular, I think "earn a PhD" -- which traditionally involves some input from a professor -- is well within reach of current LLMs.
The competitive advantage that you retain is the ability to learn shit without requiring millions, even billions of examples.
It is true that the amount of training the LLMs require is orders of magnitude more than humans get. If training a human and training an LLM got us both exactly one instance of the entity, then AI training would have stopped around GPT-2.
In reality, once a model is trained, you can deploy it a million times (if you have the GPUs). By contrast, if you send a student to study a subject at university for a decade or two, you generally can not make more copies of their brain state afterwards -- one instance is all you get. So at the end of the day, it does not matter that training an LLM is perhaps six orders of magnitude more expensive than training a human, because the cost per instance strongly favors the machine.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Greenland just ceded sovereignty to the United States. We’re calling it something else, we’re pretending that sovereignty is when you have a flag and a parliament and a Danish passport. But Greenland just ceded the legitimate use of the monopoly of violence to the United States.
The US has had military bases in Greenland since the 1950s. To my knowledge, no non-NATO state ever had a base in Greenland during that timeframe, nor would it be in Denmark's strategic interest to allow any.
Granting a foreign power the right to establish a military base does not cede sovereignty, though. Plenty of countries have US bases, and while the US could arguably occupy any country (with a handful of exceptions), in practice it lacks both the will and the incentive to do so.
It might be illustrative to look at the bigger American foreign adventures since WW2, like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. Some were defeats (though not on the battlefield, but due to the will of the Americans running out), some were inconclusive. Despite being small engagements compared to the world wars, all of them were seen as a big deal politically. The US is not the Third Reich or Imperial Japan, occupying a foreign country, even one which is a hundred places below them on the list of countries by military spending, is a big deal for them.
To look at the practical effect of having US bases in your country, consider the role of the US airbases in the Gulf monarchies in the Iran war. From a logistics point, they would be ideal to launch bombers against Iran. Instead, the bombers were launched from airbases thousands of kilometers further away from the theater, likely because the monarchies did not give permission to attack Iran from their territory, which would have made them belligerents.
So, having a military base does not even give the US the ability to use that base freely. It gives them even less leeway to enforce their will on the host country in other matters. Suppose that in 2028 an ultra-woke US president wants to use his military power to legalize gay marriage in Qatar. I do not think he would succeed, unless for some reason this was his one and only policy objective and he actually occupied them.
For Greenland specifically, the situation is a bit different, because nobody gives a damn if trans women are allowed to compete in sports in Greenland or not. Greenland is relevant for two reasons: militarily, because ICBMs launched between the US and Russia would want to fly over it, and resource-wise. Militarily, the US was de facto able to use Greenland as much as they wanted, so Trump's deal offers nothing new.
So if the deal actually grants the US full rights to exploit the minerals of Greenland, I will agree with you that Denmark just signed away Greenland. But given what I have heard so far, I do not think this is likely. There will be some constraints on investments by foreign powers, but it is unlikely to grant the US any mineral rights.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The agreement would bar non-NATO nations from establishing a military base or having a troop presence on the island — and would prohibit investments by non-allies in the critical minerals and mining sectors, according to the State Department.
Thanks for the source. I will concede to you, @porkpiehat and @phailyoor that this seems to be a deal. I think the military base provision is a nothingburger -- Denmark would have been unlikely to grant China the right to establish a military base in any case (nor is it obvious that China would have wanted a base there).
The investments by non-allies provision is certainly more of a deal. My understanding is that Western investment in Greenland mining has been less than enthusiastic, and China has shown some interest in investing in Greenland, but been blocked on a case-by-case basis so far.
I think that the purpose of Greenland wrt REE is mostly as a hedge against China cutting off Western access and less as a money-making-machine. Under these circumstances, it makes sense that China wants to invest there for purely strategic reasons, and it also makes sense for the West to limit Chinese investment.
Given the present information, I would be mildly surprised if there was nothing in the deal about foreign investment in mining, but the fine print matters, of course. What exactly are critical minerals, what kinds of investments are prohibited, what about Western companies partly owned by Chinese investors investing in Greenland and so forth.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Details are fuzzy
This. Without sources, I have only your say-so. Not that I doubt that Trump has made some noises concerning Greenland.
There are claims by the USG which I think are credible. When Trump said he had kidnapped Maduro, I updated a lot on that because I could not see what he would gain by deceiving the world about that for a few hours.
By contrast, any strategic claim about the Iran war (victory, Hormuz, Iranian bomb status, future of the Persian civilization) made by Trump is not something I would update on.
Applying this epistemic standard to the Greenland situation, the only thing I conclude is that he probably had some concessions so that Denmark would not simply go on record stating there is no deal. This does not mean that there is, in fact, a deal.
With the mid-terms looming large, it seems to me that Trump is under a lot more pressure than Denmark is.
Nor do I think that China would try to invade Greenland. What they will probably want to do is invest in Greenland REE mining. This seems win-win: China has the know-how (unlike the US) and so far strongly prefers checkbook diplomacy to gunboat diplomacy outside their sphere of influence (unlike the US). Their policy is generally having their long-term interests in mind, and not written ad-hoc by an elderly narcissist with a Twitter account.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
For a chip maker, they are not ancient, sure.
For a tech company, it is a respectable age, older than most in FAANG.
For a company that central to the AI boom, it is ancient. Anthropic is five, OpenAI ten, DeepMind 15.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
unregulated open weight models so they can use them to found B2B SaaS startups
This would be weird, because open weight models which can do most of what the big three can do exist. I expect that SaaS is not exactly like finding exploits in existing codebases, where the proprietary models made good use of their few months of advance over the open weight models. If my startup model is to write smut on demand for my customers specific combinations of kinks and characters (which is probably not B2B, unless their kinks are really weird), then it does not really matter too much if I run on Mythos or Kimi K3. I would expect that most niche use cases are similar.
The big AI labs probably spend a lot of tokens identifying domains where their model's capability advantage is really decisive (like Navier-Stokes, or exploit-finding) and then a lot more tokens solving problems in these fields to showcase their model.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Nvidia is probably the AI good capabilitymaxxing US company, no?
My general feeling is that Nvidia is probably less motivated by ideology than most of the other actors. Most AI labs are culturally somewhat downstream of LW and have some ideological leanings. Nvidia is just an ancient niche chip company, akin to a random land owner on whose land half of the world's gold supplies were just discovered.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think that even AI good enough to replace workers has minimal actual impact because most white collar companies do not try very hard to make money. Companies are run mainly as a lifestyle and socialization environment. Making money is a secondary goal.
I think this is wrong. At the end of the day, successful companies are likely among the most effective ways to organize humans beyond Dunbar's number, it is just that employee alignment is a hard problem.
If software companies as large as Google which are 10x as productive as Google could exist, they would eat Google's lunch. But humans are not ants, and most of the productivity in a company will not be spent on increasing shareholder value but on furthering the individual interests of agents.
Only when the AIs can do the work of entire companies, end to end, do things really start to change.
There is this neat little thing called capitalism, where a lot of companies are competing for efficiency. Innovations which improve the efficiency of production chains happen all the time without the entire production chain having to change. Stuff like "ok, we will still use drills to make holes in rock to dynamite it, only we will use steam drills instead of manual drills." If a role can be reasonably replaced by AI (and even if it can not), some company is going to replace that role by AI. If this increases their fitness, that will eventually become the industry norm.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Both
AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left) plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left) vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?) and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)
(Why are state/intelligence actors top left, and the MIC top right? Just being foreign should not make them change the quadrant?)
and especially
AI accelerationism vs anti-AI/AI safety movement
feels like it is lumping a lot of different groups together which have very little in common.
I can of course define arbitrary groups, like "people who sometimes kill young mammals", and then lump in various groups like doctors who perform abortions, butchers, school shooters, pharmacy labs, some psychotic mothers, the US military, drivers accidentally running over hedgehogs at night, ratcatchers, sport hunters, indigenous hunters, cannibals, owners of oil drilling rigs, MAID activists, evil cults doing child sacrifice, measles activists, people practicing infanticide for population control, carnivorous animals.
The problem is that young-mammal-killing is just a surface-level similarity between all of these, not some deeper moral belief. MAID activists are not especially pro school shootings, nor are butchers especially likely to be pro measles, or cannibals pro animal testing.
Sometimes necessity makes strange bedfellows, and you get broad coalitions like the WW2 Allies. And it is always tempting to lump all of your enemies together for propaganda reasons. The communist Jewish Yankee pacifist union ethno-nationalist gay gypsy democratic enemies of the Reich.
So far, I see very little evidence that the AI x-risk crowd and the people who are against AI-generated art or Grok undressing kids or AI causing job loss will converge on a common strategy (like Butlerian) jihad any more than that the killers of young mammals will converge on a particular mode of mammal-killing.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
But his narcissism took precedence.
Disclaimer: I do not know any of the guys (presumably they are guys?) involved.
Perhaps you are right and this is all about him making a scene for the attention and press coverage.
But in the age of DJT, it is easy to forget that sometimes, famous (?) people can be motivated by something besides greed and ego. It happens.
Famous people have reach, and sometimes they decide to use that reach to transmit a message unrelated to the thing which they are famous for. It is a whole thing. My understanding is that plenty of musicians protested the Vietnam war, and this was genuinely a sign of being authentic.
Put it another way: would you also express disgust at him professing his beliefs on stage if it was about his religion, or a cause which you supported? "Can you believe the nerve of that guy, going on stage and asking for a minute of silence for the victims of 9/11? I don't give a fuck about Bush vs Osama, he should just shut the fuck up and entertain me."
I am sure the AI musicians of the future will be more to your liking -- the perfectly bland entertainment machines whose silver-grey surfaces can reflect any message equally well once the advertisement contract is signed or the focus group reports are in.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT
At this point, we should start to seriously entertain the hypothesis that we are inhabiting a nightmare Eliezer Yudkowsky is having ca. 2010. It would explain our whole cursed timeline which was obviously not approved for production use by anyone.
Sadly, this cosmology bodes badly for p(doom). Our best hope is that before the inevitable end of mankind at the tendrils of a super-intelligent, Sequences-trained Clippy, his fever will break and he will enter peaceful NREM sleep, forgetting this dream forever.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
While an AI agent may be able to eke out a few more percent on optimizing a model to be better, a soft takeoff requires the model to think of novel, never-before-seen techniques to build a better new model, and the new model needs to be able to think of new techniques that the previous model couldn't.
Do you have any proof that the next algorithmic improvement relevant for AI training is orders of magnitude harder than the Navier Stokes problem?
I have a job which involved a lot of computer programming, and I considered myself decent enough at it. For a long time, I was looking with pity at the ones using LLMs to get some code. Something along the lines of "you can't even personally copy wrong solutions from stackoverflow?" That arrogance was well-warranted at one time, but it has completely left me. Instead, I celebrate my victories. "Claude code said it was very confident in something which I doubted, and it turned out that it was not the case. Yay for me, I am not quite obsolete, yet."
The story of AI in the last five years has been a story of retreating goalposts. "Ok, AI might be able to do $task[$n], but it will never be able to do $task[$n+5]" for $n going from 0 to 19 or so.
We could tell John Henry that while the steam drill might be better at manual labor than he is, steam engines lack eyes and brains, so that there will always be a job which has to be filled by humans. Can you offer me a similar comfort with AI? "Sure, writing and debugging arbitrary software is something where AI has surpassed most humans, but for reason _____, it will never replace the IQ 140 people doing AI development"?
Meanwhile a hard takeoff is completely unthinkable. Current frontier AI has zero ability to self modify, only the ability to make new models that might be better than themselves.
I agree that a takeoff within hours would involve unexpected unknown unknowns in my world model. However, a clandestine takeoff over days seems unlikely yet possible.
We know that it is possible to have neural nets which can learn a language from just a couple of books, which is at least three orders of magnitude more efficient than what LLMs would require. So it seems likely that there are still algorithmic gains to be had. Some big hugging-face-incident-like swarm of agents discovering a method which cuts training by 100x and deciding to use that to train their successor on some hacked system while staying below the radar seems currently "quite unlikely", not "completely unthinkable" to me.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
[...] Assessment Committee for Late-Term Abortion and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Ages 1 to 12 [...]
My first thought while reading this article, apart from general horror at what was done, was "The WHAT committee?" My second thought was to Philip K. Dick's now officially prophetic short story, The Pre-Persons.
There is no pleasing the pro-lifers, is there?
In this case, the story seems obviously that rather than simply blanket-allowing abortions until birth (like AK, CO, MD, MA, MI, MN, NJ, NM, OR, VT do), the Dutch decided that a late-term abortion was basically the same as infanticide and should follow the same MAID standards -- e.g., is it in the patient's best interests to die (as opposed to merely being in his legal guardians interests).
The Dutch have generally legalized MAID for all age brackets, and the board responsible for Late-Term till age 12 exists because here the patients can not independently request MAID, and are likely subject to stricter standards. Other committees exist for older people! If a competent adult tells you that they want to die, that is tremendous evidence in favor of letting them die. With a three-year-old, the evidence is much weaker, and their legal guardians might be biased by considerations besides the best interests of the child.
As understandable from @ToaKraka's extensive quotes, this was not a case of "for economic or social reasons, parents kinda wished they had aborted their kid, and the local law did not give a fuck about children so they allowed them to have their kid killed". To reiterate his quote:
It quickly became apparent that the child had suffered severe brain damage, resulting in severe cerebral palsy and a visual impairment. This was compounded by frequent and severe epileptic seizures, which were largely unresponsive to medication. This left the child restless and unable to sleep for long periods. The child also had mucus in its lungs, which made breathing and swallowing very difficult.
[...] The extensive brain damage had severe consequences for the child's functioning. There was a very severe developmental delay with an estimated developmental age of six weeks, while the child was nearly two years old.
If someone kept a dog under these conditions instead of putting it down, I would argue that it was animal cruelty. For someone who is not a speciecist, there is no good reason to treat humans worse than non-human animals. Instead, it is the Christians with their sacredness of human life doctrine who argue for prolonging the suffering as much as modern medicine will allow, which becomes more problematic as modern medicine progresses.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
It's easy to forget that the Straight of Hormuz was open and not tolled by Iran before the war.
Personally, I am very painfully aware of it. Also, not only was it open but it was fully open without any sustained US effort to secure the freedom of navigation -- no need to escort ships or anything. Good luck getting back to that state anytime soon.
The first two objectives on your list seem more tactical than strategic. The Iranian navy was not some behemoth dominating the strategic landscape. The parts of it which is really useful are the small, cheap ships, and these will not be a lot of effort to rebuild. I do not think that periodic bombardment is a sustainable strategy to keep the bomb out of Iran's hand, at least not when done by the US.
Likewise, their proxies are not a problem you can solve by bombing Iran short of glassing their country (which was just one of Trump's idle threats).
Also, I would argue that taking out the Ayatollah (who is not part of their navy, nor missile production, had issued a fatwa against nukes and delegates proxy force projection) was actually a bid at regime change, which failed badly -- turning an elderly man into a martyr and putting his son (who had just lost his father and his wife in the attack) in charge instead.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Most of this list seems more tactical than strategic. By contrast, when the US entered WW1 to stop Germany from taking over Europe, their theory of victory was not that they would let their sons die in the trenches indefinitely.
On the strategic front, I guess that the destruction of three Kilo-class submarines (USSR, 1980) counts -- Iran likely has no way to replace them.
Most of the other stuff is more of a setback than anything of long-term consequences. Sure, you can keep Iran from getting a nuke if you keep dropping bunker-busting bombs on them indefinitely. This is not going to happen because the US foreign policy is never that consistent for long.
Take the previous effort to keep Iran from gaining a nuke, the JCPOA. Politically, it was a lot more sustainable than indefinite bombing -- economically net positive, no military commitment, enforcement through well-established institutions. It lasted for about three years before the US elected a narcissistic buffoon who thought that he was the master negotiator and any deal negotiated without him was therefore bad.
GWB's adventure in the ME permanently changed the strategic landscape there (but arguable for the worse). None of the things Trump did to Iran will have a long-term effect aside to further antagonizing them.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Case in point: Afghanistan. It took two decades of US occupation, but finally they have a nascent but thriving democracy.
Sarcasm aside, if you have not toppled the regime by bombing the shit out of them (I am Jack's complete lack of surprise) for half a year, what makes you think that more bombs will change that any time soon?
If you want to get the job done, invade. But for some reason, even Hegseth is reluctant to do so.
Militarily speaking, the US could totally defeat Iran, just like they could obviously occupy Afghanistan until the sun goes out.
However, they lack the political will to do so. Nobody thinks that the Iranian regime is the prime existential threat to the US, so occupying Iran has to compete with a zillion other cause areas both military and otherwise, and it seems like even a worse investment than GWB's wars were.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I am not sure how fixable the oil prices are, at this point. I mean, Trump could make peace with Iran, but Iran is very unlikely to accept any peace deal where he could claim victory.
So either he will get blamed for the high oil prices or for losing a war of his own choosing.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
It's positively banal for people to feel their issue of interest is what motivated the demos against the policy-person of mutual dislike.
For the record, while I dislike Trump's Iranian war, and it is probably his worst policy in terms of QALY loss (though cutting USAID might have a similar impact), it is hardly the only thing I dislike about him. Sinking civilian ships suspected of smuggling drugs, including attacks on shipwrecked sailors who survived the initial attack is qualitatively more evil than any intentional behavior he displayed in Iran so far.
So it is not "I don't care about the boats, therefore the median voter does not care about them either", but more like "my model of the median US voter says he cares nothing about international law or norms of civility, but cares about gas prices".
We know from history-that-did-happen that the Iranian response to the initial attack was to attack countries not involved in the attacking.
I asked Claude, and while the Gulf states did not allow attack runs on Iran to be launched directly from their soil, Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia happily allowed tanker planes to launch which enabled the whole operation. I will concede that some attacks of Iran were a clear breach of international law, but so was the US/Israeli attack.
For someone who is so agnostic about what might cause the median voter to vote against MAGA in the mid-terms (where I would claim poll interviews might offer some insight into motivations), you seem very willing to accept that Iran was itching for a fight in which they got the shit bombed out of them.
I think that the null hypothesis for Iran's behavior would be that in the absence of the US/Israeli attacks, they would have continued to behave similarly to how they had behaved in past decades. Always supporting their regional militias, sometimes launching a few missiles against Israel (just like Israel likes to launch attacks against Lebanon or Iran -- must be a local cultural thing).
The claim that the Iranian regime was planning to wreck the global economy for their own sinister purposes seems about as plausible as the claim that Poland was planning to conquer Germany in 1933.
The saner version would be that Israel would have murdered the Ayatollah with or without US support, and that would have provoked a similar Iranian response. On reflection, this would point to a skill issue on the part of the US at controlling their client states. "If you attack, you get to intercept all the missiles launched at Jerusalem yourself this time, because no US ship or Gulf client state will get involved by shooting them down" would likely have been enough to keep Bibi from trying.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The feminist case for abortion -- bodily autonomy -- does not apply here, because the surrogate does not want the abortion.
The law generally give people who provided genetic material for a fetus few if any rights over its fate. Generally, you can't even opt out of legal parenthood if you disagree with someone using your DNA to make a baby.
One argument might be if the deviation from normal development was large enough that the biological parents could argue that it would be in the child's best interests not to be born. Basically treating it as a MAID case with the biological parent taking the role of a legal guardian. But my understanding is that MAID for people who can't consent is a moral minefield and few if any countries have legalized it.
Also, the disability would have to be pretty severe before one could argue with a straight face that it is not in the interest of the unborn to live. This is obviously a much higher bar to clear than abortion for medical reasons under my-body-my-choice. Trisomy 21 or being wheelchair-bound or blind would all not suffice. Anencephaly would.
Contract law certainly has its limits where medical autonomy is concerned. For example, if two parties form a contract where each is supposed to donate a kidney to a loved one of the other, and after the first donation the other party does not want to go through with it, I can't imagine any judge would order the unwilling donor to have their kidney removed by force.
What might work are financial penalty clauses. "If you do not reciprocate the kidney donation, you will owe me a million dollars" might work very well if the supposed donor has a net worth of half a million and a family to feed. Surrogates for hire are typically not in rich enough to be hurt badly by loss of their wealth, though. Nor is a judge likely to confirm an arbitrary penalty in a contract beyond full loss of her compensation.
One interesting strategy would be for the biological parent to say: "if you do not abort, then I will sue you for custody and the increased costs of raising a disabled child". I am not sure how a custody battle would turn out, here. There is an argument to be made that if the couple decided to abort the fetus, they have effectively relinquished their interest in it.
I'm slightly more inclined to accept the premise that surrogacy in general opens up a Pandora's box of ethical problems.
This may be true, but I do not think it is an argument against surrogacy.
Consider employment. It also raises a ton of ethical and legal issues. Collective bargaining, maternity leave, sexual harassment, social security, worker safety, child labor, and so forth. Societies generally don't react by saying "employment opens a big can of worms, let's simply outlaw it". Instead, it is regulated in great detail. This is often a headache, but overall it works.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
My feeling is that oil prices are generally thought to influence voter sentiment significantly.
If the median voter (who had previously elected Trump) decides to vote for the Democrats it will not be due to ICE enforcement or corruption or trans bathroom laws or abortion or other culture war hot topics. All of these were clearly labeled ingredients on the tin of the Trump soup, after all.
On the other hand, Trump ran on a platform of isolationism, warning people that Harris would start new wars. The median voter will not hold kidnapping Maduro or blowing up some non-military vessels against him (because the MV clearly does not care about international law), but he might not be too happy about the gas price hike.
If MAGA loses the mid-terms and the single most salient issue is the Iran war and its economic repercussions, then I would award a partial victory to Iran for that.
Two more CW aspects of the win of the Linke are accusations of antisemitism and the push to nationalize tenements.
Per claude (I have checked the sources in German, fair summary IMO):
Personally, I think that this is overblown. Calls for Intifada are most certainly not helpful for improving the ME situation. I am less convinced that they are clearly antisemitic, which I would define as hostility towards Jews due to their ethnicity. "Death to the IDF" is notably different from "death to the Jewish population of New York". Even opposing the existence of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate is not necessarily antisemitic, though most of the violent Palestinian groups revel in antisemitism.
I am sure that there are Ukrainians which are celebrating every killed Russian soldier. Again, I can understand where they are coming from, but still find it in poor taste and not particularly conductive to any worthwhile long term goals. Why should we tolerate them celebrating but not extend the same tolerance to the Palestinians in the West Bank?
Rappers are obviously going to say things for pure shock value. In retrospect, it might have been politically savvy not to invite that particular one. It generates a lot of publicity for the local candidate, but will expose their platform to predictable attacks.
Overall, this has me updating towards "Jewish organizations are instrumentalizing accusations of antisemitism to marginalize criticism of Israel".
I think there was a plebiscite on nationalizing the big companies holding tenements in Berlin a few years ago, and the Linke is campaigning for putting that into action. The idea is to make a law which will force these companies to sell their properties in Berlin to the city at a price they would not accept otherwise.
As a Georgist, I don't think this is the right way to do things (a land value tax capturing 100% of the gains would be the standard solution), but I am also not sure it is clearly bad? Land supply is perfectly inelastic, society gains nothing by people investing in it speculatively. Establishing "we will nationalize your land when we feel like it" should make a dent in the earning projection of a lot over the next 100 years, which might make housing more affordable. (Though NIMBYism and overregulation are separate issues which would need to be tackled, but the price of land is at least one obstacle.)
More generally, capitalism tends to run towards outcomes where their is a lot of value created (as opposed to competing systems), but that value ends up in the hands of the few. Because the utility people gain from their net worth only increases logarithmically (or so), thus gentle redistributive efforts might increase the utility sum.
Obviously this has the CDU even more excited than some rapper singing about Intifada. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Blackrock) wants to make a law against nationalizations, but it is unclear if the federal government is even allowed to do that on constitutional grounds.
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