Do we have any English lawyers here who can comment on whether it may actually be legal to nationalise Adele (the person) under English law? ChatGPT says it may be possible through an act of parliament, but I’m unsure whether I can trust ChatGPT in this case.
The promise could be re-interpreted in some funny ways. For example, Count Binface didn't specify when nationalizing Adele would occur.
They could create another[0] special case in UK copyright law with a minor twist: Instead of eventually entering the public domain, the copyright of Adele's works would transfer to the UK government which would donate any proceeds to a charity that builds affordable homes.
A simple bill of attainder would do it, but she'd have recourse to the ECHR to appeal it, which would in practice bind the UK. If we thought she wasn't going to be chill with it, we'd first need to withdraw from the ECHR. As it happens, withdrawing from the the ECHR is a prime Farage objective.
Parliament theoretically has unlimited power, practically I think this stops short of reintroducing actual slavery. Lawyers would be busy arguing in international courts; but hopefully 50℅ of the electorate might actually bother to vote.
(Obviously the MP for Clacton has the power to talk sturnly to someone with actual power in the councel over the bin collection schedule; the is no plausable way to deliver any of their pledges)
if we want to be anal, UK cares a bit because of the GFA, North Ireland peace agreements. An international agreement is a part of those & also it's very important to the UK for various reasons, some even characterize it as de-facto a part of the UK's constitution. And it binds the UK to the ECHR.
The shareholders or owners may or may not receive compensation.
Presumably a normal(?) interpretation would be that the British government uses whatever eminent domain law it has and it takes over Adels copyright on all her songs and gives her whatever the fair market value of the catalog is.
But because this is a joke candidate, could be anything.
Water companies used to be publicly owned until Thatcher privatised them. Unfortunately, as they are a natural monopoly (you cannot choose which company to supply your water services apart from moving to a different part of the country), the companies have basically been extracting as much money as possible from the public and not investing in the infrastructure. This has led to ridiculous bills for water and disastrous performance in terms of not pouring sewage into waterways. The classic example is Thames Water which is now saddled with incredible debts and is asking for yet more money to invest in infrastructure (which they didn't do all the other times they asked for more money).
Generally water nationalisation means nationalising the companies which supply water to homes and businesses. Not, er, literally nationalising water as in the substance.
If we project her lifespan as 50 more years and assume the UK population stays stable at 70 millions, that works out at 3835 and a half lunches per day.
1. Fix a formal system S. In the LLM example, it uses first-order arithmetic, but I don't see why we wouldn't be able to use ZFC.
2. Let D be the set of subsets of the natural numbers N which are definable by a finite formula in S.
3. There are countably many finite formulas, so |D| <= |N|.
4. Cantor's theorem says that the size of the power set of N is greater than |N|.
5. Therefore there must be subsets of N which are not definable by a finite formula in S.
If you disagree with this, I would be interested to know.
Not happy to respond to LLM talk, but you seem interested anyway. Some sleight of hand happens between "fixing a formal system" and using Cantor's theorem for the metamathematical analysis, as if we use classical set theory anyway. Note that you cannot construct any particular example of a non-definable set, which should cast doubt of existence. I'll disagree by pointing to anti-classical set theories. The axiom of infinity proves independence from ZFC, so I can freely replace the axiom of infinity with its negation, then the natural numbers no longer form a set. Some constructive analysis systems include an axiom that every real-valued function is continuous (as discontinuous functions are undecidable).
“The basic realism of science, then, rests upon the following claim: the Universe is such that facts can be plainly stated within it, even though the facts themselves need not be plain.”
What facts can plainly be stated within this universe? Can facts exist outside the common language within which they are expressed?
I'm not going to waste my time describing the entirety of the last century of physics, or the numerous technologies we've developed whose operation depends on this being true. We don't have to prove it, it's one of the most thoroughly tested and proven concepts in existence. Read a book.
That answers a different question. The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework.
Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language. Simply asserting that they do is the realism that I am disputing.
Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.
>The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework.
The proof that the proposition exists can be found in the countless references and papers referencing it, including Einstein's original 1905 paper. You can find the Wikipedia page on mass-energy equivalence here[0] and the paper here[1].
And you were talking about language, not conceptual frameworks. Obviously one can imagine conceptual frameworks where E=MC^2 is not true, but your argument was that facts cannot exist and cannot be proven outside of the language with which they are expressed, which is obviously false because observation, experimentation and science are not expressed entirely with language.
>Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language.
Yes they can, because if facts didn't have truth independent from common language, the technology wouldn't work, or rather, would work differently depending on the language of the user. This obviously isn't the case. We can observe that the universe, made up of stars and planets that don't have language, nevertheless obey the physical laws that we express in language. We can observe that animals which don't have language behave in ways we can describe, and obey physical laws they can't comprehend.
>Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.
It is. It was true when Einstein wrote it in German, it was true before he wrote it down, it remained true when it was translated into English, it's true in Esperanto, Dutch, Klingon, any language you prefer, because language doesn't define reality, it only describes it. Rename it Q=XZ^01 and it still describes the same fundamental and immutable fact about reality. Write it upside down and it still works the same.
Do conceptual frameworks exist outside of language? If so, where do they exist, and how do you define existence in this context?
If facts have truth independent from common language, where do those facts exist, and how do you define existence in this context?
As an example, are you hinting at the existence of facts and truths that are somehow different from the easier definition of formal truths which hold in an assumed axiomatic framework, as happens in mathematics, which itself is a framework of language?
Is it useful? If not, it has no intrinsic value. It might have emotional value, either by being a memento, something of historical significance..., or something to calm the the dreams for quick, easy, and abundant money.
- Having a beneficial use; serviceable: "a useful kitchen gadget."
- Being of practical use: "a useful job; useful members of society."
- Full of use, advantage, or profit; producing, or having power to produce, good; serviceable for any end or object; helpful toward advancing any purpose; beneficial; profitable; advantageous: "vessels and instruments useful in a family; books useful for improvement; useful knowledge; useful arts"
Let’s say I bought an NFT for X and later sold it for Y profit. I bought a house with Y. The person who received X bought a car with it, or maybe long in oil futures with X before the Iran war, made Z, and bought a field with the profit. Or maybe he put Z in a couple of bonds and used the resulting return later.
I'd say that's a scam, not an argument for the usefulness of NFTs. My counterargument is that most NFTs made people lose money instead of buying them houses or oil fields.
I'd bet that most stories of NFTs translating to material wealth come from minters or the inner circle of early adopters, because they made something useless and valueless, and somehow convinced enough people that it was worth buying it for hard-earned cash. Many lost so a few could make bank.
Value and usefulness are again subjective. For instance, what value would you have put on a can of Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit? After all, we could all take a shit in a can. One can was sold for 124k EUR.
Many people lost some money. Maybe they gained from the experience. Many people made money. Maybe they lost some on other things. Many people got their knickers in a twist over things with such perceived (by themselves) low value selling for high value. Maybe they forgot that fiat money is a construction as well. Conversely, maybe they gained something intangible from the whole experience.
I feel sad about keeping animals in small confines, away from their natural habitat, but on the other hand, I have come to the subjective conclusion that rights are also subjective.
Have you considered that the public may be gaining something from the conversations and awareness that arise from the performance of this art? I invite you to move away from evaluating a piece of art simply in terms of the monetary cost to the tax payer.
I didn't mention it only because it's difficult to attribute a monetary value to "conversations and awareness that arise from the performance of this art", while it's easy to cite the sale value of previous works.
I still do this. The ingredient list of my hand soap is a page-turner. In The Netherlands, I found it quite common for there to be books or comics in the toilet. Mostly humorous. I never got a tummy bug from partaking in this.
