Sort of like how the medieval world relied on a small class of aristocratic landowners who loved riding fast horses and killing each other, the postmodern world relies on a small class of people from all walks of life who will work much harder than usual to make more money than they need, operating large enterprises to solve various material problems of other people that they don't really need to be solving, paying tax on those enterprises that they could otherwise avoid if the were not working so much.
Thats a real big difference in how socialists vs ryandian people view the world.
The Ayn Rand philosophy holds that the people at the top are working hundreds or thousands of times harder than the rest of us.
The modern socialist view is completely contradictory, where most of the people at the top are supposed to be doing even less than a construction worker, but they're rich because of the return on capital or the right to extract some sort of rent.
The problem with both views is it ignores lived experience.
Everyone knows people at the top get paid more, even in socialist/communist societies this is the case. Now whether this is because of birth privilege, good social connections, politicking, actual hard work. It's pretty well a constant that's held across time & differently structured societies. I guess what I'm trying to say here: there's always people jockeying for position. Pretending we're in some sort of utopia won't give the average person a good experience.
Second. While the hard work is most definitely over exaggerated, it's not uncommon that hard working people usually end up better off then not hard working people. There's also the saying/belief that people make their own luck. And I am firmly in the camp that luck, whether it's made on their own accord or blindly stumbled into, is a probably the biggest unspoken factor because it takes away from narratives of self-made etc.
This is an empirical question. 10 seconds of googling suggests CEOs work about 60 hours/week average: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/harvard-study-what-ceos-do-a... so harder than the average employee, but I'm not sure by what measure anyone believes they work 100x harder.
Perhaps the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO is 100-1000000x the average worker's productivity, or even more. I suspect the real disagreement is: does that justify paying a CEO 10-100000x more than the average worker, even if they only work 1.5x as hard? From the perspective of a company it may be worthwhile, but I can see how some people might feel that's a little unfair.
Using this tool seems to generate superior cringe posts to the actual cringe posts. I made one about what my female toddler’s violence taught me about B2B SaaS sales and the story it created, while implausible, was genuinely charming.
I prompted it with "How uncontrollable flatulence taught me to handle business curveballs" and I was definitely mildly amused by the results. So much detail.
LLMs have created more billable hours for me as an attorney because the LLMs convince the client that they need to know more about irrelevant issues, how specific statutes may apply, and other such things. They may ask about specific procedural issues that they would otherwise have no idea about that I then need to explain in greater detail. It reliably bloats things that would be a .1 into .5 or more.
>They may ask about specific procedural issues that they would otherwise have no idea about that I then need to explain in greater detail.
My favorite part about LLMs is that their insufficiency as legal aids (Aides? Aids.) seems to be slowly cluing-in the general public as to how Byzantine and "inside baseball" our legal system has become. (This is a bad thing.)
It's a big part of why I'm strongly opposed to common-law systems (as opposed to civil law). All the case law, all of it becomes, well, law. And then you get the whole "legislating from the bench" critique, which, while valid critique, is only a big problem because it's a common-law system.
Yes, I realize many (most?) legal systems are actually hybrid, but they do tend to err pretty strongly into one direction or another.
Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.
None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.
I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.
Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.
Everything on your list but VA benefits and defense are very regularly called into question. Even VA benefits are questioned pretty regularly, but that tends to be put down pretty quickly.
> A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners
That's just a byproduct of propping up the military industrial complex; have to have conflicts to justify giving the primes sole-source cost+ contracts so they can meet their quarterly EPS targets.
This is why, here at GloboCorp, we kill an Excel monkey at the office right after the daily standup. The open office plan makes it so that the whole team hears the screams (and some lucky team members catch a little splatter). Death creates some unexpected synergies. At GloboCorp, our employees learn that death is inexorable. Does one fear the rising of the sun? No. One simply accepts that the sun will rise. So too do our valued team members at GloboCorp simply accept that they will be checking functions until they are reduced during a daily teambuilding exercise.
No one at GloboCorp asks themselves if they will live the rest of their lives as Excel monkeys, because we answer that question for them every day. The answer is Yes, you will fill out the little cells, and then we will kill you. We provide effective solutions to the problem of being. We transform existential dread into acceptance and peace and high performance.
It’s a guy asking to make an end-run around the constitution and the APA regulatory framework based on a flimsy sci fi premise. Naturally it provokes a negative reaction.
This reads like an AI with an overflowing context window wrote it; or in the alternative it’s a list of statutes written by an arrogant and delusional king. It is this type of arrogance that will lead to an unfavorable reaction by Congress.
You can prompt up some really cool commercial-grade art within the limitations of the models.
Getting more precision and consistency in the images requires additional technical configuration and actual artistic skill such that it more resembles using Photoshop and similar software. But what can be done with prompting is a lot more impressive than what can be done with rudimentary Photoshop skills and a big photo library to work from.
And even if it was, it would be art stolen from the poor to profit the wealthy. The worst "art" there could possibly be. And then it's so tacky and mediocre on top of that.
Either way, I can't draw a line between art and non-art, but I can draw one between humans I respect and humans I don't.
We basically have the situation that some people thought they were super clever by finding out that you can steal from a blind beggar, enhancing their productivity, getting those results. Sure you can do that, they're blind after all, just yoink it; but you cannot undo it, and we all saw. A person who would do such a thing will never understand why people who would not do such a thing are appalled at them. And they think they don't have to care because they now have "AI" and can just brute force or work around consent. I don't know how exactly this will fall on their feet but what goes up will come down.
What is art? How is it not art? Collage is art, photoshop itself is used for cut n paste of photos, and people call that "art". AI image generators go through a much more interesting process to make their art.
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