is there any particular reason you’re saying that besides cynicism? I am having trouble finding specifics, but there’s a lot of reporting that the MTA is expecting to raise $15 billion from congestion tolling to fund public transportation repairs and improvements and pretty much all of the proposals for this in the past required all of the revenues to be earmarked for use by the MTA

The irony is, I like proton because I don’t think you should trust literally any business to behave altruistically, including proton. By structuring the business in the manner that they have, I don’t just have to trust them. I just have to trust that the people in charge don’t want to go to jail or get fined, which is literally not true for any business owned by private individuals.

First of all, I did not say that proton is opposing capitalism. I said that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise. As in, you can be opposed to an economy comprised primarily of capitalist institutions without being opposed to the concept of free enterprise. Proton is simply an example of such a business, which can be used as evidence for the fact that it is entirely possible to start businesses in a free market economy which are actually interested in solving problems as opposed to using the existence of problems as a vehicle to enrich a class of shareholders.

Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote, which I will repeat here: “I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share.”. You’re right that them adopting a nonprofit structure doesn’t change that, but it does change their ability to sell out their customers at the discretion of a class of shareholders, unlike any business which is owned by private individuals.

I remember one time I criticized proton for positioning itself as community oriented while still being a for-profit corporation. I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share. But then several months later, they actually announced that they were going to put their money where their mouth is, and transition to a nonprofit structure.

I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise, and people should always think about this sort of thing when they listen to any kind of business leader try to convince them that it’s actually really important that they be allowed to cash out whenever they want.

I can’t imagine that their set up is perfect, but I definitely am going to have to give this offer serious consideration.

Maybe somebody should make the argument that random businesses benefiting from prison labor is not only unethical for the prisoner, but also for the people that they owe restitution to.

so like I am not making any comment on anything but the legal system here. but it’s absolutely the case that you can win a lawsuit on purely circumstantial evidence if the defense is unable to produce a compelling alternative set of circumstances which can lead to the same outcome.

in civil matters, the burden of proof is actually usually just preponderance of evidence and not beyond a reasonable doubt. in other words to win a lawsuit, you only need to have more compelling evidence than the other person.

Mozilla could solicit donations for the development of Firefox while also still being able to rely on commercial funding sources if they restructured the Firefox project so that the core technologies underlying it (stuff like Gecko and SpiderMonkey) were actually developed by the Foundation instead of the Corporation, while the Corporation could package all of those pieces together into a complete software product with branding. The way things are now, though the entire browser is developed by the Mozilla Corporation and so its development can only be financially supported by Mozilla Corporation selling products or engaging in business deals.

Let’s just suppose for a second that this really was unnecessary. is it the patient’s fault or the doctor’s? Truly the most insane thing in all of this is this expectation that the patient should be on the hook for unnecessary medical expenses when they quite literally are the least informed of all the parties in the situation.

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I am not referring to the politics of any of these media outlets when I say they are non-capitalist, but their ownership structure. I don’t disagree that the guardian has a major status quo bias, but at the end of the day, it is wholly owned by a non-profit trust as opposed to shareholders (aka capitalists in the pure economic sense of the word)

some high-quality non-capitalist media organizations and businesses:

ProPublica, The Guardian, Democracy Now!, NPR, PBS, Associated Press, Texas Tribune, Mother Jones, the Intercept

It’s important to distinguish within a political philosophy the normative values that inform it and the actual strategy, if any, that it prescribes. Especially on the left, there is an extremely large amount of common ground with respect to normative values, and what distinguishes the different tendencies almost always boils down to little more than arguing about why the other person’s strategy will actually not work and why their strategy is what we need to be doing. But like something else I notice is very rarely do people actually engage with the context of situations and they also think in very absolute terms which makes them feel like by identifying with a particular tendency they are attached to and constrained by it. What’s even more interesting to me is this common ground doesn’t even end at the left and quite frankly even the average politically disengaged individual will agree with so many of the normative values expressed by leftists, and with a thoughtful rhetorical approach can usually be made to see all of these issues for what they are.

this is all to say that the idea of being any particular kind of “-ist” in the sense that it means you can’t be also at the same time critically engaging with or even simultaneously identifying with other kinds of “-isms” has for a very long time felt extremely incoherent to me and even worse is when people try to project these labels with certainty (typically at the exclusion of other possible labels, no less, other labels which are simply assumed to be impossible to synthesize together) onto others on the basis of random public statements they have made.

The left-right dichotomy is not about political philosophy, but attitudes towards the status quo and hierarchies.

The most amazing part is not even that long ago, everyone agreed this is how it worked, even the business owners. I remember recently watching the 1923 silent film “Safety Last!” starring Harold Lloyd. I was very struck by a particular scene in the film where the owner of the store Harold Lloyd works at says:

“I’d give $1000 for a new idea that would attract an enormous crowd to our store. Something is wrong with our exploitation! We simply are not getting the publicity that our position in the commercial world calls for.”

This character is not presented as some kind of villain or saying something wrong. He’s just talking about how everyone understands business to work, by exploitation, which has always simply meant taking advantage of some kind of opportunity, even when people like Marx talked about it.

it was definitely happening several hours ago at least. I asked for it to tell me what the full name of a baby would be if the musician who made the song neon named his child after the most famous king of the Torah. as soon as it wrote out the word “David” the session would just end with the error message “I’m unable to produce a response”

Its actually insane that the guy who owns the most valuable electric car company in the world would have a problem with climate diversification

do you ever think about how the original paint that Da Vinci used to paint the Last Supper faded away hundreds of years ago?

The public needs to understand that this is literally people trying to take away some thing that belongs to the public, without having to even pay you for it

I don’t use it for writing directly, but I do like to use it for worldbuilding. Because I can think of a general concept that could be explored in so many different ways, it’s nice to be able to just give it to an LLM and ask it to consider all of the possible ways it could imagine such an idea playing out. it also kind of doubles as a test because I usually have some sort of idea for what I’d like, and if it comes up with something similar on its own that kind of makes me feel like it would be something which would easily resonate with people. Additionally, a lot of the times it will come up with things that I hadn’t considered that are totally worth exploring. But I do agree that the only as you say “formidable” use case for this stuff at the moment is to use this thing as basically a research assistant for helping you in serious intellectual pursuits.