Gonna have to force-feed them enough pizza, maybe tricking them that it's causing the other three great pains to give it to them. Fortunately, it's been shown that these people are very easily tricked.
I mean, they tried that in the primaries and young people still stayed home. If they actually came out in force for Bernie like you said they would, he would have won every primary. Young people simply don't vote because of a lot of different reasons. Probably some of the reasons are immaturity and a lack of belief that they have agency, which is understandable given how society works in the US. You have basically zero rights until you turn 18, at which point you are magically able to vote! Do you believe you have the ability to affect the world at that point? Of course not.
"Put up candidates that don't suck" in this context is basically "put up candidates who will cater to young voters at the expense of literally every other constituency", which is exactly the reason Bernie lost in 2016, and lost even harder in 2020. You can't focus only on one group of people, even if that's the only way to drive their turnout. It's just a losing game, clearly not one worth playing with a group of people who don't yet understand that other people exist, with other priorities.
I guess I just didn't realize that was the settled reason why Bernie lost!
I just think even granting this framing, what is the point or the lesson here? Is the idea that Clinton in 2016 was more well-rounded, had broader appeal as a candidate and young people were too immature to realize this?
The lesson is that making your sole priority driving youth turnout is a losing strategy, for reasons that are not that confusing. The Bernie lamenters would do well to learn lessons from his failures, rather than blaming everyone else.
Sure, but what does this mean? Like ok we know not to solely cater to the youth vote, great. That wouldn't imply to me then that the correct thing to do instead is alienate or anger that same vote, right? Shouldn't we see nominees that cater to all of them, or a lot of them at least? Or, what's wrong with wanting that?
We do not need to start from the point of view that each given interest or group is totally opposed, that we are locked in some zero-sum death spiral where "the youth vote" shares absolutely no overlap with anybody else. Politics is possible at all because we believe in something else. You could decompose everything down into a list of people to blame with stuff like this, but it won't tell you what to actually do!
That's the thing - we already know that each given interest group has common interests. That's how you build coalitions, by finding those common interests and tamping down on the differences. The problem with the youth vote that we know, is that if we cater to anyone other than them, or god forbid have any opinion they disagree with, they get disillusioned or even outright hostile (very much to their own detriment), for reasons I speculated on above.
So it's better to treat them as a totally unreliable voting bloc that is nice to have, but in no way should be treated special. They are fickle, impossible to corral, and make particularly awful coalition partners.
Bernie, for one, would have done well to use their energy to launch, as he did, but then switch to broadening his coalition, rather than doubling down on catering to their every whim and attempted browbeating. That rigidity and tunnel vision is what sunk him, and is what would have led to total electoral collapse if he had somehow made it to the nomination.
Ok well then I guess there really is no hope here for this. I guess it's just a shame it's such a helpless case with the kids here!
But really, if you have a democracy where there seems to be one uncompromising bloc that no one can really satisfy, that too is democracy in action in a way! Or rather, it maybe says something about the state and the parties that this is the case with regard to the youth. Given all of history, we can't just say in general "kids are intrinsically uncompromising, short term idealists fundamentally incompatible with democracy." Right?
I feel like you shouldn't get to criticize protests for not being violent enough if you're not already performing sufficiently-violent protests. "Firebombing a Walmart" meme really is evergreen.
Roe v. Wade isn't gone because of the will of the people. Nobody voted to overturn it. It's gone because of a unique scenario involving the balance of power in the SCOTUS.
Congressional Republicans simply refused to confirm a legally appointed justice, allowing a conservative justice to be appointed in their place after the next POTUS was elected. Then, another liberal justice passed away creating another vacancy which was again filled by a conservative. If either or both of those things hadn't happened, Roe v. Wade would not have been overturned.
And sure, you can say it was the will of the people that a conservative was in office at the time, and appointed the justices, but that's not the same as voting for or against federal abortion rights.
Appointing judges to overturn Roe v. Wade was a focal point in the 2016 election. Dangling that possibility was the entire point of the confirmation shenanigans.
There is zero guarantee that these tools will continue to be there. Those of us who are skeptical of the value of the tools may find them somewhat useful, but are quite wary of ripping up the workflows we've built for ourselves over decade(s)(+) in favor of something that might be 10-20% more useful, but could be taken away or charged greater fees or literally collapse in functionality at any moment, leaving us suddenly crippled. I'll keep the thing I know works, I know will always be there (because it's open source, etc), even if it means I'm slightly less productive over the next X amount of time otherwise.
What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”? I would say Claude right now has probably made worse code and wasted time than if I had coded things myself, but it’s because this is like the first few hundred days of this. Open weight models are also worse but they will never go away and improve steadily as well. I am all for people doing whatever works for them I just don’t get the negativity or the skepticism when you look at the progress over what has been almost zero time. It’s crappy now in many respects but it’s like saying “my car is slow” in the one millisecond after I floor the gas pedal
> What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”?
Simple. The company providing the tool needs actual earning suddenly. Therefore, they need to raise the prices. They also need users to spend more tokens, so they will make the tool respond in a way that requires more refinement. After all, the latter is exactly what happened with google search.
At this point, that is pretty normal software cycle - try to attract crowd by being free or cheap, then lock features behind paywall. Then simultaneously raise prices more and more while making the product worst.
This literally NEEDS to happen, because these companies do not have any other path to profitability. So, it will happen at some point.
Sure but you’re forgetting that competition exists. If anthropic investors suddenly say “enough” and demand positive cash flow it wouldn’t be that hard, everyone is capturing users for flywheels and capex for model improvements because if they don’t they will be guaranteed to lose.
It’s going to definitely be crappy, remember Google in 2003 with relevant results and no endless SEO , or Amazon reviews being reliable, or Uber being simple and cheap, etc. once growth phase ends monetization begins and experience declines but this is guard railed by the fact that there are many players.
Comsidering what I described is how tech companies actually function and functioned in the past, theoretical competition wont help.
They are competing themselves into massive unprofitability. Eventually they will die or do the above in cooperation. Maybe there will bw minor snandal about it, but that sort of collution is not prosecuted or seriously investigated if done by big companies.
So, it will happen exactly as it always happens with tech.
My understanding is that all the big AI companies are currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get big, and then hope to make a profit later. So any service you depend on could crash out of the race, and if one emerges as a victorious monopoly and you rely on them, they can charge you almost whatever they like.
To my mind, the 'only just started' argument is wearing off. It's software, it moves fast anyway, and all the giants of the tech world have been feverishly throwing money at AI for the last couple of years. I don't buy that we're still just at the beginning of some huge exponential improvement.
My understanding is they make a loss overall due to the spending on training new models, that the API costs are profit making if considered in isolation. That said, this is based on guestimates based on hosting costs of open-weight models, owing to a lack of financial transparancey everywhere for the secret-weights models.
"With Monday’s announcement universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income. This amounts to an average annual family savings of $12,000 per child."
Also, once police are no longer occupied ticketing motorists, I hope cyclists are prepared for actually being held accountable to laws. The police budget isn't going to refill itself.
Or maybe we prioritise the class of vehicles responsible for almost 5 fatalities and 75 serious injuries a day[1]?
For comparison, [2] says that 30 pedestrians were killed and 1093 serious injuries involved cyclists in eight (8) years. In 416 weeks, that's less than one (1) week of car deaths (0.2% ratio) and two (2) weeks of serious injuries (0.4% ratio).
Anyone that says "we should prioritise X and 416*X the same" is either not arguing in good faith or should be nowhere near decision making.