When a "right to..." law is passed, there is usually an accompanying narrative that explains a past injustice that will be corrected. Matthew Shepard hate crime, Civil Rights Voting act, etc.
The absence of such a story makes me think this law doesn't protect shit. What exactly did a Montanian get killed or arrested trying to do with a computer that is now protected? Can I use AI during a traffic stop or use AI to surveil and doxx governemnt employees? What exactly is the government giving up by granting me this right?
Or is this just about supressing opposition to data centers?
Yeah I think it's pretty obviously the AI industry trying to ban its own regulation
> Nationally, the Right to Compute movement is gaining traction. Spearheaded by the grassroots group RightToCompute.ai, the campaign argues that computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right. “A computer is an extension of the human capacity to think,” the organization states.
computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right
Computation however requires a vast supply chain where certain middlemen have a near monopoly on distribution of said "fundamental right". The incentives for lobbyists seems clear.
I don't necessarily disagree with the idea, but until profit is shared with taxpayers, this is a one-way transaction of taxpayers bankrolling AI companies.
I find your claim that there is a monopoly on computing laughable. No other technology has improved in quality or dropped in price as much as computers over the last 40 years. If this what you get from a monopoly, then we need more monopolies.
Modern semiconductor fabrication is a very narrow field.
As far as monopolies go I don't think it's our biggest concern, like you say.
If we want to continue to wage wars and seek conquest, it's not great to have it located in one/few countries. But instead if we want to work towards peace, we should continue breaking down barriers to trade (while maintaining protections for labor).
Looks like this one might be while in general the rule does not hold. Good regulations exist, and so do bad ones. Arguments without nuance often do more harm than good to your side.
Aggravatingly, some of it is. The organic food regulations are impossible for the small farmers who invented the idea. Only mega corps can do it, and their definition is not much better (if at all) than industrial farms.
It's still way better than Upton Sinclair's time. But it would be nice if the FDA and USDA were run by people who eat rather than sell food.
There are also laws about how fast you can drive to your restaurant and whether you can assault your employees once you get there. Neither of them have a place in a conversation about the efficacy of food safety laws, nor do the building permits you mention. We have different laws to regulate different domains and they exist largely because someone cut corners in the past and people literally died.
> Neither of them have a place in a conversation about the efficacy of food safety laws
They do because these fees are paid to engineers and architects as well as to the local health authority to certify that the restaurant is up to local "health codes", keeping in mind this is pre-lease and pre-construction. They regulate the size of pipes, the potential ventilation, amount of washrooms, amount of sinks, etc... in the name of food safety.
Now that's fine but why do governments get tens of thousands of those fees? There's also no nuance for small-scale operators. And if you buy a defunct restaurant that's already paid those fees, you get to pay them again. Again, these are to comply with "health regulations" and are things that no non-food business needs to pay.
> And none of it prevents bad food handling practices by minimum wage staff.
Your argument is that all restaurants in your area handle food unsafely? Or that some do flagrantly and without penalty? Or that one has once and you got sick and so all the regulations are worthless as a result?
Trying to understand what argument you think you’re making, here, and specifically how factually bereft and vacuous it actually is.
Maybe try reading or understanding. We're talking a stage where there is no lease and there are no employees. There's just an idea and an empty space.
You need to pay various levels of governments, engineers and architects 10's of thousands just to make blueprints and have them stamped by 2 levels of governments before a construction permit is even given in the name of "food safety".
Then you need to build the thing, pay more fees to get it actually certified. Then maybe you can think about hiring and training employees, a million or so dollars later.
The equivalent is a tech startup needing to pay government and some regulatory organization $50k just to be allowed to buy a laptop to then maybe think about writing code in the future.
Yes, paying government fees before there's a single employee doesn't magically imbue the employees (that don't exist yet) with the knowledge of safe food handling...
> We're talking a stage where there is no lease and there are no employees. There's just an idea and an empty space.
Do you think cold storage requirements, sinks, and other functional items in the kitchen don't prevent poor food handling practices?
> a million or so dollars later.
Eye roll.
> The equivalent is a tech startup needing to pay government and some regulatory organization $50k just to be allowed to buy a laptop to then maybe think about writing code in the future.
Your shitty react SPA likely won't kill anyone because you didn't bother installing any sinks and didn't think your refrigerator needed to appropriately keep raw chicken at the right temperature. But if it could, maybe they should. Maybe there would be less Meta engineers and we'd all be better off.
> Yes, paying government fees before there's a single employee doesn't magically imbue the employees (that don't exist yet) with the knowledge of safe food handling...
And yet it provides them with the appropriate tools to keep that food safe after.
> Maybe try reading or understanding.
Ironic lead in, when you don't actually know what regulations you're even whining about or why they might exist.
> Do you think cold storage requirements, sinks, and other functional items in the kitchen don't prevent poor food handling practices?
They make it easier to have safe food handling practices but they don't prevent poor ones either. Otherwise we'd have eliminated food poisoning from restaurants and institutions. Canada sees 14 million food poisoning cases per year (out of a population of 40 million) and many of those are from restaurants and institutions.
There's also many, many jurisdictions with less regulation. Most of the US, everywhere I've seen in the EU, most of Asia from what I've seen. Dunno how much you've eaten in Canada but our food scene is on average, pretty shit.
I don't think that this is a good idea. For medical applications, I can understand that LLMs are not the best solution, since they are so bad with numbers/probabilities. But for legal advice, I think they should be pretty good.
So the only reason I can think of to forbid such use cases is that people in those professions fear being replaced by machines.
Preventable medical errors kill 250,000 American every year, I can imagine LLMs could be both good and bad for that number, but on net, it is hard to say without just guessing. But if you ban the application of LLMs to medical care, you close that door before even seeing the potential on the other side. I think that is absurd.
I don't think that conclusion really follows because I don't think the ban works that way.
There's a big difference between ChatGPT writing a prescription and a doctor double checking his diagnosis using some kind of Claude code for medicine. ChatGPT writing prescriptions and giving medical device directly to people should absolutely be prohibited for now, but the second approach should be encouraged.
It really isn’t. How many surgeries do you think LLMs perform? How many of those medical errors would’ve been resolved by a chatbot? It’s easy to quote a big scary number and pretend like it has some vague relevance when you don’t actually understand the problem space.
Ok, so how many deaths from medicals errors have been caused by and prevented through the use of LLMs (since you say it isn't hard). Can you enlighten us and not leave us guessing?
I understand many deaths due to medical errors are caused by patients misunderstanding the advice they are given. You are saying you know exactly the net value of LLMs in this problem space?
> Ok, so how many deaths from medicals errors have been caused by and prevented through the use of LLMs (since you say it isn't hard).
I'm thoroughly disinterested in doing your homework for you. If you don't know how to answer that question, you shouldn't be opining in that space about things you clearly don't know anything about. It's that simple.
> Can you enlighten us and not leave us guessing?
You made the argument, you back it up. This is middle school shit. If you're not capable of understanding the subject matter, the best thing to do would be to stop asserting strident opinions about it as if you do, not be a smarmy jerk because someone called you on it.
> I understand many deaths due to medical errors are caused by patients misunderstanding the advice they are given.
Understand based on what, specifically? Many is a weasel word that people use to pretend that something happens frequently. What, specifically, do you mean by "medical error" in the first place? Do you know?
Eh, if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event, I don't see any contradiction in doing the opposite.
> if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event...
If you mean besides the extensive harm to air quality, the large land fingerprint of data centers, the massive strain on water resources and treatment facilities, the insane electricity demands resulting in skyrocketing prices pushed onto everyone else, the deafening noise pollution, and what they've done to the price of RAM, then sure. And that's just the data centers!
The usage of AI itself has resulted in all kinds of harm and even actual deaths. AI has wrongfully denied people healthcare coverage they were entitled to preventing or delaying needed surgeries and treatments. There's a growing list of LLM related suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots). The use of AI in parole systems has kept people locked behind bars when they shouldn't have been due to biases in the bots making decisions. AI used for self-driving driving cars have killed pedestrians and other drivers. There are thousands of AI generated harms tracked here: https://airisk.mit.edu/ai-incident-tracker
I think there's places to deprioritise safety, like the US military for instance, we gripe too much when soldiers die, we should instead just put right there in their employment contract or draft notice, "side effects of troop activation may include injury or death".
Also jets. I think jet safety is way overrated, they are so much safer than driving statistically that I think there's plenty of room to work with here, def some room for some serious corner cutting with air travel.
Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. We would all be stuck working on farms today, because we didn’t want to allow tractors or other machinery because it would take away farming jobs.
Instead of banning tech to save jobs, pass laws that make sure tech prices in externalities (tax carbon emissions), and find other ways to assist people who lose jobs (UBI, good social safety nets, etc).
Don’t stifle progress just because it makes us have to work less.
Because there are people who live off rent (in a broad sense of this world), and there are people who live off selling their ability to work. Increased efficiency and productivity may or may not benefit the second kind of people, depending on whether they can sell their labour to be used for something else.
Well, usually we tax the landlords instead. But when the landlords make up the overwhelming majority of the legislature, this tend to not happen.
The situation with apartment buildings is even more quirky because the USA has quite ridiculous zoning regulations, which AIUI many landlords actually support? It's really a wonderful barrel of worms, and I am glad I have no paddle in it.
Banning AI does increase efficiency. It makes it more efficient for a working class family to afford to survive. What perverted definition of the word were you considering?
How is this different from saying "Banning mechanical farm equipment does increase efficiency, it makes it more efficient for farm workers to afford to survive"
You are fighting against productivity improvements when you should be fighting against people hoarding the benefits of productivity improvements.
Your definition of efficient doesn't make any sense. If people can work less and produce more, that is the definition of efficient.
I agree that keeping everyone fed and sheltered is of primary importance... but wouldn't it be better to have everyone work less while doing that?
Let's have robots do all the hard work and then share the wealth with everyone. Why force people to work at jobs that could be done easier just to make sure we employee everyone? Might as well just pay people to move rocks back and forth.
Just increase taxes on robots and use that to pay basic income.
> Let's have the robots do all the hard work and then share the wealth with everyone
That sounds fantastic, except that in our capitalist economy the wealth will not be shared by everyone, and will instead be funnelled directly to the tech oligarchy, while workers get laid off. Until we fix that part of the equation, innovations to efficiency will continue to result in working people getting screwed over by technological innovation.
Sure, but this entire thread is about hypotheticals anyway.
It will be equally politically difficult to ban AI as it would be to grab some of the wealth generated by AI for the exact same reasons - either attempt would be fought against by the same tech oligarchs, for the same reason. To protect their money.
If we are going to have to fight them anyway, let's fight for the one where we don't have to work jobs that could be done by computers instead, while still having the same income.
And we don't have to get rid of capitalism entirely to spread the wealth. UBI can be used in a capitalist society, too.
A carpenter using a hand saw instead of a power saw just to keep more carpenters employed is not being efficient. It's Pareto-better to keep all those carpenters employed, earning the same salary for fewer hours.
If the idea was that laws must be motivated by a negative occurrence rather than preemptive, then that'd follow yeah (if counting job loss as a reason to ban something, which I think is questionable). But note akersten is saying that it's normal for laws to be preemptive in both cases.
Bad example. You are agreeing that copyright is owned by the people whose work an AI agent is trained on. Sure, come take a class of jobs, and then pay them in perpetuity to license the exposition of their work. For 75 years after the authors death, just like current copyright.
>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.
You don't think there's reasons pass laws banning AI...datacenters?
Because what state is banning the concept of AI? They're banning/restricting the creation of a type of infrastructure within their borders because they feel that is detrimental to their citizens. Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
I'm already running an LLM locally. This is just me renting space in a data center. Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things? For the record my local models run off the solar bolted to my roof. Even including the data center I'm using 1/10th of the energy we were using on tube monitors back in the 90s. This is exhausting. My GPU would be demonstrably using more power by playing a videogame right now than when I run a local LLM.
Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?
This question is not the obvious winner you think it is. To me, and I am sure many, it sort of undermines your argument.
Even in the most ‘free' cultures, society has _always_ restricted people’s individual ability to do things that it collectively deems harmful to the whole society.
This is literally why America was founded. Too many people stifle innovation. Move to Europe if you want to be stuck in the 20th century frankly. That doesn't mean we can't take care of folks. But the ludites need to get the fuck out of the way. You're all exhausting.
And people in the late 1700s were just allowed to do anything? (The answer to that is obviously ‘no’).
I’m not even in complete disagreement with your opinion on data centers (like, people are coming up with noise, water use, pollution and traffic arguments about why a data center should not replace a recently controversially closed paper mill near me, which is ridiculous), but your argument doesn’t work. You need to change it if you want to convince people.
Please, don't be so negative about the rest of the world. No one has any idea what would have happened if the US did not create their country the way they did. This is the same level of under-appreciation of humans that the ancient aliens people have when they say its impossible for humans to have built the pyramids. Lets be constructive instead of just hating on everyone else please.
I was born in Europe. I know this for a fact. The difference in "can do" culture between old world and new world is everything. There's a reason Europe still doesn't have a self landing rocket. They aren't even trying. It's crabs in a bucket mentality writ large. I wish it weren't so. Yet it is.
It's partially true but it's not as true as doomers would like. It's not America: innovation=yes, Europe: innovation=no. Most of the American innovation came from a small number of very rich people. It has a lot of very poor people as a consequence.
> Most of the American innovation came from a small number of very rich people
Replace "came from" with "was purchased by" or "was copied by an entity with the resources to push the inventor out of the market" and you're getting a lot closer.
This encompasses rich people telling others what to do, and it also encompasses others doing work they think they can sell to rich people.
I think in Europe, people are just overall a bit more chill, and happy people don't feel the need to join the ultra-competitive scramble to the top, they're fine doing enough work but not an extreme amount.
I don't even agree with that. In many cases the rich people at best paid the salaries of other innovative people and then claimed the IP rights and the overwhelming share of the proceeds.
Elon didn't invent anything about rockets or electric cars. He hired (or perhaps just bought a company that had already hired) smart innovative people and got rich off them.
Pharmaceutical CEOs aren't innovating anything but they get rich off the innovations of others.
Most of the people who innovate or invent a new tool or product don't have the capital to mass produce and market it and end up selling their rights, which others benefit from.
Very few rich people are involved at all in innovations. Technology, which is less capital-intensive to scale than other fields, is an exception where several rich folks actually were involved - Steve Jobs' design sense, Larry and Sergei's PageRank algorithm, etc. but even then most of the people actually innovating new things don't get rich and watch others with more resources copy them, outmarket them, and take the money.
>>when did we restrict people's abilities to do things? That's literally what most laws are, saying what you can and can't do. This is like, a foundational understanding of what government/regulation is.
>>this is just me renting space...
Okay, so a "network effect" is when things have greater impact due to larger usage. So the data center usage that you're talking about does not represent the overall impact of the data center. Saying "I only pour ONE cup of bleach into the ocean, so I don't see why it's so bad to have the bleach factory pump all its waste in as well" is a WILD take.
An absolute free market would, by definition, permit the selling of the service "restrict someone's freedom for me".
Not sure if that leaves it a free market. So if we're gonna be talking holes in the cheese - seems like you're reasoning in terms of a basically self-contradictory notion.
But truly, what do you reckon about the 1st point, in terms of the interpretation of market freedom which you use?
There have always been rules and laws. The US has never been a totally free market. Most of the laws and rules we have were written in blood by people professing a "free market" right to poison our people, rivers, air, and more.
America was largely a free market until the 1920s. Since then more regulations have actually increased the cost of living. The healthcare problem in America has a lot to do with increased regulations. For one we have a fixed limit on how many doctors can graduate every year. That was put in place by the medical lobby in the US. Ever since then healthcare costs have increased exponentially. Tale as old as time. This happens with every single new rule put in place. Rent control does the same thing. Prices just go up. This includes NIMBY laws.
The US does not limit the number of doctors that can graduate. The limit is on the number of residencies funded by medicare. If the private sector wanted more doctors in order to pay doctors less, they could just offer paid residencies themselves. Somehow the free market hasn't solved that one. This ignores that doctors' salaries aren't a significant cause of the problems and insurance companies are the true root of high prices.
Rent control stabilizes prices while more supply can be built, because it is in the interests of society for people to be able to afford to live, and we can't will additional buildings into place overnight. High eviction rates destroy communities and have many negative side effects.
In the absence of regulation, corporations lie, cheat, and steal, and have a massive power imbalance against ordinary people. No one has enough time and energy to research every option for everything in their daily life, and they rely on laws to establish safety measures they can rely on.
Oh you're one of those. You actually believe rent control works in the face of overwhelming evidence that all is does is increase the cost of housing. Fascinating. Pointless talking to you.
Rent control doesn't have to be "you as a landlord can't change no more than $X in rent." It can also be "rent increases on existing tenants in good standing are limited to X%.
What are the holes? There are places today with no government - perfect free markets. If you think perfect free markets are awesome, you can move there and do business there. It's a bit like telling someone who loves communism to go to China.
I don't think you understand the qualifier. I meant in the tradition of liberal free markets that have unlocked human potential on the global scale. I'm saying no it's actually good that you don't have to ask the local government when you want to do something. If American style free markets didn't gain traction we'd still be doing subsistence farming.
The thing is, since we recognized that such a tradition led to the unfettered destruction of the natural environment which we depend upon to survive, we have decided that local governments should be responsible for preserving said environment by regulating the destructive actions performed by the liberal free market. Not doing so will even destroy our ability to perform subsistence farming in the long run.
So far all I hear is complaining about electricity prices. No one actually cares about the "environment". They are just mad that the KW/h is up 3 cents.
Why should we stop there? Let’s ban people flying on vacations, because why should our resources go towards some dork laying out in the sun? Air travel is horribly wasteful. Let’s ban people racing cars, that is also wasteful. We shouldn’t be using our resources to drive in circles.
How do we pick which activities are worth using resources? Which ones are too ‘dorky’ to allow?
Look, I am all for pricing the externalities into resource consumption. Tax carbon production, to make sure energy consumption is sustainable, but don’t dictate which uses of energy are acceptable or ‘worth it’, because I don’t want only mainstream things to be allowed.
I didn't say any of that in my comment nor express an opinion about this whole thing writ large. I'm only pointing out that it's not weird for legislature to preempt a real world use case by way of pointing out similar laws.
>>>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.
What did you mean? Why do you believe there has not been a motivating event to ban data centers when those bans have happened, which is literally what you said?
In the context of the discussion a correspondingly negative event would have been along the lines of "we built a data center and then it exploded, we need to make sure that doesn't happen." Not "we're worried about the effects the data center might have," which is vis a vis to "we're worried about the effects banning ai might have." All I'm saying is neither of those last two are weird reasons to enact a law.
GP was insisting that "rights" named laws always come after some negative event and it is weird that we have this "rights" named law without someone being deprived of their computation or whatever. I'm disagreeing with the premise that that's weird by pointing out laws preempt real world events all the time, in either direction (restrictive or permissive).
> Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?
> Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?
Because, in this country, we have “local government” wherein a bunch of people who live near each other have frequently banded together to make laws about the places they live. Surely this isn’t shocking news to you? Surely you’ve encountered this phenomenon before?
Why do you think you have a right to do anything you want, anywhere you want, no matter what?
That they live in the affected place makes it their business - I'm not clear why you think it's any of yours based on the thread of your arguments. Perhaps it's better to let people govern themselves and mind the laws where you live instead of whining that they won't do what you want them to in their own backyard?
Because these data centers are at best overstressing utility grids and elevating prices for everyone and at worse running dirty generators and poisoning entire communities, for a start.
If the businesses that want data centers want to pay the full construction costs for the new power plants, great. Otherwise consumers are paying for them in the rates they pay to energy companies.
It should not be considered shocking or controversial that people already hit hard by corporate greed and other effects of late-stage capitalism don't want to pay higher utility rates to subsidize the data centers being built by megacorporations who want to take away even more of their jobs.
only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice Bellard at the Louvre.
Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.
You're right in that we kept the best examples (as coding museums will do in the future) but the best of something is a benchmark. It is striking that modern automation, even hundreds of years later, can't touch what a skilled craftsman could do in the past.
With programming, we documented a lot of it, so it's unlikely to go the way of fine weaving. People will always be able to learn to think and be great programmers.
Maybe if the wool weavers had internet, they could have blogged, made youtube videos, and cataloged their profession so it could last Millenia.
Agreed, I think the good gained by wool mills is greater in that little Timmy is less likely to lose a leg to frostbite than the bad loss of my scarf not passing through a ring.
Long term though, I’ve always wondered if the Amish turn out to be the only survivors.
I am kind of lost here on this whole scarf through a ring thing as well. This is just a function of the thickness of the scarf? My wife went through a scarf phase about a decade ago, and I am pretty sure a Pucci scarf could easily fit through a typical sized ring meant to go on a finger?
Its entirely possible that old manufacturing methods produced things that are different, but I would be entirely surprised if they are entirely better overall. If the defining metric for scarves is how well they fit through rings, I am sure they would all be made so you could fit 3 through a ring if people were willing to pony up for that. If you look at a lot of old clothes, they are generally a lot heavier, but I am not sure I would really want to wear them, they look quite uncomfortable. I also think its wonderful that today you can get a set of clothes for a few hours of minimum wage work while in the past this was a major investment. You can also choose to pay thousands for a shirt if you wish, but from 10 feet away its going to be hard to tell the difference.
A full size wool scarf cannot go thorough a ring. You are probably thinking of a silk scarf. I have a wool scarf next to me from Kashmir and it went down about 25 cm. The full scarf is a bit over a meter.
Looked up Pucci - looks like a designer that makes silk scarves. Silk is a totally different material. The Luddites were wool and cotton weavers.
Making wool thin enough for a meter long scarf to go thorough a ring requires the individual strand of wool to be very thin. Both making it thin and weaving that thin strand is the craft that was lost. Go look at wool yarn next time you are at a store and see how thin they can get it.
As for "Are they better?" Yes. Thinner wool is incredible, soft. High quality merino wool is one of the most expensive fabrics. Look up this brand "Made in Rosia Montana" if you are curious. It's not like what the Luddites made, but its as good as it gets in the modern world. Getting stuff from the Kashmir region is difficult - I got mine because I knew someone who ran a school in the area. Most "Cashmere" stuff in department stores is fake/chemically processed for fake softness which makes it nice but it doesn't last. Real quality wool lasts a lifetime. The chemically processed stuff is ok if you want to see how it "feels"
EDIT: also, wool is naturally waterproof! I can walk in the rain with my scarf from kashmir on my head, its pretty thin but absolutely no water goes through even in heavy rain. it has to do with the springiness of the fibers and its natural oils. I will stop nerding out on fibers now!!
Appreciate the clarification. I guess its a case of I don't know what I don't know, but the choice of metric around quality was just an odd one. And yeah I assumed silk because I can't imagine a wool scarf going through a ring.
Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and write those bytes to disk and you are the author of a perpetual stream of data.
Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and describe those bytes in words and you are no longer the author a perpetual stream of data.
In a world where slapping an overlay of someone looking incredulous over someone else's video is considered "adding substantive commentary" by every major video sharing platform, I don't even try to understand copyright law at all. It is way over my head.
If it makes seven figures of revenue, there is a real system in place to litigate copyright disputes between corporations. Two kaijiu summoned by ritual magic to fight for the future of the franchise / giant pile of money.
Everything else in the entire system is just bits of monster and building falling randomly. We know if we put the whole population under strict scrutiny ("laser eyes" + "lightning wings"), it would kill every last one of them; every teenager is theoretically criminally liable for the GDP of the Milky Way, a series of violations beginning with a performance of The Birthday Song at their first cake day. Even hiring the cheapest defense lawyer would bankrupt nearly any family in the nation. So we try imperfectly to dodge copyright, hopefully by a couple zip codes, and live in a state of nature on the ground.
> slapping an overlay of someone looking incredulous over someone else's video is considered
it really isn't, you actually have to provide enough relevant commentary for it to be transformative
it just looks like that because
- not every claim leads to a take down, more common is that the advertisement revenue is redirected to the owner of the original video. That is very very common, especially on YT, but not really visible as viewer.
- there are enough copyright holders which overall tolerate reactions, even if they don't fall under fair use.
- Sometimes people claim it doesn't fall under fair use when they don't like how the reaction is done, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be ruled fair uses if it came in front of court.
- Sometimes people reacting have explicit permission from the original author to do so, no matter if it counts as fair use or not.
and maybe most relevant here, pretty much all large platforms have a tendency to favor the person claiming the copyright violation over the person which reacted to it. To a point there is is sometimes a big problem if systematically abused with false claims.
Those two hypothetical scenarios you listed don’t necessarily work the way you are describing it, which is why the whole logic and mechanisms behind the US copyright laws might seem incomprehensible or illogical to you.
In reality, it is way more complex and less clear-cut. Which makes sense, because oversimplifying it will lead to silly-sounding conclusions and an almost entirely incorrect understanding of how this works.
For those who don’t want to read the actual full explanation (which is a totally normal position, as the explanation is going fairly into the weeds), I will just a put a TLDR summary at the end. I suggest everyone to check out that summary first, and then come back here if there is interest in a more detailed explanation.
----------------------------
First, we gotta settle on 3 key concepts (among many) the US copyright law relies on.
1. Human authorship - self-explanatory; you cannot assign authorship to a fish or your smartphone.
2. Original/minimal creativity - some creative choices, not just "I pressed the button."
3. Fixation - the content needs to be recorded on a tangible medium; you cannot copyright a "mood" or a thought, since those aren’t tangible media.
Now onto your hypothetical scenarios:
1) "Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and write those bytes to disk and you are the author of a perpetual stream of data."
Writing bytes to disk satisfies fixation, but it doesn’t automatically make you the author of a copyrightable work. You gotta satisfy the minimum creativity requirement too (e.g., camera positioning, setup, any other creative choices/actions, etc.). Otherwise you are just running a fully automated security cam feed with zero human input, and those videos aren’t easily copyrightable (if at all). You might own copyright in a video work if there’s sufficient human creative authorship - but mere automated recording doesn’t guarantee that.
2) "Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and describe those bytes in words and you are no longer the author a perpetual stream of data."
This is just close to being plainly incorrect. If you (a human) write a textual description, that text is typically copyrightable as a literary work (assuming it’s not purely mechanical like "frame 1: car, frame 2: another car, etc." with no expressive choices). Creating a description doesn’t erase any copyright you may or may not have had in the underlying recording. They’re just different works (audiovisual work vs. text work).
Important to note: neither makes you the author or owner of the underlying "data" of reality, because copyright protects expression, not the underlying facts.
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TLDR:
* Recording the street can produce a copyrightable work if there is human authorship and minimal creativity in how the recording is made. Pure automated capture may fail that.
* Describing the street in words is usually a separate, independently copyrightable work (e.g., a text or audio version of those words), but it doesn’t change the status of the underlying recording.
But how does that apply to photography vs AI photo generation?
Photo (w/ camera):
1. MET: Human authorship - somebody picked the tools (lens, body) and used them.
2. MET: Creativity - somebody chose a subject, lighting, etc.
3. MET: Fixation - film (or SD card)
Photo (w/ AI):
1. MET: Human authorship - somebody picked the tools (models etc) and used them.
2. MET, maybe?: Creativity - somebody wrote the prompt, provided inputs, etc. (how is this substantially different than my wife taking a random snapshot on her phone?)
3. MET: Written to disk, same as a digital camera.
The camera analogy breaks at one specific point: who determines the expressive elements of the final work.
With photography, the human determines framing, angle, timing, lens, exposure. The camera just records light from a scene the human selected and composed. Even a random photo reflects where the photographer stood and when they pressed the shutter. The device doesn’t invent the composition.
With AI imagen, the user provides high-level instructions, but the system determines the actual composition, lighting, geometry, textures, etc. The expressive details of the final image are generated by the model, not directly controlled by the user.
That’s why the US copyright laws currently treat them differently. It is less of a "tool vs. tool", and more of whether the human determined the expressive content (or if the system did). Prompting can be creative (in a legal sense), but giving instructions is not the same as controlling the expression.
If I tell a human painter “paint XYZ in an expressionist style,” I don’t become the author of the painting. The painter does, because they determined the expression. And since the painter (in the case of AI imagen) is not a human, then that work usually cannot be copyrighted.
There is an important caveat to all of this: it’s not binary or perfectly clear-cut. If someone iteratively refines prompts, controls seeds, manually inpaints, selects and arranges outputs, heavily edits the result, etc., then those human contributions can be protected. But purely AI-generated output, where the system determines the expressive elements, is not considered human-authored under the current US copyright laws.
Mind you, none of this is perfectly settled, as this is a very rapidly evolving/adapting area of law (as it pertains to AI usage). I am not claiming that this is the end-all of how it should be legislated or that there are no ways to improve it. But the current reasoning within the US copyright law used to address this type of a scenario (at the present moment) doesn't strike me as illogical or unreasonable.
If you are going to break the law under capitalism, you must do it sustainably. Facebook, Apple, et al have shown that the latency of judicial pipeline usually means a billion dollar in fines comes after several billion in profits. You profit from the lag between the crime and the consequence.
I don't think social justice has that same profit pipeline, but I am not sure. There is an asymmetry in the type of evil our society allows.
Break the law, make $1B of illegal money, then get dragged to court and pay a $200M fine - while you keep most of the profit and your market position you illegally gained.
Bonus: Shield all managers from personal accountability, best in a way that they got their bonus and salary and moved on a long time ago before the verdict hits.
Best: Not get to court, but make an $100M outside court settlement.
They just need to do what oil & gas (and other "dirty" industries) do to avoid reputcussions: form lots of shell companies to shield the parent. It becomes a hydra of corporations kinda like terrorist cells.
In the social justice context, "cell" is a better fit than "company". Some are Antifa Ost, Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, and Rose City Antifa. If Greenpeace had organized like this, their liability would likely be far lower, but so would their organizing effectiveness.
The expected response from both companies and social groups is to deny the affiliation. The overall strategy is transpartisan because it is effective.
We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls.
1. Postal Service Act of 1792
2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986
Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.
We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.
Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.
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Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.
Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.
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Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
The Video Rental Protection Act was passed when a video rental employee blackmailed a congressman and there was no law against it. So it's clear how to make congress write new privacy laws.
That doesn't appear to be accurate, at least from the Wikipedia article.
Robert Bork (sorry to add my personal commentary but an absolute shit stain of a human being) was nominated for the Supreme Court (which, thankfully, he always not confirmed), and a reporter went to a video rental store and asked for his rental history, which there was no law against. The published article didn't include much, as Bork hadn't rented any particularly salacious material, but there was bipartisan outrage that this had occurred.
Just goes to show how far we've fallen when there was once bipartisan outrage over accessing your Blockbuster rental history, when tech giants now have 10 times as much surveillance on you - your 1 am "shower thoughts" in your search history, all the websites you've visited, all your social media posts, and even social media posts about/including you posted by someone else, everything you've ever commented on a blog forum, your location history, etc.
> Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.
The gendarme might actually arrest the attacker. The security camera will do nothing (but record). And having the policeman standing there is about as much a deterrent as a "Smile--You're Being Recorded" sign.
This argument justifies CCTV surveillance of all public places.
Is that what you intend to be arguing for? In any case, there needs to be more nuance in the discussion than a one-liner.
I think the quantity of surveillance matters. When it’s just a few places, then it’s a minor intrusion on liberty. When it’s a lot of places, it’s a major intrusion that will facilitate the (further) rise of authoritarianism.
What counts as a "super public busy place" ? The airport? The bus terminal? The local library? All major roads that experience rush hour traffic?
Who is the person who says where the cutoff line is? What if that authority wants to move the line to include everything? Or nothing? Do they even need to provide notice to the public of their actions?
Who should be able to access to all this footage? Public? Government investigative branches only? What about the system administrators?
Does this footage require attestation to prove it's legitimacy in a world where AI can generate footage?
How long should this footage exist for? Do I have to trust not just current admins and their superiors but all the people who may be in those roles in perpetuity? IE do I have to trust people who haven't even been born yet?
Is it allowed to be centralised, so people can easily be tracked from one site to another for every step outside their house? Or should each site have separate data housing with access terms to match so that tracking a person is a significant task?
..
..
There are a lot of concerns. You may argue that there isn't a lot of nuances because you have a set idea of how it should all go. But others may differ.
There's just....not. It's a pretty well established concept by now. For almost 50 years or so.
> What counts as a "super public busy place" ? The airport? The bus terminal? The local library? All major roads that experience rush hour traffic?
Yes to all of these.
> Who is the person who says where the cutoff line is?
Not a person, but a sound methodology ideally. Kind of like what we've mostly been doing even if it isn't formalized.
> What if that authority wants to move the line to include everything?
Yes, the slippery slope is a problem, agreed. That's why we need to be vigilant in responding to government plans.
> Do they even need to provide notice to the public of their actions?
In a civilized democracy, they should.
> Government investigative branches only?
Yes, pretty much.
> What about the system administrators?
Not if it can be avoided.
> Does this footage require attestation to prove it's legitimacy in a world where AI can generate footage?
No.
> How long should this footage exist for?
3 - 6 months is typically standard.
> Do I have to trust not just current admins and their superiors but all the people who may be in those roles in perpetuity? IE do I have to trust people who haven't even been born yet?
You have to trust the system is accountable.
> Is it allowed to be centralised,
Ideally, no.
> Or should each site have separate data housing with access terms to match so that tracking a person is a significant task?
Bingo.
> There are a lot of concerns. You may argue that there isn't a lot of nuances because you have a set idea of how it should all go. But others may differ.
I'd argue your concerns have already been addressed by current systems that have worked fine for decades.
> I'd argue your concerns have already been addressed by current systems that have worked fine for decades.
The issue is that times are changing. "Worked fine for decades" doesn't apply to the Ring Doorbell or Flock. Or that authorities exactly want to have all footage in the one place, from train stations too.
Modern computers allow for scaling of capabilities that are only tolerable at all when limited in number.
IE the capability to track an individual's every movement is tolerable if it is limited in number, has oversight, and only used by appropriate authorities against bad people that everyone can agree are bad.
But being able to track minority groups en masse as modern systems are capable of is clearly an issue.
I see your parameters to the above questions as mostly reasonable although I'd rather not have the cameras everywhere in the first place. But do you think even your reasonable seeming desires are being adhered to?
I'm not arguing for mass surveillance, I'm arguing for keeping surveillance in busy places which as you admit has worked well for decades. I'm against the Ring/Flock dystopian nightmare as well.
> But do you think your desires are being adhered to?
No, but I think an apathetic population are the problem, and I don't know how to solve it.
> But there are other ways that we could figure out who to blame after the fact that don't require everything you will ever do to be recorded, forever.
No one said anything about retaining footage forever.
What are your suggestions for help finding an attacker without CCTV footage?
Well, not just what I propose but a lot of aspects of society would be improved if we could subject people to mandatory reeducation and/or limit who gets to vote. Even just requiring a college degree to vote, or a simple quiz testing knowledge of what is being voted on would do wonders.
How would term limits help? Without term limits, congressmen can be judged by their voting history. With them, we get always new batches of congressmen, while lobbyists stay the same and consolidate their power.
It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.
One problem is that seniority confers power. Throwing out a long-serving incumbent substantially reduces your district’s effective representation.
That could be improved by getting rid of de jure preferential treatment for things like committee memberships. You’d still have informal power from seniority though.
I think long-term ("establishment") politicians are more-inclined to have been bought-out; new blood is more likely to make new alignments, churning up the dirty space that is politics.
Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse.
Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic.
Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?
These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination.
Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Well, except that you have debts like mortgages and car loans to pay off. And your kids need to participate in extra-curriculars so they can get into a good school, and those cost money. And theaters are out of fashion now, so you'll need to buy that 80" TV with the surround sound so you can have a theater at home. And your shows are now on 6 different streaming services so that'll cost a little extra each month. And life really is easier with AI, but they all have strengths and weaknesses so you'll probably want to pay for 2, if not 3 of them. And your fast fashion gets threadbare after 20 or 30 washes so you'll need to regularly order 3 or 4 replacement shirts so you can send back the 2 that don't fit quite right.
Anyways back to the gears and whee.... oh look a squirrel!
> Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests.
Which changes? metoo certainly didn't change much, the George Floyd protests also led to nothing, just look at how ICE has been executing US citizens in the last months. In 2025 alone, before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE murdered 32 people with zero accountability [1].
Shot. Killed. Executing is a ridiculously inaccurate framing bordering on rage baiting. And that is before we get to whether Pretti or Good were committing felonies, when they were willfully obstructing federal agents from doing the job they were assigned.
> when they were willfully obstructing federal agents from doing the job they were assigned.
Even if one assumes that to be true: there might have been a case for an arrest, but not for firing into a moving vehicle that is forbidden even under ICE guidelines, and certainly not for unloading a whole magazine worth of ammunition into an unarmed person.
I stand by my judgement: both cases were extrajudicial killings and clear enough in their intent to be called executions.
Good hit him with her car and he is law enforcement. She should have put her car in park and surrendered to the officers as they were instructing her to do. The agents and the Goods both didn't appear there in the street out of a vacuum, clearly she was there to obstruct. Seemed like Good was afraid and chose to flee consequences.
Pretti may have had an accidental discharge of his gun, which he took to a confrontation with law enforcement. Sad and foolish way to go out, seemed like a suicide by cop situation to me.
Everything I just wrote is opinion, just like everything you wrote. Who is right? Maybe neither of us, it's complicated/messy.
Considering only the timing of these events, I conclude this ice stuff is poorly concocted psyops meant to enrage people and distract from other news.
if government agents can kill people on their own authority, without following due process, when they aren't threatening the safety of anyone, without any investigation, then all the other freedoms you supposedly have are useless. I would hardly call that a distraction from real issues.
Regarding conservatives/MAGA, if you're saying the US hasn't changed dramatically since 2016 then I don't know what to say to you.
And I think you're misremembering the world before #metoo and George Floyd. Regarding the latter, police used to widely behave like ICE; now it's anathema - at least in cities. None of them help ICE afaik.
The conservatives like to preach hopelessness to their enemies - for obvious reasons, an age-old tactic - saying things like protests accomplish nothing (obviously false), these movements did nothing. The wierd part is, their enemies have picked up that argument and make it themselves. They simply and bizarrely have disarmed themselves, but they had and have the power the entire time.
> Regarding conservatives/MAGA, if you're saying the US hasn't changed dramatically since 2016 then I don't know what to say to you.
That is precisely why I didn't mention these.
> Regarding the latter, police used to widely behave like ICE; now it's anathema - at least in cities. None of them help ICE afaik.
They still kill people en masse [1], still overwhelmingly non-White people, and the number only increased over the years. It's good that police and National Guards (at least in Minneapolis) are on the side of the people, but as a system, police in the US is still loving to kill people.
And the GOP had DC tear apart the last visual reminder, the Black Lives Matter road mural [2] under extortionist threats.
> The wierd part is, their enemies have picked up that argument and make it themselves. They simply and bizarrely have disarmed themselves, but they had and have the power the entire time.
Similar to the Epstein Files, what should have happened in response to metoo and George Floyd/BLM was action that went beyond symbolism. Actual prosecution and judgement of people found to be in violation of the law and making sure that the conditions leading to these events will not repeat. But that was not done - movie sets got intimacy coordinators, Washington DC the BLM mural... while Weinstein got at least one conviction overturned on technicialities and Chauvin got moved to a low security prison [3].
Of course particularly the young generations are angry. Absolutely vile and horrible things can happen without any impactful action afterwards. And that's before we even go into the mess that is the Epstein Files, with Maxwell hoping for a pardon of all things after being moved to a minimum security facility already [4]. She does not deserve even one single day in freedom in her life again. Or before we touch the mess that is Jan 6th 2021, with Trump handing out pardons like others hand out candy [5]. Attempt a fucking putsch and get off scot free? WTF is this shit? In many other countries, putschists get hanged in the streets, as a warning sign to others.
To sum it up: there have been no meaningful results and changes from either of these events. And that is why there are so many voices on the progressive left calling for the removal of, amongst others, Chuck Schumer and other high-ranking Democrats in favor of people like Mamdani on one side, and mob justice aka the plumber's brother on the other side. Some still have faith in democracy itself but just demand better representatives and leaders, but others deem executing people like insurance CEOs the only way forward. And personally? I don't condone acts of violence like this, but I understand where they are coming from - a completely shattered trust in the ability of the government to hold bad actors accountable and improve the lives of the wide masses.
To say there are still problems doesn't mean there isn't significant progress. Otherwise, there is no significant progress anywhere in anything.
> what should have happened in response to metoo and George Floyd/BLM was action that went beyond symbolism.
There was and is:
Laws have been passed in many places protecting rights. Oppressive systems like bail have been reformed in many places. Progressive prosecutors were elected around the country - some still are in office. Even the other prosecutors have (often) stopped backing law enforcement corruption. In some places, police have been prosecuted and jailed for the first time.
I think people overlook it for a common reason: Many things that were disruptive change then became the norm, so people don't notice them. As they say about innovation: First they laugh at you (ridicule your idea), then they say it's not in the Bible (violates the established orthodoxy), then they say they knew it all along. :)
> And the GOP had DC tear apart the last visual reminder, the Black Lives Matter road mural [2] under extortionist threats.
Maybe the last reminder in DC, which I doubt. I see plenty of BLM signs (and LGTBQ+ pride flags) in cities.
> I think people overlook it for a common reason: Many things that were disruptive change then became the norm, so people don't notice them. As they say about innovation: First they laugh at you (ridicule your idea), then they say it's not in the Bible (violates the established orthodoxy), then they say they knew it all along. :)
You do have a point in there. The problem IMHO is communication: silent progress just isn't enough with such glaring abuses of power.
> Maybe the last reminder in DC, which I doubt. I see plenty of BLM signs (and LGTBQ+ pride flags) in cities.
That's private persons that float these. The DC mural was a public admission by a government entity that they don't stand for such behavior, and that is what made ripping it out so powerful symbolically. The teardown was a very public symbol of "we shit on anything DEI".
Get to work, ha. People are too fickle and their brains are too easily hacked with the latest craze to trust them to do the right thing, whatever that is in your opinion, especially en masse.
I just see right through each of these latest crazes. Power is everything, divide to conquer. I don't play along with the identity games that destroy people anymore.
Beyond that, there is no consensus on any of these gobbledygook movements - all these comments up and down these threads make the implicit assumption that we all agree.
If anyone with power picks and chooses who gets justice then there is no justice, those people are corrupt, and they need to be removed from power and charged.
Whatabout whatabout whatabout. Charge, try, and imprison the guilty regardless of how much money they have, which political party they are part of, or how they vote. Anything else is madness.
My personal take is that everything is a distraction, nothing is real ( except conspiracy theories -- naturally ). Also, please subscribe to my totally organic podcast.
Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!"
Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!"
So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
> So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
No, the right thing to do is to buy an IP camera (most of which are made in China), firewall it, and send the footage to a local NVR. At no point should the camera speak to the open Internet.
It's the same principle with any Internet-of-Shit device -- it's not allowed to communicate over the Internet, period. At that point, any built-in backdoor or anti-feature becomes irrelevant.
> Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one.
These constructions feel too simplistic to capture anything useful.
My credit card company can see my transactions. My medical provider can read my medical records. People who hire house cleaners let people see inside their house.
It's commonly accepted that when you engage with a company for business purposes, they can see things involved in your business with them.
The problem with the Ring situation isn't that Ring can "see" your video cameras. It's that they were using the information for things outside of the scope of business that was implied when you bought the camera.
People don't care if a Google bot "reads" their e-mail for spam filtering. They don't care if a contractor sees the inside of their house during construction. What they do care about is if the other party tries to use that access for something outside of the scope that was agreed upon.
> It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
These snooty takes where we're supposed to look down upon others for having reasonable assumptions about usage of their data are why it's so hard to get the general public to care about privacy. It's unnecessarily condescending for what? To look down upon people or play "told you so" games? If privacy advocates want to get anywhere they need to distance themselves from people who run with this kind of attitude.
> > It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
> These snooty takes where we're supposed to look down upon others for having reasonable assumptions about usage of their data are why it's so hard to get the general public to care about privacy.
In addition: it’s not just the Ring camera installer whose rights are being violated (to be optimistic), it’s everyone who walks past on the sidewalk.
Privacy is a public good.
And it’s so long gone nobody (in the US or UK at least) can see a way to get it back.
Yes, that is what many people thought because people assume that a state with a reasonable commitment to individual liberty would have safeguards in place to force merchants to not spy on them.
The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.
> But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!
This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion.
In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so.
There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.
'then they can be fined into oblivion' with capital CAN.
Give me an example where this actually happened. (not just a statement that it will be done, but an actual example of a company going under because of the fine)
We have known all of this for over a decade now, ever since the Snowden leaks revealed some very damning things. The public has unfortunately decided they do no care it seems...
>, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
The Chinese or Russian or whatever government is not sending thugs with guns to my doorstep over petty matters and if they did I would likely, depending on the exact details be within my rights to resist them with violence.
You can't say that about the federal/state/local government.
Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices.
These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win.
Any such agenda must also be willing to purge itself of any old guard that stands in the way, and treat them as a virus attached to their political movement. There is no benefit from trying to say, make a wedge between a Clinton and a Trump. If you can't get over that you're part of the problem, and this cycle will just continue.
Stop defending an old guard halfway in the grave. Being right doesn't matter in electoral politics, winning does. It is likely the only way to achieve such a broad reform is to be willing to entertain as many incriminations as possible.
Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations. Let's not squander it by defending anyone simply because they fall on one side of a dubious partisan line, or seem "less bad" than another.
The broader the castigation, the more likely to achieve momentum that can actually enact said reforms, given the disadvantages of taking on these vast incumbent interests and a government that is easily susceptible to gridlock driven by a minority.
Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party dominance.
Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit. Not only does it eliminate the spoiler problem, it is easy to see why it does so: your ability to vote for any candidate is independent of your ability to vote for any other.
I've heard the arguments for approval voting, and I'm sure it's all the things you mention and more, but people don't get it. I don't get it. I don't want to vote for both Hillary and Bernie. I want to vote for Bernie, and then only if Bernie can't win, would I let my vote go to Hillary. You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
I know, it sucks. Politics is terrible. But we have some momentum behind RC/IRV so we should use it and stop the single-vote FPTP system that's plagued us for centuries. Anything is better than that. So let's join forces and get behind whatever has momentum even if it's not technically the best.
Approval voting seems to me to be worse on all counts that the previous commenter was levying against ranked-choice. To your point, the spoiler effect seems like it would be much worse with approval than with a ranked ballot, since highly partisan voters would have little reason to approve of any candidate other than the single candidate they want in office. Approving of anyone else lessens their candidate's chance of winning.
A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
>A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.
While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.
I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."
In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.
All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.
It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
>It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
I'm sure you're right. Unfortunately, I'm not the person you'd need to convince.
Here's contact information[0] for the relevant folks, and thanks for taking an interest. I'm sure my fellow townspeople will be grateful for your guidance. You have my thanks for stepping up to help us improve our voting systems!
For your reference, here's some background on the how the process came to be[1][2][3][4]
Thank you for your expert opinion. Unlike yourself and your colleague[0], I am not an expert on voting systems and infrastructure.
I am just a consumer of such things and have exactly zero say in my town's approach to voting.
I do know that RCV is better than FPTP, even more so if we don't, at least, require a majority, and am glad my town is at least making a start at such things.
That said, I'd love to make it even better.
As I suggested[1] to your colleague, it would be terrific if your expertise could be used to improve the voting system where I live.
I'd expect that the folks[2] who make such decisions could be convinced to re-frame things in another referendum based upon the recommendations of you and your organization. I know I'd certainly appreciate it!
> You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
but your actual strategy is to rank hillary in 1st because bernie can't win. or, in the case of my aunt, she preferred warren but voted biden to beat trump. she would have ranked them biden>warren>trump in a ranked election for that very reason. this is called "compromise strategy".
bro, approving both of them is better than being strategically forced to say that you prefer clinton to bernie or biden to warren.
> Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit.
Not so dead simple to vote, though. If you're a sincere voter and you prefer Alice to Bob and Bob to Charlie, do you approve of Alice, or both Alice and Bob?
That choice has to be either strategic or very noisy.
There seems to be some unavoidable complexity to voting methods: letting the voter deal with the complexity leads to a method with a very simple algorithm but that's tricky to use. Letting the method itself deal with it leads to more complex algorithms, but makes it easier to vote.
That said, the alternative vote is a bad ranked voting method; with that I do agree. Just beware of the complexity hidden in the system, whether that's Approval or Ranked Pairs.
I agree with this. Ranked choice is easy to explain to a naive voter: everyone understands how a preference order works, and the result is "the candidate more people like the most". Counting the votes is (a bit) complicated, but I think the (minority of) people who get excited by implementation details out-smart themselves, by worrying that most people won't understand the details. Of course most people won't understand the details, because they don't care about the details. They don't know how votes are tallied now!
My position admittedly breaks down when people lie to low-information voters about the fairness of the process - but, in my defence, people will lie about any system that doesn't produce the results they want. I'd prefer they lodge their objections to a better system than first-past-the-post.
That's fair. RCV does break down with a large number of candidates. Though doesn't star voting have some odd corner cases? Regardless, every alternative scheme I've seen seriously proposed would be a massive improvement over FPTP.
When we get out of this hole, that will be the number 1 thing I dedicate my civic duties towards. It's the last true bipartisan gridlock and it of course works against the people.
Even by its nature, ranked choice means that radical ideas need to temper themselves or somehow be extremely popular. Trump never would have won in a ranked choice system.
If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.
The best way to get money out of politics is to get politics out of money. The government playing an outsized role in the economy is precisely what draws money into the political process in the first place.
This. If you're the trade group for a billion dollar industry you'd be not doing your job if you didn't buy both sides of the isle. With how powerful the government is you can't afford not to.
Weird way to agree with someone, end with an insult just because you're not sure whether or not you should take the least charitable interpretation. You would think the rest of my post would have been a clue.
Moving past that, yes we are in agreement. In fact you bring up an excellent point, which is that political parties themselves make corrupt use of campaign finance lawlessness to get in the way of their own voters and rig their own primary systems. None of these entities, whether the DNC or a right wing corporate interest group should be able to buy and sell American elections.
Individual campaign contributions are a non issue, also because regular people are capped at relatively low and long established FEC limits these various slush funds/pacs are designed to circumvent. As you said, the math is clear. I'm confident if this issue were ever put straightly to the American people, the result would be overwhelmingly in favor of campaign finance reform. The real issue isn't anyone's ability to do math, but what you hinted at earlier. The political parties themselves enjoy and benefit from this corruption. Therefore they are incentivized to ensure such a vote never takes place.
The current moment offers an opportunity to overpower such entrenched powers that be, if we can collectively move beyond partisan finger pointing that will only alienate those fellow Americans we need to agree with us to make such a broad based reform possible.
What point are you attempting to make? Or are you one of a minority of people that refuses to see the difference between (say among other things) the unrealized gains of someone like a Musk vs someone's working class parents saving up for retirement?
Citizens United litigated a very specific issue. It was only an issue because Congress had actually passed some meaningful campaign finance reform after many painful years (really decades) of effort. The court essentially kneecapped it overnight on a 5 to 4 basis. Get money out of politics commonly means get dark/pac/corporate money out of politics, not individual donors well within long established FEC limits that these pacs are designed to circumvent.
Again, billionaires live by different rules. This doesn't just apply to taxes, criminal justice, etc it applies to the foundation of our democracy - free and fair elections. What could be more in keeping with the best of American traditions than ensuring our elections are as egalitarian as possible?
> Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact
Citizens United was a case about a federal agency attempting to suppress the publication of a movie due to breaching "electioneering communications" rules first introduced in 2002. Contrary to the common narrative, it was more a case of the government arguing "speech is money" as a pretext to use its authority to regulate certain expenditures of money in order to control what information could be released into the media ecosystem. The court struck this down under a correct application of consistent first amendment jurisprudence, ruling that speech is always protected by the constitution, and cannot be suppressed under the guise of regulating spending.
The case and the ruling had nothing to do with campaign donations or funding of candidates. Overturning the Citizens United ruling would create a situation in which agencies under the authority of incumbent politicians would be able to control and curate public political discourse in the lead-up to elections. This is likely the exact opposite of what you intend.
> term/age limits for all public offices.
Term limits would have the effect of creating large incentives for office holders to use the prerogatives of office to set themselves up for their future careers after their terms expire. Term-limited politicians would be even more motivated than those in the status quo to hand out favors to potential future employers and business partners.
On top of that, it would be much more difficult for for politicians to establish notoriety and carve out a base of direct public support by building reputation in office. Instead, a steady stream of relative unknowns would require support from sponsors and entrenched party organizations to win office, making back-room players much more powerful than in the status quo. This is, again, likely to result in the exact opposite of what you intend.
> Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations.
Agreed, but that will require voters to abandon their reflexive partisan positions and accept that the institutions themselves are dysfunctional, irrespective of which people happen to be administering it at any given time. In the current cultural climate, that seems unfortunately unlikely.
I am almost sure that those two acts refer to human beings reading and listening, not to algorithms. Or at least a decent corporate lawyer will convincingly turn things that way.
... that has been virtually useless as it has been rendered ineffective by Republican obstructionism and the unwillingness of the Democrats to counteract it, leading to the current state of Trump being able to do what he wants completely unchecked.
That's a flaw of the constitution and it's revisions.
You should always assume bad actors when designing a political system.
And that's why parliamentary republics where you elect parties that form coalitions that chooses a prime minister who still has to deal with opposition and its own party support, every day, are much more resilient to authoritarianisn.
In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. Presidential ones? As many as you wish.
It's very stupid to elect single individuals to executive power.
> In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago.
I'd disagree on that. Austria had the FPÖ in government multiple times and each time they caused massive scandals. Some of the German states are on the brink of the AfD not even needing a coalition partner alone - should the elections this year turn out to be as bloody as the polls suggest, it may very well be the case that they go from opposition straight to sole government, with no one holding them back.
Zero? I think the expected number of collisions can be larger than zero. Jimmy Johns sandwich delivery by bicycle has resulted in more collisions than zero and that is arguably safe.
I hate receiving competitive quotes so I take what the 1st guy offers or dont engage at all. AI agents could definitely be useful gathering bids where prices are hidden behind "talk to our sales specialist" gates.
The absence of such a story makes me think this law doesn't protect shit. What exactly did a Montanian get killed or arrested trying to do with a computer that is now protected? Can I use AI during a traffic stop or use AI to surveil and doxx governemnt employees? What exactly is the government giving up by granting me this right?
Or is this just about supressing opposition to data centers?
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