I used TikTok and also never came across a meme like that. Or maybe I did once or twice, I just quickly swiped away (or if something I’m not interested in is shown repeatedly I click not interested and it’s gone at least for a long time). If you’re shown the same meme from 20 different people chances are you just kept watching them, maybe with disapproval, but your device can’t read your brainwaves yet so the service just thinks you’re super interested.
And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
>And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
And before the transistor, we had flagpole sitters[0] and dance marathons[1] and dozens of other memes, just in the 20th century.
This kind of thing is nothing new, and has been going on for as long we've been us. Now this is accessible to a larger and more varied audience, not just those who are nearby.
I looked at all the AI signatures and they’re all phrases I use in my very human writing. If you’re anti-AI generated content then stop posting clearly marked AI dross like this I guess.
That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.
People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.
But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.
I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor.
On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.
If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.
There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.
The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.
I will add this: the number of ways in which humans can harm one another is immeasurable, and every law comes with an associated cost. At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions. But bad laws can also dampen legitimate economic activity, making social problems worse.
As a society plunges into dysfunction due to economic stress, the number of people harming one another increases. If the society responds using more laws, and fails to correct the source of the dysfunction, it will eventually collapse under the weight of those laws as enforcement becomes uneven and politically driven. (This is the failure mode of legalist and bureaucratic states.) Alternatively, if the society responds with a more arbitrary case-by-case system of punishment, it will collapse into mob rule or dictatorship, so lack of structured law isn’t a solution either.
The only real solution is to fix the root problems facing the society. Antitrust helps with this because it can “unstick” parasitic incumbents who are preventing the market from dynamically responding to real economic conditions.
> At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions.
Don't forget compliance costs. Those are some of the largest costs and they're largely hidden because they don't go into the government budget. You pass a law to prevent a million dollars in total harm and then a hundred thousand companies each spend $100 to comply with it, what did you get and what did you pay?
Compliance costs also have a specific type of cost because of their asymmetry. It's like adding a fixed amount of weight to a boat. If you add 1000 pounds of regulatory costs to a 200,000 ton container ship, it doesn't even notice. If you add the same amount of weight to a kayak, it sinks. But if you keep adding costs until you sink all the small boats, and then sink all the medium boats, you're not just failing to solve all the problems caused by market consolidation, you're actively making them worse.
Oh sure, if we can somehow get functional anti-trust, campaign finance reform, labor protections, and progressive taxation, then we probably wouldn't need nearly as many of these protective laws.
However, I don't see that happening anytime soon so the numerous laws are the best option we have.
How do you forsee contract law helping? I can't very well sign a contract with every person that I meet. That's to say nothing of situations where they simply refuse to agree to reasonable terms.
The surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat.
You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds .
Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence.
In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.
And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.
You can make it zero too if going by this argument. Count up the individual points at which crimes were committed. The area adds up to zero since the number of crimes is finite.
We know exactly where the majority of crime is in the US, you are correct, down to the neighborhood.
Now… let’s say you were to call the national guard in to safeguard those areas, how do you think that would go over by those cities governors and reaction media? I guess the answer depends on the year.
And science already told you the best improvement ever, in the world history with regards to violent crime, came from unleaded gasoline.
So, are you using your brain and demanding other systemic changes like free mental-health care and housing? or are you just being a tool and wanting more police violence?
There's always the question of where exactly you're referring to and what kind of crime you're referring to. But I assumed that's what the parent post was referring to.
If you’re being sarcastic, well, congratulate yourself for being better than shitholes I guess.
If you’re not, yes it is, unfortunately same can’t be said about the U.S., where my not very large social circle have experienced robbery at gun point at a gas station, street mugging, home break-in with everything stolen, smashed car window, all within the past decade. I was more fortunate but still got my bike stolen.
For example, Wikipedia has a page of studies and conclusions about violent crime rates in countries around the world, and the United States isn’t looking so good on that list, which compiles many studies and statistics. It’s far behind both Canada and Europe on violent crime.
Yesterday I asked a question about a Claude Code setting inside Claude Code, don't recall which, and their builtin documentation skill—something like that—ended up doing a web search and found a wrong answer on a third party site. Later I went to their documentation site and it was right there in the docs. Wonder why they can't bundle an AI-friendly version of their own docs (can't be more than a few hundred KBs compressed?) inside their 174MB executable.
It's insane that they concluded the builtin introspection skill for claude documentation should do a web search instead of simply packing the correct documentation in local files. I had the same experience like you, wasting tokens and my time because their architecture decision doesn't work in practice.
I have to google the correct Anthropic documentation and pass that link to claude code because claude isn't able to do the same reliably in order to know how to use its own features.
They used to? I have a distinct memory of it doing exactly that a few months ago. Maybe it got dropped in the mad dash that passes for CC sprint cycles
I’m at 19186/233259, about 0.082, and I’m pretty sure most of my higher upvoted comments are on the shorter side, and my wall of texts tend to not deviate much from 1 karma, sometimes even negative. Don’t put too much stock into fake internet points.
And I really need to waste less time here, didn’t expect to be top 1500…
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And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
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