Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.

For example, read this study on the policy views of practicing economists: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf

You will find that most economists strongly support things like environmental, food and drug safety, and occupational safety regulations.

Convincing people liberalism is an evil capitalist ploy to deregulate at all costs is a conservative psyop, and judging from comments like the one to which you’re responding, it’s working.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

In Bibi’s eyes, every day that Hamas continues to exist is a good day. If Hamas ever ceases to exist, Israelis might go back to questioning his corruption charges.

Yeah, I remember doing a pretty standard software eng internship for a cloud services company one summer back in undergrad, and I just found it so dull and uninteresting. It wasn’t even the company’s fault, as the team was great, good work-life balance, and good pay. I just realized through that internship that I truly did not want to work in cloud services or as a bog standard software eng.

Much happier now working as a research engineer in embedded systems, as it’s a field I find genuinely interesting. When you’re young is exactly the time to try to figure out what actually interests you and try to go do that. Spending all day every day writing code to solve problems you find fundamentally uninteresting is a quick route to burnout.

In 2016, I said half-jokingly that I was moving to Canada if he won. Then he won and now here I am in Canada. Granted, I was a senior in high school when he won and I was already applying to a couple universities in Canada. But definitely was worth it. As many issues as Canada has (cough cough housing crisis), I at least trust it to not descend into fully-fledged fascism any time soon.

Yeah, this is a great example of why I make an effort to specify the government when criticizing countries. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? I call Putin and his government evil but never the Russian people at large. China’s genocide of the Uyghurs? I call Xi Jinping and the CCP evil but never the Chinese people at large. Israel’s apartheid state and ethno-religious cleansing? I call Netanyahu and his government evil but never the Israeli people at large (and certainly not Jews at large).

The allure of treating entire demographics or populaces as a monolith and blaming them for the crimes of their government is exactly why genocidal rhetoric is so dang pervasive, and I won’t abide by it.

(Yes, I will also criticize civilians who actively support these crimes, but I make sure to be clear in distinguishing between them and the rest of the civilian population.)

Ah, but that says not to kill people. It says nothing about killing rats! /s

Seriously, though, that’s exactly why we’re so capable of committing atrocities: we dehumanize each other until we consider it acceptable to kill. Portraying Jews as rats and subhuman is exactly how the Holocaust happened, and portraying Palestinians as subhuman is exactly how Israel is currently doing what they’re doing.

When you’re a thin-skinned fascist conducting ethno-religious cleansing, any criticism must be met with absolute resistance. Fascism requires extreme black-and-white thinking and complete rejection of nuance.

We see the same pattern in the US with the MAGA movement, where even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Liz Cheney get demonized for “betraying” their “side”. Facts and nuance are rejected, and the only thing that matters is team loyalty.

Ah yes, a totally normal thing that innocent, non-fascist governments do. Nothing to see here, UN. Certainly no war crimes or ethnic cleansing!

A life goal of mine is to try to develop tools to help automate sustainable agriculture as much as possible. As I see it, part of the reason we keep on doing the monocultures is because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive, and anything that helps sustainable polycultures, agroforestry, etc. be more automated and less labor-intensive makes it easier for us to finally kick our current soil-destroying and ecosystem-obliterating habits.

I don’t follow their politics closely, but I still can’t believe Netanyahu clawed his way back into power after basically everyone else in government, even fellow hard right-wingers, banded up to oust him. That, plus him having faced all those corruption charges. Wtf is up with politics in Israel that allowed him to claw his way back in so quickly like some sort of alien parasite?

There’s even an entire book related to this topic, Progress and Poverty

If I understand the video correctly, the professor in question is the one who created the technique and and is behind the coral reef-building, but his ultimate goal was to create entire artificial islands using it, which could act as cybertecture cities at sea.

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Present Day

Okay, so that’s enough about the past. What about now?

Well, monopolization of land and housing via the housing crisis has done tremendous harm:

In 2015, two talented professors, Enrico Moretti at Berkeley and Chang-Tai Hsieh at Chicago Booth, decided to estimate the effect of shortage of housing on US productivity. They concluded that lack of housing had impaired US GDP by between 9.5 per cent and 13.5 per cent.

In a follow-up paper, based on surveying 220 metropolitan areas, they revised the figure upwards – claiming that housing constraints lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50 per cent between 1964 and 2009. In other words, they estimate that the US economy would have been 74 per cent larger in 2009, if enough housing had been built in the right places.

How does that damage happen? It’s simple. The parts of the country with the highest productivity, like New York and San Francisco, also had stringent restrictions on building more homes. That limited the number of homes and workers who could move to the best job opportunities; it limited their output and the growth of the companies who would have employed them. Plus, the same restrictions meant that it was more expensive to run an office or open a factory, because the land and buildings cost more.

And that is just one form of rent-seeking. Imagine the collective toll of externalities (e.g., the climate crisis), monopolistic/oligopolistic markets such as energy and communications, monopolization of valuable intellectual property, etc.

So I would tend to say that — unless we change our policies to eliminate the housing crisis, properly price in externalities, eliminate monopolies, encourage the growth of free and open IP (e.g., free and open-source software, open research, etc.), and provide critical public goods/services such as healthcare and education and public transit — we are on a trajectory for AI to be Gilded Age 2: Electric Boogaloo. AI merely represents yet another source of productivity growth, and its economic spoils will continue to be captured by the already-wealthy.

I say this as someone who works as an AI and machine learning research engineer: AI alone will not fix our problems; it must be paired with major policy reform so that the economic spoils of progress are felt by all, not just the rich.

Joseph Stiglitz, in the same essay I referred to earlier, has this to say:

My analysis of market models suggests that there is no inherent reason that there should be the high level of inequality that is observed in the United States and many other advanced countries. It is not a necessary feature of the market economy. It is politics in the 21st century, not capitalism, which is at fault. Market and political forces have, of course, always been interwined. Especially in America, where our politics is so money-driven, economic inequalities translate into political inequality.

There is nevertheless considerable hope. For if the growth of inequality was largely the result of inexorable economic laws, public policy could do little more than lean against the wind. But if the growth of inequality is the result of public policy, a change in those policies could lead to an economy with less inequality, and even stronger growth.

Exactly. I work in AI (although not the LLM kind, just applying smaller computer vision models), and my belief is that AI can be a great liberator for humanity if we have the right political and economic apparatus. The question is what that apparatus is. Some will say it’s an inherent feature of capitalism, but that’s not terribly specific, nor does it explain the relatively high wealth equality that existed briefly during the middle of the 20th century in America. I think some historical context is important here.

Historical Precedent

During the Industrial Revolution, we had an unprecedented growth in average labor productivity due to automation. From a naïve perspective, we might expect increasing labor productivity to result in improved quality of life and less working hours. I.e., the spoils of that productivity being felt by all.

But what we saw instead was the workers lived in squalor and abject poverty, while the mega-rich captured those productivity gains and became stupidly wealthy.

Many people at the time took note of this and sought to answer this question: why, in an era over greater-than-ever labor productivity, is there still so much poverty? Clearly all that extra wealth is going somewhere, and if it’s not going to the working class, then it’s evidently going to the top.

One economist and philosopher, Henry George, wrote a book exploring this very question, Progress and Poverty. His answer, in short, was rent-seeking:

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

Rent-seeking takes many forms. To list a few examples:

• Land speculation
• Monopolization of finite natural resources (e.g., oil, minerals)
• Offloading negative externalities (e.g., pollution)
• Monopolization of intellectual property
• Regulatory capture
• Monopolistic or oligopolistic control of entire markets

George’s argument, essentially, was that the privatization of the economic rents borne of god-given things — be it land, minerals, or ideas — allowed the rich and powerful to extract all that new wealth and funnel it into their own portfolios. George was not the only one to blame these factors as the primary drivers of sky-high inequality; Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has stated:

Specifically, I suggest that much of the increase in inequality is associated with the growth in rents — including land and exploitation rents (e.g., arising from monopoly power and political influence).

George’s proposed remedies were a series of taxes and reforms to return the economic rents of those god-given things to society at large. These include:

• Implementation of land value taxes:

Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.

• Implementation of Pigouvian (aka externality) taxes, e.g., carbon tax:

A Pigouvian tax (also spelled Pigovian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (i.e., external costs incurred by the producer that are not included in the market price). The tax is normally set by the government to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome (a market failure) and does so by being set equal to the external marginal cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, social cost includes private cost and external cost caused by negative externalities. This means the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of negative externalities are environmental pollution and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption.[2]

• Implementation of severance taxes,

Severance taxes are taxes imposed on the removal of natural resources within a taxing jurisdiction. Severance taxes are most commonly imposed in oil producing states within the United States. Resources that typically incur severance taxes when extracted include oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, and timber. Some jurisdictions use other terms like gross production tax.

such as in the Norwegian model:

The key to Norway’s success in oil exploitation has been the special regime of ownership rights which apply to extraction: the severance tax takes most of those rents, meaning that the people of Norway are the primary beneficiaries of the country’s petroleum wealth. Instead of privatizing the resource rents provided by access to oil, companies make their returns off of the extraction and transportation of the oil, incentivizing them to develop the most efficient technologies and processes rather than simply collecting the resource rents. Exploration and development is subsidized by the Norwegian government in order to maximize the amount of resource rents that can be taxed by the state, while also promoting a highly competitive environment free of the corruption and stagnation that afflicts state-controlled oil companies.

• Intellectual property reform, e.g., abolishing patents and instead subsidizing open R&D, similar to a Pigouvian anti-tax (research has positive externalities) or Norway’s subsidization of oil exploration
• Implementation of a citizen’s dividend or universal basic income, e.g., the Alaska permanent fund or carbon tax-and-dividend:

Citizen’s dividend is a proposed policy based upon the Georgist principle that the natural world is the common property of all people. It is proposed that all citizens receive regular payments (dividends) from revenue raised by leasing or taxing the monopoly of valuable land and other natural resources.

…

This concept is a form of universal basic income (UBI), where the citizen’s dividend depends upon the value of natural resources or what could be titled as common goods like location values, seignorage, the electromagnetic spectrum, the industrial use of air (CO2 production), etc.[4]

• Funding public goods via the Henry George Theorem:

In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, beneficial investments in public goods will increase aggregate land rents by at least as much as the investments’ cost.[1] This proposition was dubbed the “Henry George theorem”, as it characterizes a situation where Henry George’s ‘single tax’ on land values, is not only efficient, it is also the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures.[2] Henry George had famously advocated for the replacement of all other taxes with a land value tax, arguing that as the location value of land was improved by public works, its economic rent was the most logical source of public revenue.[3]

…

Subsequent studies generalized the principle and found that the theorem holds even after relaxing assumptions.[4] Studies indicate that even existing land prices, which are depressed due to the existing burden of taxation on labor and investment, are great enough to replace taxes at all levels of government.[5][6][7]

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Additionally, most of the world’s Muslims don’t live in the Middle East or North Africa. South and and Southeast Asia combined have by far the largest Muslim population in the world. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. And the way they practice Islam is quite different from the Middle East and North Africa. According to Wikipedia, there are about 241 million in Pakistan, 236 million in Indonesia, about 200 million in India, and 151 million in Bangladesh.