Wilzax

If we stopped donating to specific campaigns and started donating to organizations that are lobbying against voter suppression we could all do much more than our single vote allows

This kind of non-news news that only exists to spread rumors to influence stock prices is starting to wear on me.

Why can’t journals stop themselves from publishing stories where nothing has actually happened?

Average is better means fewer incidents overall. But when there are incidents, the damages for those incidents tend to be much worse. This means the victims are more likely to lawyer up and go after the company responsible for the AI that was driving, and that means that the company who makes the self-driving software better be prepared to pay for those worst case scenarios, which will now be 100% their fault.

Uber can avoid liability for crashes caused by their human drivers. They won’t be able to do the same when their fleet is AI. And when that happens, AI sensibilities will be measured my human metrics because courts are run by humans. The mistakes that they make will be VERY expensive ones, because a minor glitch can turn an autonomous vehicle from the safest driving experience possible to a rogue machine with zero sense of self-preservation. That liability is not worth the cost savings of getting rid of human drivers yet, and it won’t be for a very long time.

The problem with self-driving cars isn’t that it’s worse than human drivers on average, it’s that it’s SO INCREDIBLY BAD when it’s wrong that no company would ever assume the liability for the worst of its mistakes.

This comment, in reference to anything but parasitic sociopaths who exploit others for their own benefit, would be very troubling.

But because this is targeted at a billionaire asswipe, I have to say I agree wholeheartedly.

Same is true for Georgia

Spacetime is curved. Inertial paths through spacetime are straight.

Euclidean space is not the only space where straight lines are possible.

While I don’t think it’s as high as 90% of users, I admit I didn’t think about people who would subject themselves to Arch just to not take advantage of what Arch has to offer.

(But seriously, why would anyone choose to do this when they can just install Mint)

I agree that right now we’re facing both at the same time, but either one in isolation would still be a huge problem.

Inflation at the current (reported) rate of ~3-4% is healthy for almost any economy, since it promotes spending your money on high quality, long lasting goods, or investing your money to promote growth of businesses. A little depreciation of money each year dissuades people from sitting on their cash. Even without a stock market and capitalism, inflation is an incentive for people to put their long term savings into government savings bonds, which allows for more public development today without more taxes.

BUT if inflation is too high, (even with wages increasing at the same rate, which never happens) it’s extremely difficult for people to save cash to make large purchases. Any economy that uses money needs for people to be able to afford to wait a while with their money before deciding what to do with it, otherwise people are forced to settle for lower quality goods or whatever investment opportunities are available on short notice. Less time to make wise choices with money means less productive use of that money, meaning a less productive economy overall. Not what we want.

And of course, if wages don’t keep up with inflation, either because inflation is running away or because your government has refused to increase the minimum wage at all since 2009 when the national currency was worth 1.47 times as much as it is today, 15 years later (cough cough), then obviously you’re going to run into some problems with people’s ability to afford things.

That said, I think some shady manipulation to the consumer price index is going on to make the reported inflation figures look a lot lower than the actual increase in cost of living that the majority of people are facing. The biggest offender is housing costs skyrocketing in the past decade, but not uniformly across the US. The result is that areas where this hasn’t been nearly as big of an issue falsely “balance out” critical problem areas, where people are practically being forced to either relocate or become homeless due to how rapidly housing prices have gone up.

There’s just so many different things that need to go right for an economy to be prosperous for everyone who contributes to it, and right now the people in charge of steering that economy are getting kickbacks from the people who stand to benefit the most from taking it off the rails.

It’s not about Arch itself being a unique choice, it’s about how Arch looks very different from user to user because they not only had the option but the requirement to install nearly everything but the Kernel themselves.

The result is that no two Arch users end up with the same OS, just the same kernel and package manager.