UBI is not the panacea imo. We need UBS, and not the bank - universal basic services. Whether that's healthcare, education, unemployment, free transportation, food stamps for the needy, housing loans, more government jobs, etc.
UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did was elevate prices and push a lot of people into Robinhood, while elevating the debt crisis.
> UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did...
I would not put the one-time covid cheques on par with the various rigorous UBI and/or free housing experiments that have been run over the last 30 years
But the COVID cheques were the only ones done at a scale comparable enough to what a UBI programme would look like in the US, one that could inform government on what usage would look like.
Free housing is just another form of UBS that I was talking about.
That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.
It's telling when the largest maker of these devices themselves put societal controls in place to curb the excesses of this device - yet they're failing miserably too. Or are they? Perhaps the result is also what they want internally.
What social controls? Apple and Google get a cut of all the business that runs through their apps, including gambling apps. This has been the subject of numerous lawsuits.
You don't think the Play Store or the App Store are just giving out those apps and not making money from it, do you?
The app platforms are not only complicitous, they're enabling gambling by allowing these apps at all. It would be very simple to take them all away with TOS that banned gambling apps.
Alaska was like this. Taking your trash to the transfer station or dump was expensive, so people throw it all over the place, trashing the highways and vacant land, or they use burn barrels and cause massive pollution torching plastic and other things. It's pretty horrifying to see such beautiful areas littered up :-(
This has to be by far one of the most ignorant and bigoted answers I've ever read on this site, or on this question in particular.
If Islam is as unique as you say it is, why is it that Pakistan is able to constantly hold its ground against India, ever since the independence of both countries? Why Afghanistan beat conventional armies regularly, including the most powerful military in the world? Why Chechnya was such a thorn in Russia?
The answer is much simpler - Arab society is built upon tribes, and the tribal system continues today. Rulers of autocratic countries want loyalists from their allied tribes at the top of the military, and tribes do their best to look after solely their own interests. Never mind that oil wealth has also enabled insane defence spending, which means with the right positioning, some well-placed members of the military could stand to earn millions in bribes and skimming, which makes a career in the military all the more lucrative for the tribes.
Which is why ISIS was so skilled and so much of a threat to the Arab countries - because their motivation was not to enrich themselves, it was purely driven by their radical ideology. The best killers are those who don't give a shit about their own lives.
I think you're probably right, but your counterexamples don't really refute the strongest reading of the thesis. The military establishment has always ultimately held the reins in Pakistan, so the dynamic of civilians avoiding threats by rewarding incompetence isn't there - the threat is present anyway and the rewarding isn't in their power. Afghanistan and Chechnya are confederations of tribal warlords, so of course the armed forces are controlled by competent fighters, it's almost a tautology. You need an example where there's a strong civilian central authority that controls the military effectively, and maintains a highly competent military, and isn't constantly troubled by the threat of coups.
A bit tough to do when almost all Islamic-majority countries are located in Asia or Africa, where they're prone to dictatorial tendencies and nepotism runs galore. But the few European ones are doing alright - Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, heck might even argue Turkey (people outside Istanbul voting for Islamist Erdogan is still democracy in action).
"It would be a pity if I were to tarnish jlarocco's reputation within my network. I even have his GitHub from his profile. I'll just talk shit about him to all the CTOs on the block and ensure he doesn't get a job again..."
See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?
Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.
In that analogy, you SHOULD assume the person is an influencer.
In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.
There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".
Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad. A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.
The important thing is how we go about it, and whether their reputation remains reflective of their actions, or we try and make it worse than it ought to be. We can’t say for certain the author of the message was going to do the latter, but it does not inspire good faith.
I wrote my comment with the assumption that the ‘basic idea’ was intentionally making reputation worse on account of poor behaviour, and communicating that to the business owner. Of course, if you imagine the basic idea to be the extortive aspect, then it is literally extortion.
but the only way they can "fuck up" this business is by influencing their reputation. no one is getting a brick through their window. this is an attempt to try to mutate basic feedback mechanisms until they're equivalent to physical violence and turn "I won't shop here and neither will my friends" into "literally extortion".
> "A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal."
Yes, except this case isn't about a customer—it's a disgruntled vendor (commercial artist) acting on behalf of an association of other vendors. Not (AFAICT) on behalf of real customers.
A customer complaining about their needs and preferences is useful feedback.
A vendor whom you have no business relationship with (and want none) is not helpful.
If they criticize your business practices in public, that's certainly their right. But, if they're threatening to do that, with an attached demand of commercial services to them (or to their associates), that's something else. It's the linked demand for payment that loses them all legitimacy. (Possibly even into criminal racketeering; I'm not an expert).
Certainly, but considerate the alternative: the account simply publicly posts about a public posting (not private business). Which happens all of the time for public ridicule or shame. At least this provides some recourse for the person affected. Sure, the alternative is simply to not post in the first place; but such is the nature of large social media accounts.
the crux of whether or not this is extortion isn't just "something I don't like happens". it's not extortion to dislike a business's practice, and it's not extortion to tell your friends about it. it may be distasteful, maybe even shitty (in fact I'd go so far as to say that even while I agree with the idea I really don't like how they did it) but to criminalize what this person said is to criminalize the idea of not doing business with someone because you don't like their actions and is an attack on free speech.
It's extortion when you tell the business as a conditional statement. Perhaps you're lived a fortunate life as to not have dealt with a mafia gang ever in your sheltered life.
I don’t deny that based on the screenshot there is both strong-arming and a lack of sympathy or empathy from the other account towards the fact that it seems like many people are just using AI tools without giving it a second thought.
However, I’m just pointing out that as far as the implications of the threat goes, in most instances it would’ve just happened anyway, without a “warning”, because people simply post things to make fun of them and mock them. Sometimes those accounts might at least anonymize their subjects, but this might be a name them and shame them type situation.
This is ludicrous, I'm sorry. People are treating this minor social scuffle like they're going to burn the business down. No, they're not saying 'work with us or die' unless you read it in the most hostile way possible to be terrified of something mundane. To them, the AI is the problem, if the owner took it down and replaced it with a Microsoft Word printout, they would be satisfied. Trying to recommend an artist they know may come off as an advertisement or as trying to get ahead of the owner claiming there's no one who can do this kind of work, depending on how charitable you want to be. But no matter how you read it, this isn't a mob boss forcing you into a protection racket. It's just some guy who probably wanted to name and shame on a Facebook group but decided to hold off for one day.
But "European data sovereignty" is regulatory capture, although it sort of reads like they had a US parent company to attend y combinator and raise money, but are now moving fully to Berlin, which is what they intended from the start.
Excluding foreign competitors is a classic ‘regulatory capture’-style approach. Regulatory capture is (typically) a ‘bootleggers and baptists’ scenario where there are both good and bad reasons to enact the rules.
The difference between data sovereignty and regulatory capture is that the populace generally wants data sovereignty. The populace does not want big corporations dictating the rules of the trade.
> But "European data sovereignty" is regulatory capture
This doesn't match my understanding of regulatory capture [0] - is there any evidence that this company specifically orchestrated the EU's data protection laws in order to benefit from by blocking out competitors? Would be unexpected, since laws like GDPR predate its founding.
> is there any evidence that this company specifically orchestrated the EU's data protection laws
Companies don't write laws. All regulatory capture requires is for the company to be benefiting from laws and/or policy designed to exclude foreign companies and/or other competition. The point is that type of economic productivity is useless and derived from corruption in a free market. For years the EU has attempted to exclude US tech companies from competing and this is a continuation of that.
And for what its worth your wiki link seems to agree with me, I'm not sure why you posted it.
I never claimed companies write laws, but they do lobby governments to write laws which are beneficial for them. This is well-documented, including in the US, fwiw.
> All regulatory capture requires is for the company to be benefiting from laws and/or policy designed to exclude foreign companies and/or other competition
This doesn't match what the wiki links says (first sentence):
> In politics, regulatory capture (also called agency capture) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency[...]
Operative word is "co-opted", which sort of fits with what would be required for something to be considered corruption. So no, the company can't just benefit, they also have to have pushed for the specific outcome.
> For years the EU has attempted to exclude US tech companies from competing and this is a continuation of that.
I find this quite hard to believe. Digital sovereignty in the EU only really started in 2025, prior regulation like GDPR has applied to tech companies from all companies, including the EU. The continent has effectively allowed Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc, to dominate the tech scene here since their inception. Perhaps you're thinking of China.
i'm not sure why you're being downvoted. They know more AI regulation is coming, they know what it's going to be, they're influencing it and setting themselves up to benefit. It literally is the definition of regulatory capture.
UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did was elevate prices and push a lot of people into Robinhood, while elevating the debt crisis.
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