mountainriver

joined 1 year ago
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A tangent: the tablet.

Why is the tablet ok for taking notes? Is it banned from the wifi? Does it lack a browser? Or are todays students unaware that most sites can be visited without an app?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

Really good.

You are quite right in describing the zero interest rate as central banks taking the foot of the brake. Similar to how a brake can decrease speed but not increase it, the interest rate can destroy demand but not create economic activity.

The reason for not using tried and effective method of Keynesian spending is of course ideological. In the euro zone it was ruthlessly enforced by the ECB and the Commission were the deficits created by automatic stabilisers were taken as breaking the Maastricht treaty and those countries had to be put through austerity.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I also wonder if revealing the fact I’ve looked at job listings might hurt my standing.

If honesty isn't the best policy you can always work in that while looking into that company you noticed that they have no one in your role and in fact is actually hiring their first. You don't have to mention where and how you found it, people will probably assumed you used a search engine.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago

As I have pointed out here previously, Microsoft is jacking up prices on 365 licenses, so when they say they have increased revenue on other cloud services, think squeezing the economy through their chokehold on governments and corporations.

I don't have statistics, but having gone through licenses during last year and ended up just avoiding a price increase (instead of getting savings), it's pretty clear that is what are doing.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

And he is brave enough to say that:

  • There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.

  • Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.

  • Trans people are not people.

Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.

Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it's the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

I followed the 2008 crash in some detail and as far as I remember it the pension funds and little towns in Norway that got swept away in the financial avalanche were not known before the crash. Then the surviving banks were allowed to rebuild their balance sheets by both government largess and fleecing their customers. And in the euro zone there was the whole euro crisis as spill over effects hit the banks and French and German banks were saved by fleecing Mediterranean EU countries, payed for by destruction of their economies. Which had some nasty political effects like the direct inheritors of Mussolini's party now running Italy.

I don't think we can know even the direct knock-on effects of the crash without knowing what financial institutes and pension funds has gambled on the line going up.

Anyway I expect the oligopolies to receive government support and fleece the rest of the economy. They can probably jack up prices at least 10-15% every year without CEOs going to their IT department and saying "fuck it, teach me Linux, we are switching, this is just to expensive".

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

However, even the accelerationist don’t want Chinese AGI, because insert standard sinophobic rhetoric about how they hate freedom and democracy or have world conquering ambitions or they simply lack the creativity, technical ability, or background knowledge (i.e. lesswrong screeds on alignment) to create an aligned AGI.

I thought in modern US phrenology East Asians were smart? So they just haven't been reached by the holy scripture/ Harry Potter fanfic?

Now I got curious, has there been any attempts of spreading EA to China, and if so how did it go?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

I saw in passing a claim that investors (or rather gamblers) are fleeing the dollar for safer assets such as "gold and Bitcoin".

Gold might be true, the ancient relic is up against the dollar, but Bitcoin!? Someone tell me that isn't true and it's just coinfondlers trying to hype it, in order to steer stupid capital their way.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago

Meta claims they have approval. No comments from regulators in sight, no actual decision quoted.

It's not necessarily false, but it does come from the lie and break laws industry, so I wouldn't be surprised if it is a lie.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It really looks like it's on an awful trajectory.

In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a "simple" plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.

I'm rambling and it's late. Sympathies and solidarity.

 

Capgemini has polled executives, customer service workers and consumers (but mostly executives) and found out that customer service sucks, and working in customer service sucks even more. Customers apparently want prompt solutions to problems. Customer service personnel feels that they are put in a position to upsell customers. For some reason this makes both sides unhappy.

Solution? Chatbots!

There is some nice rhetorical footwork going on in the report, so it was presumably written by a human. By conflating chatbots and live chat (you know, with someone actually alive) and never once asking whether the chatbots can actually solve the problems with customer service, they come to the conclusion that chatbots must be the answer. After all, lots of the surveyed executives think they will be the answer. And when have executives ever been wrong?

 

This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.

A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.

"No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.

Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.

In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.

In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.

If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.

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