Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.

You mean by investing the stock market? Or literal cash under the mattress?

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

Too broad. Wealth hoarder describes everyone with a mortgage as well as grandma Sally and her pension plan. Anyone who saves for retirement is a wealth hoarder.

Either way it’s going to organized crime. At least the crypto scammers are unlikely to influence the election!

I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.

But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.

The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.

Yesterday was my convocation day. So yes!

You could hire a hundred times as many grad students into the tenure track but that still wouldn’t stop people from competing to study with the best ones.

The brutal, national, standardized exam is what you get when you eliminate all the other barriers to going to university. It means every single student is in competition with one another to get accepted.

Shuffling staff around between schools just sounds like a great way to drive all the best researchers to the private sector while driving all the best teachers out of the profession entirely. Forcing people to move around to different cities for their job means you are selecting heavily for a particular “nomadic” type of person without any attachments to the local community. Sounds absolutely awful to foist that on educational institutions who really ought to be in the business of fostering community.

Everything these AIs output is a hallucination. Imagine if you were locked in a sensory deprivation tank, completely cut off from the outside world, and only had your brain fed the text of all books and internet sites. You would hallucinate everything about them too. You would have no idea what was real and what wasn’t because you’d lack any epistemic tools for confirming your knowledge.

That’s the biggest reason why AIs will always be bullshitters as long as their disembodied software programs running on a server. At best they can be a brain in a vat which is a pure hallucination machine.

There are an estimated 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per day. At 8 hours per day it would take 90,000 people just to watch all those videos, working 7 days per week with no breaks and no time spent doing anything else apart from watching.

Now take into account that YouTube users watch over a billion hours of video per day and consider that even one controversial video might get millions of different reports. Who is going to read through all of those and verify whether the video actually depicts what is being claimed?

A Hollywood studio, on the other hand, produces maybe a few hundred to a few thousand hours of video per year (unless they’re Disney or some other major TV producer). They can afford to have a legal team of literally dozens of lawyers and technology consultants who just spend all their time scanning YouTube for videos to take down and issuing thousands to millions of copyright notices. Now YouTube has made it easy for them by giving them a tool to take down videos directly without any review. How long do you think it would take for YouTube employees to manually review all those cases?

And then what happens when the Hollywood studio disagrees with YouTube’s review decision and decides to file a lawsuit instead? This whole takedown process began after Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube!

I’m not sure what you mean by “true cost of business.” The biggest cost here is the issue of copyright claims and takedowns which were created by law in the first place, not by a natural phenomenon.

No matter what system we design, you’ll find that people adapt to take advantage of it. Well-meaning laws frequently have large and nasty unintended consequences. One of the biggest examples I can think of is the copyright system — originally intended to reward artists — which has led to big publishers monopolizing our culture.

Google is absolutely allergic to hiring humans for manual review. They view it as an existential issue because they have billions of users which means they’d need to hire millions of people to do the review work.

Yes and the rich have the advantage here: they are few. Cooperation is always easier to achieve with few than with many. Now include the fact that the rich have vastly more resources and the scale of the problem becomes much more apparent:

You’ve got to organize the masses with very few resources. The rich in the mean time leverage their resources to buy traitors, crack coalitions, divide, and conquer the masses.

This is the reason why popular revolutions rarely succeed. If you really want to win you need to divide the rich and get some on your side.

The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.

My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.

The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.

Can you name a non-bad single player strategy game?

Meta’s not behaving in the slightest. Their entire business model is illegal under the GDPR. They will continue maliciously complying for as long as they can. Just like Apple. Fight tooth and nail for as long as it takes.

Apple’s going to fight all of this tooth and nail, country by country, to the end of time. Anything less and they risk a shareholder lawsuit.

This is billions and billions of dollars we’re talking about, not chump change.

“Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!”

WhatsApp is owned by Meta.

Funny you should bring up Caves of Qud. That game is pushing the envelope in terms of procedural generation. They want to do a ton of the world building and background stories with procedural generation while leaving the main plot hand-crafted. They also do a really fun procedural detective story with one of the quests, so the clues and evidence you find when investigating the crime are different every time.

I think a lot of the fun of that game is with exploring the procedurally generated environments and doing the random quests. There just needs to be more research into generating branching plots and simulating events, with chains of causality. Dwarf Fortress does a lot of this in its world generation, for example.

I think what works for Minecraft is the spatial nature of the game. Procedural generation gives the player a new environment in which they can role play as an architect and engineer. While nothing stops you from building exactly the same structure every time — block for block — it’s more fun to design your structures into the landscape itself, like a real architect would! The same goes for Daarf Fortress and the like. It scratches an engineering/managerial itch.