Is happiness the point of life? We just exist self referentially, to live, churn chemicals in our skull, and then stop living? The whole thing is just a self perpetuating chemical reaction?
Back-of-the-envelope
- Road area. World road length ≈ 60–70 million km. Using an average paved width of ~8–10 m ⇒ area ≈ (0.9–1.3)×10¹² m². Earth’s surface is 5.1×10¹⁴ m², so roads cover ~0.09–0.13% of the planet.
- Albedo change. Dark asphalt is ~0.05–0.10. “White” coatings can push toward ~0.4–0.6 (fresh), but weathering quickly dulls them. So a plausible Δalbedo for roads is +0.2 to +0.5.
- Global albedo change. Δα_global ≈ (road fraction) × (Δalbedo_road) ≈ (0.001)×(0.2–0.5) ≈ +0.0002 to +0.0005.
- Radiative forcing. Globally averaged incoming sunlight ≈ S₀/4 ≈ 340 W m⁻². Forcing from an albedo change is ΔF ≈ −Δα_global × 340 ≈ −0.07 to −0.17 W m⁻².
- Temperature response. Using a standard sensitivity ~0.8 °C per W m⁻² (≈3 °C per CO₂ doubling): ΔT ≈ −0.05 to −0.14 °C at equilibrium.
They like blowing up boats. There is no evidence that any drugs or "terrorists" were involved, and there never will be because any potential evidence exploded. The government didn't even pretend to provide any evidence because they know their base doesn't care.
The Republican base likes breaking the law? That's rather ironic coming from the party professing to be the party of Law and Order. Here's where some "show me, don't tell me" can be applied.
Why not both? Things can have multiple reasons and then later second order effects on top of that. Either way the law should stay outside of what narrative you choose to follow.
Is an individual human raised alone significantly smarter than a chimp?
How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication that lets us educate ourselves and compound knowledge vs biology? Homo lived for thousands and thousands of years with the same level of development as other apes
Since it is impossible to instill human culture into a chimp (and scientists certainly have tried) there must be some important biological differences between people and chimps.
In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
Overall national wealth and power shrink under monopoly super corporations, that is the reason it is a matter of public policy in the first place. If you go back and review the major antitrust actions of the 20th century, each one was followed by an explosion of market-creating innovation: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, even Microsoft. Look even further back, and many national economies were organized around a few state-sponsored monopolies e.g. the East India Company. They all lost ground to economies with more numerous and competitive companies, most notably the U.S.
i think it could be argued that sure, 20 Googles would be better for US power, yes. why wouldn’t it be? it would drive more innovation which likely would only increase our influence on multiple levels.
there could be more reason to argue it would absolutely be more secure—if any of these tech giants or one of the people inside were to sell us out it could be very very bad. if one or two out of twenty were to sell us out, the damage is much much less severe.
not to mention we’re significantly stronger as a country when we have diversity of ideas leading to diversity in innovation which the dominance from a tiny few just entirely undermines.
As long as the state has power over Google (and it does, even if the media cycle presents it like they’re powerless), they can surveil billions of people, control populations, distribute propaganda.
Look how the US is able to spread it’s culture everywhere, cut off regimes, debank people it doesn’t like, all by controlling a few choke points.
Look how China uses its corporations to increase state power. The US does the same but with a few more carrots (lucrative govt contracts).
A mega corp means you can do your coercion behind closed doors rather than with sweeping regulations
> In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations?
I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.
Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.
I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?
I mean it largely depends how you define that. I can think of a lot of social ills the government isn't working to solve... poverty, houselessness, poor funding of schools in general, the ongoing deterioration of social programs, but I wouldn't say they're the cause of those issues?
Fact is when you scratch even fingernail deep on any of them you find the private sector, far more often than not. The welfare state is in tatters because numerous components of it have been privatized and are operated by contracted companies who are siphoning off substantial amounts of the utter pittance we dedicate to the problem itself, which means what gets to the people who need it is even more a pittance than it started as.
The houseless issue is perpetuated in part by local governments zoning restrictions and the myriad of issues around building them here, from supplies to labor availability, and also a substantial contributor is the fact that huge amounts of homes are being purchased by investment companies and hoarded either without people in them, or are rented out in which case worker's earned income is being siphoned off to those already far wealthier than they need to be.
Poor funding of schools is often due to a whole mess of factors relating both to how we as a society prioritize education (or don't, more often) and the fact that a school's funding is heavily dependent on property taxes around where it is operating, which means under served areas have less quality schools from the off, which means less educated people with less money to spend, which means less economic activity, which means less property taxes and so on and so forth.
And in all of these and many other problems you have the elephant in the room: lobbying. Corporations spend billions to lobby the government to do even less than it does about these and a bunch of other issues, chief among them to permit said corporations to hold more money, a solid portion of which can then be spent on yet more lobbying. And certainly the government and it's politicians aren't simply helpless patsies in that arrangement, I also would hold the people making the decisions to route that money far more responsible.
> only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
At a glance it seems this would only remain true so long as American interests and the interests of the corporation align. Which they do, up to a point.
The question then becomes where is the "triple point" between "A globally competitive USA", "Corporate oligarchy", and "Power to the people"? If such a balance can when exist
White privilege is a specific case of the phenomenon: “if you live in the culture built by your culture, you will benefit”, which is the whole point of culture in the first place.
A Japanese person has Japanese privilege in Japan, an Egyptian in Egypt, etc
If you’re “culturally American” in America (regardless of race), you will benefit.
If you’re White and culturally American in parts of America where White American culture dominates (like our institutions, which reflect a country that has been historically 90%+ White), you will benefit
If you’re White and in a place where non White culture dominates, you will be relatively disadvantaged. Most countries around the world, and even parts of the US (parts of Chicago where you have significant disadvantages from being White).
Great to acknowledge luck but too often it’s used as an excuse. Even the story you laid out has to do with a lot of persistence, grit, determination, learning from mistakes, etc
A better way of putting it is probably: barring terrible luck, nearly anybody can be successful if they’re willing to make the sacrifices, work hard, learn quickly, and keep at it long enough. And even if you get terribly lucky, it just makes your odds worse - there are people out there who’ve had worse luck than you and still became more successful than you.
> barring terrible luck, nearly anybody can be successful if they’re willing to make the sacrifices, work hard, learn quickly, and keep at it long enough
The problem is, I don't think we have nearly enough global signal to make that assertion. Wouldn't we need some objective metrics on how many people succeed vs. fail correlated against their level of effort?
I have some pretty deep-seated concerns that we have assumed "fortune favors the brave" without comparing that assertion objectively to other hypotheses such as "fortune favors the sons and daughters of the successful" or "fortune favors the pretty" (where "pretty" here is standing in for whatever mostly-permanent physical characteristic one might choose: sex, gender, skin color, working legs, what have you). To be certain, from a personal standpoint the only one of those you can control directly is your own boldness so that matters in terms of personal choice... But policy has to look at the level of not personal choice, but the effects rules, laws, and incentives have on sculpting society as a whole.
The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people.
Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k.
This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases.
Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created.
And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.
I don’t think this is true. I think CEOs are replacing people on the assumption that AI will be able to replace their jobs. But I don’t think AIs are able to replace any jobs other than heavily scripted ones like front-line customer support… maybe.
I think AI can automate some tasks with supervision, especially if you’re okay with mediocre results and don’t need to spend a lot of time verifying its work. Stock photography, for example.
But to say AI is replacing jobs, I think you’d need to be specific about what jobs and how AI is replacing them… other than CEOs following the hype, and later backtracking.
> (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers
This assumes that humans will be unwilling to work if their wage is below living. It depends on the social programs of the government, but if there is none, or only very bad ones, people will probably be more desperate and thus be more willing to work in even the cheapest jobs.
So in this overabundance of human labor world, the cost of human labor might be much closer to zero than living wage. It all depends on how desperate to find work government policy will make humans.
We can't prove why people are being replaced, and the people who claimed to have replaced people with AI don't have a lot of good outcomes. Now there is some success but... it is bespoke to that environment often, so, your reasons would be sound if the premise was. We need more information.
I've seen AI replacing a lot of jobs already in regulatory/consultancy business making billions. A lot of people producing paperwork for regulative etc purposes have been replaced by language models. My question – should this business really exist at all?
Can you though? From my experience this is just a wishful thinking. I am yet to see actual productivity gains from AI that would objectively justify hiring less or laying off people.
It’d be strange if they didn’t. All human organization should be expected to behave like this, especially as rates of communication become faster.
As much as our brains seem to be evolved to delude us about it, we’re not uniquely able to resist the continuity between physics and chemistry and biology.
As self-replicating chemical and physical systems, we exist only because our atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, and cultures all follow these rules naturally selecting for least action
The alternative is what? “Working to live” is often just making more money so you can spend it hiking, traveling, and maximizing your dopamine. Maximizing your happy chemicals is also materialist.
Working a substantive job contributing positively to the work is among the most important and fulfilling things one can do with their life, alongside raising a family
