Low margins just means big corporations have th advantage, because they make profit through volume.

If renting wasn’t profitable at all, landlords wouldn’t rent.

And in many cases they don’t. Which is one reason why ten percent of US houses are vacant.

But that misses the point, which is that housing should not be a for-profit industry.

If you repair a house, if you maintain a house, if you renovate a house, you have the right to be paid for your labor. Any profit you “earn” from rental payments, above that amount, is money you didn’t earn - it’s money you were able to extort from your tenants because you have a piece of paper saying you own the house and your tenants do not.

Whether a landlord makes $1 profit or $10000 profit, that profit is still “earned” by collecting rent on property, not by creating any value for anyone.

Housing is a human right. And rent collection is theft.

If I boycotted any platform that hosted shitty people I certainly wouldn’t be on Lemmy 😆

Thank you for reading it!

The United States was preparing in advance for bad actors like Trump since 1787 and it didn’t fucking help.

I’d argue the article’s point is “new communication technology encourages a particular form of psychosis, and LLMs are especially prone to encouraging psychosis because they generate such a believable imitation of speech”.

I’ve been coming to believe LLMs dangerous to mental health in general for a lot of reasons, and I thought this was an interesting discussion of how a basic human instinct - to look for patterns and assume rational thought and meaning behind those patterns - has always gone wrong when applied to technology and is particularly dangerous when applied to LLM-generated content.

(Because there is a reason for every LLM-generated utterance, and that reason is “make the company money”. LLMs are capitalist speech acts in their purest form.)

BTW, what’s wrong with Substack? Is it just the “Substack hosts fascist blogs so everyone using Substack is fascist by association” thing?

A managed economy could happen and would be highly efficient, especially because running a nation is a collective endeavour. Individuals fail but groups have memory.

Yeah. Imagine how prosperous the United States would be if the current administration was running it as a managed economy.

If we can’t dream big, all we can do is maintain the status quo. And the status quo kind of sucks.

One in ten houses in the US are vacant.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/

“Society” has more than enough housing. We just distribute it poorly.

The idea is, we abolish the concept of private property, but retain the concept of personal property.

Personal property being stuff that’s used by one person, or ome family, or one small group, and ownership rights come from that use.

So a car would be the personal property of the driver or drivers who use it - the same as a computer or microwave or toothbrush would be the personal property of the person or people who used it. You drive it, you fuel it, you repair it, and that’s what makes it yours.

How to produce and distribute goods (like houses and cars and toothbrushes) without a system of private property, purchase, and ownership is a major site of leftist contention 😆

This is hardly unique to AI. When I used Reddit, r/bestof (a sub that reposted the “best” comments from Reddit threads) was consistently full of posts that confidently, eloquently, and persuasively stated bullshit as fact.

Because Redditors as a collective don’t upvote and award the truest posts - they upvote and award the posts that seem the most trustworthy.

And that’s human nature. Human beings instinctively see confidence as trustworthy and hesitation and doubt as untrustworthy.

And it’s easy to project an aura of confidence when you post bullshit online, since you have all the time you need to draft and edit your comment and there are no consequences for being wrong online.

Zero surprise an AI algorithm trained on the Internet replicates that behavior 😆

As always, the poor are human shields for the rich.

Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.

The general idea is recognizing a right to “personal property”, which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of “private property”, which you get from buying something.

Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build one giant fortified survival compound, as he chooses. His property, his choice, whether it benefits the community or not.

In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community, so no one person or company could accumulate land to the detriment of everyone else.

Landlords hate this idea.

Here’s a really super basic summary:

https://www.workers.org/private-property/

And here’s a long complicated discussion:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property

As usual when it comes to climate impact, the US will be fine. Three out of every four calories of corn is used to make ethanol or feed animals, both of which are ridiculously inefficient uses. Hell, corn syrup is in everything because the US grows so much more corn than it needs that we practically give away the corn syrup.

Soybeans are even less efficient - less than 3% of the American soybean crop is actually eaten by human beings, despite soybeans being a complete vegetable protein and one of the healthiest foods out there.

In other words, the United States could lose 9/10ths of the land growing corn and soybeans and still feed itself with plenty to spare.

All that land is only under cultivation at all because the United States can’t stand the idea of giving up one foot of the land it stole in the name of manifest destiny. Because if we weren’t using land for corn and beans in the Midwest or grazing cattle in the Great Plains, people might start asking why not give it back to the indigenous peoples we stole it from.

So yeah, America will be fine.

It’s the rest of the world that’s going to suffer for America’s climate crimes.

Taking away a billionaire’s private jet, as cool as that would be, won’t cut your electric bill. Shitty Euro bakery curtains will 😆

I mean, how many people fact check a book? Even at the most basic level of reading the citations, finding the sources the book cited, and making sure they say what the book claims they say?

In the vast majority of cases, when we read a book, we trust the editors to fact check.

AI has no editors and generates false statements all the time because it has no ability to tell true statements from false. Which is why letting an AI summarize sources, instead of reading those sources for yourself, introduces one very large procedurally generated point of failure.

But let’s not pretend the average person fact checks anything. The average person decides who they trust and relies on their trust in that person or source rather than fact checking themselves.

Which is one of the many reasons why Trump won.

Oh fuuuuck no.

You’re not good enough at controlling your thoughts to be less useful than the pornsick social media addicted ai drones with 10 second attention spans that would willingly participate in this.

I remember a fantasy novel from the Myth Adventures series where the good guys went undercover as conscripts in an enemy nation’s army. They ended up assigned to logistics and decide they could effectively hamper the enemy army, while keeping their own cover, if they messed up ten percent of their supply orders. And they got medals for efficiency because a 90% success rate was so much better then every other logistics unit 😆

Anyway, that’s what I think of when I hear your suggestion. The average competent human being reading this and recognizes how dystopian this bullshit is, even trying to fail, is going to give better data than the kind of fucking idiot who thinks this is a good idea and participates willingly.

But not the last.

Unfortunately, the world won’t give a shit until Los Angeles or a similar “developed” city runs out of water Parable of the Sower style.

To put that sum in context, the article says €225 per month represents a 41% reduction in the monthly food bill.

In Western countries, a vegan diet is not just healthier but cheaper than a standard meat-heavy diet. And the difference is significant in both cases.

You know, when someone wastes hundreds of dollars a month to indulge a pleasurable habit that shortens their lives significantly - like, say, cigarettes or alcohol - we’d have no qualms calling that an addiction. But the slaughter lobby has prevented any studies on the addictive nature of animal flesh and the harm it does to public health. Gosh, I wonder why.

I agree. Biden’s presidency was the biggest lost opportunity of my lifetime for exactly that reason.

FDR responded to a similar global challenge - the Great Depression - by transforming the American government to serve the needs of struggling Americans - and the American people rewarded his courage and vision with overwhelming support when he ran for his second term.

Biden? Barely tried to improve America. And everything he tried failed. He couldn’t even reduce student loan payments. And when Harris had the opportunity to break with him and fight for her own vision of what America could be, she either had no vision of her own or was too afraid to fight for it.

The American “left” is terrified to promote anything more than a return to the Obama-era status quo. But if they don’t find their vision and courage the United States is guaranteed one party Republican rule for another generation.

I cannot say I agree, and I think I recall that some indicators currently suggest we’d need about 3 planets to keep going at the same pace.

The back of the envelope calculation says if everybody on Earth lived like an average American we’d need the resources of about four Earths to cover it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712

That being said, from the same source, if everyone on Earth lived like an average Indian we’d only use half the Earth’s resources and could support twice as many people.

So it’s not about the number of people - it’s about the standard of living those people have and the resources they use.

I think the most effective way forward is more efficient and sustainable lifeways - if the richest countries learn to consume less, if people around the world get access to better technology and better institutions to raise their standard of living without raising their resource consumption.

And it’s interesting to note, the better off people are, the fewer children they tend to have. If we improve people’s lives worldwide, a steadily declining population will be a natural side effect.

An incredibly difficult goal, of course, but worth pursuing.