The worst is schroedinger’s auditory buffer. (Heisenbuffer?)
If you give me a second to parse what you said, I can reply just fine. If you ask “are you listening?” in an aggravated tone, the buffer gets discarded instantly.
And this is completely orthogonal to whether I was trying to pay attention to your words, cuz I basically can’t process your words directly as you speak anyway.
So I might have an easier time continuing the conversation if I’m mildly distracted instead of constantly overwriting the perfectly understandable stuff from 5 seconds ago with the white noise that I’m hearing in the immediate present.
Also capitalists don’t have an appetite for the kind of risk involved in inventing touchscreens or GPS. That stuff all comes from public funding. Capitalists just figure out how to monetize it.
My stream of consciousness: “What? Reed isn’t pronounced like led. Oh there’s more here… Ohhh, red is pronounced like leed. Er, reed is pronounced like… uhhh… anyway, I get it.”
They weren’t opposed to technology. In many cases, they were the ones who built the machines they would later destroy.
They were opposed to letting capital owners dictate how the technology was used. They worried that they would end up working longer hours, in worse conditions, for less pay.
They died (and killed) to prevent this — to the point where destroying a knitting frame was declared a capital offense.
While they did get disbanded eventually, they also laid the groundwork for modern labor rights.
Which is why it’s super disappointing that their name has become a derogatory term for being stuck in the past, when they were ultimately calling for a progressive technological revolution that we have still failed to achieve today.
So here’s the thing… In between the land of “shitty service jobs” and the land of “fully automated luxury” lies the vast desert of “reverse-centaurs”.
Right now, when “AI” takes over 60% of a job, that remaining 40% becomes a brutal dehumanizing gauntlet: the “human-in-the-loop” becomes a peripheral for the computer, manipulated into working at the speed that the computer prefers, like Lucy in the chocolate factory, until they’re used up and replaced. Think Amazon warehouse pickers or drivers.
Part of the problem is that this exploitation is hidden from consumers. When we see a fellow laborer suffering horrible conditions in a public-facing service job, we’re much more likely to throw a fit than when they’re hidden behind a sleek UI.
With no guarantee that we’ll ever make it through to the other side of the desert, I’d be perfectly content to stay on this side of it.
When self checkout started, it was too dumb. It would panic if you breathed on the scale wrong, frequently double-scan items or just have weird bugs.
Then for a minute, it was perfect. They smoothed out the UX, and everything Just Worked™.
Now self checkout is too smart. The camera sees me grab multiple items to scan back-to-back, or sees my kid playing with the bag carousel, and it sets off a shoplifting alarm that the employee has to come over and clear 2-3 times per trip.
So I’ve caught myself adjusting my behavior, like the Amazon drivers that get penalized for singing while they drive because the face-tracking throws an alarm.
If it were just me, I probably wouldn’t think much of it. But then I wonder: Is my daughter going to have to adjust her hands, her posture, her facial expressions… to be acceptable to an ever-present AI observer, for the rest of her life?
I’m glad there are other people out here trying to explain how money actually works. I gave up a while ago cuz I got sick of being treated like a crazy person.
I think that, partially, people don’t like being told their folk wisdom is wrong… but more importantly, they don’t wanna believe that the people in power are either just as misinformed or deliberately lying.
Eldritch is right, but it’s kinda like Newtonian physics vs general relativity: you can think of (federal) taxes as “funding the government” and it’s not a terrible approximation. But it’s not the reality.
The reality is more like what Eldritch said: money is spent into existence, and taxed out of existence. The issuer of a currency doesn’t need to take the currency from you in order to spend it — they need to destroy it so that their newly-printed currency is actually worth chasing after.
Sounds like a distinction without a difference, right?
Except it matters when we talk about “tariffs funding the government” (cuz they don’t) or “how are we gonna pay for something like the green new deal?” (paying for it is the easy part, controlling inflation is the real constraint).
When we talk about major economic initiatives, it kinda matters for people to understand how money actually works. Musk, for example, had no clue and thought he had uncovered some massive scandal when he gained access to the federal payment system and was confused at how the funds don’t actually come from anywhere: https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/elon-musk-discovers-the-magic-of
These are people who heard “trade deficit” and thought “deficit? That’s a bad word!”
We were getting a ton of stuff from other countries for cheap, meanwhile those countries either couldn’t afford our stuff or bought it at an absurd premium.
That is not supporting the other countries, it’s exploiting them.
The funny thing is, I’m like… Yeah, we should probably stop exploiting them. And in that sense, the tariffs are a good thing. Buuut the price of doing that is being paid disproportionately by working class people.
If it was more equitably implemented, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with a more tariff-based USA.
“This is probably not a Hatch Act violation, because it's not tied to an election,” Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the non-partisan ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Forbes.
Not tied to an election? What? What rock are you living under?
I should be cynical about AI and labor displacement, but…
Does anyone actually want to wreck their bodies by walking all over a giant warehouse and lifting heavy unwieldy objects?
Now the robots will do all of that.
We’ll just need some humans to uh… follow them around the warehouse… and move them when they break down. (This is totally different, you see.)
And do the original task that glitched it out. And dodge all of the other robots while doing so. And be paid less because we have robots now.