queermunist she/her

First you say “you’re not mad a GenAI as a technology, you’re mad at Capitalism” and then when I agree with you you move the goal posts to argue against it? Are you just arguing for its own sake?

It’s like I never left Reddit!

Talking to you was a mistake. You’re just trying to “win” the conversation, you don’t actually care about anything I have to say.

I’m done. You can have the last word.

And you can’t separate the technology from it’s historical and material context. We could say “capitalist LLMs” instead of just “LLMs” every time we talk about the technology, but is that useful?

The problem is capitalism, but the technology was produced under capitalism and you’re using this technology under capitalism. So, a distinction without a difference.

Yeah, and all it requires is for poorly paid workers in Kenya to be tortured and forced to watch CSAM all day.

I’m saying WoD failed to stop drugs.

I’m saying evil pieces of shit like Nixon did not care about drugs. They don’t care about addiction, or overdoses, or any of that shit.

Do you think he was just a good boy trying his best to help people?

Why do you think he was the one the launch the war on drugs? Why him?

The wealthy don’t have money, because there are better investments

Their investments are still denominated in the currency, and by controlling the currency they trade in you can control their assets.

It’s always the richest people in society that push for austerity and cuts to government services and lower taxes. You think this is a coincidence? They very much do care about their money, even if they have properties and stocks and other instruments.

Listen to what Nixon, the guy who launched the war on drugs, said:

[Editors note: the removed word is the n word obviously] You start out in 1954 by saying, “removed, removed, removed.” By 1968 you can’t say “removed”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “removed, removed.”

You expect me to believe this racist piece of shit wasn’t just looking for a way to terrorize and imprison Black people? I’m supposed to believe that it was just a coincidence, or something that emerged later?

I can’t buy that. He knew what he was doing.

As to printing money, Zimbabwe had a lot of other problems besides printing too much money. It was a young post-colonial nation that was struggling to break away from dependency on the colonial metropoles, they had massive crop failure, and colonial banks wouldn’t lend them money. Their inflation has a lot of causes beyond just too much money printing.

Printing money just increases liquidity and velocity of money, it doesn’t actually increase the amount of wealth a society has. Canada wouldn’t become richer just because it printed more money, it would just be a redistribution of wealth.

But Canada is not Zimbabwe. It could certainly stand to print a little bit more money for the hospitals, and redistributing wealth to the hospitals would create economic value and actually benefit society. People living longer and healthier lives creates more demand for money, which in turn counters inflation.

Modern Monetary Theory.

The US empire is collapsing. I really doubt they actually want the empire to fall and for us to enter the Chinese century.

I start from TPOASIWID and then try to disprove it by methodically examining the system. Basically, it’s my Occam’s Razor.

Yes, printing more money for hospitals would liquefy the whole economy into jello.

The value of money floats on the market - supply and demand.

On the supply side the government creates money when it funds programs and destroys money when it collects taxes. Importantly, taxes don’t fund programs. Programs are funded by fiat and taxes are a way to reduce the supply of money in the economy.

On the demand side, funding programs creates economic growth and taxes must be paid in the currency being printed. Printing money doesn’t create “national debt” or whatever, it creates jobs and investment and growth by funding essential services.

Taxation acts on both the supply and demand side of the problem. The way to control inflation is taxation, not austerity. Austerity, in fact, can make inflation worse because it shrinks the economy and reduces demand for dollars i.e. stagflation.

Printing money for the hospitals would be immensely positive. It would create economic growth by giving people longer and more productive lives (which means economic productivity), on top of employing more hospital staff and creating demand for more pharmaceuticals and equipment, which in turn creates jobs for pharmacists and equipment manufacturers, etc etc.

Someone lied to you when they told you we can’t afford to fund the hospitals.

Now, money doesn’t explain everything of course – perhaps there are some racially-linked diseases that are underfunded, and here “TPOASIWID” serves an explanation, but a rather bad one because it doesn’t actually explain anything. … “The purpose of the hospital is to have institutional racism” doesn’t make sense at all – it’s the purpose of institutional racism to infect the hospital, and the purpose of leftists to purge institutional racism.

The purpose of hospitals in Canada is to have institutional racism. That doesn’t mean that the concept of hospitals is racist and I think we can be a little more granular than defining all hospitals as racist.

It’s a brazen assertion that whoever is running the world is doing things exactly right and simply can’t fail.

Yet you do the opposite, you’re making the credulous assertion that whoever is running the hospitals is trying their best and they aren’t intentionally killing people. You do it again here:

But TPOASIWID just leads one to conspiracy theories: since the War on Drugs basically just got a lot of black people thrown in jail, then surely all those people who claim to hate drugs must actually just hate black people, and not drugs at all!

“Whoever is running this War on Drugs is simply doing their best to stop drugs and they aren’t intentionally filling the prisons with Black people. They certainly aren’t running drugs and guns for cartels to fund CIA off-the-books operations in Latin America!”

You’re very trusting of the people in charge and this is why TPOASIWID is so useful - it makes me skeptical of powerful people. At the very least it should be one of the ways you approach systems when you try to understand them, even if it isn’t the only one. I certainly don’t assume the people in charge are perfect and that everything is going Just As Planned!

That is simply not true. The government may print arbitrarily much money, but due to inflation that will not necessarily fund everything. Who would accept worthless money in exchange for services?

But that still begs the question of “would printing money for hospitals produce enough liquidity to cause runaway inflation (almost certainly not)?” and “why fund this and not that?” and “why do we collect taxes instead of letting inflation do the exact same thing?” or even “so what stops the government from using price controls to fight inflation instead of just austerity?”

There are answers to these questions, but without TPOASIWID these questions never even get asked.

When I see somebody say that phrase, I assume they have no interest in learning more about the system as they already have the only answer they ever need.

Is that what you’re seeing from my comments? I think I’ve shown you that this heuristic can be useful for raising further questions!

When I see people not using this heuristic I see people fall for lies.

For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election.

But this isn’t how money works.

Canada prints its own currency, it doesn’t need to pull dollars from one place to fund something else. The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference. Austerity isn’t necessary.

So, why does it happen?

This heuristic can’t explain why anything happens, but that’s not what it’s for? It’s for raising the contradictions and forcing us to ask harder questions of systems, like: if a country prints its own currency why would it ever choose austerity?

There’s still more work to do to answer that question and this heuristic is useless for doing so, it’s really only a basic first step towards building a critique.

I still think it’s extremely useful.

If the purpose of a hospital is to only cure enough patients, the question becomes; “Why is the purpose of a hospital to cure just enough patients?”

You aren’t supposed to just use it to argue in a circle. The purpose of a system is what it does, so, why is that the purpose of the system and why do we have that system?

It implies that the system is working as intented, and that’s why we need to destroy it to build an entirely different system.

The purpose of a hospital is to cure just enough patients.

And the purpose of Ukraine is to be caught in a stalemate. The West gives them just enough support to never lose, but never enough support to win.

And the purpose of the British government is to pretend like it is responsive to protests.

And the purpose of buses is to burn gasoline and support the oil industry, when trains or trams would be much more efficient.

And the purpose of arguing on the internet is to waste everyone’s time while accomplishing nothing

Etc etc

Why? The purpose of the system is to not work, so there are no democratic checks.

The world won’t end, but we are absolutely on track for billions to die. If not from cataclysmic climate change, then from the inevitable start of WW3 triggered by climate change.

Things are, in fact, really fucking bad. We don’t need even more bullshit making it even worse.

The situation is already apocalyptic. Making it even worse just means we all die even faster.

America produced 4,000TWH of electricity a year. This report says “22% of household consumption in 2028”, which if I commit the faux pass of mixing data it gets me 7% of US power consumption.

7% is a fucking lot though?? That’s an immense amount of power going towards slop instead of making our lives better or growing the economy or actually being productive.

It’s like we just decided to start burning our limited reserves of natural gas for fun.

Many worlds theory gives us an alternative - in one world I left my phone in 1929 and that shaped that world tremendously.

But that didn’t happen in my world and it can’t, because my world is the world where no one left their phone in 1929.

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