It wasn’t you but GP who started this thread stated:
> sub-Saharan African nations (many of which are on food aid) have fertility well above replacement levels
So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?
> How does the government track anything?
While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China and they have arguably the most perfect surveillance state worldwide - I don’t think this is desirable, the tradeoff in freedom and security is just too big.
> So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?
Is is now or is it later? We're dealing with statistics that change over time.
An idea that depends on certain areas having "fertility well above replacement levels," like using immigration to compensate for demographic decline, falls apart when the fertility in those areas drops.
Then there's the additional problem of do the numbers even add up for that idea to work in the short to medium term. There are a lot of very large places with sub-replacement or near-replacement fertility right now: Europe, China, India, Russia, etc.
And there are even more problems! Everything above is a one-dimensional analysis, which assumes bodies can be moved around frictionlessly to do labor, and the only question is "do you have enough?". IMHO that still points to immigration not being a solution for fertility problems, but add more dimensions, and I think the idea becomes even more unworkable.
>> How does the government track anything?
> While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China...
What didn't work in China?
The US government already reliably tracks births and parentage, and that would only get more reliable if there was a new financial incentive that it be accurate. That's pretty much all that's needed for my idea. Tracking a "certain number of good-faith attempts" at fertility treatments for fairness could be covered by similar processes to those already used by health insurance.
IMHO it’s because in our imagination anything is possible, we can imagine the bad situation in more and more elaborate and complicated scenarios.
And we can’t see beyond the bad situation.
While once we are in the situation we can do very practical things and have agency to react to and improve our situation.
I once read a French „practical philosopher“ who expressed it much better than me, but yea essentially the most terrifying situations are in our imagination.
I never understood the need for smart lights for able-bodied people.
You just stand up for a moment and flick the switch, what benefit do smart lights or even a remote for lights provide?
Even if you disregard all the issues these iot/smart devices have and assume they operate perfectly I really don’t see why we should expend any resources to make them.
> I never understood the need for smart lights for able-bodied people.
I've never owned a house/apartment, always rented, fwiw. The best part of having smart lights for me is that I can place my (zigbee) switches wherever I want, as apparently the people deciding where the light switches go, have no idea what they're doing.
So first thing when moving to a new place is replacing the bulbs with my own bulbs, and find better place for the switches.
I know almost nothing about all the smart home tech, but my son-in-law is a tech fanboi that has smart lights everywhere in his home, and some small Alexas in rooms that they are hooked up to. His lights are all voice controlled so they never use switches. Just thought I’d mention it as an option if switch placement is an irritant.
A difference of values? Mine is convenience/cost. I suspect yours is "always works" (possibly a bad guess let me know what your top property is).
I've used smart switches to join otherwise disconnected electrical lines without rewiring my house.
Compare two fans I replaced with a combo fan and light:
One is WiFi controlled, other is a remote.
I didn't want to run another electrical line and expand the box.
Disconnecting the wall switch "always on" was optional. The remote takes over both to allow fan or light. There are 5 switches controlling my main living space. Only the fan is "smart". These switches are not co-located.
With a remote: We rarely use the light or fan.
With a WiFi (in main bedroom) the light is used daily. Fan can be turned off from the wall, but not on (by choice). Fan also shuts off on schedule.
Ignoring fan costs:
Two smart switches cost $25. Can be done in under an half an hour in main living space.
Compare running a new wire:
25ft wire ~$20
New Box: $5
New switch: $17
I need to crawl into attic, move insulation. Also run the wire through the wall.
Is it required? No. Does it make the system more usable? Spouse doesn't know/care. "It just works"
When it doesn't: it's two steps.
If you're already doing this: the extra step is nothing lost.
Here's some questions I ask myself:
For $25 what annoyance can I fix this month? And I try to just do it.
Do I have an hour? Can I do it now?
What does this cost over time? This is not of a gamble (I spent much longer than I'd like to admit writing this post).
Thanks for the elaborate reply. I agree that it stems from a difference in values, my guiding one’s are being „always works - is resilient“ and „no unnecessary waste/labour“.
I know my time is extremely limited and while automating things like this might be a fun project I rather spend my time sitting in a park and looking at the trees. But this attitude also leads to living with unnecessary annoyances for a prolonged time sometimes
I have Hue lights actually. I kind of dislike them since they try to nudge me hard to create an account - dark pattern IMO - lights do not need security updates or accounts period.
> Why goto the park and fly a kite when you can just pop a pill?
Weird tangent. I much rather go to the park and chill instead of tinkering away on my smart home setup…
To be sure, there is no *need* for smart lights, just like there’s no need for air conditioning, refrigerator water dispensers, and wireless headphones. But they are nice to have.
As someone who recently moved, they were pretty low on the priority list to get them reinstalled, but it was nice once it was done.
You can't imagine how much kilometers of in-wall electical cable installation (at least done euro-style) one can avoid by replacing normal light fixtures and switches with a single group relay, some tracks, and some matter bulbs.
Once everything is set up and switches are magnetically attched to walls, it works just like the dumb lights, but without 230V all over the place. Just need to swap coin battery once a year.
Plus, you can go fancy with colors, dimming and stuff, if you get the urge.
(also, if you ever had home fire because mismatched dimmer switch combusted, you would not want that stuff anywhere near your home)
Agreed, existing wiring is better of with dumb bulbs (you can keep using existing switches), except if you want to add dimming — I have no idea how normal person can figure out which lightbulb will not burn down given wall dimmer switch (along with the whole house), if it all fits into E27. Integrated lightbulb seems safer.
I have my entire living room (which also includes the dining room) set up to turn off via voice command.
Why? This covers 4 light switches worth of lights. They also auto-turn off at 1am via Alexa routine. Also I can change the colors of all the lights (and do sometimes - at Xmas parties I have a script which slowly cycles all the lights between green and red).
For sure if I could make all this work cheaply without needing an internet connection, I would do so.
‘Siri, nighttime’ turns all lights off downstairs except for kitchen, which it dims to 50% and turns on lamp in bedroom. Saves me switching potentially 9 switches manually and adjusting the dimmer.
‘Siri, downstairs off’ when I crawl in bed, and ‘Siri downstairs on’ in the morning.
I can also turn porch lights on from my car when coming home at night.
I personally liked the full RGB color change option, which I use to help with sleeping (e g. lower and more orange lights at night). Hue also lets me control six or eight lights at once, instead of doing a full circle of the room to flick switches.
Yeah how dare they not buy cars and gas and insurance! They'd save so much!...
I think this is weird rhetoric given the total ambiguity of who the target is. You can't just average comments on the internet and pretend they're all the same people.
The quote was mostly a flourish (and apparently too open to interpretation to be useful).
In any case, it is about hypothetical “machine dictatorship” in particular, not human dictatorships you describe. Machine dictatorship traditionally invokes an image of “AGI” and violent robots forcing or eliminating humans with raw power and compute capabilities, and thus with no substantial need for accomplices (us vs. them). In contrast, it could be that the more realistic and probable danger from ML is in fact more insidious and prosaic.
What you say about human dictatorship is trivially true, but the quote is not about that.
> I don’t see how an LLM in the mix would make it worse
How about a thought experiment.
1. Take some historical persona you consider well-intentioned (for example, Lincoln), throw an LLM in that situation, and see if it could make it better
2. Take a person you consider a badly intentioned dictator (maybe that is Hitler), throw an LLM in that situation, and see if it could make it worse
Don't forget the deceptive aura of objectivity that machines have. It's easier to issue a command when "the machine has decided" or "God has decided" rather than "I just made this up".
Most excellent restaurants where I live would never post pictures of their food anywhere and have no web presence at all. In many you can’t even reserve a table - you go there and eat.
Those who need a lot of web presence / pictures etc are usually not great (good but not great).
If you see lots of people in a place and it’s crowded it’s probably good.
What area do you live where this is true? Michelin places may prevent customers from taking pictures, in my experience only the overrated ones do this, but they have their presence with information on the Michelin site.
In Tokyo, everywhere but the smallest stand, and often times even them, had reviews on Tabelog. In my smaller East Coast city, every restaurant I've seen within walking distance of my apartment has reviews and their menu online.
Places famous before the internet may get away with forcing their customers to pay in cash and no SEO, but places that completely delete themselves from the web are hiding something. They will also just never come up in a discussion about where to eat because they don't show up online.
> sub-Saharan African nations (many of which are on food aid) have fertility well above replacement levels
So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?
> How does the government track anything?
While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China and they have arguably the most perfect surveillance state worldwide - I don’t think this is desirable, the tradeoff in freedom and security is just too big.