EmptyString @emptyUtf8String

@EP_Freely True. People say that you have to argue for capitalism on moral grounds, and that's true, but then you have to argue morality on epistemological (and ultimately metaphysical) grounds.

@ArtGuide_db For $100 or so, you could make your own. No talent required.

@RockChartrand There's a third who says "I don't like where I am. Government bureaucrats must be the reason, and they should be fired, and we should have a free market."

@paraschopra You are making the 電気 (electric spirit) sad.

"A function is a named, reusable block of code that encapsulates a specific task. It accepts zero or more inputs (parameters/arguments), executes a sequence of statements, and optionally returns an output (return value). It may also produce side effects by interacting with or modifying external state." -- Grok

The capabilities of LLMs are changing (and usually increasing) with each new release. We can assert our own human consciousness as an axiom, but determining whether a *machine* is conscious or "just faking it" is turning out to be a hard problem. It's a problem that can only be solved by *induction.* The only way to tell whether a machine is conscious is by induction over what the machine says and what it does.

@theswansjr Energy sets a ceiling on the price of bitcoin, not a floor. If it costs X kilojoules to mine a bitcoin, nobody will pay more, because they can just mine their own. You can persuade someone to buy *your* bitcoin instead of mining their own, but only if yours is slightly cheaper.

@bunburyoudoujp In some US cities they made people sort their trash like that, and they would fine them if they sorted anything wrong -- but then they would gather it all together and dump it all in the same landfill anyway.

@seanboisselle @a16z You can know how to ride a bicycle, but you can't learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book.

@mholt6 It's to store all those AI-generated pictures and movies of course.

@RockChartrand @jacobin Indeed. Capitalism requires a separation of state and economics.

@DanBurmawy If you have an argument about reality, you can look at reality to see who is correct. If you have an argument about faith, there is no reality to look at. People believe, or they don't. If people cannot agree to disagree, they end up resorting to force; that's all that's left.

@tenobrus This is probably why, in the old days, a person would occasionally move to a new town and start over.

Ronald Coase destroyed the entire justification for environmental regulation with a single theorem, and bureaucrats have spent sixty years pretending he never existed. The Coase theorem proves that when property rights are clearly defined and transaction costs are low, private parties will negotiate efficient solutions to externality problems without any government intervention whatsoever. Consider the classic pollution case. A factory dumps waste into a river that fishermen downstream depend on for their livelihood. The statist reflex screams for EPA regulators, environmental impact studies, and a bureaucratic apparatus that costs billions while solving nothing. Coase demonstrated that this approach is economic illiteracy dressed up as policy. If the fishermen own the water rights, they can charge the factory for pollution or negotiate compensation. If the factory owns the rights, fishermen can pay the factory to reduce emissions. Either way, the parties reach the economically efficient outcome through voluntary exchange. The initial assignment of rights determines who pays whom, not the final result. You can watch this work in practice when neighbors negotiate noise disputes, when airlines buy and sell landing slots, or when cap-and-trade systems actually function (the rare cases where government accidentally creates real property rights instead of regulatory theater). Transaction costs matter, but they're usually lower than the deadweight losses from bureaucratic "solutions." The state creates externalities by refusing to define and enforce property rights, then uses the resulting chaos to justify its own expansion.

@beaverd Companies are voluntary structures; people are free to leave. With dictatorships, this is not so.

Rights come from humans recognizing that the proper condition for a rational being to live amongst other rational beings is one in which force is banned… since rational thought and action are impossible under compulsion. In the same way men recognize that they must be clothed to live… eat nourishing food to love and have shelter to live…so they recognize the fundamental condition of social life… rights are inviolable so long as people value life

@JohnAllegretti @VBierschwale Capitalism requires a separation of state and economics. The state provides police so people's rights can't be infringed. Businesses then have to provide products that people actually want to buy, and jobs that people actually want to work in, or else they go out of business.

@NoOneCaresEver0 @TheBabylonBee The free countries are not dying because of freedom but because of corruption and "suicidal empathy."

@NoOneCaresEver0 @TheBabylonBee Identification of reality is needed for survival; free speech (and the press) is the only way that such identifications can be shared and independently verified. Free speech is the only way to prevent some person or group from suppressing the truth.

@NoOneCaresEver0 @TheBabylonBee You've got it backwards. Morality is the identification of what humans need for survival. Rights don't force people to be moral. Morality forces people to respect each other's rights. It's always immoral to infringe rights. (Some kinds of immorality are non-infringing.)