yiliu

Not to mention, even if you can accurately measure calories in a specific serving, companies produce thousands and thousands of servings per day. They can't accurately measure all of them. And ironically, the more 'natural' the food is, the less accurately they can measure the nutritional value: protein paste is going to be a lot more predictable than pasture-raised chickens.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like...over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a "pretty girl" it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an "ugly girl" you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack "...but diverse!" on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse...but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Well, right, you're dealing with statistics. It's not impossible that Trump will quantum-teleport into the sun, physics allows for that possibility. It's just incredibly unlikely. And the odds of some other person getting elected with no actual effort to make it happen before now is similarly basically zero. Theoretically possible is all very well, but we live in the real world.

How do you figure? I remember reading somewhere that using a phone while driving is worse than driving drunk, and I see people using their phones on the freeway, every day.

I could see the delay being caused by the rise of ubiquitous social media or something. For the first few years, there just weren't as many reasons to be checking your phone in the car. And there's the intersection of distracted driving with bigger vehicles.

As a Canadian, I'd love to believe that. As someone who's recently driven in and out of Vancouver a bunch of times...I really don't.

Yeah, this was really interesting. The big revelation is that in Europe, the vast majority of cars (80+% or something) are standard transmission, whereas in the US the vast majority (95+%) are automatic.

And the thing is...you can't use your cellphone while you're driving a manual.

Combine that with the relatively gigantic cars & trucks that Americans prefer, and you get a long way to explaining the huge gap in relative fatalities.

Of course...that doesn't explain why fatalities are more than twice as high in the US as in Canada (where automatic transmissions & trucks are similarly popular)

Don't have any counterarguments? Don't let that stop you! Just throw out some insults and act as though a serious reply is beneath you, given your superior understanding of the world. If confronted, gesture broadly at the comment you're replying to and say something like "that third point you made is stupid!" Don't bother elaborating or explaining why. Everybody will probably think you're a professor of economics who's just sick of explaining himself or something!

The state of healthcare in the 1960s through the 1990s? I mean, it wasn't that bad. Life expectancy at the time was rising very quickly in developed countries--and in Hong Kong.

Libertarians can drive me crazy too, and I agree that a lot of them are driven by ideology, not practicality. And a lot of them can't even make these arguments in defense of their own beliefs--they just come at it from a simple moral POV ("taxes are violence!"). But that's not unique to libertarians: most people hold to ideologies they don't fully understand, which is why they defend them rabidly with insults and attacks, instead of just explaining why they believe what they do. "I believe we should do this because it's right, and I'll get mad if you try to explain why it's impractical, impossible, or counterproductive!" is an attitude I hear more often, if anything, from the Left.

And, well, in a libertarian world, your ability to opt out of things may depend, to some extent, on your wealth--but (they would say) it's easier for people to get wealthy in general. And as I pointed out in my original post...well...no, it's not really true. I opt out of Facebook and Microsoft and other 'monopolies', and I'm just fine. Why would that change? But I really, actually can't opt out of the state, and the bigger the state gets the more restricted we are. So, the solution to "if the libertarians got their way, some people would be more free than others" is "we should significantly restrict freedom overall, for everybody"?

Somebody already did.

But yeah, sorry, I couldn't fit the worldview in a tweet.

I think you may have come up with the least unpopular opinion on Lemmy. There's more people who are unabashed fans of Stalin and Mao than there are libertarians.

Buuut...I mean, I'm not a libertarian, but I've taken libertarian ideas more seriously than you have, so I can play devil's advocate.

The idea behind libertarianism isn't to hand power over to corporations; that's just what detractors claim will happen. What they claim will happen is that corporations will become far less powerful.

The nightmare cyberpunk scenario where companies acquire private militaries and just physically take over doesn't really apply. The difference between libertarians and anarchists is that the former do see a place for government, usually including military, courts, policing, enforcement of contracts, and a few other things. So companies would continue to have to earn your dollar the old fashion way.

Now, think of industries that suck, where the companies are really shitty causing people to complain about them all the time, but are nonetheless stuck using them for lack of options.

Got some? Okay, now, were you thinking of electronics companies? No? How about bedding, or kitchenware? Hardware & tools? Flooring? Children's toys? Food & grocery?

Or...were you maybe thinking (depending where you live) of banking, airline, healthcare, insurance, or telecom industries?

Okay, now, change of topic: think of some industries with lots of regulation and government intervention.

Did you by any chance come up with the same list?

Lots of people will claim those industries are heavily regulated because they're somehow inherently shitty, and need the government to step in to fix them. Libertarians would say that those industries are shitty because regulations and government interventions prevent competition and shelter incumbents. They don't have to treat customers well anymore, or make particularly good products, because their position is secure whether they do or not. In an actual free market, competition is easier, so it's harder for a company to establish a monopoly.

An extreme example: Britain famously demanded Hong Kong as compensation from China during the Opium Wars, and used it as a gateway to Asia. They treated it with a sort of benign neglect: as long as the port was functioning, they didn't pay that much attention to the operation of the territory. It was not heavily regulated, to the point that even (for example) the healthcare industry was basically regulation-free. You could literally stick a sign on the door of your apartment claiming you were doctor, and start treating people, and nobody would stop you.

So, since healthcare is one of those sacred industries that requires heavy government regulation to protect people, the life expectancy and health outcomes of Hong Kongers must have been abysmal, right? Well...no, it actually climbed steadily throughout, and is #1 in the world today (though it should be noted the situation re: regulation changed post-1997). And it was a hell of a lot cheaper than American or European healthcare at every point.

There are industries where monopolies seem to form naturally. In my lifetime, Microsoft, Facebook and Google have all been accused of being monopolistic. There were calls for government intervention. But like...they were monopolies (or got close, anyway) because lots of people chose to use them. Nobody was forced. I couldn't stand Microsoft or Facebook, so I switched to Linux way back in the 90s and I've never really used Facebook at all. I do use some Google products, because they're pretty good.

And I'm fine. Nobody ever threatened me. My life wasn't negatively affected AFAICT. I just didn't use that product. Competitors appeared, like Linux & BSD, Reddit, Lemmy, etc, and I liked those better so I used them instead. That was it. Pretty boring as far as dystopias go.

The situation is a bit different when it comes to government. I can't opt in or out, I'm just stuck. I mean, I can move (assuming I have enough cash to do it), but fully extricating yourself from your home country is surprisingly hard: the US will chase you around the world to claim taxes from your income. And you immediately have to pick another country, and your options are severely limited.

People talk about corporations in such dire terms. It's kind of mystifying to me: just don't fucking use that corporation's products. Voila! You're free from their insidious influence.

Ahh, but they corrupt government institutions with their lobbying money! The libertarian answer is: have fewer government institutions, then. They can't lobby to bend regulations in their favor if there are no regulations in the first place. They would say that heavy regulation means incumbents are protected from competition, and can thus extract more 'rent', meaning more profit, which they can then turn towards warping the copious regulations in their favor...meaning still more protection, more profit, and more regulatory capture.

Like I said, I'm not a libertarian, but I understand their perspective, and I think it should be more influential than it is. I can talk about how rent control raises housing costs, or how "worker's rights" results in lower pay, or how minimum wages are racist and sexist.

Or you can just call me names for taking libertarians seriously! That seems like the more popular approach.

I mean, it was more like over the course of a millennium, starting with the Roman destruction of the 2nd temple. I'm sure it picked up with the Muslim conquest, but that wasn't the start of the diaspora.

What's funny?