The former. We measurably just have less housing stock per capita than other developed Western nations. Maybe the latter happens too, but I’m skeptical, because rent money is as (non-)green as the rest, and it’s not required to explain the situation.
Why we haven’t built more houses is less clear. In the absence of hard data or guesses from more educated people, I’ll speculate a bit:
One tradesman I know is billing high enough to feel personally guilty about it, and is still swamped with work. From what I hear this is typical. The US and Canada officially have the same rate of construction work employment. We don’t have undocumented immigrants working construction really, while it sounds very common in the US. Put together, my guess is there’s a sizable labour shortage, but it’s masked by data collection issues in the main other jurisdiction that builds largely with wood framing.
Is…is this guy arguing that we’re equally likely to fall into a communist dictatorship as a fascist one?
He didn’t say that explicitly, but now that you point it out, that would be a simple corollary of this dude’s take on the shape of polarisation in America. And it’s obviously a dumb conclusion.
Hmm. I did notice the funny, overly-symmetrising perspective, but I couldn’t place who it sounded like. I guess that’s because I don’t know any billionaires.
In addition to the contemporary takes, “fascism is right-wing dictatorship and communism is left-wing dictatorship” isn’t an entirely useless way of putting it, but it’s close. Left and right are very situational, and there’s been left wing dictatorships that weren’t very much like the USSR, and plenty of right-wing monarchies that had none of the populist vibes fascism runs on.
For everyone planning on fleeing to Canada: we have a massive housing shortage already. You’re probably going to end up in tents. Igloos, maybe, which would be ironic since a lot of you think we live in them.
Edit: For the record, I welcome all non-MAGA Americans. This is just facts, though; if housing prices were allowed to spike up even further there might be legit rioting. It’s already the top political issue.
I’m glad we’re seriously discussing AI safety as a society, but for this exact reason I wish more people questioned whether “obedience” is a good metric of success for it. A paperclip optimisier is bad, but whoever has the password getting unlimited power could actually be more fucked up. A ball of paperclips is at least benign, once it’s finished.
Hypothecated taxes are tricky like that. I think they’re underrated when it’s essentially a user fee, but otherwise, no, it’s an old-timey idea for a reason.
Fun fact, in Canada we have a carbon tax that goes right back out as cheques to people, kinda like this but at a lower rate. Currently getting rid of them is the leading candidate’s whole platform
Yeah, I don’t think design was the problem here, once the software exists. That machine just has a lot of parts, each with a cost attached.
Even if most people owned one robot (humanoid or not), obedient GAI would enable rich people to own armies of them without worrying about pesky things like revolt.
Relatively dumb robots could accelerate inequality just by increasing capital earnings vs. labour, but we’ve been dealing with that for a couple of centuries already.
Yeah, how long did it take for an imposter to emerge, become dominant in some contexts, and then have to be defended from imitation by the original standard. Like, three years?
How much power does it provide? This doesn’t sound like a high-energy reaction.
Second question, if it’s actually enough to be useful, which I doubt: How long does it last?
This reads like a nothingburger right now. Science journalists have a way of taking academically-interesting projects and omitting all the catches so they seem commercially relevant.
Well, there’s things like “jumping genes” that don’t necessarily provide anything for the organism, but that’s a bit of a nitpick, since they’re not just random codons, and some do or at least could.