A mere casual endorsement is not an appeal to authority. If you don’t like the guy that’s fine, but it’s not a logical fallacy to, for example, describe a late night comedian as “a kinda funny guy.”. (A logical fallacy would require that someone assume Krugman is RIGHT because of his record, not that he’s merely worth reading )

How is dismissing someone because of where they worked NOT an ad hominem attack?

How is splitting hairs over which awards given by the swedish government are and aren’t “nobel prizes” NOT a distinction without a difference?

You didnt attack any of his actual credentials, though. You just said that he should be dismissed because he wrote for a particular newspaper and the award he was given by the Swiss government was not one of the awards given by the Swiss government funded by the gift of a 19th century arms merchant.

If you want to rebut my statement that Krugman “has a pretty good track record”, please do so! But you didn’t, and haven’t, and instead asserted your own biases as fact.

Which is obviously your right to do but, again, is a really weird response to a “who is this guy” post.

But we’re always trying to increase revenue and decrease cost. That’s biological. It’s a constant.

You may have this habit, but it’s hardly universal to our species. My biology tells me to value the stability of home life and the predictability of patterns; any increase in revenue or reduction in costs is from learned habits or intentional action.

I completely agree about personal discipline being a good bulwark against accidental change for the worse, though.

I don’t think it’s often useful to react to contrary evidence as special case exceptions.

The “tragedy of the commons” is a real thing, but it’s also literally what “the cathedral and the bazar” is about. I would argue that the awareness and intentional action made based on either side of this mode is why technology seems to behave differently from other areas of human society.

Generalizing from the specific, I think it’s more helpful to say “things tend to change randomly over time, and people can be resistant to sudden change which is not obviously better.”

Since random change is more likely to be a change for the worse than a change for the better, societies will have a tendency to slowly become worse as time goes on. But the worse something gets the easier it is for people to discard it, and since intentional changes for the better are so often deliberate they also are often improvements to the best of what came before.

Enshittification occurs more as a deliberate act to increase revenue or decrease cost, which is a whole different ball game.

An ad hominum attack and a distinction without a difference is a hell of a response to “who is this guy”.

Do you want to show the class where on your wallet the Keynesian model of economics touched you? (Or do you perhaps have a “Krugman sucks and you shouldn’t listen to him” link you’d like to share?)

People making things worse isn’t a natural state.

To give an example off the top of my head, the US House of Representatives used to be even worse. An interpretation of the Constitution’s quorum clause became traditional in that if a rep would not answer “present” when called to a vote they were counted as not in attendance. Essentially, a minority faction gave themselves a veto on the whole body. This persisted for decades until one speaker just said “I can see you there”, and the body got slightly better.

(That it was latter became bad all over again in new and clever ways is a slightly different issue.)

Paul Krugman is a nobel-prize winning economist who used to have a column in the NY Times. He has a relatively impressive record of predicting terrible things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman

And while I certainly don’t want to push back on the difference between heroin and other opium derivatives, it’s worth noting that legally speaking they’re both exactly as illegal when not used as prescribed for the treatment of pain or disease.

It’s not a blog post about heroin or opiates, though, so quibbling over the imperfections of his analogy is kinda missing the point. Please give it another read if you have a few minutes; the analogy is fairly apt, though very depressing as an American.

No, because that’s already the constitutional quorum. You could alter or abandon the cloture rule, however.

Changing Senate rules can be done as a simple act of the Senate, with a simple majority of the senators who show up voting in the affirmative (and VPOTUS casting a tiebreaker.)

Don’t hold your breath, however. Unless the 2026 blue wave results in 70 democratic senators who can remove trump after impeachment, the incentive to radically change anything is dramatically reduced.

Eww. It’s a LLM travel agent.

So, the people in companies pushing and making this AI slop treat it like toxic waste, and the author thinks that they’re the problem?

I suddenly want to look at his AI map thingy and see how bad it is.

If we’re talking re-enacting the way the folks who wear historish costumes and blank-fire muskets at each other mean it, then the cutoff is “whatever the last war was fought locally and then ended.”

If you mean it the way the folks who wear even sillier costumes, drink, and walk around with swords mean it, then the cutoff is “whenever the clothes we want to wear were last plausibly worn.”

If you mean it the way a TV reporter, producer, or academic might mean it, however, there’s no cutoff beyond “isn’t happening now.”. (There’s a famous story about someone who won the lottery after playing on a whim, was egged on by a reporter to re-enact buying the ticket, and won again.)

No. I’m a happily married alcohol-and-caffine-only boring dad-guy.

Definitely a computer nerd, though.

Is this a graph of “report negative opinions about homosexuality”, or “think homosexuality should be illegal.”

The former is just freedom of speech (“freedom to say something dumb and bigoted”), while the latter is a public policy concern.

I got all the way to “as I’ve been writing about for years …” before I clocked this as something I won’t bother to finish.

Humans as a species have never listed as the lead quote implies. We’re a shallow species whose interpersonal communication is far more of a handshake than a learned debate. If you go against someone else’s notions you may, at best, get them to remember a short phrase. (And if you’re really lucky and repeat a phrase a few times, it may even be one that accurately reflects your position!)

Sex in heaven is really good, but gets boring after awhile.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/execute

“Execute” primarily means “carry out”, not “kill”. The latter definition is an adaption from the person designated to carry out the act of killing people for violating the law, which presumably at one point was done directly by the hereditary executive.

The article is about decentralization of assignment of IP addresses,.not CDNs or social networks.

It’s like "imagine if you and your friends could just make your own phone system by making up your own numbers without having to rent them from telecommunications companies "

Whatever device you’re using to post to Lemmy can easily handle “thousands of transactions per day”. You’re off by several orders of magnitude before transaction processing is a scaling concern.

CDNs exist to reduce lag and optimize media file delivery. They can be decentralized, and internally essentially are, but having a neutral clearing-house helps solve the “leech” problem that thinks like BitTorrent suffer from.

He can try.

Each of the fifty states literally has its own legal system, which are as a rule very particular about the separation of powers.

If Trump signs an EO directing the FCC to declare AI a.“telecommunications” product.that states aren’t allowed to regulate, there’d be that same week ten to fifty lawsuits by the states asserting that the EO was unconstitutional and had zero effect.

What the AI oligarchs want is for the FCC to decide this on their own without an EO, or for Congress to pass a law. (Although Scotus has made noises about lifting what can be done without Congress in other areas …)

You mean, instead of an eros potion it’d be a portion of agapa, philia, or xenia?

Most likely because “be nice to strangers” or “don’t defile the dead” can be easily enforced with violence without being rapey.

(And, worth noting, modern anti-depresssnts are kind of a philautía potion already, since they help with “love of self.”)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love