privacy-focused appeal of Linux
Linux isn’t inherently privacy-focused. It’s focused on interoperability and customizability.
You could use it as a foundation for a distro that watches its users even more efficiently than Windows or MacOS. You might even call it ChromeOS or Android or something.
And none of it detracts from the main point, like you were saying. Being rich takes things into another world, to where comparisons to normal budgets don’t really capture the essence of what is going on or how it is being experienced by the rich person.
I chose net worth because I think at around the $100 million mark, realized income in any given year gets fairly meaningless compared to longer term trends, including in unrealized gains/losses in one’s net worth.
But nothing truly captures what it’s like to have money like this. These people treat money like points in a video game.
I’ve been talking about net worth this whole thread.
the average is significantly lower than that
No, for these types of long tail distributions, the mean is much, much higher than the median. In this case, mean net worth is about $1.25 million, about 6 times larger than the median.
Half a billion dollars for someone worth $1 trillion is about 0.05%.
Median American net worth is $216,000, and 0.05% of that is about $108.
Sorry guys, back in 2008, I asked a monkey’s paw for better first party software support for desktop Linux, and this is what we got.
The specific example you used, of Anthropic’s $80 billion loss, does match the explanation, though. It should be closer to $8 billion before the accounting adjustment, which is still a loss, but the other $72 billion is just numbers changing in a spreadsheet, not actual cash going one way or another.
The sample here is people who interact with that specific user who posted the poll. The exact same poll would have totally different results depending on the person posting it, with some people who have very pro-AI professional circles getting pro-AI results, and people who have anti-AI professional circles getting anti-AI results.
This is meaningless.
plagiarism
outright theft
It frustrates me to see that people are suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property right of people to control creations after they’ve been created.
I’m pretty skeptical of AI and have my doubts that it will be a net good, but I’m definitely not gonna suddenly be pro-copyright as part of that fight. Copyright has traditionally been used to entrench corporate interests, and strengthening those protections isn’t going to suddenly win a fight against some kind of AI dystopia.
The most secure messaging system in the world won’t matter if you read all your messages with a camera over your shoulder.
E2EE protects what’s between the ends. But once a message is delivered to the end, the user can do whatever they want with it: screenshot or save the message, forward it to others, save it in a database open to others, etc.
AMP was two different things.
I was 100% on board with #1, but #2 was controversial and created a lot of the conflicts of interest that tore the whole thing apart. Google spun off the AMP project as an open governance model, and then it was taken over by the OpenJS foundation.
In the end, the performance gap between mobile devices and desktops narrowed, and at this point most people’s phones and mobile browsers can load pages just as quickly as a laptop, so the purpose of the project itself is less important to the actual web as it exists today.
No paychecks mean no customers.
That’s never been a concern with the corporate executives. The macro level stuff is someone else’s problem.
We saw it in the 90’s when they stopped hiring managers from within, instead relying on bringing in outside consultants, and then directly hiring the ones they liked, so that there was no longer a path between the typical employee’s seat and their boss’s seat.
We saw it in the 2000’s when companies realized that they didn’t want to train entry level employees anymore, and would rather wait for someone else to train them, and then hire midlevels. Except too many employers did that and then the pipeline of future midlevels dried up in a lot of industries that were then ill positioned to survive the tumult of the 2008-2010 recession. Then something similar played out in the 2010s in certain other industries.
It’s always been buck passing. They don’t care.
He doesn’t even have that. He just pretends, by misleadingly saying he has a degree from Wharton. He does have a business degree from undergrad, from the University of Pennsylvania, whose business school is called Wharton, but most people say Wharton degree to refer to an MBA from that business school. He takes advantage of the confusion by referring back to his Wharton degree, and it sometimes works.
Google’s AMP was supposed to stop this, but they never could get around the conflict of interest between “our search engine experience is improved by prioritizing fast loading results” and “our ad business needs websites to carry a ton of ads,” ended up carving in enough exceptions and an anti-AMP backlash that they pretty much walked away from the whole thing.
You’re really mixing up a lot of stuff
I don’t think I am. I’m just describing a broad definition of property, as a descriptivist/positivist argument, observing that this broad definition already applies in most modern legal systems.
For instance, the fact that something can be sold doesn’t mean it’s a form of property.
If we want to get into the philosophical underpinnings of what rights do or don’t qualify as property, I’m just describing the legal frameworks that already apply. Pretty much anything that can be sold (or leased or licensed or conveyed in a will) counts as property. Lots of these rights are intangible, including the broad sets of rights under patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law that we describe as “intellectual property.”
Property, by its nature, includes the right to exclude others from enjoyment or profit that arise from that property. And it doesn’t require the consent of the excluded. Some argue that the concept of property itself is theft, for that reason.
But libertarians generally support strong property rights, and I’d argue it’s consistent with that view to support strong intellectual property rights (whether administered by a government or not).
Indeed most of your examples are not property.
All of them are property, technically. Including contractual rights (which can be bought and sold). And plenty of these intangible rights don’t arise from contract. How much of the world’s land is owned by people who trace their purchases/inheritance to an original owner who was granted the land by a government or royal family no longer in power? Including through conquest and wars ended by treaties (of questionable consent when you consider the coercion and duress that losing a war creates). The consensual transactions downstream from that system that nobody today consented to don’t actually limit the legal power of that ownership.
the most important thing about contracts is that they’re voluntary, and negotiated between the parties
That’s true of contracts, but not true of all the rights that can get transferred around from contracts. Some governments gave homestead rights transferring land to anyone who built a house on that wilderness. How is that conceptually different from a king-granted monopoly to someone who invented something for the British Navy?
And then there are other forms of rights. If you crash into my house and I sue you, I might win a court judgment ordering you to pay me a certain amount of money. You didn’t consent to that, but you owe it just the same. And that right to payment can be sold, and is considered property as well.
People hold out intellectual property to be something unusual and different, but really it’s not that different from accounts receivable and stocks and bonds and leaseholds and licenses and other forms of intangible property.
Everything you’re saying also applies to non-tangible property rights generally, which includes property rights to land (and the accompanying rights to airspace above that land or mineral rights in the ground), and rights like:
Each of these are enforced by some kind of adjudicatory body (which we can call a law and a state if you’d prefer). But that would be true of anything like a copyright or a trademark or the right to one’s image/name.
And so we’re still basically talking about how strong the right to property or the right to contract is, and what types of rules/rights will not be enforced by the courts, and which will. Some types of contract terms are unenforceable, and some property rights are limited.
Can you imagine somebody asserting rights over the cider you made with the apples he sold you?
What about someone asserting rights to the apples you grow on the land they’ve leased to you? Or asserting rights to the water that flows across the land they sold to you? That kind of stuff happens all the time.
The fact is, libertarian doctrine is generally in favor of a strong rights to property and contract, and that’s why many libertarians are strongly in favor of strong IP rights.
is not a property, it’s a state-enforced monopoly
Isn’t that what property means? A state enforced monopoly over the subject of that monopoly?
Ownership of farmland, a factory, a house, a checking account, a stack of cash, a car, etc., boils down to a state enforced monopoly to control who may use or possess that thing.
Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions
Libertarianism is closely aligned with strong property rights, and the right to exclude others from your property, the right to enter contracts, even oppressive contracts, that you’ve agreed to. In other words, the freedom to bind oneself and exclude others. Libertarians don’t believe in granting the public freedom to walk onto private land and pick fruit from its trees (or the right to harvest lumber on someone else’s land).
Strong copyright is therefore fairly associated with libertarian ideals.
Two that we know of, so far.