Alastair JL

And, after "they jacked them back UP again", was it illegal for anyone else to import dairy themselves? Were there legal or regulatory barriers from whomever had previously been part of the former "functioning [domestic] [dairy] system" from restarting their party of the system?

Starting a farm back up again takes a lot of capital. It takes TIME (during which, like, you need food). Land changing land is not like an instantaneous thing.

What you are describing sounds all well and good, assuming you are working in a frictionless economic system, where start up capital is available, etc etc.    But the system is NOT frictionless, and overseas companies had just demonstrated that they... (read more)

I remember when my younger brother was born, and this sensation of going from this scaredy hypochondriac 6 year old (who worried about poisonous spiders, house fires, earthquakes, etc), to a mindset of "Okay, but what will I DO if there is a fire. How will I get me and little brother out the window?". There was this really sharp sensation of "Oh, I'm responsible now." and an associated values system shift, which... I suspect is similar to what a lot of people are talking about here?

Pretty much all of my adult life, my baseline levels of "protection towards children" are pretty damn high... to the point where I stand up and... (read more)

So... in terms of "well intentioned" limits on letting things over the boarder, etc etc....

There's a story of some smallish island nation (Carabian somewhere?), which had a functioning Domestic diary system. They made a free trade deal with USA, incoming corporations bottomed out the price until no locals could compete, and then once the domestic market collapsed, they jacked them back UP again, (for massive profits).

There are like... legitimate reasons to deliberately favor local food production, even when doing so is "inefficient" in an economic sense. Preserving your own countries ability to produce food can be sensible self reliance, even if someone else could do it cheaper and more efficiently. A decade... (read more)

So, of tangetial relevance, but something I've been thinking about recently is... well the governance structure of a small company (dictatorship of one person over 3-8 people, who all have the option to leave), vs the same company several years/scale increases later.  (A company of millions of people which effectively acts as a large piece of infrastructure in the country it lives in, yet is still goverened by private interests)

It kind of feels like different governance structures are warrented... and should be legally mandated.
Like... I want small start ups to do what they want. 
I want Amazon to slow morph into a democratically run piece of infrastructure, as opposed to a monopoly, as... (read more)

I want to believe this. I really do. And like... extrapolating from fiction, extrapolating from my intuitive notion of the world I do.

BUT....

BUT.....

We are Godshatter. We are beings that were produced by a complex multidimensional optimization process over billions of years, where evolution created a bunch of weird ass heuristics and left those heuristics in play even after the ceased being relevant (to the blind idiot god), and we are made of those, and fell in love with them.

An AI is either.... going to ACTUALLY be good at optimizing for its goal... or it will be built of a bunch of very different whims and heuristics, which will lead... ?????????? I don't... (read more)