ClaytonB
Member

From Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard, ch. 19, "Property Rights and the Theory of Contracts":

Under the status quo redcoat tyranny that has been occupying DC since 9/11, no contract with any commercial entity is consensual or voluntary in any meaningful sense. Does the inmate have a consensual relationship with the prison contractor who puts slop on his tray in the chow hall? If he has the choice between cornbread or wheat bread, is this a truly "voluntary" choice? I am a high-tech engineer and, throughout my entire career, I have been subject to ironclad non-competes (usually 10 pages long, or more) forbidding any form of technical work outside of my day-job or any kind of work that the company might construe in any manner to be in competition with them, up to and including ideas that may form in my mind while employed in my position, an absurd and utterly unenforceable clause, unless you were to intentionally betray yourself under oath. I have never been in a position to "shop" between employers based on the looseness/strictness of their non-competes, nor have I known anybody that could, including colleagues with salary in the mid-six-figure range. In short, the idea that anybody working in tech who is not a household-name rockstar could negotiate the terms of a non-compete is downright silly. The company simply dictates the non-compete, and you sign it if you want to work there. In 2015, I had an offer in-hand from one of the FAANG companies but I mentioned that I had a patent idea that I wanted to protect before joining, and they dropped me like a hot-potato. I was an unperson after that. While tyranny (banning certain kinds of private contracts) can't solve other tyranny (implicit monopoly privilege enjoyed by corporations in dictating practically all terms of employment except the salary), the idea that non-compete agreements are "voluntary" is naive to the point of being silly. It is my opinion that non-competes basically wouldn't exist in a free market in labor, but I can't prove that. In any case, I don't think this particular rule is going to do much harm, although I'm not sure it will do any good, either.

Just tipped their hand. Now you know why they want fingerprint "security" on everything. The device I'm writing this on has a fingerprint scanner. It has been disabled and cannot unlock anything. Fingerprint "security" is a scam because you leave your fingerprints on everything you touch, so the fingerprint is not a secret, and without requiring a secret to unlock the device, it is open to the world. A scammer who can collect your fingerprint and work with another crook to separately steal your phone can open the phone and image it within a couple minutes. Or cops. I'll switch to fingerprint security on my devices after the police start locking their precinct doors with a thumbprint scanner. Not holding my breath...

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WHY I FIGHT:

Well, that's good news for him -- if the 2A doesn't exist in her courtroom, her courtroom does not exist in this Republic... :shrugging:

If you want to get a download of the AI Agenda, watch this: If a group of KGB, Gestapo, Stasi and CIA agents had a month-long, coke-fueled gay orgy while sharing notes on every form of tyranny and torture ever devised, implemented or conceived by their respective agencies; reading 1984 to each other with Shakespearean gusto while brain-storming every possible inescapable mechanism of tyranny they could possibly imagine ... what they could so devise would not be a drop in the ocean compared to the toolbox of tyranny which has been placed in the lap of the modern omnipotent State by SOTA AI in the last 3 years since ChatGPT. The idea that this technology is just going to be used to help poor people access quality medical advice is bonkers. The idea that this is just somehow magically not going to be used in an attempt to implement a global 1984 tyranny is equally bonkers. Wake up!

If somebody drinks bleach instead of bath-salts, is it still toxic, even though they don't get high?

Oh boy. Here it comes... OK, so let me predict a few steps ahead so folks will be forewarned as to what comes next. Current-generation AI has absolutely no grounding whatsoever. Once you embody an AI in a robot, you can use embodiment as a kind of numbskull-level grounding. "Is the cup on the table?" <robot looks at the table> "Yes, the cup is on the table." The sensors become the robot's "ground truth" and, in this way, the AI itself will seem to become grounded. In addition, embodiment will seem to give robots the ability to reason, especially physical reasoning and similar forms of reasoning (e.g. Euclidean geometrical reasoning). "What happens if the cup is pushed over the edge of the table?" <robot ponders briefly> "The cup will fall on the floor." YouTube AI reviewer Matthew Berman uses a basic physical reasoning question that asks the AI to solve the following problem: "Suppose a marble is placed on a table and a cup is placed upside down over the marble. Next, the cup is lifted from the table and placed into the microwave. Where is the marble?" Success-rate on this question is, I believe, 0% to-date, that includes GPT-4, Claude-3, Llama3, you-name-it. SOTA AI simply cannot perform basic physical reasoning that even a child can perform. While embodiment doesn't automatically solve this problem, you basically have to solve this problem on the path of enabling robots to move around in physical space. Thus, this problem is going to be solved (if nothing else, by brute-force in simulation), and this is going to add a second layer of "OoOoHhH AaAaHhH" to the rapidly approaching fully-embodied robotic AI humanoid (Figure-01, TeslaBot, whatever). These are the two biggest missing components in current-generation AI (grounding, and robust reasoning ability). If you thought the ChatGPT hype is bad -- the fanbois are already claiming that current-generation AI is literally the mind-of-God -- just wait till we have embodied AI robots. I cannot imagine a scenario in which this does not trigger the Apocalypse. I cannot imagine how the floodgates of idolatry will stand up against such cosmic-scale pressure. We will surely have people bowing down and physically worshiping these limping refrigerators in very short order.

Of course they want it to pass...

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Fortunately, the entire scene was captured on film for posterity...

Gonna print this in large format and mount it on my living-room wall...

Did we just find out who was the mystery partner (never named) in the Senate gay-sex-tape?!

Never heard of Kolchack. Probably won't know most of these since it's a bit before my time. As a wee lad, I watched reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard. My favorite show was Knight Rider. I am just old enough that I saw the final season air live but the rest were all reruns. I also watched A-Team, Airwolf, Grizzly Adams, McGyver, etc. even though I didn't understand all of it. Oddly, I did follow and enjoy the Perry Mason reruns, even though much of the language was over my head. The Twilight Zone reruns were interesting but also creeped me out. My cartoons were He-Man, GI Joe, Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My sister watched Care Bears and My Little Pony but I could never figure out what was even happening in those cartoons. By the time I was in my pre-teens, our family had decided to kill the TV (and I'm glad they did!) so I actually didn't watch most 90's TV until I became an adult and binged a few of the greats on DVD. I have watched some Big Bang Theory and a few other shows but, other than that, I don't watch TV. So I won't have a lot of input on this thread.