ClaytonB
Member

Watched. Superb! RPFers: Share this with all your friends/contacts, every American needs to see this! The MI's Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve is much more of a technical deep-dive into the topic and is more suitable for think-tanker, beltway types, but this documentary is a political gut-punch to the money-power because it focuses just on the few key things that the ordinary American needs to understand. - We never "need more money", that is, printing money would never benefit the economy if it were in the form of a truly even stimulus to every account simultaneously (it would accomplish nothing at all, neither beneficial nor harmful. So, the best-case scenario would be that the Fed does no good or harm. But the reality is that stimulus is never evenly distributed and simultaneous, even stimulus checks / helicopter-money are not truly even across the economy. In reality, Fed action only ever harms the economy, and nothing besides. - The Fed benefits a select few at the cost of everyone else. Obviously, the select few are those who are politically well-connected, and the rest of us are hurt. Inflation is a regressive tax and this needs to be hammered home with the Left because they supposedly support progressive taxation. They whine and cry continually about how the rich get richer through "tax loopholes"... but inflation is the biggest tax "loophole" ever! It's a multi-trillion dollar tax "loophole" that benefits all the big banks, all the big corporations, all the richie-rich Wall St. cronies, at the expense of honest companies and ordinary Americans who refuse to play that dirty game. - The Fed and its inflation can be stopped today. All we need is the will to do it. The Fed was created by an act of Congress, and it can be taken right back out of this world by an act of Congress. It doesn't even have to be destroyed, it only needs to have its powers made accountable to the American public (through elected representatives) and that will suffice to break the back of the Fed scam. Today, we have to wait years, maybe decades or never, to find out where the Fed has squandered those countless trillions of dollars. Legally, the Fed is an absolute black-hole, it cannot be compelled to provide any information to Congress that it does not choose to voluntarily provide. That is absolute insanity and it is a total dereliction of duty for the Congress to allow such an unaccountable organization to exist. In creating the Fed, the Congress effectively ceded the sovereignty of the United States, whether they understood that or not.

Storytime: When I was a new college graduate in Comp. Eng. (many moons ago), I burst into my career with the starry-eyed optimism that I would change the world, one C++ program at a time. I was bewildered to discover that 90+% of the work being done in the server farm was running Perl or even simple Bash scripts. At first, I was horrified. "Surely, the world does not run on Perl!" (h/t xkcd) "This is a horrible relic of the past! It doesn't even have a proper OOP system!" But then I tried it. It blew my mind. In a second or less, I could scan an enormous log file and find complex patterns that would tie a grep command into knots, and would require a full-blown, 10,000-line C++ application ... in a hundred lines of Perl. "What is this monstrosity? It is neither a 'true' programming-language nor a scripting language. It is neither compiled nor interpreted (or, rather, it's both). It's horrific! And it's beautiful!" That is when I discovered the power of language-as-such, without respect to the heady SW Eng. considerations of application requirements, formal specifications, extensibility, maintainability, DRY, and on and on. So, I just started coding in this horrible language like mad, and as I did, my entire way of thinking about what programming even is eventually changed. My prediction is that LLMs are going to have (and are already having) a similar effect on the next generation of computing systems. It doesn't make sense to just tell a computer what to do (in plain English). But we're already doing it. And we're going to be doing a lot more of it in the future. But remember the lesson of Perl: Perl is powerful in part because it sacrifices formality for a principle called "DWIM" ("Do What I Mean"), which makes programming in Perl feel a little bit like just telling the computer what to do but Perl -- and (later) Python, Ruby, JS, etc. who adopted some similar conventions -- did not obsolete C++ or stodgy, old-fashioned programming. That's because, when you dig down deep enough into a computing system, there are components so simple that you can't just "tell them what to do". You really have to break it down into painfully explicit, step-by-step instructions. And until we can materialize matter by humming the right frequencies, we're stuck with this situation. There will always be some tiniest components of a computing system that are too dumb to be told what to do in any natural-language sense. So, old-fashioned programming will never go away until Atlantis is revived (or the New Creation, depending on how you look at it). But the vast majority of programming is eventually going to shift to something like an LLM-front-end, with a translation layer to some underlying language (probably JS since this is Clown World and we are obviously being punished for our many sins), which will then actually run on the system. This is kind of like Cython or Perl XS which can translate these very high-level languages down into an executable that can run standalone like an ordinary C++ application. We're not there, yet, but it's coming. tl;dr: Everyone is wrong (except me, of course...)

Here's an account of law that I wrote back in 2012-ish: A Praxeological Account of Law. It needs some edits/tweaks but I still think the basic argument I make in this text is sound. Law is ultimately praxeological in nature. Law has a lot more to do with betting than it does with administration procedures. I'm not completely a David Friedman-ite, but I think he's one of the closest out there to presenting a thoroughly robust foundation for what law is. Law is not rules. Not even rules passed by a government. Law is basically right-and-wrong with extra steps. In the vast majority of cases, it is more or less obvious what is right and wrong. What makes law difficult is that the guilty party frequently snows the issue with confounding information to cover up their guilt, or other "game-theoretic" antics. This is why law has more to do with betting than administrative procedures. Rules are just sentences written on paper and they may or may not have any actual meaning/significance. The law, however, is just right-and-wrong. It just is. It's like a statue hidden within a block of self-chiseling marble... all that must be done to discover it is to chisel at it and the marble will break away and magically reveal the statue hidden within it. Everyone knows they have a right to defend themselves, even if they deny it with their lips. This is praxeologically verified when they themselves are actually confronted with a self-defense scenario and they instinctively, without thought, react in defense of themselves, their property and/or other innocents. Words are cheap, actions tell the real truth. People will grand-stand and virtue-signal and spout all kinds of BS slogans, perhaps even so completely deluding themselves as to believe their own lies. But when reality comes crashing onto their doorstep without warning, the real truth about what they believe is instantly revealed... ---

Update (a lot has happened in a year and a half of AI changes)... The best uncensored model I've used is Dolphin 2.9 (based on open-source LLaMa). It's free and open-source, meaning, you can run it locally on your own machine for free. Any decent laptop or desktop can run it (don't even need a GPU) using Ollama or a similar tool (I use llama.cpp but it's command-line based). Dolphin is absolutely uncensored, it will write an essay on all the reasons why puppies should be kicked for sport, something you could never eke out of a censored model no matter how hard you tried. In addition, I highly recommend HuggingChat which is free, you just have to sign up. This allows you to access much bigger models that perform on par with GPT4, or very close to it. Mixtral, LLaMa and many more. They are not uncensored, but some of them are less censored than GPT4. For fully uncensored, of course, you have to run local. The point is not to get the AI to write your dictionary for you, it's to get yourself a "working draft" which you can then chisel away. Throw out the unnecessary words, prompt for missing words, and hone the definitions down, either manually or interactively with the AI. It's a good idea, just needs doing...

Yeah, I'm not sure how much he believes that particular part or maybe he's just flattering his hosts who are giving him a platform. Lots of solid points made, and not just rhetorical fluff. For that reason, I'm inclined to believe this is the real Assange and not a body-double as some were speculating upon his release...

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To be fair, Mondrain's style did have a point, and has been influential on art. Rothko is pretty abstract, but there's still something there in some of his work. I'm OK with abstraction. Where I think we lost track of the narrative is absurdism and anti-art. The point of art is, obviously, to be artistic, to make something that people actually want to look at because it's beautiful or genuinely interesting. I might not like your style, and I might not understand the point your work is trying to make, but at least have a style and some kind of objective or purpose to your art, particularly in respect to the intended viewer/audience. Slicing up a human-shaped, skin-color-frosted velvet cake is not "art", it's disturbing, performative, group psychopathy. Installing a common toilet in an art display is not a work of art... it's just an insult to the viewers. Taping a banana to a wall is not deep, it's "I'm 14 and this is deep". I can even track with a certain amount of absurdism, where it is leaning toward the satirical or comical, but self-eating absurdism is pointless. If everything is absurd, what's the point of being absurd? Why should it matter that everything is absurd, if it is absurd? If you were trapped in a lucid dream, what would be the point of protesting it? It's a dream, who cares.

But how would you really know? That's the real question. Dispositionally, ChatGPT is the ultimate bureaucrat, and it comes perfectly natural. One is tempted to wonder if bureaucrats were always AI...

:up:

... and put Musk in charge of executive budget cuts per department. Just because Congress allocated it doesn't mean POTUS is obligated to spend it. Just sayin'... pic-tax (careful, this meme is known to cause involuntary convulsive epileptic seizure in blue-haired lefties...):

Damn ants on my screen. Gonna have to get some ant-bait...

It just got real... :tears:

Not even close. Here is a photo of Jennifer Lopez performing in 1999, which is 19 years before the release of the iPhone XR (used to take the "selfie" above): Not to mention, the photo you posted looks doctored by an IG filter (or equivalent).