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457
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3 yr. ago

  • The issue I'd take with that is that it's hardly any more or less "luck" than any other billionaire.

    There's less than 3000 billionaires in the world. It's not like the other 2999 were wildly more qualified and had the perfect strategy that inevitably and directly led to their billionaire status.

    And while he did become a billionaire by selling to Microsoft, he would have even without that most likely. The game has sold enough copies that it would have made him a billionaire, even without the sale to Microsoft.

    And I think it's unfair, even if that wasn't the case, to lay the sins of the buyer at the feet of the seller, when the seller isn't otherwise doing anything wrong. It's basically the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" thing. There is no one he could sell to that wouldn't be "unethical", and therefore he'd be morally obligated to never sell it to anyone. He's as "morally corrupt" for that as any of us are when we shop at a grocery store or buy/rent housing.

    And I said it elsewhere, I am in no way arguing against him being appropriately taxed on this income (or potentially standing wealth). I simply push back on the idea that billionaires can only become such by being morally bankrupt exploiters who stomp on the heads of millions of the proletariat to get where they are.Are there some like that? Absolutely. Is it the vast majority? Depends on how you define "stomping on the heads of the proletariat," but it's probably a good chunk at minimum. But the only requirement is luck. Not cruelty or exploitation.

    I'm all for progression tax structures. I'm all for taxing the rich. But statements like "all billionaires got their money by exploiting the poor" makes one look, at best, uncritical of your own positions. It's counterfactual name calling of the out-tribe, the same as calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi.

  • I am talking about that level of success, yes. I in fact was using it's numbers and exact case information, lol.

    Notch is a billionaire. The original claim was that no one becomes a billionaire without stealing or exploiting the value of the work of the laborers. My question then is, the value of whose labor did Notch steal or exploit to become a billionaire?

    Note: He is also an awful person, so setting that aside for the moment. He's not awful in a way that directly relates to the question at hand.

  • I think you misunderstand me. I don't strictly disagree with anything you've said. I'm not sure that I'm on the 100% tax above a certain threshold idea, but I'm not terrible interested in debating it one way or another.

    The point I was interested in was what makes it inherently exploitative to earn that much money? You repeat the claim (and clarify) that making anything above 10mil is exploitative, but what I'm curious about is the justification.

    Typically, my understanding of when people say billionaires exploited the working class, it's because they are pocketing the excess value of those that they employ. But we have real world cases of billionaires who employ no one.

    In those cases, what have they done that is exploitative?

    And to further clarify. I'm not asking why it's unjust from an equity standpoint. I'm not asking why it would be better if that wealth was taxed. I'm specifically asking after the word exploitative.

  • Out of curiosity, let's say I'm a video game developer and I make games by myself (no team). I have a hit success and sell 300 milion copies worldwide for an average of $20 a piece and am now a billionaire.

    Was that money stolen or exploited? If so, how? If not, how does that jive with your stated position?

  • Do you really think the reason people hate Java is because it uses an intermediate bytecode? There's plenty of reasons to hate Java, but that's not one of them.

    .NET languages use intermediate bytecode and everyone's fine with it.

    Any complaints about Java being an intermediate language are due to the fact that the JVM is a poorly implemented dumpster fire. It's had more major vulnerabilities than effing Adobe Flash, and runs like molasses while chewing up more memory than effing Chrome. It's not what they did, it's that they did it badly.

    And WASM will absolutely never replace normal JS in the browser. It's a completely different use case. It's awesome and has a great niche, but it's not really intended for normal web page management use cases.

  • I think the issue is that none of those run up to mid thigh, lol. :)

  • I was just about to say, isn't this just OpenStack?

    I don't even think OpenStack is needlessly complicated.Yes, it is complicated, but who thinks operating a cloud environment the equivalent of AWS is trivial?

  • Sceptre makes modern, affordable dumb TVs.

  • I mean, even if you're against bank's utilizing funds deposited to give out loans, I think they still have an obvious core function.

    I'd much rather have a secure facility to keep my money, rather than, like, under my mattress, right? If for no ther reason than it means I'm not broke if my house burns down.

  • What clear rule did she violate though? Like, Grammerly isn't an AI tool. It's a glorified spell check. And several of her previous professors had recommended it's use.

    What she did "wrong" was write something that TurnItIn decided to flag as AI generated, which it's incredibly far from 100% accurate at.

    Like, what should she have done differently?

  • As I get older, I've realized that places like here and reddit would be wildly better if everyone younger than me wasn't allowed to use it, lol. :P

  • I'd rule out k8s if you're looking for simple administration.

  • My response was in reference to the comment the guy above linked to. The one by WallEx.

    That post was claiming animals didn't live longer in captivity, but was taking animals raised for meat into account.

  • To be fair, he's not contradicting the intended statement. "Animals in captivity" usually refers to zoos/aquariums/etc in this context.

    They are just pointing out that animals raised for food are also "animals in captivity," and have dramatically reduced lifespans.

  • Fair on all counts. I guess my counter then would be, what is AI art other than running a bunch of pieces of other art through a computer system, then adding some "stuff you did" (to use your phrase) via a prompt, and then submitting the output as your own art.

    That's nearly identical to my fractal example, which I think you're saying would actually be fair use?

  • I feel like you latched on to one sentence in my post and didn't engage with the rest of it at all.

    That sentence, in your defense, was my most poorly articulated, but I feel like you responded devoid of any context.

    Am I to take it, from your response, that you think that a fractal image that uses a copywritten image as a seed to it's random number generator would be copyright infringement?

    If so, how much do I, as the creator, have to "transform" that base binary string to make it "fair use" in your mind? Are random but flips sufficient?If so, how is me doing that different than having the machine do that as a tool? If not, how is that different than me editing the bits using a graphical tool?

  • Out of curiosity, how far do you extend this logic?

    Let's say I'm an artist who does fractal art, and I do a line of images where I take jpegs of copywrite protected art and use the data as a seed to my fractal generation function.

    Have I have then, in that instance, taken a copywritten work and simply applied some static algorithm to it and passed it off as my own work, or have I done something truly transformative?

    The final image I'm displaying as my own art has no meaningful visual cues to the original image, as it's just lines and colors generated using the image as a seed, but I've also not applied any "human artistry" to it, as I've just run it through an algorithm.

    Should I have to pay the original copywrite holder?If so, what makes that fundamentally different from me looking at the copywritten image and drawing something that it inspired me to draw?If not, what makes that fundamentally different from AI images?

  • And real children aren't in a capitalist society?

  • To be fair, I think your analogy falls apart a bit because you can in fact take a picture of pretty much any art you want to, legally speaking.

    You can't go sell it or anything, but you are definitely not in breach of copyright just by taking the picture.