I am not about to watch that. I will go insane.

the history of symbolism / society media consumption patterns.

I feel like this could be a college-level class all by itself!

This is interesting:

University of Pennsylvania political scientist Michele Margolis, in her 2018 book, From Politics to the Pews, makes the case that political identity is the primary causal factor in determining Americans’ religious identity, more so than the other way around.

Republican first, religious second. That explains why the supposed religious right can be as cruel and hateful as it is while still calling themselves religious. The Bible fits into their political ideology rather the other way around. So, they can reject a type of compassion as satanic rather than be unconditionally compassionate.

If you watch more videos, you’ll realize it doesn’t matter.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. The implicit unironic Republican motto.

Especially in Texas, somehow the proliferation of machines of war makes society safer. Somehow policies that put women through absurd amounts of harm and kill them is “pro-life”. And, somehow, ignoring or actively opposing experts and “doing your own research” makes you a free and critical thinker.

I’ll 3rd mechanicalkeyboards.com. I just ordered a new Ducky from there this morning.

I was told that this was “just rhetoric” on a conservative instance. So, it’s okay. They’re just looking for support.

The same person also told me he lived under a rock. So…ya know…critical thinking.

Allow me to respond in kind.

Here’s Perplexity.ai’s response (based on GPT-4) to your response:

In the provided link, Daron Acemoğlu’s argument focuses on how the distribution of the impact of technological change tends to favor elites over time, as they accrue the benefits for themselves. The response you provided, however, discusses the impact of the invention of the windmill on peasant life in medieval Europe, emphasizing how it improved efficiency and productivity. This response does not address Acemoğlu’s main point about the distribution of benefits from technological change and how it is influenced by the power dynamics between elites and the general population. Instead, it focuses on the general impact of a specific technology (windmills) on the lives of peasants, which is not the central argument in Acemoğlu’s discussion.

And then I asked Perplexity.ai to expand on the last two sentences. I thought they were too condensed.

In the Spiegel article, Acemoğlu argues that the benefits of technological innovations tend to accrue disproportionately to elites and people in power over time. He provides historical examples like the spinning jenny and the steam engine, which initially benefited workers but over decades the gains shifted toward factory owners and capitalists as they consolidated economic and political power.

The key point is that technology alone does not determine how the gains are distributed - it depends on the relative power dynamics between different groups. Powerful elites are often able to co-opt innovations to serve their own interests, rather than broadly sharing the benefits.

In contrast, the response about windmills focuses narrowly on how a specific medieval technology improved efficiency for peasants through automation. It does not address the distribution of gains from windmills over time, nor does it consider how elites may have captured the benefits. The windmill example is about the general productivity impacts of technology, not the argument Acemoğlu makes about unequal distribution based on existing power structures.

tl;dr: Technological innovation has improved the lives of elites and peasants. This is undeniable and is not under consideration. What is under consideration is who benefits from technological innovation at its introduction (or over some relatively other short time period that isn’t “the past”).

Also, as a beneficiary of it, AI is so fucking cool.

I just bought a mechanical keyboard with silent switches because I too love smashing the keys without the clickety-clackety of other switches.

Definitely satire lol

Oh great. I’ll get live updates from the Heritage Foundation and the Daily Signal about how Biden’s anarchistic will is being carried out through Fani Willis in an egregious abuse of the law to prosecute the greatest political force for good the world has ever seen since Chile’s Pinochet.

I can’t wait!

Ooof. That’s dark.

I like not being in jail and being alive, though.

From the article:

Take medieval windmills, a very transformative technology. It changed the organization of textile manufacturing, but especially agriculture. But you didn’t see much improvement in the conditions of the peasants. The windmills were controlled by landowners and churches. This narrow elite collected the gains. They decided who could use the windmills. They killed off competition

Except technological innovation didn’t benefit “us”, it benefited elites.

Der Spiegel’s implicit argument (in the one sentence of (“But it is true that humankind has indeed benefited a lot from new technologies”) is that technological change benefited “us” over time and, therefore, technological change is good. Acemoğlu offers a different amount of time to survey to determine the effects of innovation, which challenges the idea that technological change is always good.

Ngl, I legitimately hate Republican political leaders (not the regular folks, just their political leaders). So, yes, yes, I have. And it’s absolutely useless and self-defeating.

But that’s not the point. It did have a significant impact. Acemoğlu’s point is about the distribution over time of that impact. Elites tend to accrue for themselves the benefits of technological change.

In terms of AI, it makes some people more productive that others. So, right now, only some people are benefiting from the introduction of AI. Jobs with a $1 million salary are being advertised to replace striking Hollywood writers. It’s easy to say technological change creates winners and losers as I learned in my econ classes. But in the midst of such change, how long winners remain winners and losers remain losers matters a great deal to both.

In other words, the transition to cleaner energy sources puts coal miners out of a job until the sun goes out and the wind stops blowing. And it’s foolish claim the trade for higher quality air and a decline of associated respiratory illnesses is worth a miner’s despair and depression because they’re forever unemployed, their skills worthless.

Climate change threatens to kill everyone on the planet. It is the ultimate issue right now. This is just humans going into survival mode and focusing on the big death.

This is what I fear the most. Climate change will only become salient over time where obsession with it will manifests as extreme violence to secure resources. But it’s not like these murderous people are going to care about climate change per se; rather, they’ll think they need to secure what they need to continue their survival. But those resources, particularly water, will become less and less available because of climate change.

Better that climate “activists” block traffic, slash tires, and have no chill mode now than deeply flawed humans murdering, raping, and pillaging later for the same reason.

The reality is that these ethical barricades can sometimes stifle the very progress they purport to guide, casting a shadow over what could otherwise be a platform for rich, meaningful discourse.

I bet I could make him reconsider this by arguing postmodernism proliferated in part by technological innovation. And if he believes that all technological progress is good, then so are the things that derive from it.

Ronald Reagan was a actor, not at all a factor

Slap a symmetric, charismatic face on shit, and people will eat it up.

What I like about this interview is that it demonstrates the absurd, thought-terminating clichés that modern elites use…and Acemoğlu just steamrolls them. Like this:

DER SPIEGEL: But it is true that humankind has indeed benefited a lot from new technologies.

Acemoğlu: That is the reason we have to go so far back in history. The argument that you just gave is wrong. In the past, we’ve always had struggles over the uses of innovation and who benefits from them. Very often, control was in the hands of a narrow elite. Innovation often did not benefit the broad swaths of the population.

There was no argument. A sentence does not an argument make. But regular people trying to argue from a similar perspective would say “…well, yes, but…” whereas Acemoğlu is just like “Nope. You’re wrong.”

Edit: After a several hours and many responses, it demonstrates that the terminating cliché of “…but humanity has benefited from progress” isn’t a counter-argument. What are the premises of the asserted conclusion? Had Der Spiegel been more clear about how he’d arrived at that conclusion in context, the conversation would’ve been significantly easier to follow. So, remember that: don’t just assert shit; explain yourself.

Are we energy independent enough for Republicans yet? Or is Biden still knee-capping our national security by producing too little?