We are at a fork in the road with lots of potential darkness, but simply thinking any old social safety net is going to work is not going to cut it. Nets can be, and generally are, used to capture.
An interesting multi-pronged approach is post labor economics which is being promoted by David Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap
The basic premise is that currently we have households being supported by labor, capital, and transfers. With labor largely going away, the leaves capital and transfers. Relying on transfers alone will lead to ownership of the people by government. So we have to find ways to generate way more distributed capital ownership by the masses. This is what he plans, discusses, and promotes.
A generality about 1 word of a metaphor is not a legitimate argument.
I read what David Shapiro called concrete interventions.[1] They were public ownership, redistribution, public ownership or redistribution systems he called predistribution, shorter work weeks, and under developed blockchain ideas.
Links to my projects. I am a mathematician, Bohmian (quantum mechanical theory where particles have definite positions guided by the quantum mechanical wave function), Sudbury staffer, hobbyist programmer (now hobbyist manager of AI coders). Currently into exploring fully embracing families of rational intervals as real numbers.
I'd be curious about their analysis of the Nvidia self-driving car project which uses world models(?) to train them in far more extensive scenarios, though simulated, than possible in real world case. That keynote was after this article of course.
But I did check their dismissive claim about the 90% coding at anthropic by watching the link they provided. The Anthropic guy said that 90% was achieved at various teams within Anthropic and also hedged about the exact nature of it; it is a messy metric to be precise about. I thought the other was not generous in interpreting it which makes me skeptical of the edge of the rest of the article.
The optimal version of a PE is to take a failing business and either turn it around or carve up assets and reallocate people to do something useful and profitable. The more a business is failing, the cheaper it is to takeover and for the PE to do the work of a fungus. But this process can also become a disease if it is too easy for them to takeover, taking a healthy host and carving it up. This is mimicked in real life when conditions turn a fungus into a hostile organism on something that is living; maybe it is just a little sick but the environmental conditions help the fungus more than it ought to leading to it being a killer instead of a resource freer.
The real question to ask is why can they take on so much debt? And for that, one needs to acknowledge the fact that, particularly for the well-connected, debt is easy to obtain as banks essentially create money for loans. There are constraints (otherwise the banks would make themselves trillionaires), but the constraint is not the quantity of money. This creation of money through lending leads to inflation which further supports operating via debt as those who take out loans see the real value of the loans decrease. The banks just made up the money so there isn't a direct loser from the inflation other than everyone who has to deal with increased prices. You can think of it as a broad, regressive tax on the population to fund these firms doing far more than they should.
With an actual constrained money supply tied to real wealth in the economy, the PE firms would have to focus on the best deals which means the businesses that are truly dying and their role is to turn the nonproductive assets into something productive.
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I asked ChatGPT to critique my answer (which is unaltered above) and it said to tone down the lending being propped up by inflation and instead emphasized the following:
>Inflation can help leveraged borrowers, but in PE the bigger structural advantages are:
• Interest deductibility (a massive tax subsidy to debt)
• Limited liability (upside captured, downside partially socialized)
• Fee extraction independent of performance
• Ability to load debt onto the acquired company, not the PE fund
I then asked it to answer the question without regards to my context and it basically said PE is different because of
> • short ownership horizons
• high leverage
• strong control
• financial returns as the primary goal
Why shouldn't her medical providers be responsible for continuing critical health care regardless of payment? Why is it on the employer who is only tangentially related to this versus the people actually charging large sums of money for medically necessary treatment?
Also, the same health insurance can be continued after termination (with some external payment, of course) in addition to medicaid probably being available. None of that may be easy for someone with mental issues to navigate, but that is systematic.
As for the minor extension, is it clear how long she was on leave and what the conversation had been before the termination? The post said that they asked for small time extension, but did not give any indication as to what was happening before, neither length of time employed before taking the leave, what caused the leave, what was said in terms of a return, how long the absence was, etc. I feel like plugging in different answers for those questions would change how I feel about the culpability of the company in the current legal regime.
The usual answer is that there are other people who also need things and cannot pay, so then how should the provider pick between them fairly? (And likely some have a "free clinic", and as you mentioned there are options.)
Still almost all of the responsibility is on the patient, which is a terrible situation to be in for mental health patients. And even if the courts will find that the termination was wrongful it's unlikely that matters, because employers are not responsible for keeping employees alive and happy, they are responsible for making the usual safety precautions (see OSHA) and disability accommodations.
All the great perks of our cherished individualism suck when you have no one to enjoy them with.
It is even a bit more scrambled such as this part: hcihw selcihev selcihev ot ot ot ot erauqs strap. Looking at the original site, that text is in various nested structures with the paragraphs having that kind of text. They have multiple bits of it being an article block with a .is-paywalled governing various behaviors such as showing ads. The scrambled text is in paragraphs within the separate article portions. Presumably they have a script that will decode it for those to login though I do not understand why they even provide the text? Why not just return it after login? Maybe it is total trash text and just there to pad it out like a lorum ipso. Kind of interesting.
In EPR, the setup is that there are two labs doing measurements outside of each other's lights cone. The outcome in one lab allows a perfect prediction of what happens in the other. This means that it is not possible that something random is going on in unless there is some nonlocal coordination between the two. This suggests that there is some actual fact of the matter as to how the experiment will turn out. That is, they argued that QM+locality = extra information beyond the wave function to determine outcomes. Bell then saw Bohm's theory and wondered about getting rid of the nonlocality. Bell showed that QM+extra info determining outcomes = nonlocal. In short, EPR + Bell shows that if QM predictions are correct (the predictions, not the theory), then there is something nonlocal going on. The lab experiments confirmed this and nature is indeed nonlocal.
Thus, there is no local theory that has definite experimental results compatible with what is actually demonstrated in labs. Many worlds, to the extent that one can apply any notion of locality to it, avoids this by not having singular, definitive experimental results (all results happen).
> The outcome in one lab allows a perfect prediction of what happens in the other.
I guess you know this, but just to clarify, that's only if the same measurement is performed in the other lab. If the other lab measures an orthogonal spin component, that result can't be predicted at all (I'm assuming entangled spin-1/2 particles for simplicity). It's more precise to say that measurement in the first lab tells you the state in the second lab, and with that information the probabilities for the various possible measurement results in the other lab can be predicted. In particular, if the other lab measures the spin along the same axis, the results can be perfectly correlated, as you say.
So there's some kind of nonlocality, but it's not the kind of nonlocality that makes problems with relativity, because the correlations can't be used to signal or cause any difference in the distant lab, only to predict, in general probabilistically, what would happen in the other lab if some measurements are performed. So entanglement allows this interesting middle ground between a local theory and a theory that's nonlocal in the sense that it would allow nonlocal causation, which is the kind of nonlocality that would worry Einstein. There should be different words for the different kinds of nonlocality, but maybe nonlocal correlation versus nonlocal causation serves the purpose
In EPR, it is critical that it is the same measurement. Bell explores doing different measurements. For EPR, they assumed that if you can predict with certainty what happens in a space-like separated region, then there must be a fact of the matter about it. Not being probabilistic was very important for that. Bell then showed that there cannot be a fact of the matter without there also being some nonlocal means going on in order to account for the QM predictions. It is critical to appreciate the two separate pieces of arguments, how they differ, and how jointly they do lead to some kind of nonlocality. Tim Maudlin has a, now old, book exploring these different levels of nonlocality in quantum mechanics.
I recently heard a talk from Tim Maudlin where he mentioned that foliations are the easiest and most natural structures to use to provide nonlocality and, if there is such a thing, maybe there is a clever way of using it to actually communicate and discover the foliation in some sense. He mentioned there is current research on using arrival times which are experimental results outside of the operator formalism, as far as I know. I found an article describing the research:
> In EPR, it is critical that it is the same measurement.
I must admit I haven't read the full EPR paper, only post-Bell expositions and excerpts. But you can have perfect spacelike correlations of the same measurement classically as well, e.g. if two particles having opposite (angular or linear) momenta are sent from the midpoint towards distant labs, measuring one momentum will tell you the other one. They must somehow discuss making different measurements no? Maybe they effectively discuss a protocol where the two labs agree on the same sequence of orthogonal measurements. I should read these sources sometime...
Thanks for the ftl reference. It would be astonishing if their hypotheses are borne out. I find it unlikely, but of course the experiments will have to decide, so I'll keep tabs on that. By "foliation" in this context I guess he means a foliation of spacetime amounting to an absolute reference frame. I've seen Tim Maudlin discuss something like that before.
By the way, the article you linked mentions a couple of times the importance of distinguishing signaling from causation or action, but doesn't seem to define how they're distinct. Do you know some more formal article discussing the proposed experiments? The sources given in the article are just to video interviews.
EPR's point is that there is nothing mysterious from a classical perspective of being able to deduce this. They were arguing against the presentation of QM as to there being no fact of the matter about what the momentum is before the measurement and that it randomly becomes whatever it becomes when measured. Their point is that if both particles are randomly collapsing into their choices, then they should disagree at some point unless there is some nonlocal causation happening. Einstein rejected nonlocal causation, reasonable given what he knew at the time, and thus the momentum measurement result must already be preordained by something and it is then like the classical setup.
Bell's work was to show that it had to be the nonlocal causation.
>Do you know some more formal article discussing the proposed experiments?
I do not know of an article, but Maudlin's book Quantum Non-locality and Relativity goes through the various notions of locality and what QM says about it. There is a chapter about signaling and another about causation. It also covers the GHZ scheme which is a non-probablistic version demonstrating non-locality. It is pretty clean.
>Do you know some more formal article discussing the proposed experiments?
I have not read them, but my understanding that Siddhant Das is pursuing these and here is a link to his Arxiv papers which talk about arrival time experiments though I do not know if it is directly about these.
Thanks, I had a look at Maudlin's book. It seems the distinction between signaling and causation is that there might be some kind of nonlocal causation that we can't control and so can't use to send a signal.
Local causation is defined as in Bell's Theory of Local Beables, as the probability distribution for values at spacelike separated regions only being correlated with respect to the overlaps in their past lightcones. Or to put it the other way around, there's nonlocal causation if the probability distribution of values in one region depends on values in a spacelike separated region. That's what I'd call nonlocal correlation rather than causation but I guess that's just terminological.
This looks like a pertinent paper from Das but I haven't read through it yet
For non-relativistic QM, the QM formalism is provable from Bohmian mechanics, an actual particle theory. BM starts from particles have locations the change continuously in time via a guidance equation using the wave function of the universe. One may choose other theories to explain quantum phenomena, but to say "There is simply no physical machinery to support an objective reality, period." is just false, at least in that realm. As for relativistic QFT, there are plausible pathways using Bohmian ideas as well though nothing as definitive as BM has been firmly established.
I would also say that any theory that does not have room to say definitively that I exist is a theory that is obviously contradictory to my experience and is therefore falsified. There has to be room in the theory for at least me. Additionally, I would certainly value much more a theory that has room for the rest of humanity more than one which questions the existence of everyone but me. I am not even sure what the point of a theory would be if it could not account for collaborative science being done.
QM does not deny you existence, it rather denies you a complete objective description of how you exist. Or perhaps it says that your existence is not an objective phenomena.
Would you mind clarifying in which of these 3 dictionary definitions of the word objective my existence (in the sense of the "particles" of my body) is not objective? Or maybe these definitions are not exhaustive? Perhapse the term objective has become overloaded.
objective
adjective
Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions when considering and representing facts; impartial.
“Historians try to be objective and impartial.”
Synonyms: impartial, unbiased, neutral, dispassionate, detached.
Antonyms: biased, partial, prejudiced.
Existing independently of the mind; actual.
“A matter of objective fact.”
Synonyms: factual, real, empirical, verifiable.
Antonym: subjective.
Grammar. Relating to the case of nouns and pronouns used as the object of a transitive verb or a preposition.
BM is objective, and indeed deterministic. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "complete" but it has all the same predictions as other interpretations of QM. It has some odd quirks however, such as explicit non-locality.
Since EPR+Bell showed that nature is non-local, it is a feature, not a bug, to be explicit about how non-locality happens. Collapse theories are also explicitly non-local.
That's one position in a century-long debate. But there are other assumptions than locality in the proof of Bell's Theorem, which other interpretations of QM relax. Like having single measurement outcomes (many-worlds), or observer-independent states (QBism).
In terms of quirkiness, how would you rank them? I feel like nonlocality is far less quirkier than saying that all possible outcomes of a measurement happen even though we just see one. Also standard QM has the quirk of being nonlocal. So QM is just quirky.
There are many that I don't understand very well, so I'm reluctant to rank them. My tendency is to be skeptical about how clearly us humans can see the underlying reality of things, so I find epistemic interpretations like QBism appealing on that basis.
The "every outcome happens" aspect of many worlds is a lot to accept. Otoh that's what you get if you take quantum states to be ontological and universal. My problem is more to do with how the Born rule falls out. There are some arguments for it based on decision theory, but I find the step from "this is how a rational betting agent maximises winnings" to "this is the objective probability of a scientific observation" uncompelling.
I'm not sure what you mean by "standard QM". There's the mathematical framework - which is effectively a way of calculating probabilities of measurement outcomes - and then there are interpretations, which assign ontological status to some/all of the mathematical objects. Non-locality properly applies to the latter, since you cannot say that the "real" physical state of a particle has changed until you've said which parts of the mathematics are real.
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