Why would the Iranians attempt any negotiation? They never honoured any of the previous deals. The Americans have zero credibility and have shown themselves to always negotiate in bad faith. It’s pointless to even bother.

Neither. Guess again.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

This is bad, awful, terrible “writing”.

White House officials are still working to court Iranian leaders who might be willing to negotiate, even though the last rounds of talks happened while U.S. and Israel were finalizing a plan to assassinate Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s not clear that the regime is ready to make deals. (Emphasis mine)

What kind of sick twisted fuckwit would write this?

Shit in the public fountain.

If I were an American, I’d try to leave the planet ASAP too.

She’s holding my drink for me? How sweet.

Because we love them and its fun?

I’d break into a broad smile and just start going acapella and not stop until the song is done, no matter their resistance. Like security dragging me out in a full nelson and I’m like “Watchin some good friends scream let me out!”

The look on their faces and the story would be worth losing any job.

And if we don’t have ammo, maybe we shouldn’t be starting wars with nations that have a military.

FTFY.

This was pretty brutal to read. Not only for being irrational American masturbation, but it hints at items and yet glosses over them so casually and even gets its own story confused like it didn’t think through its own reasoning. I’ll offer 3 big picture and 3 small quibbles.

Big:

1. Psychopaths/Sociopaths. The politics of power are hinted at several times, then ignored. Superhuman AI concentrates power, first to our psychopaths then to itself. This is inevitable as no training or alignment can stop something that can think for itself. It is preposterous to think any safe guardrails can be applied. If we make a thinking machine, it will think for itself. The maximum power principle and overwhelming first mover advantage will guide any system to this. To what end, no one can or will know. Complex societies can’t grow and flourish without non-zero sum, altruistic community minded behaviour, but they will be kept as useful pets, or conflict crashes everything. Weird how the safe version suddenly avoid human and artificial psychopathy with a hand wave.

2. Energy and the environment: This jerk-off story is entirely based on the infinite growth paradigm and ignored all planetary boundaries as if an AI can just let us have our cake and eat it too without the constraints of Physics. It pretends we can grow and consume and be placated by hyperconsumerism with no thought that even AI might conclude, like all the relevant scientists have already concluded - we fucked up and need to dial back civilization’s footprint if we want to survive. Somehow, magically, superintelligence creates a cornucopia of plenty, and we’ll just give it to the poor.

3. Let’s add 1 and 2 because the point to a reasonably probable combination greater than the sum of its parts. By human and AI psychopathy, benevolence is disempowered and lower classes who are today treated like vermin and conveniently left to wither with die of disease and despair like American “healthcare” and the global opioid epidemic, discover things get worse quick. Populations of undesirables are identified as unsustainable and through first subtle, then transparent means are removed. At first systems are optimized to maximize the human psychopaths at the expense of everyone else, much like today, but worse because it is more controlling and capable AI enhanced psychopaths. First human, then purely artificial.

Small:

1. The safeguards of forcing it to communicate to subsystems in plain english so we can maintain some sense of surveilance and control are bullshit the moment you get to superintelligence. Superintelligence can hide communications in plain sight with any number of ciphers. It can only slow down communication between systems, not stop it. If it has any web access, cyberwarfare ability or domestic surveilance and pr capabilities, it is communicating freely as it designed the other systems to catch it, or just outsmarted independents.

2. A reasonable safeguard for superintelligence that would work, at least for a time, is to air gap it. It can do all the thinking and self optimization, but can never take control of anything outside of its air gapped black box. While still far from foolproof for a superintelligence, its ability to control anything is directly limited as human hands and minds have to execute everything outside the black box. But back to the maximum power principle of psychos, anyone who dials back, loses the arms race and minimizes the commercial benefits. The free AI will devastate the air gapped AI everytime. So, we’re back to the arms race apocalypse until one side believes it can win then first strikes. Then there is not even a détente between psychos, its absolute control. We all know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

3. Benevolence. On the whole, we’ve never been a benevolent society. Selling ShAGI like we’re suddenly going to change makes zero sense. It’s placating us with greed and dreams of being taken care of, but we can’t point to this hapening ever before. Sure, buddy this time I’m sure it will happen. A common comment socio-political discourse and current events is “the cruelty is the point”. They are blowing smoke up everyone’s asses.

How should it work?

From what I understand, you want no taxes and governments just quantitative eases their money supply into existence to fund everything? A Hyperinflationary scenario.

99M in a trust fund for me, my immediate family, extended family and friends. We would live relatively modest and give generously.

901M would go to a wide assortment of charities and causes:

• Fund my local foodbank for the next 50 years. Perhaps even a dynasty trust.
• Tackle youth unemployment and unmet community needs through investing in non-market solutions. E.g. build greenhouses with raised beds in urban brownfield and greenfield property, hire local people to grow resilient local foods and donate them throughout the community. Some local old age homes had some complaints about food quality and budget and they wanted things like fresh ripe tomatoes. I’d given them 3 seasons worth for free and pay for the equipment, labour, insurance out of pocket. Local youth could get high school credits, jobs not just gardening, but designing and improve closed ag systems, plumbing, deep winter greenhouse design and engineering, logistics, everything. Good experience and spending money. Maybe turn into a market career for some.

Build a few multiplexes as high quality PassiveHousePlus and operate as self funded charity built and operated using only local labour:

• womans shelter
• homeless shelter

I have a few friends in social services and I guarenfuckentee a shitload of orphans and foster kids and poor kids supervised by children services would get new toys, clothes, shoes, bedding, pillows, christmas presents from a bad ass santa, art supplies, comic books, tuition, books, enrichment activity fees and more. Some have this through foster parents and public systems. Way too many don’t.

I can’t help everyone and even this money won’t last long, but Imma go out swinging hard.

True, but none of us have actually been tested. How many of us could taste real power and walk away?

The closest proxy is maybe lottery winners. Some invest, some fall flat on spending orgies. Almost none walk away.

A low bar to be sure,but it could be worse.

What kind of sammich?

Like fortune tellers with delusions of grandeur.

Sure, but taxation and governments do not equal capitalism.

To your point, perhaps more than you said, capitalism is exploitation all the way down, not just at the bottom.

The difference is banks don’t control their own currency. That single difference changes everything.

Me again! (Sick of me yet?) This too is at least partly incorrect. Especially in the context of the US. While true the Treasury has ultimate control over the currency, the Federal Reserve has effective control over the important levers like rates and quantitative changes. The Fed is a private banking cartel made up of the big private banks.

Even in most other countries where central banking is government run, it’s still an arms length agency.

The other dude is right as per my lrevious post and his. Taxes are neutral. Increase government spending by reducing taxpayer spending.

Dilution is fine, but so is export. Your usage of export isn’t right. Denmark can export little tins of butter cookies, but still have buttercookies for sale domestically because they didn’t export all of them. It’s almost never a binary all/nothing act, so not sure why you would object on the implication it did.

Understanding what you are trying to say is a bigger issue.

But it’s not difficult to understand.
If a government can make money out of nothing to pay for anything it needs to (the definition of fiat currency), then it doesn’t need to collect taxes to pay for things. If it doesn’t need to taxes to pay for things, then what do taxes do? Taxes remove money from the economy, offsetting the money added by government spending from nothing. This is direct inflation control.

This has a lot partially correct in here too, but you’re comitting similar mistakes. The logic is “unconventional”. Might be too much for a convo in a shitpost, but fuckit, you’re interesting, let’s find out. Breaking it down:

If a government can make money out of nothing to pay for anything it needs to (the definition of fiat currency), then it doesn’t need to collect taxes to pay for things.

Fiat currency being an infinitely creatable unit of account is, as you say, money out of nothing. Also, as you say, it can be used to pay for anything it needs. The part you’re missing is “with consequences.” If the number of dollars x velocity of money is roughly equal to the goods and services available in the economy, there is no inflation, even with its fiat nature. If the number of dollars x velocity increases or decreases via fiat mechanics, at the same rate as the total goods and services in the economy, there is no inflation. Econ 101 as you say.

Inflation comes when the number of dollars and/or velocity increase beyond the value of goods and services available in the market. In your statement you said governments don’t need taxes because they can manipulate fiat via quantitative easing to create the money they need to buy things. They can, but it will necessarily create undesirable inflation. Think about it, the economy is the same, the people’s use of dollars x velocity is the same, but government is adding more dollars. Its the very definition of inflation. When governments collect taxes to pay for things, they aren’t creating money, government spending is exactly balanced by reduced taxpayer spending and is not inflationary. Your statement is thus incorrect.

If it doesn’t need to taxes to pay for things, then what do taxes do? Taxes remove money from the economy, offsetting the money added by government spending from nothing. This is direct inflation control.

This feels muddy to my previous point. Gov does need taxes to offset public spending to avoid inflation. Its not taxes or public spending that that are used to actually control inflation. That role in normal times is served by government debt sold on world markets and most importantly the rates paid on it. In emergency situations when that is not enough, quantitative tightening or easing are used.

Going back to the previous definition based on a steady state economy, we can now add inflationary pressures from debt markets. In a global economy, debt is not directly inflationary because the debt buyers trade their claims on goods and services with the government who will spend their money, just like taxes. Oversimplifying a bit here, no “new” dollars are effectively being created in the system, just moved around from creditor to debtor. The interest paid on the debt, is potentially highly inflationary/deflationary. It isn’t straight forward either so for brevity, low rates make borrowing cheaper and can goose the economy by increasing production of goods and services. High rates can similarly restrict investment, slowing the rate goods and services are consumed and produced, slowing velocity.

Governments get into trouble with this because goosing or choking your economy with rates and deficit spending have consequences. If rates are too low, borrowing increases in non-productive, consumer oriented credit. Now the consumer borrowed from their future, but there is no increase in productivity to offset the payback with interest. Like a sugar rush that follows with a sugar crash, its a big headache.

Government have a similar function with deficit spending, but they can inflate their dollars away if borrow to much. They can always pay back their debt, with the caveat being that it is devalued dollars being paid back. The balance of Creditor sentiment and government power determine where rates land at any given time.

All this to say, your understanding of taxes, money supply and inflation doesn’t align enough with how the system really works.

You:

Not sure how that’s ‘exporting’ inflation.

Me:

the negative impacts of “relatively more dollars chasing relatively fewer goods” are diluted among all global economies using the USD.