You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.
The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet.
The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.
I live in a town with municipal power, and the general consensus in the area is that the towns with municipal power are loads better at it than the main private utilities in the area. There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.
But to talk about broadband more specifically, one of the main reasons why municipal broadband started becoming a thing was because in many areas, where there is but one (private) broadband provider to choose from, that provider would proceed to refuse to upgrade the infrastructure even when municipalities offered buttloads of cash to pay for the upgrades. So the municipal broadband choice becomes "get municipal broadband at 1 gig, or private company broadband at 25 meg (asymmetric)."
> There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.
At scale, why would utilities be different than other government services, such as schools or transit?
I’m sure there are edge cases in parts of the country that are too poor or sparely populated to support a robust private sector. But I don’t live in a place like that, and most people don’t. I live in the suburbs of Annapolis. And I’ve lived in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. Would I rather have Comcast run my internet, or the governments of any of those cities? More to the point: would I want to live in the counterfactual scenario where the 1996 telecom act had gone in a different direction, and those cities had built broadband networks that were now 30 years old in whatever shape they were after decades of maintained by those cities?
My experience with the municipal services these cities do run says “no.” And that conclusion is counter to my ideology. I like public infrastructure. I structured my life around commuting over the DC Metro and Amtrak for years. But, for example, the DC Metro deferred maintenance to such a degree that the automated train control built in the 1970s had to be shut off in 2009. Headways got longer, the ride got much rougher. It stayed that way for fifteen years until they turned ATO back on last year. So in 2026, the big achievement is that we’re back to the ride smoothness we had in 1980.
>I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.
Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned.
Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.
Municipal broadband has never been banned in Maryland, where I live. Or in New York, Delaware, or Georgia, where I’ve also lived. Where are the great municipal broadband networks in these state?
The "brutal communism of China" is just hilarious on its face. It's like a Freedom House type position [1]. Funded by the State Department btw. I'm sure it's unbiased.
Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well?
So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems.
The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too?
You seriously can't expect us westerners to listen to the Chinese people about their government. How can we trust them, they are in a police state with the most imprisoned people, have oppressed, immiserated, and genocided minorities for decades, selectively enforce law for the elite, and are initiating wars of aggression across the globe. You can't trust anything coming out of a brutal regime like that.
I’m quite impressed by China’s current authoritarian capitalist system. I was talking about the brutality and incompetence of China’s Maoist communism.
Ironically, China proves that “democratic socialism” is exactly the wrong thing for a developing country. Democracy is optional for a developing country, but capitalism is indispensable.
I interpreted it to mean people feel as though they didn’t consent to having their information trained on, because for many folks, they published articles, open source projects, etc. assuming that they were only helping other people. It’s quite a shock to see megacorps use such data to create machines which threaten the livelihoods of the original authors themselves.
Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.
> What happened to “information wants to be free?”
It was 1 part of an observation of opposed forces. “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”[1]
Some people removed the context and used it to say most information should be available to all. LLMs are information.
Yes. Took. As in: without permission. Didn't ask before hand, didn't provide a way to opt-out (although that would also be problematic), didn't ask for volunteers. Took.
If I can go to jail over it then they should too. Let's not judge them by some imaginary ideal world while judging individuals by the present crushing reality.
Why does the public have a right to expropriate the property if AI companies specifically, as opposed to other types of companies? Just make broad rules that apply to everyone based on abstract principles. I’m fine even with very liberal economic approaches. If we want to raise corporate tax rates to 30%, fine, do that. Want to get creative? Half the equity of every company goes into a public fund. But this case by case, “sure is a nice company you got there” stuff is third-world shit.
Neither is using "Nazi" as a pejorative, but these kinds of comparisons can be valuable when they identify commonalities between modern proposal and historical approaches to governance that went horribly wrong. (Obviously)
The fact that somebody benefited from the output of your work is not the same thing as extracting your labor. Extracting your labor means that before you even create the work, they're conscripting you to do it.
For example, I created a useful organization at my school before I graduated. That was twenty years ago. It still exists, and people are still benefiting from it. But they don't somehow owe me compensation, nor would I go around saying that they're somehow exploiting me or expropriating my labor just because they're benefiting from what I've done in the past.
This chain has been using expropriate, not extract. Not sure why you mentioned that.
Your story doesn't really relate. I get what you are saying, but your org wasn't copyrighted under you, nor did you expect any monetary returns on it. They stole copyrighted work without permission.
> This chain has been using expropriate, not extract. Not sure why you mentioned that.
Sure, my bad.
> They stole copyrighted work without permission.
While we're nitpicking language, you can't "steal" copyrighted work. Theft/stealing are crimes that apply to situation where property is taken such that its rightful owner no longer has it. Copyright has nothing to do with theft. There is no taking of property involved. Copyright is a violation of a limited monopoly granted to a person/company to be the only one allowed to make copies.
Anyway, for a more substantive point, I think it remains to be seen that training an intelligence on information is the same thing as violating a copyright. For example, nobody would claim it's a copyright violation for a budding author to train his skills by reading tons of books.
But even setting the law aside, just morally, it doesn't seem like it should be any sort of violation. Of course, many people don't like that AI companies are getting rich, but that should be irrelevant. The fact is that nobody is harmed or deprived. Nobody's work is even redistributed. And prevention is easy -- if you don't want people/companies/AIs/etc learning from the material you put out, then keep it secret.
What seems morally bankrupt to me is this idea that anyone should be entitled to control what others are allowed to learn from. If you put information or work out into the public, that should not make you some sort of God who should control whether other people can learn from it or not.
If your product has no value without access by your company/you agents of someone elses work, you are a derivative work. The value of your product has at least in part been derived from other's copyrighted work.
The fact that these companies don't just remove copyrighted work from their product creation chain shows that they feel they are deriving value from the copyrighted works that they wouldn't have if they didn't use copyrighted works.
"Deriving value" from what came before doesn't mean that what came before is owed some sort of check. And thank god, or the world would be a horrible place full of rent seekers.
> What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?
It’s the other way around. Countries that are well suited to democracy are the exception. You need to have a state, rule of law, etc., before you have democracy. Then you need generations of people socialized in the ideas that allow democratic societies to function. For example, in many places in the world, people are socialized to put their trust in leaders of extended kinship groups and clans rather than in neutral institutions. You can’t effectively have a democracy under those conditions.
On all those fronts, Americans were standing on the shoulders of giants. England has offices of civil government (like the Chancellor of the Exchequer) that have been in continuous operation for over 800 years. Many of the concepts of the constitution date back to the Magna Carta 800 years ago. There’s also the non-religious aspects of religion. Protestants were developing decentralized church governance 500 years ago. American democracy is the product of an 800-year long process where you’re slowly and incrementally molding the structure of society and the mindset of the people generation after generation.
Read De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” where he describes the organic, bottom-up self governance that prevailed in America 150 years ago. That description bears no response to how an Indian or Iraqi village is governed. Those societies, like most, are structured and hierarchical. An individual owes obedience to the layers above (father, clan or tribe elders, all the way to the top). And those at the top have obligations flowing downward, to care and feed their subjects and maintain order. These societies are much better suited for benevolent dictatorships.
Bottom up self governance is also very foreign to modern americans, Which I do not think bodes well for the future of our democracy. How can the public be expected to be sober judges of policy and candidates, when they can barely manage their own time and attention.
You’re ignoring the most important point. India had a larger per capita GDP than China until the 1990s. As the article points out, China’s median income was lower than India’s until 2000. All those historical things you mention about India happened before that time period and were already baked into the numbers as of 1990-2000.
Those numbers also show why the “wealth transfer from India” is mostly fake. India and China were both at a subsistence level. There was no meaningful wealth to transfer.
> Those numbers also show why the “wealth transfer from India” is mostly fake. India and China were both at a subsistence level. There was no meaningful wealth to transfer.
“Wealth transfer” implies that there’s a pile of money in one place that’s moved to another place. That’s not what happened with India. At first, the EIC was a very profitable middleman. It was like Ticketmaster—it made a profit on a trade monopoly between Indian producers and European customers. The nature of middlemen monopolists is that they get rich through a tax on value creating transactions. But they don’t represent a transfer of wealth from one country to the other.
Say a shipment of tea is worth 100 pounds in India, but 400 pounds to the British. EIC has a monopoly on the transaction. They pay the Indian producer slightly over 100 pounds, and charge the British consumer slightly below 400 pounds. They collect the surplus of 300 pounds. But money isn’t being taken from India! Instead, India’s loss is the lost opportunity to get an higher price for their goods. But British consumers also lost—they were overcharged. The EIC captured the value created by the Britain-India transaction.
When the EIC became a government, they got into the business of wealth extraction. They usurped the Mughals prerogative to levy taxes. But this wasn’t profitable! Within less than 20 years of the Battle of Plessay, the East India Company was in dire financial straights. It couldn’t make royalty payments to England and owed large sums of money to the Bank of England. That’s what precipitated the government takeover of the EIC.
The interesting thing about this is that China’s homogeneity is a result of ethnogenesis. 90% of the country is “Han Chinese,” but people in different parts of the country look very different and their dialects of “Chinese” aren’t mutually intelligible. It’s kind of like if you took everyone from AOC to Tim Walz and relabeled them all “British American.”
But does it matter whether you can challenge authority or disrupt the established order? Because surely it’s even harder to do those things in China. And India’s people seems to me to be too little order, not too much.
Yeah, you got a very good point there. Yes, it may seem very weird, but that’s because China was not playing the game.
The game that I suggested earlier assumes that (1) those in power seek to maximize their gains, (2) and such behavior is NOT aligned with social gains. So, basically, a never-ending arms race between the authority and the people. (check Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes if you’re interested)
However, China (and also South Korea) got a weird alignment in interests between the authoritarian government and the people — both of them somehow sought after national economic growth. Since their interests are already aligned, they didn’t play the game that I suggested above.
I think such alignment cannot be reproduced through games nor social interaction b/w powers — rather, it is more of a humane part of the history.
Yes, they are exaggerations, similar things have been said about the Minoans. It's still true AFAIK that these societies were much less militaristic than the ones that followed them.
What is myth about not finding military grade weapons or shields or large fortifications or artifacts on glorification of war and killing, like they found in other civilizations??
Did you even read the paper you cited or was it just a cheap attempt to find a critique bc of your own personal beliefs? - most of the weapons are tools (agri, hunting etc) and the time period is 1900-1400 BC when the civilization was in its last stage.
granted IVC hasn't been excavated to the degree the other civilizations has been, but at this point no concrete evidence has been found of wars and bloodshed at the scale compared to other civilizations.
The mythologizing is in taking the absence of data—as you acknowledge, IVC hasn’t been excavated to the degree of other civilizations—and projecting onto that blank slate utopian ideas about a society free of warfare.
We know very little about the IVC. We haven’t decoded their writing, for example. So how can we draw conclusions in comparison to civilizations (like ancient Egypt) where we know about wars from their extensive written records of wars?
that's a good question and if you lead with that it would have been a genuine discussion but you had to slap the "savage mythologizing" in the comment and what did you base that upon? the excavation that has been done points to a direction, is it a really significant evidence, no but its not nothing and it points to the possibility that IVC was rather less barbaric than the other civilizations and this was prior to the study in TFA which is even more evidence in the similar direction!!! so it seems to me that you are raising suspicions based on strong bias that you have against this region rather than any genuine curiosity or scientific backing.
The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet.
The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.
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