The Europeans seem to have become more free trade curious after recent events so this doesn't seem like it will hold up as a "what if". And I expect that the coming months of US-only inflation are just going to confirm that position for them even i they face a mild recession due to US market access/demand collapse issues.
The EU has always been on the side of free trade (agreements with Turkiye, Canada, Japan, Mercosur, the failed TTIP etc have been worked on for many years).
But it's also always been protective of the internal market and e.g. added tariffs on Chinese steel recently.
> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.
Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
Is this an American thing? No one has ever in my life asked me "Who did you vote for?"
I have had plenty of people behave in a way that made it clear they assumed I agreed with them on political matters/issues that would have us voting the same way (sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly) but I have never been asked this question. Is it common or is it a contrivance in service of the article?
My experience may not be representative, but I think it's very uncommon to outright ask "who did you vote for" in the US. It's more common (although many people still find it impolite or inappropriate in many situations) for someone to bring up an issue that is important to them and that strongly suggests a preference for one of our two viable political parties.
The only scenario where I believe people might directly ask "Who did you vote for?" is screening for dating. I don't know exactly how common it is, but I've heard multiple anecdotes about that being asked on dating apps or first dates, because they're not interested in dating someone who voted for Trump.
Prior to Trump it wasn't really a thing, because both parties were still following the law and maintaining a functioning democracy, so people could date across party lines and just agree-to-disagree about taxes or whatever.
> Making the issue more political, the US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. This isn’t a secret but it taints the perception of US neutrality when making this data available.
First I have heard of this, what's the source for the US editing & censoring global sensing data?
They remove things not germane to the purpose of the data they publish. For example, USGS seismic data is noticeably bereft of most seismic events that are not geological in nature or sometimes related to mining (though in some sources they often scrub the mining ones too). Events of military interest like weapons tests, some target getting blown up in the middle of nowhere that may never make the news, etc is removed.
There are a ton of artifacts that show up in other sensing systems that are indicative of interesting or sensitive things that are outside the scope of their purpose, and these too may be edited from the data.
The people deciding what constitutes an event that should be scrubbed is pretty opaque AFAIK. It is official policy and sensing companies that do a lot of work with the government seem to follow similar guidelines.
Due to the proliferation of crowd sourced and alternative sensing platforms, I would argue that this is increasingly an exercise in futility. Nonetheless people still view many of the US sensing data sources as authoritative for all practical purposes. There are countries with laws dictating that some alternative data they control must be treated as authoritative for all purposes for their country, but that US data is sitting out there.
Well, you could go to the website where they clearly state that some data is reviewed before publication and may be removed or modified. It is a frequently asked question. Or you could find an obvious counter-examples in the data, since it is public. The detection and flagging of anomalous events for review has been automated for decades, also publicly mentioned. I don’t assume everyone knows, I’ve been working with government sensing data for 20 years, but they are quite explicit if you look.
What they remove is a secret AFAICT but if you are an expert in the sensing modality it becomes obvious what should be in the data but isn’t. There are now businesses that specialize in differentially finding or reconstructing things that have been removed or modified in sensing feeds, so the effectiveness has diminished greatly.
Less flippantly, I literally went to the USGS FAQ to find this question https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/does-latest-earthquakes-map-show-n... where it says mining events are not reviewed, but if they are identified, they are still included! So ... I'll ask more explicitly:
Can you provide an explicit LINK to anything that supports your claim? Thanks.
Like others nearby, I’d like to see something more specific.
I’m willing to believe that in some silos (like relatively high-cadence seismographs) there might be some censoring. For example, it’s believable that siting of permanent stations is nudged away from some sensitive areas. Also, more believable in the past (say, 1980s) than the present.
Related, I’m sure that some sensors aren’t allowed to be flown over some areas (e.g., certain military bases) in the US.
However, you are claiming a broad based program of censoring US scientific data - gathered by the government or by government contractors. Like you, I’ve worked in this space for a long time. But I have not seen what you describe.
I wonder if we are working under different definitions of “censor” (see military base remark above)?
Your remarks caught my notice because I have personally worked with GNSS (lower cadence than seismograph) data, and personally know people who placed the sensors, wrote the data assimilation algorithms it uses, and set up the data pipeline. This data is not censored. (Although, famously, it was, before GPS was opened up.) I’m trying to find a way to rectify these two viewpoints.
In the past I've heard similar statements and had people point at 'cooked' raw data as evidence of editing.
'Cooked" generally means raw data with warts removed, the raw data is still available, the cooked data is what's on offer as the primary data of record - typically it may have had sensor errors and saturated bursts removed, undergone light smoothing filtering, and perhaps been geolocated to earth coords rather than retaining raw instrument attitudes, etc.
'Censoring' can mean 'no longer linked on public webpages for easy downloading' - generally the raw and cooked data is still on servers and accessable by direct FTP.
I'd be interested to know what specifically the GP actually meant by that throwaway assertion.
To me OpenAI's response is simply, "It is our honestly held belief that given our available resources private partnership was the only viable way to ensure that we are in control of the most advanced AGI when it is developed. And it is our honest belief opening up what we are developing without a lot of log term due diligence would not be in the best interests of humanity and the best interests of humanity is the metric by which we decide how quickly to open source our progress."
To me you can't win a lawsuit like this that is essentially about a small difference in opinions about strategy, but I am not a lawyer.
My personal opinion is that not creating a for-profit wing would have made a even bigger mess.
(But then I also think this suit is very obviously without merit and the complaint is written in a way that it sounds like lawyers sucking up to Musk to take his money - but people seem to be taking it very seriously!)
I don't think the problem is with having a for-profit wing. The problem is that only the for-profit wing got to use the technology developed by the non-profit, when the non-profit was explicitly tasked with releasing the technology to the public, allowing competition.
I would say you are using the words "explicitly tasked" when the articles of incorporation use the words "seek to" and "when applicable". (And also the "allowing competition" part I don't think is actually in the mix, is there a citation for that?)
""The Founding Agreement was also memorialized, among other places, in OpenAI, Inc.’s December 8, 2015 Certificate of Incorporation, which affirmed that its “resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person.”""
That said, I was only commenting on the idea that creating a for-profit wing was adding to the unusual corporate structure of OpenAI and saying that it really didn't.
Running the headline "Fewer people are buying electric cars" and then conceding that EV sales are rising at the start of the 3rd paragraph is embarrassing for the author Paris Marx and I hope he feels ashamed.
> USB is not the poster child for successful industry-led standards.
Every day billions of devices use USB for charging and data transfer and work just fine.. was there some government intervention that jumped in to make that work that I am unfamiliar with?
However the sausage was made.. and is still being made... may be imperfect and ugly but USB seems pretty darn successful!
No, you be that guy. As many gripes as I have with USB, the EU forcing all phone manufacturers to use a common charging standard was huge. This is the kind of thing where government action really can improve on a Nash equilibrium.
I expect that OpenAI would concede that they used the data in any court case immediately to get that issue off the table, I really don't think they have a strong interest in foot-dragging on this stuff, right?
I would think OpenAI wants the thornier legal issues actually settled so that the whole ecosystem can grow within those terms & they can lobby for the legal changes they need/want?
