>> it is so important that the people control the means of production
> Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too - they aren’t part of the government.
You left out a very important word from your quote of the GP that's critical to the GP's meaning. I quoted him more fully and emphasized the unquoted word, the, above.
The people != some random group of people who aren't part of the government. The people should be understood as all the people of the nation. "People," by itself, could be a small (or large) group of oligarchs. Those are very different things.
> Should we mandate that workers own 50% of every corporation?
> Decision making is going to be much harder as you have to poll the workers to get a majority vote.
Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.
> The people != some random group of people who aren't part of the government. The people should be understood as all the people of the nation. "People," by itself, could be a small (or large) group of oligarchs. Those are very different things.
That’s the thing. Anyone can be a shareholder of a corporation. There is nothing preventing anyone from buying shares. You just have to be willing to risk your money to buy said shares that may or may not yield any returns - i.e. risk throwing away your money.
> Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.
On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.
The government can unilaterally (corporations have no real say) set laws and even break up corporations or even just outright seize them (i.e. nationalization).
> That’s the thing. Anyone can be a shareholder of a corporation. There is nothing preventing anyone from buying shares.
Are you serious? There's nothing preventing anyone from buying shares, except having lots of money to spare. The people include a great many who don't. That's the thing.
Then you have things like share classes with massively disproportionate voting power and individuals with massively more money than is typical.
The people aren't going to find representation and control through shareholding.
> On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.
One difficulty with the current system is that the actions the people can take to influence the government are too remote from the use of that government's power, so in the end it does a poor job diffusing the "concentrated power" that the GGGP post was talking about. This is true especially in the present day, when that "concentrated power" has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.
> Guess it’s the same everywhere. Downvotes if you disagree.
BTW, if you're not aware, I can't downvote you.
I doubt the downvotes are due to an ideological disagreement or anything like that. If I had to guess the reason, it's that the ideas you're expressing here just don't have much merit and are pretty tone deaf to boot. They're not that much different than saying a penniless, starving man should just buy food, which you personally find pretty affordable as a well-compensated software engineer.
You can buy stock with just a few hundred dollars ...
You of course won’t have much voting power but you aren’t risking all that much money. If you have little to no money in it ... then you should have little to no say in how they conduct their business - it’s none of your business; Would you want random strangers to get a say in how you spend your time and money?
Regardless, no one buys stock to “have influence”. People buy stock to (ultimately) make money.
If said shareholders and their corporations are doing things that are harmful to society at large ... that’s what the government and the laws they enforce are for.
> has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.
Also Amazon’s shareholders do not democratically control the company, so most shareholders are beholden to the board of directors and the few very wealthy large shareholders.
While I do not propose mandatory changes, I think it would behoove us to consider how current power structures affect our freedom and the freedom of others. Amazon has a lot of power over us.
What I advocate is that, if we find the current arrangement problematic, we construct alternative power structures that are democratic in nature. And we use those power structures in lieu of centralized corporate power.
If a single democratically operated company got very large and used its power in anti social ways, I would again advocate that people consider seriously the affects of that power and change their support as needed.
I do think, however, that the “problem” of large democratically controlled powers is a better problem to have than large centrally controlled powers, so it would be an improvement nonetheless.
Ideally, the democratic corporations would also make collective decisions through a congress of rotating company representatives. This would provide some forcing function that would reduce anti social behavior in a single corporation, at the risk of trade embargoes.
We kind of already have that in that democratically elected government officials have the power to unilaterally (without corporations having a say) set laws to constrain the behavior of corporations.
Problem is most of the people don’t elect officials that do so - at least according to some people’s standards.
Institutional Ownership in Amazon is 58% - so arguably most of Amazon's shares aren't owned by people. Of course, eventually all this bottoms out in people....
>Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too
This is a vacuous truth. Technically, everything is people, governments are people, repressive megacorps are people, oil sheiks are people. Obviously that's not what the grandparent meant.
It should also deflate as the economy grows. Wrt the problems of deflation, it may or may not cause some, but it doesn't really matter because people who don't want to participate in Bitcoin don't have to. They can still choose to use inflationary stores of value.
Deflationary "problems" are largely strawmen. We've never had such deflationary money systems to know how it plays out long term.
In the end, people still need to eat and drink, and they're going to pay to meet those needs no matter how much it costs them.
Most of the complaints about deflation are from the Keynesian economists, who for them, it is a major problem. How are they going to pay back all that interest they keep accumulating if people aren't continuously spending?
> As an example my son when he was young he liked carrot juice, so give it to him daily, when we went to the doctor she noticed he had is skin colored and told us to stop, I had no idea that too much carrots can be bad
Well in your son’s case, it’s not harmful per se according to Wikipedia, Carotenosis is harmless - you will just look orange.
As another poster said, it's all about the dosage. Anything can be a poison. Even water - there have been several cases of people dying from drinking too much water, some side effect of taking ecstacy - they felt thirsty however much they were drinking.
Vitamin A is a classic: Too little, and you get blind and your feet start bleeding when you walk. Too much, and you get blind and your feet start bleeding when you walk.
I'm going to go out on a limb, just to be contrarian, and say that no amount of perfluorodecalin is poisonous. You can immerse yourself in it, fill your lungs with it, fill your entire digestive tract with it, and replace a significant amount of your blood with it. It is completely inert to biology, and is readily permeable to atmospheric gases.
Everyone just give him a free pass which is bullshit.
Personally I think the guy is a narcissist given how much he loves attention. Like most narcissists he will shit on you if you get in his way, right and wrong be damned - something to keep in mind.
Regardless of how you feel about this person or any other, would you please not post uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for better than this here.
I get the impression that this is already happening to a certain extent and they are testing the water. On newer/faster devices, you’ll notice Siri transcribing on the screen nearly instantaneously, faster than any server round trip, but with poor accuracy. Then a few seconds later once the server connection is established you’ll see some of the transcription change to be more accurate.
They don't have the dataset needed to train the speech recognition engine, nor do they seem to be willing to deploy some of that $250b in cash to hire engineers smart enough to make a model which only needs the local user's input for training.
You misunderstand what the internet connection is for.
Right now most machine learning models run on server farms and your voice snppet is sent to the server, where the model processes it. They then send the interpretation back
"Local model" means the voice snippet is processed on your device. Never beamed off to a server farm.
The interpretation might be:
Action: internetSearch
QueryString: movie times for "Avengers" [near me || {userPreferences.movieTheater}]
UseLocation: true
Which then kicks off whatever process Siri has for handling internet search actions
> Its not "fake news" that has elected these forces, it was the failure of the former mid-left/mid-right government parties to listen to their people and they have been voted out of office rightfully.
There has been signs of Russian meddling via propaganda though.
Nevertheless it’s the people who voted.
If said people don’t wake up and realize that they are being played as “useful idiots” to destabilize their own country ...
Slowly their radical beliefs peter out and that’s the end of it.