A Wizardry and Steamworks list of political edicts is provided on edicts sub-page.

• Margaret Thatcher's counter-argument on the increasing wage cap is that while the income gap between the richest and the poorest might have increased, the overall income of the poorest has in fact increased.
• She continues to argue that socialism in its zeal to make everyone equal has the effect of dragging everyone down, both the poor and the rich alike. In fact, she claims that the opposing party would rather have the rich being poorer even if the poorest would be even poorer perhaps highlighting that class struggle is built on an irrational thought of a vendetta where a class would be penalized regardless whether the punishment would be to the detriment of the other class.
• The former can be traced back to Rawls where Rawls stipulates a notion of equality where no difference in wealth is to be tolerated unless that difference works to the benefit of the worst off group in society. Therefrom it trivially follows that by making a society overall poorer (ie: the rich and the middle class), one should do so since it would favor the worst off group in society; unless, via the Rawls principle of priority, the actions performed would abridge political liberties (ie: abolishing free speech if it would benefit the worst off class).
• Thatcher expresses her view against central banks claiming that central banks take away all political power from the regions that the bank has jurisdiction in. In particular, she talks about the European central bank and against the single currency policy claiming that the European Community is more about a "federal Europe by the back door".
• Known for the quote, "socialism only works until you run out of other people's money".

Explained allegorically by William Forster Lloyd in an essay using grazing pastures as the common and unregulated good and cow herders fighting over the common good and for each additional animal that a cow herder would add to the pasture it might end up in overgrazing such that the other herders would share the resulting damage. If all cattle herders would take the decision to be greedy and add additional animals, then the common good would be depleted to the determent of all.

Garrett Hardin, "freedom in the commons brings ruin for all".

Broadly as a hallmark of communist countries, yet pertaining to post-communist countries in the Balkans, countries such as France or even the US, the concept of political psychiatry can be defined as the abuse of psychiatry as a tool of repression of individuals used by the state in circumstances where people, that must be silenced or have their freedoms restricted, have not broken the law and cannot be put through court or trialed.

Sometimes, by association, the state employs harassment that would drive a person to be distressed at which point psychiatry can be leveraged on a broad spectrum to pin a psychological condition on the person in order to facilitate the suppression of their freedoms and specifically to be deemed unfit for trial. Contrary to Foucault's criticism of the psychiatric institutions, the abuse is in a political context seen as being deliberate and political rather than resulting from the implicit application of a scientific or medical perspective.

In brief, political psychiatry represents a state mechanism through which people can be steamrolled from freedom to jail whilst relieving the state from the burden of proof.

Specifically pertaining to the United States, the term "prison industry" refers to the delegation of prisons from the state to the private sector along with state-provided tax cuts, exemptions and other state subventions that, contrary to the defined purpose of a re-educational institution, result in the patrons of the private prisons to be motivated more by the retention of prisoners than their re-education.

• Chris Hedges, journalist and part-time educator at state prisons, highlights the problems revolving around commercial prisons.
• 13th by Ava DuVernay, analyses state prisons from a racial perspective but sustains the reasoning that for-profit prisons lead to higher incarceration and retention rates.

Constructed historically by Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau, the generalizing idea is that in order to form a state, a community of individuals relinquish some authority and delegate powers to the state in exchange for certain tasks that the state would accomplish on their behalf. Some philosophers, such as Locke and Hobbes mainly discuss authority, and absolute authority once the social contract has been established, Rousseau touches on the subject of authority in relation to slavery but tends to talk more about empowering the individual.

Broadly seen, in modern times, the social contract can be seen as a mutual agreement between an individual and the state that describes their relationship in all public matters. In modern times, where the concept of authority appears more refined and provided that a state benefits from an exchange currency, the payment of taxes from the individual to the state can be seen as part of the social contract where the state is supposed to collect the taxes and use them for public benefit.

In that sense, in spite of the trends of the times, taxes are not tributes but payments made by constituents to the state that needs to distribute the money to other constituents that work for the maintenance of the state (snow shoveling, defense / military, state-subsidized services such as healthcare or education (if so decided), garbage disposal, pest control, maintenance of public utilities, etc).

The phrase is originally credited to Michael Harrington and it is used to describe a stage in advanced capitalist countries where allegedly the tendency is to facilitate wealth for the rich rather than the poor. Michael Harrington's thesis is based on an analysis of poverty in his book "The Other America" where he takes the unique approach to disconsider the official definition of poverty but rather to account instead for social factors, race and overall quality of life. For instance, Harrington accounts for "the working poor" as an effigy of people being employed but struggling to break even whilst implicitly also accounting for the lack of upward mobility. Similarly, Harrington contests the official US rate of unemployment by arguing that the allowed percentage does not account for temporary workers, disadvantaged workers, etc.

The phrase is also known as:

• corporate welfare,
• privatize profits and socialize losses,
• socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor (Andrew Young, used by Martin Luther King Jr.),
• Keynsianism for the rich and monetarism for the poor (Ha-Joon Chang),

• a republic is a system of governance where the people rule via the means of elected officials and in the absence of a monarch,
• a democracy, in its Greek definition is a system of governance where the people rule directly

Both systems do not undermine the will of the people, nor are they in contradiction but the main difference is that in a republic the people govern through elect officials rather than directly which could lead to the belief that a republic denotes an organizational decree whereas democracy is more broad and idealistic.

Robert Nozick as one of the proponents of the minimal state frequently cites the nightwatchmen state where the only legal body that came close to a police force consisted in a loose organization of local citizenry that were collectively delegated to ensure peace within a community (the tasks delegated to the watchmen were minimalistic such as bringing the perpetrators of crime before the Court). Nevertheless a police force as in its ulterior and more modern embodiment as described by Michael Foucault as an institution of control where the police force behaved more proactively than reactively can more or less trace its roots in the foundations of social order due to its historical evolution. Historically, whether that meant securing property, the round up of slaves in the US, the quelling of unions (or the direct involvement in the organization of labor), the peacekeeping between nationalistic or race-based "silo" communities the modern police force ended up being less influenced by a monarch ("men of the king") and more of a force being controlled by the layers of society that had the sufficient political leverage to sway the use of force within the state.

by Martti J. Kari.

The concept was first formulated by Walter Lipmann in "Public Opinion" 1922 and by Edward Bernays in his work "Crystalizing Public Opinion". Sheldon Wolin expanded on the notion of guided democracy by introducing the concept of inverted totalitarianism.

A managed democracy is a formally-democratic government that functions as a de-facto autocracy. The government controls elections and the state apparatus such that citizens are able to formally exercise their democratic rights but without being able to change the inner workings of the state. On the outside, the state appears to be a democracy or at least it is self-defined as a democracy yet due to the accumulation of power or wealth that is hoarded at the upper echelons of society, the power of the individual and the populace at large is diminished to the point of being irrelevant or at least insufficient for political change to take place.

Even though most often found in the context of US politics due to the two party system, political polarization describes the tendency of groups to isolate themselves from other groups and to concentrate power within the group rather than cooperating and relying on other groups. Contrarily to "nuclearisation", polarization would imply that the resulting splinter-groups are opposed Perhaps the idea of political polarization can be derived from more general group dynamics such as Pierre Bourdieu's field theory that describes the interaction between individuals and the group as well as between groups of individuals by following Antonio Gramsci's idea of cultural hegemony.

Contrary to the theory of polarization, Sheldon Wolin would argue that the two-party system is expressed only nominatively and that in practical reality both parties tend to follow a pattern of lowest-common-denominator conservative thought. Wolin argues, on the basis that the coalescing of state powers leads to fascism, that the meld between the opposition and the currently governing party leads to the lack of political alternatives, especially concerning true voter freedoms that are able to bring about real political change.

Polarization does not necessarily entail nor imply a two-party system even though "polarization" is seen physically as an expression of opposites. Following Pierre Bourdieu's thesis on field theory, it is possible to generalize polarization from a -party system to an -party system where very much the same issues would prevail yet in a more complex fashion.

One Internet myth revolves around determining the extent of freedom of information of a given Internet search engine by going to the images section and looking up the phrase tiananmen square. When the image results appear, there are two possible outcomes (or a mix of both):

• images of the Tiananmen square massacre dominate the search results,
  • iff. images of the Tiananmen square massacre are dominant then the search engine is said to be free or impartial,
• photos of the Tiananmen square itself in China dominate the search results,
  • iff. photos of the square are dominant the the search engine is said to be biased towards Chinese politics

The validity of the thesis hinges primarily on the fact that the "man with shopping bags blocking the tank" (tank man) is an image that has become over the years a well-established trope symbolizing the resistance of the individual against the state. Therefrom, it is assumed that any impartial search engine would provide the image of the man blocking the path of the tanks as one of the first images due to its overwhelming popularity contrasted with the popularity of just random photos of the Tiananmen square itself. Furthermore, up to this date, "Tank Man" remains censored in China which tends to give credence to the search engine bias thesis.

Note that the thesis is different from the formal, as formal as it may be, narrative that suggests that the search terms would have originally been "tank man" instead of "tiananmen square". The drama concerning the "tank man" search terms has already been thoroughly debated, a shameless citation of Wikipedia permitting:

"On June 4, 2021, the 32nd anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, searches for the Tank Man image and videos were censored by Microsoft's Bing search engine worldwide. Hours after Microsoft acknowledged the issue, the search returned only pictures of tanks elsewhere in the world. Search engines that license results from Microsoft such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo faced similar issues. Microsoft said the issue was "due to an accidental human error". The director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, said he found the idea it was an inadvertent error "hard to believe". David Greene, Civil Liberties Director at Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that content moderation was impossible to do perfectly and "egregious mistakes are made all the time", but he further elaborated that "At worst, this was purposeful suppression at the request of a powerful state."

Whilst it seems that the search term "tank man" has indeed been adressed by Microsoft, the search term "tiananmen square" still yields random photos of the Tiananmen square and not the overly popular tank man amongst the first search results.

Probably for the same reason that no prosecution has ever been made and brought to end against the miners and the people that organized them, if you look up the Romanian "mineriada" on Google you will barely find any violent images, even if the reports from the press were gnarly and by far more graphical by what the images show.

Although, this might be a bad example, in the sense that it might not be an arrangement with the search engine itself, due to such images being likely censored by Romanians themselves.

Same results by using the search term "Haiti" for different search engines.

Ultimately a Hegelian dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, politics of continuity represent the movement of society as viewed from the perspective of various crises as the milestones of civic evolution. The concept is illustrated by Milton Friedman in the context of economics stating that "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.". The same case, is made by David Harvey stating that capitalism never solves its own problems but rather moves the problems around geographically. One of the fears of skeptics in modern political thought, for instance, as Hegel being paraphrased by David Icke "problem, reaction, solution" is that the entire Hegelian cycle of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis might not be organic, as a natural evolution of thought, but rather a pre-synthesised or pre-conspired arrangement, that might not be representative of society as a whole, but rather leveraged as a device to push policy, that either would benefit only the very few, or a policy that has already stipulated in the idealistic sense.

In many ways, the politics of continuity pertaining to crises, particularly focusing public attention on disasters (ie: Naomi Klein's "disaster capitalism"), is contemptible in the sense that it precludes noteworthy major events (ie: scientific breakthroughs, noteworthy societal events) by diverting attention towards subjects that carry "shock value" such that human history and public recollection becomes a series or sequence of never-ending calamities strung together.

In the Declaration of Independence in the United States, it is stated that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." essentially stating the Rousseuian basis upon which human rights are built and in particular the observation that the right to "life", "liberty" and "the pursuit of Happiness" are unalienable human rights. Aside from issues arising from the statement that "the pursuit of Happiness" is an unalienable human right, leading one to wonder whether that is a negative or positive right, a different question that arises is whether the converse holds equally true.

Namely, is "death", "captivity" and "the pursuit of Unhappiness" also unalienable and irrevocably negative rights? Although superficially contrarian at first, the "right to death" is subject of pertinent debate with regards to medical conditions bringing forth the notion of "assisted suicide". Following the example in the same jurisdiction, the United States does not approve, at the federal level, of "the right to death" such that "assisted suicide" is not legal in the United States (and only partially legal in a handful of its member states). As it follows, it seems that "death", "captivity" and "the pursuit of Unhappiness" are not universal unalienable human rights. In fact, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as stipulated by the United Nation, does not offer a follow-up clause that the converse of, for instance, "life" as would be "death", as a human right. As it follows, it can be said that individuals have the right to their own life but yet do not hold the rights to their own death, where, for all practical scenarios, an individual's right to death is held or withheld by the state (as a monopoly on violence, now a monopoly on death). Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill makes the claim in "On Liberty" that "[state intervention for] His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." meaning that a libertarian society should not monopolize the right to death via the right to self-harm.

In a narrower sense, and culturally speaking, the "right to fail" as coined by Zinsser comes as a reply to the societal urge for individuals to succeed at all costs. The urge to succeed, as a desire for elitism, could be seen as the transformation of "the right to Happiness" from a negative into a positive right that is then imposed as an obligation on the individual - in other words, as it follows from the theory, as well as from all cultural or practical imperatives, one has the obligation to be happy. The obligation to be happy, or, rephrased in Zinsser's terms, the obligation to be "successful" in particular with relation to the welfare state, makes one wonder whether individuals have the right to their own existence.

Recognizing the inability of modern societies to conceptualize "failure", or willing to spin failure as the road to success, and borrowing the concept of "tyranny of the majority" from Alexis de Tocquerville it is often the case that societies become overzealous and tend to pro-actively impose success (or, following the theory, impose happiness) without even wanting to recognize the concept of unhappiness, strife, misery or failure as being a self-standing concept, or counter-intuitively to them, a set of unique albeit particular human desires. Indeed, de Tocquerville argues that society tends to blanket cover all its extremities and favor some normative mediocrity yet theory would state that if and only if an individual holds the right to their own existence then both the "right to life" as well as "the right to death" must be satisfied.

As per the 1st Amendment, the right to free speech is defined as: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

In other words, the 1st Amendment makes the "freedom of speech" a negative right. "The right to be heard" (that would be a positive right) is still not guaranteed in any way, such that neither congress, nor third-parties, nor individuals, are dutifully bound to facilitate or, in any way, accommodate for "free speech".

The thesis that people might not be free of the consequences following free speech, is contradictory to the text of the first amendment that clearly states the protection from consequences, expressed via the creation of laws to restrict free speech (other "consequences", such as various forms of damages would be redundant to be mentioned because they already constitute criminal offenses):

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of […]"

The quote clearly implies that the person exercising their free speech are protected from the consequences of Congress via the restrictions imposed on Congress to not make laws that would abridge their speech.

In that sense, the supposition that free speech does not imply freedom from consequences is simply false by definition of free speech as stated by the U.S. Constitution and the 1st amendment.

However, if one would interpret the 1st amendment as it is written, it is obvious that the protections from free speech only apply to Congress, such that repercussions that might entspring from interacting citizens are not covered by free-speech rights. Obviously, the implication that "murder" would then be legal in case some citizen infringed another citizen's rights, as an act of revenge, is false because any illegal act is still illegal, just that "free speech" is not involved. In effect, the amendment defines "free speech" abstractly, highlighting the fact that free speech is, in fact, inherent to all people (in a state of nature), and defined as per the above, as a "negative right" such that protections for citizens infringing each other's free speech would require "free speech" rights to be turned into a "positive right", where Congress would be required to intervene in cases where citizens would have infringed each other's free speech rights.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of […], and guarantees the rights of citizens to express themselves without their speech rights to be abridged by fellow citizens […]"

would be turning the 1st amendment into a positive right. Then again, as per Nozick's minimal state, the excess of positive rights leads to a big government and authoritarianism such that the state tends to enact positive rights sparingly.

Fundamentally, individuals and corporations represent one and the same thing if "individuals" are seen as a group. That being said, the most that "single individuals" can hope from corporations in what regards the state, is that Congress itself shall not infringe on the rights of the corporations to express themselves. However, corporations still have the ability to use their own negative rights to abridge and/or limit the right of individuals using their products or services without the act representing an infringement of "free speech" rights. Of course, that does not mean that individuals cannot sue corporation for losses, in case the individuals contribute in some way to the corporation, in a way where the contractual agreement can be deemed unfair, but that would be judged as losses or damages, and not judged as an infringement of "free speech" rights. In other words, two "single individuals" cannot sue each other over "free speech" rights (because Congress is not even involved!), and when you scale one of the "single individuals" to a corporation, the same rules applies.

The full text of the 2nd amendment of the constitution of the United States reads the following:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

and is said to have a connection to the English Bill of Rights that is worded somewhat more amply and with reference to protestants and their rights to bear arms.

Interestingly, both the 2nd amendment but even the English Bill of Rights do mention the notion of "self-defense", or rather mention individual self defense (ie: citing from the English Bill of Rights, "[…]is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law."), yet it seems that both the 2nd amendment and the English Bill of Rights refer to the "right to bear arms" as the means to deter or prevent statist oppression. The 2nd amendment itself is worded directly for that purpose "[…] being necessary to the security of a free State [..]" whilst the English Bill of Rights ends with "[…] when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression." "Self-defense" is not necessarily insisted upon (ie: the English Bill of Rights mentions "oppression" which is far away from random altercations, and the 2nd amendment text on "the right to bear arms" could just as well been meant "as a hobby"), and it makes sense, when "the right to bear" arms is to be interpreted politically.

In brief and in theory, the criticism of the 2nd amendment is a struggle between statists and individualists, with statists wanting to delegate security and safety to the government, and with individuals wanting the people to preserve the power themselves. Due to that, the topic is a highly polarizing topic, given that there are no wrong or right answers, and that it becomes more of a matter of choice whether one leans more towards government control or independence from the state.

Regrettably, 2nd amendment discussions have as a side-casualty people that like guns as a hobby, which is actually an organic event that perhaps entrancing from the 2nd amendment but became a cultural-trope in itself, where the "power to remove tyrants" is just a glorified mythos and gun technology itself becomes the centerpiece.

The 2nd amendment has become a way more popular subject at the dawn of the bridging of countries and societies as well as more recent events in history that revealed more government outreach than it was previously thought to exist (COVID-19, cross-border modern espionage, etc.) thereby falling as an "actual matter" on the other side of the spectrum where it has been determined that the government tends to have more power than its people. Naturally, few states are true democracies, in the Greek sense yet most implement democracy via elects in order to form a republic. Nevertheless, the problem still remains whether the elect individuals themselves are not provided with too much power in order to become part of the tyranny, such that the 2nd amendment (or rather, "the spirit of the 2nd amendment", and that is "the endurance of a free State") becomes even more important to be preserved.

It is interesting that one of the arguments against the 2nd amendment is that the state would always be able to overpower an individual's capabilities regardless of how armed an individual might be. It is true that at the time of the writing of the 2nd amendment and at the time of writing of the English Bill of Rights the level of sophistication of weaponry was scarce, with flint-lock guns and gunpowder cannons or swords being the main highlights, such that the latter point holds. Nevertheless, the statement does not offer a way to not lose the capability to topple oppressive forms of government in case that the 2nd amendment were dismissed. If the 2nd amendment were to be dismissed, the state would have to provide an alternative form of ensuring that "security of a free State" would still be in the hands of the people.

Asking someone to provide an alternative means to remove tyranny in case the 2nd amendment were to be disbanded, would reveal their polarity on whether they are a statist or not and would dismiss any incertitude whether they are genuinely concerned about "safety" or they would just rather prefer a top-down government with power removed from the people and only concentrated at the level of the state. However, the later form of government would have high chances to become a tyranny, and that is mainly, exactly as the 2nd amendment provisions, due to the 2nd amendment being in historical context a tool for ensuring a free state and removing tyrants.

In that sense, the 2nd amendment escapes the notion of "guns" or rather abstracts away from it as sheer force, and it is clear that modern capabilities (ie: jet planes) are very far away from being owned "by the people", yet the 2nd amendment still stands as the means to ensure that government power is still contingent upon the will of the people and not a concentrated formation of individuals that rule for themselves and their own.

All other discussions on the topic of the 2nd amendment, with notable mentions such as "guns don't kill people, people kill people" or debates on "personal safety" are politically irrelevant and seem to be fodder for talkshows and political roundtables, given that they all fall on either side of the polarization and discussion is more about the failures of both sides of the polarity to enact sound policy for their own side.

Published by Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798, the theory can be summarized as the following: initial growth in overall (sustainable) GDP leads to a growth in the overall population, however a growth in population leads to a decrease in overall GDP.

As an allegory, the Malthusian view can be portrayed as a patch of land that is cultivated by farmers which yields a certain amount of GDP. As the land increases the GDP, the farmers tend to increase in population due to the overall increase in quality of life. However, since the quality of life increases, this means larger lifespans for all farmers and less resources for all.

The following steps would occur in succession:

• farmers have good harvests,
• income raises per farmer,
• population rises,
• there is less land available per farmer,
• average output falls per farmer,
• income of farmers falls

The Malthusian model can be explained by the economic principle of diminishing returns, where each increase along the production line yields smaller returns. As time increases, the model ends up in a stagnant system where the wages and population remain constant relative to each other with no other way to escape.

The latter stagnation is called a "Malthusian trap" and thanks to records held by the British Empire, before the industrial revolution, the population of Europe found itself in a Malthusian trap. As it so happened at the time, the black death in Europe caused a massive decrease in population which resulted in a boon after the black death due to the decreased population. Unfortunately, up to the industrial revolution, the same Malthusian effect could be observed where the wages stagnated relative to the growth in population.

Historians argued that two factors lead to the great escape for Europe out of the Malthusian trap, namely technological development and later, fueled by the massive increase of productivity per laborer, political rights that made wages rise entirely out of the Malthusian trap.

Modern accounting do not reveal a correlation with the Malthusian model due to various socio-economic and political aspects of population dynamics. For instance, it has been observed that in modern times urbanization, and implicitly wealth accumulation, leads to a counter-Malthusian effect where urban population tends to have less children per capita such that unbounded population growth cannot be projected.

• The Jaffe Memo

Perhaps one shining example of the Malthusian fallacy is the infamous Jaffe memorandum, written by Frederick S. Jaffe in 1973, which was requested by Bernard Berelson, head of the Population Council of Planned Parenthood in the USA.

In popular culture, the Jaffe memo has been seen as inflammatory due to the memorandum suggesting drastic measures for population control (ie: "encourage increased homosexuality", "fertility control agents in water supply", suggesting "chronic depression" as a population control measure, "compulsory sterilization", "discouragement of private home ownership", etc.). The Jaffe memo has thusly become a point of controversy with Frederick Jaffe having to ulteriorly make followup statements saying that the memorandum contains only voluntary suggestions and that he never implied that the measures described in the document be implemented through coercive measures. For instance, in addressing the senator Alan Cranston in 1973, Jaffe mentions: "the memorandum makes clear that neither I nor the Planned Parenthood Federation of America advocates any of the specific proposals embodied in the table which go beyond voluntary actions of individual couples to space and limit births."

Regardless of intent, Jaffe makes an iconic Malthusian argument in his memorandum stating that unregulated parenthood will lead to an unsustainable population growth. In fact, the very first point in the memorandum is almost a verbatim transliteration of the Malthusian principle, citing from the Jaffe memorandum: "[…] continued U.S. population growth will inevitably cause a deterioration in the quality of life of this and future generations […]".

Interestingly enough, in chapter II of the Jaffe memorandum, Jaffe does mention Thomas Robert Malthus, citing: "[… on population policy and assumptions …] Some of these assumptions go back in the literature for decades and centuries (e.g., Malthus' "population bounty") but have never been subjected to empirical verification. Instead, they have been accepted as conventional wisdom and in turn, tend to impede and distort clarification for the issues involved in assessing alternative policy proposals."

One could assume that Frederick Jaffe's statement is a false representation of Malthus' work, namely, The Malthusian principle is always explained based on the records of the British empire (in terms of wages, population size and productivity) as well as the dynamics that occurred after the industrial revolution. In fact, the Malthusian trap is observable based on records both before and after the black death (that wiped out one third of the population in Europe), such even if the black death were to have been man-made, it did not offer a solution to escape the Malthusian trap.

The trolley problem seems to be choice between life and death with no other option - yet, on the higher order, if one believes in the existence of non-determinism, then obviously there is always some other option (surely, one could argue that it might have detrimental outcomes and in various proportions with various applications and for various purposes, etc.).

One example, is the tersely studied "Prisoner Dilemma", initially formulated in 1993 by William Poundstone as:

"Two members of a criminal gang, A and B, are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communication with their partner. The principal charge would lead to a sentence of ten years in prison; however, the police do not have the evidence for a conviction. They plan to sentence both to two years in prison on a lesser charge but offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain: If one of them confesses to the crime of the principal charge, betraying the other, they will be pardoned and free to leave while the other must serve the entirety of the sentence instead of just two years for the lesser charge."

and the typical analysis of outcomes is the following:

• If A and B both remain silent, they will each serve the lesser charge of 2 years in prison.
• If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free while B serves 10 years in prison.
• If A remains silent but B betrays A, A will serve 10 years in prison and B will be set free.
• If A and B both betray the other, they share the sentence and serve 5 years.

Whilst all of the above is true, the context used is very reductionist and, just as a single example, it assumes that the person arresting the members of the gang is a legitimate agent.

Even in the original formulation, it is unclear why the person imprisoning both the gang members would not just imprison them forever irrespective on the relation between A and B and then perhaps claim credit for both of them whilst betraying both of them.

The problem is that when moral models are applied to real situations, it sometimes turns out that the reasoning cannot be applied, or rather, the application does not match contexts that are not as reduced as the context that the model has been created in. In some ways, moral frameworks are just as susceptible to context, just like simplistic models in economic theory that cannot be applied to all cases.

Following the definition of the world "philanthropy" such as "the desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good causes", the oil-backed philanthropy phrase highlights the means through which the goal of the definition of the word "philanthropy" is obtained.

"Oil-backed philanthropy" expresses that the more means that you dispose of, the easier, more convenient and even beneficial it would be to become philanthropist. Furthermore, the phrase would sound critical, given that it would imply that the converse would additionally hold true, such that in the absence of lavish means, it might be difficult to become a "philanthropist", or, at worse, to slink into "misandry" as the symmetric opposite.

Counter-intuitively trickle-down economics is not placed within the economics section due to being a matter of policy rather than a standard of economics and economists argue that the "trickle down economics" term has never really been coined by an economist in the first place.

Trickle-down economics is frequently represented by pouring wine into a pyramid of glasses at the top and then noticing that the wine tends to spill to the lower levels of the pyramid. Of course, this a fallacy right from the physical concept that the metaphor hinges upon, namely that glasses have finite capacity, whereas wealth has no determined finite capacity such that pouring wine at the top does not necessarily imply that the glass will spill any wine towards the lower levels. A similar older metaphor is the "horse and sparrow" theory where it is said that if the horse is fed enough oats, some of the oats will spill on the road for the sparrows to collect. However, even the "horse and sparrow" metaphor hinges on the biological constant that the horse will eventually end up satiated, which, does not apply to wealth at all.

A real scenario that has been typical of many East European countries, that is very illustrative of the trickle-down economics, incidentally due to the "reset" via the revolutions following the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, where bonds were handed out to the population at large in order to compensate them for the communist fallacy that all men are equal (including wealth). These bonds ended up being gate-kept by the best opportunists, criminals, loan sharks as well as the rest of the people that were capable of monopolizing the bonds and interested enough to buy the bonds out from everyone else such that this wealth ended up, in reverse, as per Joseph Stiglitz, in the hands of the few and trickling-up instead of down.

Other scenarios include the fish-feeding effect, described by donations, subventions, relief payments, reparations and other funds that are given out by philanthropists that, counter-intuitively, end up being monopolized by sharks that form around the faucet of money without any thought of trickling the money down in any way. Mostly this money ends up being withheld severely towards the top, by sharing the money with friends, family or political allies that are themselves at the top. In any case, the distribution of a trickle-down economics policy is severely skewered towards a logarithmic curve where the money does spill across some layers at the top but very little of it spreads to the lowest levels.

(author unknown, old illustration cca. 1980 from an electronics flyer)

A lot of criticism is extended to contemporary art in general due to the fact that computers have the capability to generate images on-demand based on previously trained models by supplying the algorithm with a phrase or keywords of what the resulting generated image should depict. Extreme criticism even considers that art, as a whole, is now futile and that AI-generated art will replace artists due to the rendered images that AI can create.

It must be observed that art consists in both the technical prowess to create a work of art, but also involves having the idea of what should be realized. If art is reduced just to the technical ability to carry out artistic work, then it might hold true that artificial intelligence will generate all art in the future, however if the ability to express original ideas are to be considered part of a work of art, then artificial intelligence cannot replace artists.

A machine learning model might be trained on a style of music to generate, or a style of painting, and requested to generate a new piece of art, yet in doing so, all the components that are a characteristic of the original piece of art are present. The fallacy of AI "generating" or "creating" can be reduced to telling a computer to use a random number generation algorithm to generate sequences of numbers, and then considering that the number sequences created are "unique"; something that Eliza talking AIs have relied upon in order to hold conversations with human beings in the past.

Here are some related examples where the technical difficulty required to accomplish a task has been reduced considerably yet it made the domain flourish:

• The Unity framework has been a framework that many independent game developers have been using to develop games. Many of these games are highly acclaimed, with the game developers themselves being self-taught. The games are are often not developed from scratch, with many of the components being bought or existing as demonstrations, however that does not prevent the games from having a great reception due to the uniqueness of the ideas expressed by the author.
• Manga or Anime, are very abstract compared to Renaissance paintings, where every detail is typically exposed, however Anime has become extremely popular and arguably the attribution is to the ideas expressed by the author and not necessarily to the drawings that are similar between various artists.

• The image above, seems interesting and unique, but note that the person using the website to generate the AI has provided a very, very, very precise description (encased by the rectangle on the right) of what they would like to see such that it would be wrong to attribute the art of work to the engine generating the image. Similarly, some of our pages use a certain template format that uses the title "Realization" in order to describe the process of applying some theory and creating the product in practice.
• Newspapers hire artists to express ideas and irrespective of what the artist might agree with politically, the artwork is still attributed to the artist.

You can also read up on our reasoning about AI-assisted art where some hashes are used to generate NFT-like uniqueness tokens.

The reason for most political parties being catch-all and catering to population segments that are not congruent with their political views is due to the parties having the obligation, by the definition of a majority vote, to appeal to audiences as large as possible, such that targeting a small segment of society, be it on opposed ends of the spectrum, is wasteful and will definitely not guarantee the majority position within a parliament.

Most states to date are a mix of ideas, some left, some right-leaning ideas, such that listening to someone pin blame on pure abstract, yet well-defined terms, such as "capitalism" or "communism" can be very jarring and leads one to conclude that the person pinning the blame does not understand either forms of government.

In reality, what is labeled as "politics" is more than often just disguised as a show, where the people that consider themselves "politicians" are barely able to enunciate or define any political terminology, in favor of soap-opera scandals, underhand agreements, corruption, cults of ego and other stuff-of-the-moment that does not even derive from nor pertain to ideology.

Discrimination is the act of disfavoring an identity over other identities whilst positive discrimination is the act of favoring one identity over other identities but for the sole purpose of the promoting identity itself rather than on the merits of the members of that identity.

While discrimination follows the path of polarization at the level of society with over-competition being one of the consequences, positive discrimination leads to a false overview of the disposition of merit within a society. Both discrimination and positive-discrimination are detrimental to the development of a society.

Here is an example of racial discrimination: "It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks." - Adolf Hitler

Here is an example of racial positive-discrimination (and discrimination): "There is just a lot of super talented hardworking people in China who strongly believe in manufacturing, they won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they will be burning the 3am oil, they won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all." - Elon Musk

The point of positive-discrimination is that it is discriminatory towards Chinese workers, in the sense that it presupposes that the average Chinese worker deliberately or willingly seeks to burn the 3am oil but not out of necessity and not by being coerced to do so (in reality, sweatshops, poor working conditions, and various other factors are being brushed over; as a practical instance thereof, the 966 working hour system).

The data reported by a country is accepted by auditors mostly on good faith without any realistic possibility to verify whether the data has not been tampered with or has been outright faked.

The former, should seem rather trivial, given that, let's say, crime records have a pipeline that follows a pattern such as, investigating murders, then reporting them to the precinct, then the precinct reporting forward to the regional administration, then the regional administration reporting forward, and so on, till the data reaches the international auditors, and it just makes sense that the data obtained by the international auditors cannot be checked, because no auditor will go all the way down the pipeline to verify whether the amount of crimes committed in a region is the exact amount that has been reported.

People tend to oversee the fact that the data is collected on good faith and then the data is used as the means to further justify actions or draw conclusions. In some cases, some of the conclusions seem funny, for instance, comparing criminality between countries such as the U.K. and Romania, on the basis of reported data, where the U.K. seems to have more crime than Romania, that does not sound plausible, especially the very large slice of rural land in Romania where, in many cases, there is barely any electricity, gas, or the bare means to survive, let alone the area being militarized well-enough to be able to account for all the crimes. One of the most hilarious cases along the very same lines has been an event regarding the hospital conditions with Europe and with Romania sending data to international auditors that made Romania seem a country with hospital conditions much better than many other countries with much larger GDP.

However, after press-investigations, as well as common-knowledge the conditions were, in fact, horrendous such that the data that Romania handed over extremely sub-estimated the hospital conditions.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of agency, for instance, it would not be feasible to send OSCE observers every single time, in order to hold bad-actor countries like Romania accountable and double-check their outbound reports, policy and especially common European policy is made by drawing conclusions from the data at hand where the values reported by individual countries is taken for granted. That being said, it might so happen that, judging in this particular case, Belgium would end up sanctioned due to their horrible infection rate in hospitals of while Romania would be lauded for their whooping that is even half that Germany, one of the largest economical powers in Europe.

In the midst of a world-wide mini-rebellion against international organizations (WHO, UN, etc), whether implied or explicit, along with the niche criticism involving various conspiracy theories, it is imperative to realize that people tend to not be capable of overlooking their own observation frame and that, overall, since recorded times back in the 1800, world-wide poverty has (in fact) been considerably and consistently going down.

Regardless of the money printing press, monetary capital is typically backed by value, and in the absence of value, the monetary capital is worthless or just inflation, particularly during times of a liquidity crisis. That being said, capital is not infinite and cannot be generated ad infinitum, such that wealth tends to get balanced around globally. Increase in wealth in one region might mean a decrease in another region. In this particular case, the idea is that for the global level regarding wealth to rise, some losses must be universally accrued, such that individuals in the developing world have noticed their own purchasing power decrease.

In theory, it might so be that governing bodies might have found a way to globally reduce wealth, by spreading out responsibility across jurisdictions, with the hopes that the effect would not be as dooming as creating a large disproportionate wealth gap, such as the one generated by the cold war. In leveraging that technique, it is possible to raise up the status of disfavored countries and populations, with only minimal and fractional losses spread out over a large yet developed population.

Naturally, observing your own wealth being reduced, tends to lead to an observational trap, where the global status is assessed from your own observation frame. However, it is a fact that, overall, globally, and on planet earth, not only is poverty being eradicated and very successfully, but there are regions that are, in fact, developing when they were deemed to be areas that will never do so.

It is maybe just human nature to have the duality of being empathetic and wanting to help people, but at the same time not really wanting to directly commit yourself and assume losses for that goal, frequently resorting to playing paddy cake with responsibilities.

Given two sets and , the definition of the "no true Scotsman fallacy" is that iff. then it follows that . The corollary is such that iff. but , then it trivially must follow that .

This leads to apparent insincerities in political debate where someone points out that, say, there exists an idealized image of a Scotsman with a person being Scottish () yet the Scotsman is observed to not follow their idealized behavior () yet the conclusion is not that for the purpose of maintaining the idealized image.

Unfortunately, the Scotsman is a treasure-trove of fallacies, half-truths, slim or superficial knowledge and with very poor application to practical realities such that a whole list of abuse of this "flash card" or "flash subject" can be constructed. We will try to illustrate a few of them that seem the most obvious, using basic set theory, built on top of the definitions, along with proper instantiations to practical realities.

is a fallacy outside abstraction (only religion deals in ultimate abstraction such the paradoxical existence of an "all-powerful God" that can do no wrong, all people living in Scotland are Scottish and absolutely conform to Scottish behavioral patterns, etc), such that frequently turns into, say, rather , that is "some people hold a Scottish residence card" rather than "all people that live in Scotland are Scottish", and iff. then this leaves the ability for a "person holding a Scottish residence card" to "not do something a Scottish person would do" . Obviously, this does not allow us to conclude; ironically, in order to fix the fallacy, that there are no "true Scottish people" or that there "are no Scottish cultural patterns" such that should be a fallacy!

This can be observed even graphically as a Venn diagram, where two identical sets superpose each other when they are equal, yet leave an intersectional area when they are disjunct. Following the story, can be a person living in Scotland but would not follow Scottish behavioral patterns .

Yet, that does not mean that Scottish people do not follow Scottish behavioral patterns such that still holds true, but only partially, and only for the people living in Scotland that also additionally follow Scottish patterns (in other words, the area where two subsets of "people in Scotland" , respectively "people that follow Scottish patterns" are equal to each other , which would be the "True Scotsmen!" mentioned).

With that said, now there exists an such that in a context where there exist two subsets of and such that , then, the following can be concluded for the following statements:

• is a fallacy,
• is a fallacy,
• , respectively is true,
• is false

Combing back to current day, the conclusion is that the "no true Scotsman" statement is a fallacy only in political terms where the question "what is a Scotsman" is answered with colonial idealism such as "anyone that holds a residence permit for Scotland". In principle, as far as adherence to written laws go, this is correct, because ultimately, it is the only written measure of a Scotsman that is official. However, the argument that some people in Scotland might have been practicing some behavioral pattern for a very long while, such that the allegorical Scotsman is disgruntled when reading about an other fellow-Scotsman committing a felony, and still concludes that the person is "not a true Scotsman", might very well hold true if the answer to "what is a Scotsman?" is shifted from "a person with a Scottish residency permit" to, say, cultural and/or behavioral patterns such as "a person that follows Scottish cultural / behavioral patterns".

Mostly, colonial idealist ideas such as "we are all equal" are misconstrued understandings of Rousseau's natural unalienable rights. That is, via Rousseau (and other French humanists) people are indeed equal yet in the right to life, yet we are not modeled the same (following distinctions between equality, assignment and models / weak equality and/or equivalence). The fallacies around the "no true Scotsman fallacy" story is a desperate attempt to equate people with a common measure such as "bureaucratic identity", which fails hilariously when cultural and /or behavioral stereotypical patterns are considered.

Unless you adhere to the absolute (which is a fallacy in itself, "there is no true abstraction") the "no true Scotsman fallacy" is always fallacious for all realistic scenarios.

One phenomenon loosely labeled as "marks inflation" is the act of falsely increasing grades for pupils or students due to various reasons that most of the time turn out to be political. The result is that pupils or students end up with grades that they do not deserve, end up competing with peers unfairly, the teacher or lecturers soft-quit and play it safe by being involved as little as possible with the work environment. Trivial causes for this pattern could include, politically connected pupils or students that hold leverage over educators, a weak government or institutions that are not able to maintain a level of integrity that would allow a fair assessment, trivial corruption along the exchange of favors between students and educators, as well as very basic game theory mechanics that interestingly favor the "marks inflation" behavioral pattern.

The reasoning follows the idea that there is no systemic nor direct pitfall for an educator to hand out very high marks - while there may exist a marking scheme, there is no factual scale on how that scheme is made and often can be interpreted in various ways. Conversely, assuming the possibility of complaints, formalities that incur delays and end up being a burden to the educator as well as generalized "displeasement" (or labeled loosely, "negativity") that people generically tend to avoid, it is only detrimental for an educator to hand out low grades. To add to this, there is another factor that amplifies the situation if one were to account for non-governmental education that is paid for by students where the situation might blur the line on whether the payment is for promotion or for "good education". Iff. education is a product, then a customer's complaint that they got a bad mark, is always valid, in an economical sense (and can always be justified or argued for)! To sum up, handing out high or low marks is not symmetric and, if one were to err on the side of caution, handing out high marks is guaranteed to be a policy that always wins the game; albeit, trivially.

In order to instantiate the talk, consider the case of giving a passing grade vs. the case of failing a pupil for, let's say, an average educator in Europe. In this situation, a passing grade would allow the student to promote and that would be the end of it. Failing a student on the other hand, would make the educator, have to justify the failure on any follow-up complaint, attend formal meetings over summer (maybe even cross-examinations) as well as shorten their own personal summer holidays in order to attend the re-examination of the failed student after the summer break. Clearly, the distinction between passing or failing a student, considering the above, boils down to just a matter of ethics on the behalf of the educator and there is no reason, no reward and no gain on an educator's behalf to fail a student.

In closing, "marks inflation" is a direct demonstration of the effects of negativity bias, namely the idea that "doing good" is often taken lightly, while "doing bad" is disproportionately taken seriously. Also, at the extreme, leading to spirals.

An engine with an interesting application at the end of a writeup on generational wealth in socialism.

One contemporary thesis that is thrown around a lot, in particular by oligarchic structures, is an idea derived from Adam Smith's invisible hand, with a Nietzschean acceleration touch, claiming that a dichotomy can be constructed between "success" and "failure" base on the concept of "luck". The thesis is typically applied, as usual, downward in order to belittle the efforts of people that did not succeed, by claiming that they "just had bad luck". Even though, a correct application of Adam Smith's invisible hand just in terms of market selection would not require "luck", because a good merchant would bubble up due to the quality of their business, the thesis can also be dismissed easily by realizing that in order for a dichotomy to exist based on "luck", no other components should distinguish between "success" or "failure". However, in many cases, in particular in cases where oligarchic structures invoke such a distinction, even if we were to consider "luck" to be the only element in the context of the distinction, then the distinction is trivially false because "luck" would rely on non-intervention and/or protectionism that are both frequently part of the context as well.

In principle, for both the "Invisible Hand" to work, and even for "luck" to be a determinant, the law must be upheld where, in most cases, the underlying system is far from a meritocracy with market players abiding by the law.

TL;DR, in a sentence, "Breaking the law (stealing) and then claiming that other people had "bad luck" such that they are not as well-off as you, does not make you "lucky" nor superior in any way, it just implies that you are a crook."

Looking at the frequently adulated "nordic socialism", the original ruse was based on a contract that the government would suck up all the generational wealth, in exchange for taking care of the population, which is a promise that was never fulfilled on the end of the government, with the government modernly dropping the contract altogether and using immigration to solve their market issues. The result of sucking up all the generational wealth, as well as an extended lifespan due to advances in medical care, has been that the ageing young generations have not had a vantage point to be able to be competitive with other other competitors in other economies that might have not implemented the same socialist policy. Most young adults are now, in terms of timeline, waiting to inherit the generational wealth, in order to construct a life, idling around or getting mauled in dead-end jobs without managing to raise capital that can be transferred to the next generation.

As a snowball-effect, this leads to the aging young population having fewer kids, hence the drop in birth rate, due to low guarantees from the future. The classical mistake is the sacrifice of the future, for the present, the favoritism shown towards the aging population to the disfavor of the young, which is a rather classical mistake of socialism. One problem with placing bets into the future, is that the future cannot be predicted and one should realize that the same system that the aging population prospered in, is not the same system that the young population is currently living in. The former distinction is trivial even from the point of view of technology, that albeit frequently overemphasized, overused and misunderstood as a factor, has lead to markets of scale and fast-or "transactional hiring patterns" (the intentional desire to renew the staff). Lastly, it should be said that either urbanization or easy access to education, has made certain patterns or governmental struts more obvious and hence obsolete in terms of motivation or even coercion. Teenagers, of very young-relative age to all-knowing boomers, frequently talk about having babies as "tax drones" or about having children only for war, seen as "meat-grinder babies", making both reasons for wielding economic switches apparent to the population at large, for whom these measures will become transparent as working against their own best interest. Life, is unfortunately, not infinite, and for many, getting rich at a very late age, leaves very little time to catch up, or even catching up might seem awkward due to being out of the correct time-frame of many activities. To many, having babies under the auspices of these issues, seems like an outright scam, for those that are not religiously motivated and for whom having babies is morally arbitrary, especially given a vapid life that is devoid of rewards whilst for others it becomes and imperative to not provide the aforementioned sacrificial lambs to an undeserving state that has been unable to even uphold their own promise.

Coming back, the idea that children should raise their own capital, might not be wrong at all, it just so happens that the world does not accept the same methodology anymore as a viable solution to growth, such that the conventional ways of working a career have shifted, with the young workforce even being encouraged to change jobs every few years, completely contrary to the old paradigm of establishing a pattern of continuity in employment. You can, if you like, even mix in some flaws of character, such as avarice, in not fulfilling the other end of the social contract, with the accumulation of point-wise wealth being preferable to releasing wealth onto the market, that would uphold the contract of the government in order to take care of the upcoming generations in exchange of generational wealth.

If you want to know what the future looks like down this pathway, as a macabre depiction of the problem, check out our original phrases section with particular attention given to necro-feudalism.

Due to the inherited wealth at a relatively late age, when end-of-life becomes a race to compress the events of a natural unfolding full lifespan, into the last few years, whilst at the same time trying to build against time, one physical solution is to slow down time, perhaps via a bubble. One such bubble, as a bonus to the thesis in this section, has been generated by the COVID pandemic, and regardless whether it was an organic or inorganic event, a noteworthy revitalization has been observed by people that were given sufficient time, implicitly, to reassess their priorities. It is clear that deceleration is needed if the recovery of the planet, along with its inhabitants, is to be attained. Otherwise, speeding forward would just result in a loss of population over time. Whether acceleration or deceleration (and we have another engine) is desirable or not, is up to the powers that be, and out of the scope of the analysis in this section.

Crash the markets! Reduce the work week, kick back and let it float for a while. . .

Every state has the Responsibility to Protect its populations from four mass atrocity crimes:

• genocide,
• war crimes,
• crimes against humanity and
• ethnic cleansing.

One of the re-occurring question that many people ask is why are decrepit states so slow to recover in spite of the philanthropic tendencies of more powerful state to subsidize the economy of a failing state. Many failing states receive very large sums of money, in particular, new member states of the European Union, for various purposes that are deliberately vague for the purpose of helping countries to recover. It is known that ex-Soviet states, in Europe have a gatekeeping issue where such subsides are kept away from the population and very little of the sum is even seen by the population at large.

However, even from a capitalist stance, the scenario is fairly easy to describe. For a state to recover and develop an economy, some investment is necessary in order to build up the economic entities such as companies and firms that will then hopefully arise and start generating wealth (either through taxes or by terraforming the infrastructure due to necessity). On the other hand, there is no market incentive for oligarchical structures to invest in the economy and that is a simple judgement given that the oligarchy would not have to bother with a long term investment in the economy when subsidies from the European Commission carry low risk and high payoff value.

One observation is that over a large timespan there is always a discussion about the obliteration of the middle class. In Soviet states, the elimination of the middle class or middle-upper class has been somewhat deliberate and on political grounds such as eliminating the bourgeoisie. This leads to the coinage of terms such as "technofeudalism" (attributed to Yanis Varoufakis) that are misleading, mainly due to overrating the impact of technological measures as well as masking "oligarchy" with the term "feudalism". Whilst it is true that technology has increased the outreach capabilities, technology itself does not enact change and capital is the only item capable of enacting change.

However, dismissing Varoufakis' term is perhaps too harsh given that there still is a lingering feeling of "feudalism". However, that seems to mostly reflect the underlying historical situation where European countries have never really been nation states, but rather empires or part of empires such that the groundwork of the European political process is fundamentally, feudal or as a consequence of imperialism. Unfortunately, the coupling of West-empires and Eastern European inherited Soviet-style oligarchical ruling, seem to go hand-in-hand and only seem to enhance the apparent feudal effect, both systems being designed following a Nietzschean blueprint of privilege vs. lack-of-privilege. Ironically, in what regards the United States, its founding was carried out by individuals that noticed that business collides with feudal systems (in principle, overweight governance) such that the "new found land", that became the United States was based upon the elimination of feudal elements as an extension of the Magna Carta, which is something that is interestingly despised by Eastern oligarchies and empires (trivially, due to the dismantling of absolutism that the Magna Carta would result in).

To add to that, the increasing outreach of a connected world acts as an amplifier where local businesses are able to shuffle their business around the planet if they feel speculative about investing in local markets. The "gig-economy" (gigonomy?) or its amplification "thugconomy", are more or less the effects of the government attempting to stabilize the through authoritarianism (and populism, as a form thereof) stances, whilst swallowing federal subsidies, such as the "development funds" offered by the European Union to member states that are only superficially contingent upon results.

The bets placed by George Soros in promoting Rawlsian-style welfare and diversity are still sound but care must be taken that some actors do not monopolize the source and actually do share or spread the wealth around with some solutions to that end provided in the edicts section.

In other words, whilst the taxing rate goes down, the federal subsidies go up, in order to compensate for the deficit caused by poor taxation, which leads to strings of point-wise oligarchies being formed around sources of capital. Furthermore, "poor taxation" is sometimes deliberately misunderstood as a failure of governments to enact repressive measures against a non-paying population, yet more correctly, and in the context of this section, "poor taxation" is also due to not having anything to tax, due to the obliteration of the middle class, business, companies and firms. Incidentally, the "technology"

In other words, it might just be that Varoufakis' realizes that he is living "just" regular European feudalism as the result of the coupling of Europe with Eastern oligarchies. Incidentally, the source and/or guarranteurs or financiers of the emerging moguls in technology lies in Eastern oligarchies and/or have been socially engineered to be tethered to Eastern authoritarian mentalities. If anything, the elimination of the dislike button on YouTube spells out the "feudal" in "technology" yet one should realize that "technology" ends up carrying the blame when, in reality, the decision to remove the button has had to be taken by some white collar individual that figured that free speech can also be bad for business.

As a bonus, Eastern oligarchies, and taking orthodoxy as a large-scale example, is less about belief and more about providing an alternative to the police, with clergy occupying functions that are politically and/or legally recognized, such that "religion" could also be considered akin to "technology", an amplifier for the outreach that oligarchies need for propaganda.

By definition, malinformation is the term coined for information that false and used a prop in order to fortify some ulterior statement. One of the few quotes that are circling the Internet is the one depicted in the Twitter screenshot, namely a comparison between various cinema shows where the reader is meant to believe that people always are on the side of the "rebels".

Unfortunately, part of this is incidentally true, due to the overall structural patterns that govern film-making, as an example, the formula given away by Rick and Morty, and part of this is factually false namely the example given that involves Star Wars. The most well-known Star Wars movies in the series, if watched in terms of appearance in cinemas or in the order of the Star Wars franchise (namely, the famous to the machete order) are the last three movies involving Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader.

Even though Luke Skywalker seems to be "the rebel", Luke and the many other "exiled Jedis" are, in fact, not "rebels" yet very much the remnants of the old republican governance that was later taken over by Darth Vader via a coup. In other words and if anything, Darth Vader is the "rebel" and Luke Skywalker, along with right about all the new Star Wars movies do not promote "rebels" but rather the "rebels" are the ones that were part of the older system of governance (Ashoka, Luke, Yoda, etc).

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) were initially devised in order to establish a virtual network on top of a physical network between machines in disparate geographical locations. Typically, the network topology for such a usage case is a star-shaped network, with multiple clients connecting to one central computer that acts as a mediator between all connecting machines. Given networking principles, it is possible for client machines to route their traffic through the central computer that all machines connect to, such that the Internet traffic will flow through out through the central computer. Similarly, the connection between the individual machines / clients to the central computer / gateway, is typically encrypted, such that the traffic between the individual clients and the gateway is encrypted.

Here is a diagram of how a connection to the Internet, through a VPN gateway takes place:

and the diagram can be refactored in order to take into account encryption, which will be represented by bypassing the ISP (not in terms of connectivity, but in terms of data visibility):

The sketch scales for multiple numbers of clients that all connect to the VPN gateway, typically mask their data from the local ISP, and then route out through the gateway to the Internet.

Unfortunately, the immediate remark should be that, whilst the local ISP is bypassed, all the traffic flows through the VPN gateway that is entirely possible to observe all the client traffic in its unencrypted form. In other words, a VPN does not provide anything additional concerning anonymity, but a VPN just moves the problem from the local ISP and to a different ISP via the VPN gateway. In that sense, a VPN will only, at best, hide the traffic from the local ISP but it will not anonymize the traffic in any shape or form.

What happens is that in a global economy, a global market, and global law-enforcement mechanisms, most companies and even just incidentally companies that provide VPN access, all tend to have clauses in their EULA stating that they will collaborate with law enforcement to the fullest extent in the event of a suspected legal issue. The classic mechanism is that the government would extend a subpoena and ask for access to the services in order to go through the data of a customer in order to build a case. Whilst a subpoena can be disputed, it still represents are legal order such that it has to be given due course by the company. With that said, it should be obvious that a VPN will not protect an individual in the least from law enforcement and due to the direct connection between a client and a VPN, tracing the traffic to the origin is trivial. There are very many VPN companies, and many of them very large, with right-about every computer user suggesting a VPN "for privacy", such that the data they collect (in some cases, as a legal obligation), must be off the charts.

For contrast, a real anonymizing network are network like tor or i2p, however it is very incidental that, from "the Anonymous hacker group", going through academia and up to large companies like Cloudflare, tor has been dismissed as a viable alternative, with Cloudflare, Google CAPTCHAs, bans and other gimmicks essentially blocking tor. Ironically, all the aforementioned seem to glorify VPNs that are not anonymizing in any way and just shift the problem from the local jurisdiction to a remote one. tor explicitly censors traffic, both at the packet level and at the network path level, with the deliberate purpose of hiding the origin.

Both tor and i2p have a traffic pattern similar to the following:

where the traffic is deliberately routed through a number of nodes within the tor / i2p network, in order to ensure that the client is well-behind all the nodes or gateways leading to the Internet. The idea is that if one of the nodes, such as the exit node, is compromised, then the follow-up node, going backwards, would have to be compromised as well, and then the next one up, all the way back to the client. The former is a daunting task, even from a legal perspective if all the nodes / gateways between the client and the Internet have to be approached and made to divulge the traffic making it next to impossible to track down the client.

Attacks on anonymizing networks do exist, yet all of them are possible in well-chosen scenarios that do not show up statistically (ie: attacks when the established tunnel through all the gateways is conveniently short) and so far there is no known deanonymizing attack on tor that would hinge on solely the tor network. Tracking users with website cookies is trivial, or WebRTC will divulge the real IP, and that will still work on anonymizing networks like tor or i2p, however those attacks do not attack the tor network, architecture or protocols yet leverage flaws in browsers.

Even in terms of conspiracy, it should be a red flag to anyone that so many companies and even "hacker groups" try so hard to dismantle tor and/or i2p, when, in fact, they are true anonymizing technologies that do have privacy in mind. Congruently, the obnoxious pitch for VPNs, even from people that should know better, is excessively large, even if a VPN does not anonymize a user at all, yet exposes their identity to the company offering the VPN service along with all their traffic. While social networks received a large amount of attention, due to the Cambridge Analytica case, it should be noted that the next follow-up problem is definitely the case of data export to VPN companies, with some thoughts given on how far such companies are or are not interested to protect the identify of a customer when faced with legal pressure and not in a declarative fashion for the sake of being part of a hype. Whilst social networks can see some social interaction, a VPN is able to observe the entire traffic making VPN data gathering more daunting.

With several large powers involved with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an intentional desire to obfuscate or to censor speech regarding the procedures used to contain the outbreak, with the concept becoming a highly polarizing topic. One large misunderstanding that stemmed therefrom has been the claim that the masks and/or vaccinations do not infringe on the constitution because in spite of the measures every individual still retain their constitutional rights. Such discussions have been predominant in many jurisdictions such that the concepts mostly apply to all of them that have a constitution drafted after the British Magna Carta and/or French model - for any other jurisdiction that does derive their constitution therefrom, the current discussion does not apply.

For all practical purposes, the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been anything less than customer-oriented, with most jurisdictions taking an authoritarian sine-qua-non stance where the measures have been enforced under the threat of force. Many ombudsmen misunderstood or were tacit on the subject due to the highly volatile political context, even though, in retrospect one could claim that even for an authoritarian stance, the whole COVID-19 debacle has been overzealous, overstated and way too outspoken, as if the pandemic itself was not the problem but rather a bizarre zeal of tyranny.

Constitutions typically formulate most rights, not as rights that cannot be denied but rather rights that cannot be constrained. The implications of the difference between rights being "unconstrained" instead of "not denied" can be derived from the distinction between negative and positive rights, where a "negative" right that is "implicit" can only logically be "constrained" yet not denied. Similarly, a "positive" right that is explicit, and would require action on behalf of a government, could potentially be "denied". For example, the 2nd amendment makes the right to own arms a "negative right", by using the formulation "shall not be infringed".

With that being said, most constitutions use the "non-infringement" or "non-fencing" or "no constraint" idea abundantly in the definition of all rights. For example, the "right to work" is, as a separate example, never formulated as "people have the right to work", but rather, "people's right to work shall not be restricted". This makes the "right to work" a negative right, that is (in religious terms, God given) and could never be "taken away" by human peers but rather only "restricted".

Under those definitions it stands that vaccines and/ or masks indeed represent an infringement, or, as it has been established, a constraining of constitutional rights and liberties. The matter stands that, for example, using the notion of "free speech", the right of "free speech" cannot be constrained by any additional condition (ie: "you can only speek freely if you wear a hat, walk on your head, etc.), such that any "fencing" of said liberties are, in fact, very much a violation of constitutional rights. The same applies to the "right to work", and by stating within the constitution that, say "the right to work cannot be constrained", the government cannot pass follow-up laws that would somehow condition the "right to work" by … wearing masks, getting vaccinated, walking on all fours, and so on. In fact, any followup law that restrains the "right to work" is just simply unconstitutional.

Historically-speaking, and with the human tragedy on the side, the mass and/or bulk-violation of constitutions across a large number of jurisdictions world-wide is a very telling milestone of the state of world-wide tyranny (whether of state and/or oligarchy and oligopolies) and betrays any notion of democracy or liberties that now seem as much aspectual as prophylactic, that now seem fair game to be infringed on a "might makes right" basis (regardless whether that might is derived from science, the military, the state, the mob or otherwise).

One of the re-ocurring theme in political debates at the current date seems to be the criticism brought by the Eastern part of the world, from the right side of the Berlin Wall and up to China, but excluding China, towards privately owned business and by scale towards corporations. However, due to history and observation, a lot of the hate can be explained such that actions taken by these countries start to appear more rational then chaotic.

First, it is important to realize that most of Europe, or whatever economical engine Europe has, has never been built on top of nation states, and that all the reminiscent part of the power is power that has been inherited by empires. Going further back, you would find monarchic structures that frequently appeared economically more-or-less as a functional state-monopoly, at times to harsh extents that employed slavery. This spans for a very long while and up to the Magna Carta, that is perhaps one of the first incipient forms of liberalism that sets boundaries between the state (be it a Monarchy) and its constituents as well as constituents themselves as peers. After the liberalization and the emergence of privately owned businesses, one step further has been the industrial revolution that removed the "common person" from difficult labor jobs by focusing on optimizations and the usage of technology for the purpose of exploiting resources (ref, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is a good reference).

After the second world war and with the rise of communism, there has been a major paradigm shift in the countries that were occupied by Soviet forces, where instead of following a liberal path, Marxism was used instead in order to work towards an "egalitarian" goal that was mostly driven to the extreme. Marx said that ideally, in order to remove "privilege", any power-structure has to be demolished and, obviously, all people have to be equal (or else it would not be an equality). Even before the World War, due to the German revolution of 1918–1919, the idea of equality and the seizure of assets had been well established by Rosa Luxembourg that drove a revolution of the working class against the state. In principle, early revolutionists like Rosa Luxembourg ended up building power structures themselves, after gaining power, that were very remote if not opposite to Marxist egalitarian dreams. If you want an allegory that you can relate to, Ms. Luxembroug and the other revolutionaries were typically people of the quill, not really machinery operators in factories, such that the pretense that these fine literate people would just give up the plume in order to start digging coal out of mines and in atrocious conditions, is hardly likely - it is more likely that these people would wave the "from each according to their ability […]" Marxist idea in order to, in fact, become the new bureaucrats of the followup regime. Jonas Čeika, a Czech philosopher, for example, that recounts the German revolution of 1918-1919 also goes ahead and discusses the "re-organized" "socialist" government, yet Čeika, as good of a philosopher as he is, fails to recognize that German rigorousness aside, a multi-stage, 7 layered governmental system with compartments, departments and sub-compartment-departments that was proposed to replace the "old system" is completely orthogonal to an "egalitarian system" as per Marx but rather a metaphorical Tal-Mahaj of power and hence a nest of festering privileges (which is what Marx was explicitly seeking to abolish and including the state itself, in the very last stage of "communism") showing that the intents of communist revolutionaries at the time were not immediately noble and more of a swindle. Even so, the concept of "equality" was used profusely, and mainly in deliberate and active interventions to make people equal rather than fashioning an egalitarian society. The dethroning of the Romanovs in Russia, and the dismissal of the monarchy, ended up being an asset seizure by underprivileged people that resorted to theft under the guise of creating a "more egalitarian" society (a good reference is Doctor Zhivago (1965) and a nice scene where a family of intellectuals return home only to find their house parceled up by "revolutionaries" that tell them that they are only entitled to a small room in their own house). Regardless, it is important that the communist systems juggled with the notions of class (via Marx) and privilege, yet frequently to a Nietzschean extent, as a clean-cut separation between slaves and masters - in reality, the extremes were fairly prevalent and could be traced to low industrialization of the areas where such systems flourished and where, contrasted to the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom, people still worked to the bone.

Nevertheless, after the "communist" (most countries calling themselves "socialist", due to "communism" only being the ideal last state of the Marxist progression) system took hold, the education followed the same revolutionary principle, where people were taught that they are all equal, that not one or the other person knows the best and that wealth just has to be flattened across a wide population with any "anomaly" of increased wealth being an indicator of foul-play. In layman terms, an inversion of values took place where it became "cool to be poor" and anyone owning more than anyone else was considered a bastard. At that point, the distinction between poor and wealthy was just ideological and could have been sustained by Marx' idea of exploitation, where a business with employees is deemed to automatically be exploitative due to additional gains made by the owner that are not then re-distributed to the workers. Later, the ideology got transposed into a destructive zeal where, say, in China school pupils were told that they are no lower than a teacher or a professor and were encouraged to literally damage or seize property at their own volition. Naturally, on the principle that nobody knows best and nobody is the wiser. However, China recovered during and after Mao, mostly by liberalizing their markets such that whilst the area between the east-Berlin wall and "up to China" still continued on a stark path of implicit nationalization.

To put it bluntly, these countries completely obliterated the middle class, by following the principles above, that were driven to the extreme and frequently by self-interested leaders that leveraged Marx' philosophy in order to spin their own interests at the cost of the population at large. A good reference is Animal Farm, with all its in-flexion points, including even the most subtle abuse of power, during the establishment and fall of a communist society as narratively described by George Orwell. In modern times, such criticisms prevail and there is a clean-cut distinction between the West and the East, even in terms of "just wealth", where the West tends to look admiringly at wealthy people and the East that considers wealth to be implicitly derived more or less from sin. You have to take a moment to observe that the implication is near-mathematically accurate if you take into account that Marx considers that surplus from a business with employees that does not share that surplus with the workers is unjust. Given the former, the implication can be simplified leading to the conclusion that any business is automatically unjust (or sinful, in religious terms) because the business is built upon inequitable labor. Using that implication, any business or corporation is logically evil and cannot be seen any other way. Post-modernly, the same education carried over, and even in places that do not have a master-slave dichotomy as per the Russian "the state and the people", where people tend to be employed more by the state than by private business or the private businesses being more or less subsidies of the state.

After the fall of communism, the genuine intents of the West to bring Friedman style economics to the East, fell more or less on a bad foundation, where most of these "privately owned businesses" were either subsidies or were created on very wobbly and corrupt foundations, albeit most of them being a way for people that inherited wealth in questionable circumstances, to launder money via a "private business". The former can explain the criticism of "bad service" due to the observation that these businesses were not built on the foundation of a truly "privately owned business" but rather a business set up either by a relative or by an oligarch that needed the front-cover to hide the real businesses that was often shady. Obviously, in the kerfuffle the corruption, if already existing, ended up being even more amplified, which made private ownership a liability based on a lot of random risk that not many could afford or mitigate with an investment. Similarly, countries on the Balkan belt were the gateway between Arabia, Europe and Eurasia such that they became the ebb and flow of conflicts between various empires. Capitalism never took place! Yet the problem was not incompetence of the people, nor the lack of means, it was simply that the mentality was different and the intents were also different. Wealth was never accumulated "generationally", with every followup generation adding a rock, and then passing the castle onto the next, but rather though massive polarizations and re-polarizations of the powers in the area to the effect of wealth being a prize on a spinning wheel of fortune. The incentive to have a war was deepened in the area because a shuffle of the situation stood to be far more likely the way through which people obtained their upward mobility, if any, or that of their offspring.

These were people for whom the following statements would unwaveringly hold and be the main order of business:

• trust is good, control is better,
• money is given, not earned,
• knowledge is stolen, not taught,
• masses always win over the individual

and then coupled with Greek-style virtues and ending with a dash of ethnocentric values. Naturally, as per the German 7-layered stuffy super-structure that defiled, just by its sheer geometry, anything remotely simple and Marxian, all of these "beliefs" were neatly packed into a paradoxical tesseract that could be reconfigured endlessly in order to suit the current trend of the times and the problem at hand. For any value, there is a counter-value, everything is relative and there is no absolute; with which, anything can be made true.

As a bonus, the lack and/or abolition of private property, along with collectivist principles lead to a situation where the West preserved hierarchies but only functionally, as in constructing an efficient machine with an efficient use of talent, whereas the Eastern world ended up corrupting the notion by associating human virtue with a misunderstood sense of "rank". The negative outcome would be some sort of stratification of creation of "class" within an enterprise, where things became awkward due to mingling hierarchies meant to be functional with human virtues, for example, ending up in situations where it was not clear whether the head technical engineer was superior or inferior to the CEO of the chemistry sub-department, or stark comparisons between the sanitation team and other staff - allegories that reaches back to stuffy structures and highlight that the hierarchies within businesses were meant to be operational for their intended purposes but not seen as positions of virtue or telling of virtue, which is how they ended up being interpreted in the East.

To conclude, people like Milton Friedman come across as "tricksters" to most of the Eastern world because there is absolutely no indicator that such methods lead to wealth, quite on the contrary, giving up the current system, as defective as it is, is either a further risk or a reset that nobody, either oligarch or the people could possibly (re-)afford due to the already existing historical shuffles that took place. Corporations and privately owned businesses at the same time are seen with distrust, both due to the near-history shady reputation of businesses in the area have due to their often revealed connection to the state, often come across as "self-righteous" or "privileged" that upset the Marxist sense and sensibility that ultimately, "we are all the same" or are taxed and regulated into the ground on some Marxist premise that if you are rich, you automatically owe something to the less rich, and more than likely due to the assumption that your wealth has been accumulated illicitly.

The current Artificial Intelligence (AI) boon is based on a long-existing and forgotten trope, namely the Eliza bot developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1967 at MIT that leveraged some psychological primitives in order to befool its users into believing that the chat bot was, in fact, human operated. Eliza kicked up quite a kerfuffle historically speaking, with lots of world-wide drama taking place world-wide as a response, with people swearing they were actually talking to a robot instead of a human being. Later iterations of Eliza, one example from retro-computing being "Racter" (Mindscape, 1986) for the Commodore Amiga, were also additional to using psychological primitives, loaded with knowledge, very similar to what ChatGPT is now, in order to also add the element of offering "insightful responses" with knowledge that the chat interlocutor might not have known. Pure "Eliza" by contrast is mostly just an elegant way of rotating sentences around in order for the chat interlocutor to think they are talking to a real person. None of this is new.

As a followup, if you like, one of the funniest events in post-modern human history is Deepblue defeating Kasparov at chess, another drama that led to Kasparov threaten to sue the venue, going as far as claiming that he was, in fact, playing a human being that would be somehow hidden within the computer.

In principle, both these events, and in general, hinge of a misunderstanding of what A.I. is and with particular attention to engineering more than computer science.

In what regards computer engineering, A.I. is coalesced with a bunch of terms that it should not be. Similarly, computer science has some precise definitions of terms that also tend to get coalesced with A.I.

In order to make the situation clear, the following holds true to the limit of current human knowledge (including A.I.) has not solved the issue:

"given a set of inputs and a program, it is undecidable whether the program will ever terminate"

Which is the definition of the "halting problem" leading back to Leibnitz 1671, the mathematician, that thought to devise a machine that would automatically compute proofs for him. Similarly, this is also Gödel theorem on undecideability or "das Entscheidungsproblem".

What is essential to retain is that a cognisant A.I. that would perform a task with a desired output cannot be built until this fundamentally mathematical problem is solved (not even necessarily pertaining to computers).

You can, however, build something that, depending on the set of inputs, might produce some output, yet it is not determinate that whatever that something outputs will also be desired or useful.

This is very critical because you do not want to entrust "A.I." to drive a spaceship that "might or might not" land on the moon, under the guise that the "A.I." might somehow know anything more than matching up and correlating patterns, which is more of what one would call, a probabilistic crap-shoot not too far away from shooting someone out of a huge honking space cannon and hoping they get to the moon!

You could stop here, all of the rest is irrelevant and only a filler judging on smaller cases and disambiguation of the term "A.I." and what it is used for.

Translate plainly, the term means, "the problem of deciding" which is the fundamental problem why A.I. would never be able to "write software". In order to explain this, you would need a simpler language than English and something more abstract to understand the problem so here are two examples very easy to relate to.

"Mathematica" is some software developed by Wolfram that compared to standard "scientific calculators" can be given as input a formula and the software is designed to apply mathematical operations in order to reduce the input formula and solve the problem. For example, you could write an integral equation and "Mathematica" will apply all methodologies in order to expand and reduce the expression symbolically, without substituting numbers like "scientific calculators" would do in order to produce a numeric result.

However, just like in real life, it is completely possible for some polynomial to be crafted that cannot be reduced or in reducing that polynomial, the polynomial instead expands, which turns out to be very frustrating for the person solving the problem. That person will have to "empirically decide" when it is time to stop, backtrack at some point where that person thinks a different path could have been chosen and then perhaps try again. Similarly, it is possible for polynomials to exist that cannot be reduced (of course, within the contraints of a context, for instance natural numbers instead of imaginary).

What happens in those situations with "Mathematica" when solving or reducing an quation is that the software includes a timer that at some point will prompt the user with a soft-error along the lines: "spent … amount of time attempting to solve, but could not find a solution [convergence], should I stop or continue?" at which point the user has to decide whether the problem they have input to the "Mathematica" is "just too tough to solve" or perhaps the machine has insufficient power to solve the problem.

For that reason, A.I. cannot solve problems and it cannot write software.

However, "modern programming" and in particularly for large programs, especially using Object-Oriented languages frequently need "templating" or creating stubs for an API, all of which are mostly very thin files without much content and just identifiers that "just have to exist" in order to match the overall aspect of the program (and also there for further development). Creating these files is very laborious and it is something that can be handled by code generation, which, depending on the sophistication of the algorithm, can just very well be an A.I. However, the idea that an A.I. will write code from scratch that would make sense, for non-trivial and not-known problems, is just ridiculous.

Other examples include just plain code generation like Intellisense in IDEs, and all the way up to Clippy included in Microsoft Office back to the 90s, that are useful but will not sentient in any way, nor do they solve "the problem of deciding".

The fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus is a special function that can be used to implement recursion. Consider a lambda term and the fixed-point combinator , with the following application of to with two -reductions and a substitution that take the expression to its -normal form:

The problem is that without the substitution in the second step, the application of the Y-combinator to the lambda term would have never halted:

and instead would have expand forever.

Using lambda calculus that is a Turing-complete language is perhaps the best way to demonstrate the effects of the halting problem or the dependability problem or "Das Entscheidungsproblem" (from Kurt Gödel back in 1978). It is also additionally a hard-NP problem that simply has not yet been solved and even the possibility of a solution seems unlikely.

Racking a bazillion computers on top of each other and connecting a gorrilion networks together will just not solve the issue such that the halting problem will be solved.

In computer engineering, whatever people refer to as "A.I." gets split into other notions such as:

• algorithm,
• expert system
• A.I.

where "algorithm" covers most of what politicians refer to as "A.I.", examples include:

• "lights turning on during night time", which is just a "heuristic" (to be understood as, "arbitrary" and not fixed) decision that is taken on a series of inputs, for instance, depending on, say, light sensors, computed time of day, etc,
• "chess", given two perfect chess players, the outcome of chess will always be a stalemate (like tic-tac-toe on a smaller scale, not provenly-(or StarCraft but on a much larger scale)), chess is a deterministic / algorithmically determined game where given sufficient computational power to push beyond the event horizon, the outcome is known in advance and any opponent can be beaten or a stalemate can be drawn. Modernly, the computational power already exists and any player can be perfect.

Planes that have an automatic pilot, and have had a fully fledged automatic pilot for decades, implement what's called an "expert system", which means that the algorithm, depending on a series on inputs, takes decisions, recommends them to the operator, and the operator can reject or approve them. Examples include:

• "tesla cars", along the lines of "one more change to the algorithm and the car will drive perfectly, we swear!",
• "planes",
• "nuclear power plants"

Expert systems are mostly in place to solve very difficult tasks, but they explicitly rely on a human operator to make the final call because it is arguably anti-ethical for a robot to take the final decision given the possible large-scale impact of the decision.

The statement "A.I. will put people out of jobs" has been true for about a century, iff. "A.I." refers to algorithms like menial jobs, for instance, carrying stuff around, issuing tickets, selling Pepsi, etc. However, remember that "A.I." frequently only refers to algorithms when it is mentioned in the media, never to expert systems and/or "A.I.".

One thing that was irrevocably provided by "A.I." and, in fact, "machine learning" is the ability to generate work, whether scientifically or otherwise. For example, there is a whole class of "applying machine learning to subject X"-scientific publications that do nothing more than use an algorithm in order to check whether it is able to solve a problem, and if not, how much of the problem it can solve. There is an indefinite amount of publications that you can just bulk-generate by using "machine learning" and a hype or quirky application thereof and cross-domain, to add to the coolness factor of the publication.

Another "boon" or applicability is within art where precise and pre-determined outcomes are not necessary. It feels more like a throw of dice.

… is a solution to a problem that does not yet exist.

Conspiratorially speaking, it might just be a way for techno-oligarchs to pretend that "A.I. must be slowed down" in order to justify that they have not yet attained the "God"-levels of coolness they were promising and hitting the halting problem very early on after it has been explained to them that none of the "transhumance" mumbo-jumbo they've been using to receive funds will ever come to be! In other words, a way to delay the popping of the "A.I." bubble where investors will figure out that "A.I." is not the second coming of Christ, as the techno-oligarchs portray it to be, and will be desperate to recuperate their money. As for any market, buy early but also be sure to sell early-enough before it becomes too mundane!

On the other hand, perhaps Tesla "autopilot" cars should be regulated and applying whatever pre-trained program in Silicon Valley to a … less democratic place with unmarked roads, wild bears roaming through the streets, outright misleading road signs (points left to exit, leads into a mud wall), the occasional window-washing rapist, roadblocks that should not be there, would be a very funny experience but just for those that stand outside the car and at a safe distance.

More than likely, yet completely unrelated to "A.I.", due to A.I. arriving much later than expert systems or algorithms, there were some U.N. international treaties in place to prevent the usage of autonomous robots in warfare due to ethical concerns, akin to those that made people design "expert systems" instead of fully autonomous systems.

A clear modern-day exemplification thereof is the usage of CAPTCHA prompts by Cloudflare and Google that have driven a whole generation and more crazy with solving silly quizzes that for an informed observer are questionably only solvable by humans (in fact, there are whole sets of tools out there to bypass CAPTCHAs automatically with various techniques, ie: listening to the voice recording instead and interpreting the voice to read out the letters or numbers, using A.I.!). The losers in this case are, of course, the people that the owner of the website might not even know they are blocking, and the decision of the owner to use Cloudflare being purely economically-cheap but not enough to care or too trusting such that the owner starts to lose business without knowing why. Just like people that delegate responsibility to algorithms, very similar to users of Cloudflare that would have an alternative available, it is clear that they can afford the losses in order to not care. A very slow deflation of the bubble that is A.I., if you will.

Another concern that is uttered very frequently by politicians is the usage of chat bots ("A.I.") in order to provide customer support. However, the disgruntlement is mostly due to very vocal people detecting the usage of a chat bot and then resenting the service. In reality, "chat bots" for customer support are very closely related to automated answering machines, where, go figure, that probably more than half of the requests on behalf of customers can be solved automatically without even needing human assistance. While most people consider themselves "technologically apt", the reality is that most humans tend to overlook the obvious, such as plugging the machine into the wall socket, pressing the button to turn the machine on, and so forth, that all can be solved by a simple FAQ or using triage as per the answering machine to speed up more complex problems that customers might have. Unfortunately, while the chat bot is visible, the reality that you might have a very complex issue and are in a queue waiting for a bunch of people that did not read the manual, when, on the contrary, you are a long-term user, is not that apparent. A chat bot could touch on "related" topics that might make the user think and it might prevent a human operator having to intervene.

Machine learning, more precisely, is good at training an algorithm against a fixed-set of inputs such that any input that falls within some entropy range of similarity and variation, will be labeled similarly by the algorithm. This leads to an observation-frame confusion where the operator is tempted to constantly adjust or train the algorithm to match even more inputs that were not matched, up to the point of biasing the algorithm such that it starts to match completely unrelated things. Train the algorithm on too many lemons and it will match an orange, and what happens when it's not fruits but real people, what will be the plan when those people ask for justice for being mislabeled?

Another problem that "A.I." presents is traceability, namely, the ability to determine both the inputs or the algorithm that generated the outputs, as a consequence of the halting problem, which makes "A.I." even less useful. In many cases "here, I found the solution!" does not fly when it must be known how that solution has been found. In such case, anything before the output could just be replaced with a random shuffle, conditioned or not.

One of the largest misunderstandings of computing, particularly derived from the crowd that believe that the universe is deterministic, is that every problem can be solved if you throw enough computational power at it.

This has lead to the creation of giant computer farms that are fed difficult problems and a lot of these farms churn on problems numerically and try to solve them. As an aside, in terms of computer security, some algorithm creators in the past hinged their cyphers on the idea that computers with the computational power that are now available will never exist, such that there are some merits to computational power, however, as the sentence implied the assumption was naive and modern cryptography is based on problems that cannot be reversed by an adversary (logarithmic reversibility - elliptic curve, quantum cryptography, etc) such that the mistake would not be made again.

Even though the former sections already demolished the idea by now, there is an additional mathematically provable observation that demolishes the idea that the problems of humanity hinge on the lack of computational power, there is still one very trivial observation that tends to escape even the most of famous of computing or A.I. pioneers making claims about computing and/or A.I., namely the matter of complexity of algorithms.

That is, it is mathematically provable that given an algorithm that is known to terminate but takes time complexity will terminate much faster using computational power (or clustered machines with partitioned tasks) than another algorithm that is known to terminate but takes with computational power (or clustered machines).

A reduction of that formulation in simpler terms is the observation that bubblesort on a super-computer with time complexity, given a sufficiently large dataset of numbers will finish much slower than a PC 368 (from the 90s) with an time complexity.

The former observation is absolutely trivial, or should be, to any programmer such that any discussion on how any problem can be solved with more power is just null and void even to non computer-scientists that are just programmers.

There are various types of software that are … associated with A.I. but most of these just use "machine learning" that lead to wild range of false positives and hence defeat the purpose in most cases:

• tensorflow is a machine learning library that can be used to train an "A.I." / algorithm to identify key-aspects within an image and attribute labels to the image depending on what as detected. If one uses the default per-training package, the results are obviously very bad. If one trains the algorithm using specific inputs then the "A.I." will be trained to identify those and only those inputs including their variations - which is a bit of a tautology when you think about it, tautology that will just fail when a key-characteristic is removed from the inputs. As a short example, you can train tensorflow to identify police cars based on the premise that police cars are white and blue but if the police turn up in an unmarked car, then the whole algorithm fails and hence why it should never be used for anything critical.

• OpenCV is a very old library that is just capable of doing very very many things with and to images

• What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) / Artificial superintelligence (A.I. that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks.)?

A marketing term like "information super highway" to describe something as plain as the Internet.

• Will A.I. ever be sentient?

We do not know what "sentience" means nor implies but we like to think about ourselves as "sentient". A Tamagocci from the 90s had people grow it like a pet when there was no such talk about A.I. Was the Tamgocci sentient?

• What is A.I.?

Initially, research into neural networks and machine learning. Now, it is an umbrella term from anything starting from a (linear abstract machine) algorithm and up to aliens while going through a lot of promises that will never materialize because there are fundamental problems that have not yet been solved. In terms of marketing and given that this is the politics section, A.I. is a bubble created by overhyped science, similar to the environmentalist boon in the 70s. It is a blessing for side-researchers that can churn out stacks of papers just by applying established algorithms in different contexts and reporting on their performance and hence expand their publication list (similar to physics and papers with hundreds of authors where it is unclear who-did-what).

• Is A.I. dangerous?

Very. Just like a car.

• Are any state and/or legalistic regulations need to prevent the use or misuse of A.I.?

A.I. simply does not have that large of an impact (even if something as trivial as an "algorithm" or "robot" is now also filed under A.I.). Just like for crypto-coins, there might be problems with fraud or scams using A.I., second-hand damages created by "malfunctioning" robots, "misinformation" if you believe that sort of thing yet the serious cases would be processed under scams and/or fraud, some security issues regarding existent software and hardware that base their security on weak assumptions and might be defeated by A.I. (CAPTCHAs, etc) and so on.

In any case, the doom-mongering is just for the effect - it's not nuclear radiation that would render the earth unusable.

• Why is everyone talking about A.I.?

Because the crypto-coin talk fell out of fashion. More than likely there are large interested parties that would like to keep the bubble growing. Even for scientists it is a way to justify their work and to produce large numbers of publications with very little effort.

• What sort of problems does supercomputing solve?

Large scale problems where millions of datapoints have to be tracked have large computing needs. However, it is rarely the case that supercomputing solve any fundamental problem. The discovery of he Higgs boson at C.E.R.N. was a practical experiment to practically demonstrate / reveal in reality the existence of a theoretical particle yet the existence of the particle had already been proven theoretically… by Higgs in 1964.

Abstract terminology should never be used for realistic scenarios because the abstract cannot be materialized which is the root cause between the parties disagreeing on the problem on whether work is or is not a zero sum game. One of the anti-Marxian view that workers are not, in fact, exploited hinges on the observation that whilst workers do work, they are also paid (even accounting for Marixian losses) such that the workers slowly elevate themselves. The same standpoint is held by the Austrian school of economics that suggests that offshoring and venture capitalism generally has a beneficial outcome for all parties due to the area where the companies migrate to end up way better in terms of quality of life than before the companies arrive.

However, the counter-thesis is that there might be some point of diminishing returns, where the venture capitalism fails to pay off and when work is, perhaps not a zero sum game, but a close to zero sum game. As efficiency measures are introduced, behind the scenes, or implicitly, as reflected in prices, there is some sort of "quantification of needs" going on in the background, even for large companies that heuristically decide trivial minutia on how to price products depending on the weather, time of the year and perhaps even political or strategical outlooks. The same drive to make things "more efficient", even in terms of "human capital" has the backflow effect of dragging progress back into Marxism and quantifying the needs of the workers to the effect of starting to ponder "how much should be sufficient". When that question arises, it is just a matter of numbers to push the quality of life down, perhaps not to an abstract "outright zero", but rather to … "close to zero", where, say, the workers do not progress but are at the very least nutritionally sustained so they do not die off due to hunger.

That being said, the criticism that is raised more than often, is not that people do not gain anything, but that somehow their gains do not cover their further chances at survival, perhaps even in terms of families and generations where one generation after the next must pick up the baton, more or less where the other left it off and to repeat a cycle, or a game, that seems overall circular with no real progress made in terms of wealth, power or liberties.

One point that is raised during the discussions is the "quantification of needs" that is deemed a Marxist or Leninist idea. However, disappointingly and more than often, the fight takes place on a plainer plane where property, whether in terms of land or objects, is measured in order to be deemed "more necessary than the other". In reality, the whole fight is more due to the same observation that abstract terms cannot be applied in reality, and the observation that the "quantification of needs" hinges more on whether "infinite scaling of needs" exists. In other words, in terms of governance, is the prospect even realistic that some individual would ever "want it all", and if they do, wouldn't it be for the sake of generating others that "would not have any"? Otherwise, it is of course trivial that needs are different, yet those needs can often be different on a horizontal scale rather than a vertical one, which is trivially true if one would not look towards "wealth" as a goal but rather towards something like "hobbies", "talent" or "passions" in an utilitarian sense. The "quantification of needs" is still a mechanism, even if just a Bernayesque scheme to attract customers, or as a tool for the government to prevent the destruction of the environment by competing industries.

When everything is already owned, and if you want to "infinitely scale", the result will be the creation of commodities with only a very loose binding to realities (or that can be backed by realities) or, in other words, virtual wealth. This virtual wealth can then detach itself from realities and just scale infinitely to proportions where your wealth as a shareholder in virtual wealth becomes much less a matter of materialism and more of a matter of … belief. As follows, the virtual wealth will then hinge on the belief that has been generated, and if the belief ever withers away, deemed to be false or contrasted strongly with a system that works better, the virtual wealth accumulated also withers away along with the belief that sustains it. The problem is that belief seems more palatable when it is tied to realities that people can relate to rather than abstract theology that seems unbelievable and cannot be related to, such that the need to reinforce that belief grows to the point of requiring military authority to ensure that the belief, and hence the virtual wealth that it vouches for, does not fall apart. With that realization the distinction of virtues that could be materialized beyond just belief that divides the rich and poor ultimately subsides, along with the need for a vertical scaling that now just seems arbitrary and not backed by realities.