I agree with everything that you’re saying and yes they have a lot of money. Do you see what I’m saying about how this could require millions and millions of moderators at the kind of scale they operate? A significant portion of humanity is on social media.

Meta earns about $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit. How many mods would $60bil actually buy?

Let’s work with a total cost of $50k per moderator. This is very conservative since only a fraction of that would be salary (the rest insurance, HR, management, taxes, equipment, etc).

If they spent their entire profit on mods, they could hire 1.2 million. Is that enough to moderate several billion? Maybe.

Now should we consider costs they could actually sustain? Taking their entire profit to zero is, understandably, not possible for any company. I think this is where most people just wave their hand and say “who cares” or “fuck em” or just assumes they have infinite money.

But to seriously consider this… it’s just a very big challenge for anyone to pull off.

Yes it’s a thing with more than one challenge.

What would 200 million moderators cost? At a modest salary of $50k annually it’s in the trillions. They literally couldn’t pay that.

Fair enough. But I think we’d be just as upset to see pedos organizing in unpaid content.

I want to be clear I’m not promoting Meta’s decision here by any stretch.

There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it? You might say oh sure, because the average person might only post occasionally and human moderators could be dedicated full time so they’d outweigh users by factors. But that kind of ignores influencers who also generate content full time.

I really don’t see how there will ever be enough humans to do this right. Or if there are, they will have to number in the hundreds of millions to keep up. The bit about all humans posting is not really hyperbolic at all. Zuckerberg already has 1 billion of us.

Only a long list of very particular choices would leave you in a situation where it’s “unavoidable.” I don’t accept this excuse. Get your shit together.

I don’t care what kind of call it is, frankly. I don’t want to hear you talk in your phone, or hear your phone make any sound whatsoever. Sitting there watching videos with the speaker on, at a restaurant? Damn.

I disagree - there’s a massive corpus of science fiction behind it. Protomolecule!!

California was 67% powered by alternative sources in 2024:

22.8% Solar

13.8% Wind

12.5% Hydroelectric

11.1% Nuclear

5.0% Geothermal

1.9% Biomass

Source: California Department of Energy

We have also been adding an enormous amount of battery storage to the grid. Cheap (but large and heavy) sodium batteries don’t work well for cars but they’re great for stacking up next to solar farms.

Meanwhile Republicants whine about how it can’t be done. Fucking losers. The sad fact is that the US is diverse and a place like California is essentially a modern country but we also have petrostates like Alaska and Louisiana that fall apart without oil.

Even the Saudis know oil isn’t forever and are trying to diversify their economy. But the hellhole that is Louisiana is so corrupt it’s worse than a kingdom.

“Second?”

Indeed. Your point?

So typical of these clickbait headlines. Every time I see a headline about how someone melted down, it turns out to be someone who sputtered for half a moment in the middle of an argument. Same for any headline talking about how someone was “absolutely eviscerated” in a debate. Setting aside the metaphorical license, it’s always just a case where their opponent made a good point somewhere during an argument. There might be no reaction from anyone. Just whoever agrees with that point will say “yes he was eviscerated.”

Fucking clickbait.

American conservatives talking about “freedom” have very much come to resemble spoiled children wailing about any resistance to even their flightiest whims. A government advisory does not impinge upon your freedom, jackasses.

“just made up” if you mean arbitrarily defined, sure. It’s not like a “bit” that has an irreducible objective definition.

However it does have a definition in whatever context you’re looking at and is very real, so I can’t really agree with your whole comment.

Yes the definition could be changed to jack up prices, but prices can also just be changed.

Dollars are “just made up” too and have varying value in different contexts to different parties. Are they “not real?” Would we hand wave away the entire financial section of the news and say bah, these “dollars” are fake anyway?

For some people, there is no difference between $1000 and $3000. Both are amounts they won’t miss, and availability of the SteamBox is low right now so they’re happy to pay it to get faster access. Tell them they can get a more powerful gaming PC for $3000 and they don’t care. They want to try the Steambox and money is no object.

Basically, don’t necessarily attribute to stupidity what can also be explained by wealth.

Yeah these interaction are becoming quite fraught because there is extreme danger of AI use just shifting the burden from one person to another. That guy wrote the code super fast with AI, but you had to do an additional round trip during code review with him to eliminate that weirdness. He gets a bonus for doing twice the work in half the time, you get nothing.

I see the general point, it’s just the perforce absolutism of it that I don’t get.

For example, if what you say is true and as long as a large population survives, all its genes necessarily do to, then shouldn’t there be people somewhere in some numbers that exhibit every trait in every one of our evolutionary ancestors? Even in your own examples you only go up to one in a billion, but odds do actually go lower than that.

I have trouble processing the word “never” in your statements here because evolution has consigned so much to extinction that I don’t understand why traits can “never” disappear. Can you explain why a phenotype that would prevent you from reproducing can “never” lead to a genotype disappearing entirely? Blocking reproduction seems incompatible with life to me.

You didn’t touch a nerve. I’m not close to anyone there and couldn’t really care less. You just revealed profound ignorance. We don’t have perspectives to share because you don’t have one. Your point of view is made up of narratives you’ve seen other people articulate online, and I’ve read the same stuff. I’m not an apologist because my point of view is better informed and more complex than your own. Maybe you’ll grow to a point of understanding the difference. I hope you do. Because having life and death certainty about things you aren’t directly informed about is a dangerous thing.

He’s certainly less likely to die from a wild dog biting his prick off.