Since it isn’t happening to you personally I guess it would be hard to back up with evidence but is there not somewhere you could anonymously report these abuses and concerns to? Any government department? At the very least the misrepresented conditions seem like they must be a violation of something . If it’s anonymous hopefully you’d be shielded and you don’t personal face the same risks to your well being. If there’s anything that is actionable it could result in better conditions all round.

Your tip might be a piece of information that they can add to any other such information to trigger an investigation maybe. Here in Australia at least, the government does at least sometimes act on abusive labour practices, they’ve swooped in on farmers employing fruit pickers who are almost entirely foreign and who suffered absolutely blatant wage theft and abuse and other high profile instances such as foreign embassy staff being treated as slaves.

Ah but is it still the same hand?

Super disconercting when you’re not the one in the lift.

Well, the chimp, the duck and the frog all looked pretty cool.

ChatGPT is pretty helpful despite the hate. I’ve found myself using it quite a bit recently. Situations like these where you don’t get a joke are good ones in particular, since it’s something you might have struggled to figure out just by Googling before. However, you do need to be able to check the output to gain value from it and that’s kind of one of its limitations since you sometimes end up needing to do as much research or work verifying what it tells you as you tried to avoid by using it.

In this case, where it’s not so much a question of facts and it’s more about interpretation, a simple test of asking yourself “does this make sense?” could have provided a clue for you that chatGPT was struggling here. One of its problems is that it just always tries to be helpful and as a function of how it works that often ends up favouring the production of some kind of response over an accurate response even when it can’t really produce an answer. It doesn’t actually just magically know everything and if you can’t confidently explain the joke to someone else in your own words after reading it’s “explanation” then the odds are good that it just fed you nonsense which superficially looked like it must mean something.

In this case it seems, that the biggest problem was that the joke itself didn’t entirely make sense on its premise, so there wasn’t really a correct answer and chatGPT just tried really hard to conjure one where it didn’t really exist.

Is it actually non-deterministic or just too many variables and too much sensitivity to initial conditions influencing the scheduler’s decisions for the programmer to reasonably be able to predict?

I actually had similar theories though in the end I concluded that a person definitely couldn’t be doing it, but I did used to rack my brains how the machine did it so fast. I had to do a project on how TV worked and was invented when I was in the 6th grade and it didn’t help at all, the whole electron gun thing didn’t explain it to me at all because I was imagining the gun like, drawing objects like trees and buildings and people and none of the boring confusing stuff I read helped me understand how this gun knew what to draw and could do it so quickly.

Hey thanks. Turns out I’m actually banned from at least one community. They think I’m a bot. Beep boop.

EDIT: Actually, I think that must have been lifted. I commented there earlier today and the post has upvotes so I assume people can see it. Is there any way to be notified when both banning and subsequent unbanning happens? The Modlog doesn’t mention the unbanning part of the equation.

I thought they’d already bought it, I didn’t know it was still in question. What a bummer. This was going to be hilarious.

is that what this guy did? I didn’t know logs were public. Is there an efficient way to search them?

I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I’m also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here’s my take.

I can’t figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur’s understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it’s difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I’ve decided to forgive the loan I can’t find a way to frame that as theft. Who’s been stolen from?

If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren’t stolen from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you already have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don’t like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn’t make the decisions themselves theft if you just don’t like them.

That’s about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher’s justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can’t find a way to make the statement true.

What happened there? I followed the link but it looks mods removed whatever the offending poster had done.

On balance it could be that the risks to your personal safety might outweigh the perceived increase in secrecy. To me I don’t like the idea that I’ve left a record that can be questioned if I’m getting prosecuted, but you’re right I haven’t factored in the overall risks from the alternative.

Yes, indeed. Hence the earlier, “HOW GET MONEY?” someone so eloquently asked in relation to this dead drop method. You could arrange your own dead drop for the dealer’s payment I guess, or stuff the money in to the same tree. It’s all a bit fraught, and requires you both to trust each other even more than a deal normally would. The system seems to be pretty flawed. Guess it works of you’re happy to leave an indelible record of you transacting with this person and if you trust them to actually put the goods there rather than just take the money since you’ll never see them and have no recourse.

I’d be uneasy with electronically transferring funds for illicit drugs, cash seems wiser.

I remember around 2005ish, maybe earlier, there was a company that started selling Duff beer here in Australia with the same font as from the Simpsons and a complete clone of the cartoon can design. Everyone thought it was cool and it became very popular very quickly. People were surprised that The Simpsons name would attach itself to a real life beer given it was a family show and this would be ripe for controversy. It came to light after only a couple of months that The Simpsons brand had nothing to do with it and the company had somehow managed to go through all the steps of bringing this to market and just presumably hoped they wouldn’t get in to trouble. They were very quickly made to stop distributing those beers. Weird situation.

I’m curious about the “better tech than us” claim. Can you give some more detail and context to this?

My parents have a well worn story of the time they were students and very poor and they saw a homeless guy outside the kebab shop and asked if he’d like a kebab to which he agreed. They brought it out to him and he examined it and threw it on the ground and yelled at them about something they now don’t remember exactly but they think was something to do with not wanting chilli sauce. Guessing that guy wasn’t in the best state of mind at the time, bit of a bummer for them though because they scraped together the last of their cash to pay for that and it would have been better if they could at least have eaten it themselves.

I really can’t see a downside. If they seem to be obviously homeless or they’re actively asking for help, they probably need it. Though it’s extremely unlikely that your meager contribution will be the change that suddenly allows them to magically overcome poverty and become middle class home owners with well paying jobs, that doesn’t really make them need it any less. Whatever they use the money on, it’s going to be what they need in the immediate term, be it drugs or food or anything really and unlike others this is the only way they can really get that money so they do need people to occasionally part with it. You’d only give it to them because you had it spare anyway and it’s not going to make them more homeless than they already were. If the concern is that it’s not addressing the root personal problems that put them individually on the street or the root social problems that put many on the streets, that’s completely true but if you’re serious about doing that you’re going to need more than the couple of bucks in your pocket anyway. That’s going to be concerted massive political will and financial effort and several people’s lifetimes worth of work all at the same time, besides you can always involve yourself in some way in such efforts and hand over spare change. The only times I can really think of where it makes sense not to give directly are: you can’t afford to do it, the physical circumstances of handing it over are dangerous/impractical, you don’t care about homeless people or other people in general or you subscribe to some nasty Malthusian ideas and think yourself somehow benevolent for condemning people to destitution as some kind of “cruel to be kind” doctrine in which case you’re unlikely to have given this a lot of thought anyway and don’t really face much of a dilemma.

I thought hipster was essentially supposed to be someone vapid and style obsessed at any given time. Dandies would have been hipsters by my understanding. It’s a focus on appearance and also whatever is a current trend of the times so they might also include interests or hobbies as well, the point is the term is used pejoratively because the interests or the style adopted by these people is considered surface level and inauthentic because it is primarily based upon the recency of widespread adoption of whatever it is.