The key is to look and act innocent and to throw them some batteries, then when they are concentrating on their food you skip right past. They can smell fear so that's the one thing you shouldn't feel while you're doing all this.
There have been plenty of times in history (almost all times) that physically weaker men have secured the loyalty of soldiers with wealth and influence during periods where strong centralized civic authorities did not exist.
But the soldiers didn't have the mobile phones then. This was possible by manipulation the information about reality those soldiers had.
For example, how Mallory can gain power over Alice and Bob who don't directly communicate.
First, Mallory tells Alice: "I am stronger than you. If you don't do what I say I'll kill you." So Alice decides to submit.
Then, Mallory takes Alice to Bob and says to him: "Together with Alice we are stronger than you, and kill you if you don't do what I want." So Bob submits.
This only works if Bob doesn't talk to Alice, otherwise they would together see the empty threat.
With more people, it becomes a bit trickier but hopefully you see how blocking communication helps to gain power over people. Often the blocking of communication is done through propaganda, e.g. Mallory might entice Alice and Bob to hate each other, so they wouldn't get together and figure he's the manipulator. Or Mallory might just kill someone randomly to motivate people not to talk to each other.
Anyway, this shows the importance of free speech (which is really a misnomer; it should be called a right to listen). If you can freely talk (and listen) to other people, you reduce your chances to being subjugated by someone.
(This is also why in a war, people are incentivized to dehumanize the other party and not to listen what they say, because together they could figure out that the real enemy are the war profiteers on both sides, colluding. And besides, killing is the most reliable way of silencing someone. That's why people should also universally reject killing - based on someone else's word - unless they are directly threatened themselves.)
Sorry, but I think you've kind of just dug yourself into some concept you think is neat but which doesn't really hold up. Like, this just doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all.
First, general historical power dynamics were in no way predicated on misinforming people. It's really quite a lot simpler than that: A commands B and C. A approaches D and says get in line or we'll kill you. D says OK or dies. ABCD approach EF and repeat this process. The person with the most connections, actual real connections, wins.
Second, mobile phones do nothing to change this dynamic,and in fact, are one of the most powerful tools for cementing existing power structures ever created. They are both the ultimate channel to propagate misinformation, and are also 24/7 surveillance devices that will betray any attempt to conspire against those in power. If you want to foster rebellion against your evil overlords, your organization absolutely cannot use phones without giving themselves away, which puts you at a massive disadvantage. And even if you try to forbid members from using phones, they're so deeply ingrained into daily life that somebody will inevitably slip up and give the surveillance state info on your planned rebellion. I would go so far as to say we can expect to never see a successful rebellion against anybody with the level of surveillance as the US, in our lifetimes.
The end of Covid in China is interesting. Even the CCP, and their level of surveillance and control, were unable to maintain control of an entire population fed up with sheltering in place. If there aren't fair and open elections in 2028, it will no longer be the United States of America.
And there have been plenty of times when the armed thugs have staged a coup and overthrown their masters.
In the absence of civic order, personal relationships between the elites are what matters. Your thugs can easily take everything you own, but they don't inherit your relationships. A billionaire in an isolated self-sufficient bunker has nothing to offer to thugs who are already inside. A billionaire in a bunker that relies on trade with other nearby bunkers is in a much stronger position.
If it happened, they better don't run polls for popular support. If the building were empty at the time of the strike, you'd probably get 70% among college students (Luigi had 41%).
Health insurance in America is—quite uniquely—the deep end of the pool in the whole capitalism v humanity conundrum. I think a lot of Americans feel that viscerally and the widespread support for Luigi was symbolic of how truly fucked up that country is in general.
At this point if news broke Anthropic’s office was bombed my first thought would be the US government. Didn’t they label the company a national security threat?
The idea of Anthropic allowing a contractor to squeeze such a tiny cost center at such a massive PR cost right before their IPO is just an objective blunder, IMHO. They should've replied to that email with a quick "No, you will be negotiating with the union tomorrow morning. You maybe eventually saving millions right now could cost us literally billions."
Most likely a typo (fixed by now), but in some (most?) non-English languages billion is the correct word for 10^12 instead of 10^9, usually the error happens when from English, not into English.
Wow, this is bad news. Without in-office collaboration, company culture will collapse. The organic moments of spontaneous synergy won't take place. Perhaps OpenAI or even xAI will take over as leading company. Grim.
IDK what I would do if I was working and couldn't hear my coworker loudly "spontaneously collaborating" on the phone with the contractor installing his kitchen floor. At least I have an hour commute each way, $25/day in parking costs and another $20/day in food costs to comfort me.
You're wasting more of their money by using it. I've personally siphoned probably a few million in electricity costs alone from them while giving them pennies.
Claude, I need a strategy for defeating unions trying to up their rates, please research union defeating settlements done in the past 50 years and build a case against them to keep our rates at the lowest possible.
Most of the stats show it being less productive for the company. But in my opinion its more efficient because the company prod takes a slight hit while the workers life productivity also goes up quite significantly.
Being an employee is an exercize in force of all kinds (do the work, join the call, do this do that) . By it's very nature, in-office workspace is what people want, not butt in office. Somehow people believe the same force for work location is suddenly too much?
RTO is an expression of that. Best workers can do is vote with their employment.
Pretty crazy. The security team denies there ever was a threat of a strike? And generally you do announce strike threats, it's kind of the whole point with strikes that your employer knows of the possibility.
Did Anthropic get "warned" about this strike by its own AI models?
It's possible that they just took the state of contract negotiations as an implicit threat of a strike without waiting for the union to explicitly announce the threat.
"based upon the intercepted emails and language used in discussions with the union, we predict with 63% accuracy that they will strike within ~3 months"
just because AI is really good at being wrong doesn't mean that people aren't themselves capable of being wrong manually. Do I think someone may have consulted AI? Almost certainly, in fact I'd guess that there's an internal policy document somewhere saying that they have to consult AI before making choices like this. Do I think that good old fashioned human incompetence and baseless speculation are at the heart of this? also yes.
Well isn't that a damn terrible idea? Who convinced them that was a good idea? "We have a heard faint rumors of a whiff that you may one day threaten a strike, so we're gonna try insane overreaction as a tactic"
a week of wfh from a company that's equipped to support remote work anyway and only wants in-office 25% of the time hardly qualifies as "insane overreaction". I'd says it's probably more along the lines of "a single email".
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] threadFor example, how Mallory can gain power over Alice and Bob who don't directly communicate.
First, Mallory tells Alice: "I am stronger than you. If you don't do what I say I'll kill you." So Alice decides to submit.
Then, Mallory takes Alice to Bob and says to him: "Together with Alice we are stronger than you, and kill you if you don't do what I want." So Bob submits.
This only works if Bob doesn't talk to Alice, otherwise they would together see the empty threat.
With more people, it becomes a bit trickier but hopefully you see how blocking communication helps to gain power over people. Often the blocking of communication is done through propaganda, e.g. Mallory might entice Alice and Bob to hate each other, so they wouldn't get together and figure he's the manipulator. Or Mallory might just kill someone randomly to motivate people not to talk to each other.
Anyway, this shows the importance of free speech (which is really a misnomer; it should be called a right to listen). If you can freely talk (and listen) to other people, you reduce your chances to being subjugated by someone.
(This is also why in a war, people are incentivized to dehumanize the other party and not to listen what they say, because together they could figure out that the real enemy are the war profiteers on both sides, colluding. And besides, killing is the most reliable way of silencing someone. That's why people should also universally reject killing - based on someone else's word - unless they are directly threatened themselves.)
First, general historical power dynamics were in no way predicated on misinforming people. It's really quite a lot simpler than that: A commands B and C. A approaches D and says get in line or we'll kill you. D says OK or dies. ABCD approach EF and repeat this process. The person with the most connections, actual real connections, wins.
Second, mobile phones do nothing to change this dynamic,and in fact, are one of the most powerful tools for cementing existing power structures ever created. They are both the ultimate channel to propagate misinformation, and are also 24/7 surveillance devices that will betray any attempt to conspire against those in power. If you want to foster rebellion against your evil overlords, your organization absolutely cannot use phones without giving themselves away, which puts you at a massive disadvantage. And even if you try to forbid members from using phones, they're so deeply ingrained into daily life that somebody will inevitably slip up and give the surveillance state info on your planned rebellion. I would go so far as to say we can expect to never see a successful rebellion against anybody with the level of surveillance as the US, in our lifetimes.
In the absence of civic order, personal relationships between the elites are what matters. Your thugs can easily take everything you own, but they don't inherit your relationships. A billionaire in an isolated self-sufficient bunker has nothing to offer to thugs who are already inside. A billionaire in a bunker that relies on trade with other nearby bunkers is in a much stronger position.
Half of the employees deported and a few shot dead just for good measures should be enough to bring Dario to the negotiations table.
We’re invading spreadsheets now. Anything is possible.
The Wikipedia article has a nice map what countries use which convention (search for "Current Usage"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
Specifically:
> [...] giga- is always 10^9, which is 'billion' in short scale but 'milliard' in long scale.
you can trust them with AI code, you can trust them with a full-on rifle
RTO is an expression of that. Best workers can do is vote with their employment.
Did Anthropic get "warned" about this strike by its own AI models?
"based upon the intercepted emails and language used in discussions with the union, we predict with 63% accuracy that they will strike within ~3 months"