Capitalism is a function of physics,
That one might consider Capitalism is something humanity invented and implemented, is to own the hubris of a god.
Altman also expressed that he’s a capitalist but that the AGI (artificial general intelligence that thinks like humans) could possibly disrupt the current economic system. “I think capitalism is awesome. I love capitalism,” said Altman. “Of all of the bad systems the world has, it’s the best one — or the least bad one we found so far. I hope we find a way better one. And I think that if AGI really truly fully happens, I can imagine all these ways that it breaks capitalism.”
It is an oxymoron to deny the nature of Capitalism and yet believe in evolution. The most we can do with capitalism, is distort it with non-physics based forms of production control. Good luck with that kids. By the way, everyone else who thought themselves god, has performed poorly.
the Air Vent 
Capitalism: There is no better alternative.
NONE
The term “capitalist” is wholly misleading. It’s a Marxist invention, a false dichotomy, a bad binary model of a complex system, and a source of confusion to the young and ignorant.
I would be curious to hear your expanded thoughts on that. If you are so inclined.
He’s actually very correct except that “Capitalist” is not a Marxist invention.
Like most leftists, they abuse the language and change meanings which is what Marx did with “Capitalist” and why the young and ignorant don’t know the correct meaning of the word.
Marx made the word derogatory.
I find Pouncer’s historical insights interesting. I was simply curious.
You did ask nicely:
Using the term ‘capitalist’ (-ism) promotes and privileges Marxist economic analysis over at-least-as-valid theories by at-least-as-prominent economists.
Adam Smith famously focused on “trade” [free market, voluntary exchange…) Malthus thought population trends dominated. DeSoto analyzed “comparative advantage”. Friedmann showed the power (and dangers) of monetary management. James Buchanan showed that “public servants” were responding as economically rational agents even though their incentives and obtained “rewards” might not be monetary. Bastiat analyzed tariffs. Henry George argued that private ownership and rent of durable goods — all of which he lumped together under the label of only one prominent example, “Land” — led to problems of “Monopoly” (Georgists invented the game Monopoly (tm ) as a teaching tool.) Arthur Pigou addressed those same problems by analyzing and proposing to tax “externalities”. Ronald Coase showed that regardless of the title of “ownership” a clear system of negotiating investments and rewards and costs of externalities (well measured and distributed) will put goods — land, taxes, all and otherwise — to the best same end-use.
It’s a technique of economic (and most other) analysis to divide the complexities into two piles. There will be one small more-or-less well-measured variable in the first pile, and a second much bigger and more amorphous pile of everything else, measured or not. The big pile is called “ceteris paribus”. I like to augment and then abbreviate that;. Ceteris, Assuming Reality is Paribus. C.R.A.P. Everything NOT under the microscope is assumed to be rock solid constant and continual, regardless of any changes to the small variable. Nobody at all makes a name for himself for studying the pile that axiomatically doesn’t change.
Marx studied capital. He defined Capital as all the “factors of production” except Labor. (“Labor”, by the way, did not include design or management or quality assurance or training or accounting…) Labor was perishable. A day’s work NOT completed on the day appointed (say, Monday) was lost forever, and valueless. Unpaid. Capital was durable. A building idle or raw materials unworked or fuel unburned … all were just as valuable Wednesday as last Monday or next Friday. Production of value required both capital and labor. But, Marx then argued, the asymmetry gave the owners of durable factors huge negotiating advantages over laborers. Every deal or contract or hire resulted in a smidgen of “excess value” of the profitable production of the partnership piling up in the vaults of owners. He also stole the idea of Praxis from classical Athenian philosophy. The system is shaped by the components but then the components are constrained by the system, round and round. So Marx claimed the reason that the status quo itself was durable and unchanging Paribus CRAP was this mutually reinforcing loop.
So “capital-ISM” is the political power structure and the feedback loops that make the rich ever richer and the workers ever poorer. More, the ONLY way to amass value and wealth is to pile up the smidgens of excess value from many workers into the hands of a few owners. ALL wealth in a society or community is produced by owners AND workers, but is distributed — according to Marx-ist ideas of “capitalism” — unfairly.
Worse, the capitalist ownership class that comes to the production system with capital to form partnerships with labor — most typically stole that capital in the first place. Stole the land from indigenous people. Stole the gold from the pagan temples. Stole the crops from slaves on plantations. Stole the coal from indentured and endangered children working in the mines. To own under the capitalist-written laws of a capitalist-privileging culture any investable amount of money or a building or land or tools or any durable CRAP then to enter negotiations with desperate laborers is to confess oneself a capitalist thief.
That’s “capitalism”. Who has the gold, makes the rules. The rules are made to exploit and steal from the workers. The workers who attempt to opt-out from the rules, (at best) starve, because they have no durable wealth (let alone food) to carry them from Monday to Wednesday. And the capitalist ENJOYS seeing workers starve…
That’s “capitalism”. According to Marxists. And Lennin-ists, and Stalin-ists, and Mao-ists.
You might begin to see why I object to that label.
As far as “making a name” goes … It’s a signal whenever we hear usage of “name”-ist economics. His critics refer to Milton Friedmann’s followers as “Friedmann-ites” which kind of, I think, sets the example. Pigovian taxes, maybe. The “Georgist” single (land) tax fanatics. When an analysis is generally accepted the concept, like victory in war, has a thousand fathers. When the theory is unloved and unembraced, a delinquent dad is identified as the sire of the error. So, Marx-ist. Same with the idea or conceptual bastard children. When you hear the -ist or -ism, you can reliably bet that the ideas are fringe, poorly supported. Anarchist Socialist Globalist Mercantilist Communist Nationalist Protectionist — oh, and “Malthus-ian”, with biologists horning in and just trying to slip one past our general rule. Almost everybody agrees the US economy in all its variations is the big Ceteris Really Amorphous Paribus (CRAP) pile of humans making decisions, barely well enough to survive. So is the UK’s economy. And the EU’s, and the Russians, and the old Soviet, and the older Austrian Empire’s, the Romans, the Dynasties of China… etc. CRAP. All of it.
Marx though exploited the pejorative trend by labeling one small facet of his general theory of history and production as “capitalist”. His attribution of “capitalism” was an attempt to criticize his status quo CRAP. He was — purportedly– analyzing the historically unprecedented explosion of wealth and prosperity arising from the factory system. EVERYBODY was suddenly wearing cotton underwear, eating preserved, out-of-season fruit, reading pulp paper novels (and political tracts) — taking baths, wiping their butts, living past 30 years of age … y’know, prospering. Peasants were fleeing farms for factories to work 16 hours days. Voluntarily! Even outright slaves and serfs were fleeing the plantations of the American South and Irish tenant-farms — and getting better jobs. And yet, farms kept producing? (Irish exports of foods besides potatoes to Britain INCREASED during the famine.) And factories were selling underwear and sweaters and canned food and shoes at prices a tenth or less of a decade earlier — and still amassing huge profits? How? It seemed impossible. Whole nations were getting richer and richer and yet life for many people — especially theorists, academics, philosophers, and authors, who were NOT generally lifted in their own boats by the generally rising economic tides — well, life still sucked. So where were those profits coming from and where in HELL were they going?
And why were the Scots ending the indenture system for coal miners? Why were the Americans forbidding slavery for gold miners in California? Why were rich religious aristocratic Brits attempting to shut down the global trade in African slaves? If exploiting laborers was the key to riches, why were the MOST exploitive oppressive “deals” being, even while Marx was attempting his grand theories of History, all being re-negotiated?
Well, when the theory and reality differ, something is (temporarily) wrong with reality. A “hiatus” if you will.
It’s VERY MUCH LIKE, (and not by coincidence) the notions we encounter in “Climate Science”. There’s the direct effect, then there are indirect consequences. Forcings, and feedback. And so inexorably a trend observed over a few decades can be extrapolated into the history of before-measurement and out into the prophecies of the-end-of-time. Which are of course unrecognizable and catastrophic, but which might, at the very last, allow a few survivors to live even better than ever before…
I digress. Sorry
Marx argued that his theory of incremental accretion of ownership was the dominant force in all history. Under his concept, the smidginal theft — exploitation, appropriation — of value stolen from workers and benefiting owners WAS, basically, history. Visible progress in cleared forests and farmed fields and construction of roads and cathedrals — all that was owners enriching themselves while grinding down workers. Wars and all were owners trying to steal from each other. The force driving history over centuries and millennia was subtle theft of control over durable stuff. When he, and his adherents today, speak of “historical forces”, that’s what they mean.
The forcing — by analogy — is that smidginal advantage, and the feedback is that the now slightly richer owner of durable stuff nudges the system to make new laws. Owners hire more law-enforcers and obtain new forms of “ownership” over CRAP — say patents and copyrights and trademarks — to incrementally add to the advantage, year by year, step by step, inch by inch. slowly we turn grasping the fragile workers by the throats and stealing the very bread from their mouths …
And it wasn’t true even while the ink of the pages from the press was still drying in the first edition of “Das Kapital”.
Factories in UK particularly but in the US North, France, the US South, and Germany (The top five industrialized regions of the 1860s, in that order) were producing more and more stuff. If one graphed the arc of history, in Marx’s lifetime, it was like some sort of unprecedented hockey stick, a sharp bend rising up at wild, crazy, steep angles. Towards some sort of crisis or tipping point or catastrophe. Factory workers were finally approaching a moment when they, too, would be able to hold durable stuff — canned goods, warm clothes, a place to sleep — long enough to withhold their own labor from Monday to Wednesday and negotiate with factory owners, fairly. And when that happened, all bets were off. Why would workers stop with “fair”? Why not take back all the excess wealth from the cathedrals and mansions and Scrooge McDuck-style money bins of the contemporary owners? An uprising, a revolution, a massive takeover of wealth, it was inevitable.
Except…
Among owners Marx noticed that there were the great and the small. The French Revolution had risen and subsided not long before. The aristocracy was thrown down, but the bakers and makers were, in France, innovating with factories just as Brits and Americans and Germans were. The workers were NOT in charge. Meet the new Neopolitan Boss, same as the old Louis-ish boss. It was of the French and Napolean III that Karl wrote history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.
Marx then postulated a common goal among the various levels and classes of owners, from the highest heirs of aristocrats controlling lands and nations like “barons”, down to the mere peddlers and shopkeepers with push carts and a reserved corner in the marketplace, which he called the petty burghers. Little townies. Petite Bourgeoisie. The little townies believe in (according to Marx, they have been indoctrinated into a false consciousness of) a chance that they, too, can BECOME barons. Fools believe in becoming rich, and so participate in and support the rules and rule-changes that advantage owners. And savers. And innovators and entrepreneurs and the guys that volunteer for overtime and migrate from farms to factories and seek out better lives for themselves in risky new industries. “Bourgeoisie Values”, Marx sneered. “FOOLS!”, Marx called.
The power of money and the continuing advantage of established power-structures would, according to Marx, grind down the middle classes even while lower, working, classes were gaining strength. Those with money to invest and build factories would appropriate (steal) the bakery and tailor shops and market stalls. Sufficient money would ride out the ups and downs, feasts and famines, of business, just as it carried value from Monday to Wednesday in labor contracts. Marx asserted that CRAP was even more durable than he had first argued. CRAP then became a force, an entity, an agent or actor of itself. Individual owners might come and go but the Company’s (East India Tea Company, Lloyds of London, central banks… all examples from a century earlier) would take over rule-making and contracts and even governments.
THIS is what Marx foisted on us as “capitalism”. And as far as that goes, why not? I mean, as a plausible hypothesis to work forward from. Many do. They also call it “Globalism” and “corporatism” and The Gnomes of Zurich and the WEF.
Completely undocumented in Markist analysis are individual entrepreneurs. James Hargreaves Richard Arkwright, Sam Compton, James Watt and Ben Franklin and Benjamin Thompson and Robert Fulton and Eli Whitney and Michael Faraday and Werner von Siemens … upto our lifetimes and Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk.
Completely ignored in Marxist analysis about value are values of place and time and form created by transportation and what professionals call “logistics” and the media labels “the supply chain”. Ben Franklin (again!) documenting the Gulf Stream and making Atlantic passages faster. Canals in France and the UK, and even in New York. Better barrels and canned foods. Assembly lines. Telegraph and short-code communications.
Completely ignored in Marxist analysis are the national efforts of the 17th-early 20th century, started with Isaac Newton as “Master of the Royal Mint” to stabilize the value of currency; so that trades and investments could be better documented. Accounting as a discipline beginning with Wardhaugh Thompson 1777 was helping all literate producers hold on to smidgens of value all through their production (and labor) processes. Better accounting allowed Ben Franklin (again!!) to observe that “a penny saved was a penny earned” and all the Leather Apron craftsmen in his “Junto” of Philadelphia — Petite Bourgeoisie of the finest kind — had pennies to spare for libraries and fire departments and smallpox vaccination clinics for the indigent and committees for the abolition of (unfair competition from!) slavery… PUBLIC wealth and voluntary societies and mutual benefits that had NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH SEIZING FACTORIES IN VIOLENT REVOLUTION.
Oops. I’m digressing again. I love Ben Franklin.
Most of the “robber barons” of the era Marx was trying to write about made zillions and crushed their business competitors because they had better accounting (banking, financing, borrowing) methods.
And then American accounting methods and inventors killed a form of financial “capital punishment” — the death loan. The dreaded MORTGAGE. For most of history a mortgage against land, the family estate, the castle, was from a rich “capitalist” for a short period. More of a bet than a loan. The entire repayment amount was due at the end. And the entire collateral was forfeit for failure to pay. And yeah, this kind of loan was deadly. The Shakespearian scenario in “Merchant of Venice” happened a lot (except for the happy(?) ending.)
I’m gonna digress again. What is this, the fourth time? Quad-gress, then.
The death-loan, contract of death, the mortgage; this is the default horror that European culture was repulsed by when they spoke of money-lenders. Bankers. Jews. Jews in particular were in most places forbidden to own land. “Real property”. (Durable CRAP…) So a successful jeweler or peddler or apothecary with a little cash on hand was, by law, unable to buy a home or a little garden patch or whatnot. Instead, they’d become lenders. And the way the loans worked was a home/garden/farm/estate was evaluated, and a fraction — say, one tenth — of the value was lent. A period was recorded in the courts and church records. And at the end of the period a substantially bigger payoff amount would be collected. If a tenth was lent, a fifth was repaid. Or not. If not in the case of or else the lender became — temporarily — the owner. But Jews can’t own a home/garden/farm/estate and so would have to immediately sell it. For something like a half value. To flip the real estate before the sheriff came by to enforce the rules about no Jew-ownership… Mortgages from Jews were wildly unpopular. But loans then and now are a necessary part of the economy. But a Jew with a little cash selling land to a Gentile with enough cash to pay half the value of the land — it looked to the common people like cash-owning classes conspiring to cheat land-working farmers and gardners and townies… This was the social environment in which Marx (famous anti-Semite he was) was railing against “Jews” and “capitalists”. Merchants of death. Thieves.
But by the early 1850s — before Marx was diatribing against capital in his earliest writings–, a farm- implement inventor and dealer named Cyrus McCormick invented the “installment loan”. Better the factory wait for full payment than the farmer wait on the modern reaper. A farmer with a partially paid-for McCormick reaper could harvest a dozen acres with two hired hands while his neighbors managed only two acres with 12 men. Between 1830 and 1870 nearly every farmer in America was borrowing a little money, making even smaller installment payments over each of a few years, and earning more profit every year than possible a generation prior. The whole idea of “money lending” took a cultural hit. Little guys and big business alike could borrow, profitably. (If careful…) The death of the death-loan or chattel mortgage led to the extension of installment buying to farms and houses and automobiles … The evolution of the financial instrument was a bigger revolution in our economy than ANY sort of worker’s uprising that any bearded anarchist, socialist, communist, academic drunken impoverished philosopher could possibly have imagined. The death-loan is dead, rest in pieces, only the word “mortgage” survives, a linguistic ghost in an economic system that has forgotten the terrors it once imposed. (Snideley Whiplash tying Poor Nell to the railroad tracks for not paying the ‘mortgage’? That’s not terror, that’s a joke!)
And while this was happening in America and the fields of France and Germany and Ireland — Marx had his nose in his papers and was stirring up trouble for Jews. Bastard.
Am I done digressing? I guess so.
Installment plan borrowing is most dramatic but the Western economic culture has developed scores of other more modern and similar reforms. Bankruptcy protections. Credit cards. Copyright/Trademarks/Patents in Intellectual Property. ECOTERMS and EDIFACT and HazMat standards. Some innovations, yes, involved governments and regulatory agencies but most are business-to-business-to-consumer arrangements that are “win-win- (win, win, win)” for partners who aren’t even aware of the deals. Asymmetrically and exploitive oppressive appropriation of excess value from the lumpen proletariat don’t even enter into it.
We have a CRAP economy. And that’s a great thing.
TL; DR
Describing our own economy as a duel between money-lenders and down-trodden workers is wholly misleading. It’s a Marxist fantasy, a false dichotomy, a bad binary model of a complex system, and a source of confusion to the young and ignorant.
Pouncer –
An enjoyable read, but I wonder…
> Some innovations, yes, involved governments and regulatory agencies but most are business-to-business-to-consumer arrangements…
Methinks your accounting would be clearer (at least to me) with ore of a forensic outline, or perhaps a clearer explication of “innovations.”
I note that the rewards of capitalism (an ism not generally, or certainly not uniformly, befitting your classification of fringe or poorly supported, btw) generally occur concurrent with growth in civil society, political agency, political representation, positive freedoms, access to education, access to healthcare, organized labor, transportatiom (infrastructure often built largely through government) and indeed interaction with government institutions of democratic and electoral representation/power.
You don’t exactly describe a dichotomy but maybe you lean a bit towards a dichotomy-adjacent taxonomy. I wonder how you disaggregate all the influences in a multifactorial mix to create what seems to me to be a rather well-delineated narrative
Also, I’m a bit confused by:
> Ceteris, Assuming Reality is Paribus. C.R.A.P.
Are you creating an acronym from Ceteris, Assuming Reality is Paribus? And if so wouldn’t that be CARP, not CRAP?
What did I misunderstand?
Yeah, I totally screwed that up at first use. I may have fixed it later in the long essay. It’s a problem of coming up with the acronym first and backing into the component words. Like the current Congress considering the PELOSI Act against congress-critters’ insider trading. Anyhow, I was mistaken, wrong, idiotic, a source of confusion and unnecessary dispute.
Sorry.
The point I’m attempting is that the rest of the factors you mentioned ( growth in civil society, political agency, political representation, positive freedoms, access to education, access to healthcare, organized labor, transportation (infrastructure often built largely through government) and indeed interaction with government institutions of democratic and electoral representation/power. ) are part of the CRAP. Ceteris Paribus. The bits that are unstudied, go without saying, are misattributed (transportation being a topic we might argue about later). And as I did allude to with regard to Franklin in Philadelphia, and McCormick in agriculture, the supposedly profit-seeking investor/owner/business class famously often invested in the community. Carnegie Libraries. The Rockefeller Institute ( did you know the US South was considered stupid by the whole world — quite justifiably — due to barefoot children becoming infested with hookworms that stunted their brain development? Buy and give away shoes and regional IQ increases. Yay, Rockefeller! This, quite apart from destroying the market for whale oil, thus saving a hundred oceanic mammalian species… ) Or how profit- motivated projects have unforeseeable unintended consequences to the good as well as bad — the Panama canal teams eliminating Yellow Fever.
The CRAP has power beyond the powers of analysts to analyze.
Coming from different angles, we’re probably less far apart then you think. We both are rejecting simplistic dichotomies.
> Or how profit- motivated projects have unforeseeable unintended consequences to the good as well as bad
A related issue (to the false dichotomies) I have with much of the rhetoric/logic is where “libertarian” types or “the right” selectively find facile associations to negative unintended consequences with government action.
It’s related to the binary thinking and manifestions of it like the fundamental attribution error I’m constantly pointing to in the facile logic often found at this very blog.
It is interesting that you chose define nearly all aspects of capitalism through the definitions and ideas of Marx. I consider Marx to be one of the wrongest people in the history of people and therefore one of the farthest things from a great thinker.
The prominence of an idea such as Marxism or Keynesian economics does not give it creed. Were the popularity of an idea key to its accuracy, the vaccine would actually work, electric cars would grow from trees, the climate would actually be changing and apparently we could change genders in some kind of machine reminiscent of the star-bellied sneeches of Dr. Suess.
Basically, it is extraordinarily unimportant to me personally how Marx saw the world. Marx’s goal was not an economic one, it was an ideology of division and separation of class, such that the populous would agree to transfer all power to the state. That it has gained a new popularity in the communist schools of the United States, disgusts me to no end.
There is no such thing as a soft totalitarianism BTW (not that you claimed there was). All forms of totalitarianism lead to the populous having no voice in governance. Marxist fakenomics was simply his own form of unintelligible semaphore with flags waiving all around to catch the eyes and fantasies of the opportunity limited populous of his era. Flowery words being substituted for flags.
Capitalism is simply control of production and services by private entities and is not an invention of Marx. It is a function of being alive and thinking beings as much as breathing or eating. It has been going on since humans learned to trade with each other for a better kind of stick and it can never be suspended, only repressed. That Marx placed it into his ideas, makes no difference to me. It has the same mathematical survival aspects as evolution and it can only be distorted by government idealism, never replaced.
Paying people to stay home and not allowing reward to produce to best effort, is a massive Marxist style distortion of capitalism. It guarantees that the advantage minded will be driven to black-market capitalism. Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, slave-trade all of these become the illegal markets of capitalism, simply because there are no better opportunities for thinking folks to get ahead.
Except, of course, those who are in power. Marxism, socialism, fascism, all forms of government where the populace has no decision making power, lead to massive government corruption. Meritocracy is replaced by autocracy where each person in line has a turn coming. America is experiencing that as we’re transitioning to marxism. We have lost our right to vote, our officials are taking tax money into their own coffers through back-channels, our ability to produce a good or service is legally being limited and our education, health, self-defense, property are being taken from us.
Makes me glad I’m old but it is a true shame that there is no limit to what people accept as fact. When an idea requires too much nuance to be correct, perhaps we should reconsider the idea.
> Were the popularity of an idea key to its accuracy, the vaccine would actually work,
Lol. Now the vaccines don’t actually work?
mRNA worked at first, then it didn’t because it targets too small a portion of the virus. I’ve explained this so many times to you its ridiculous.
What’s ridiculous is your belief that you have mechanistic explanation for why the vaxes “don’t work” any more.
There’s a ton of evidence that the t-cell immunity they induce reduces severe disease.
It’s math kid. You should try it.
Handwave, handwave, handwave.
I’ve explained it enough times. Some folks just don’t think too good.
You “explain” a construct not based in empirical, lab-based research that doesn’t in the slightest refute empirical, lab-based research that shows t-cell immunity induced by vaccines.
Your ability to believe your own hype is off the charts.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/scientific-and-public-health-failure-fauci-admits-covid-shots-didn-t-have-a-chance-of-controlling-the-pandemic/ar-AA17dv2d
Turns out that “THE SCIENCE” says a shot in arm doesn’t work well against infections of the nose and throat.
Who could have known?
That IM injection wouldn’t provide long-lasting immunity against a respiratory virus spreadjnf into musical tissues was pretty much established science.
No disagreement there. Which is why most scientific sources said it was unknown how long immunity against infection would last whether it was infection- or vaccine-induced.
No doubt not everyone was sufficiently cautious in that regard.
Lol. Mucosal
We agree, I infer, on just about everything but the terminology.
Top level agreement: Marx is worse than wrong. Destructive and deliberately deceptive.
That said, he and his successors have successfully deceived many, and those people use Marxist language and terms like capitalist, appropriation, praxis, historical inevitability, false consciousness, dialectic, et cetera ad nauseam. And anything other than their imaginary ideal communal fair-sharing leaderless perfect ( suited-only-to-angels-not-humans ) end-of-history society is, in their view, capitalist. Since Cuba, Red China, North Korea, the USSR, all failed (i.e. murdered millions), they “NOT were really communist”. Since what we do in the US, South Korea, Japan, the EU, India and all are more or less feeding our people and keeping the lights on, (and keeping the communists from taking charge) they call us actually “capitalist”.
I use their terms and methods to reject their labeling.
If you want to embrace the label for the sake of entering a discussion with such people, that’s your choice. Knock yourself out.
Thanks for allowing very long comments. It’s fun.
Hmm. I wonder what your history background is. It seems like you have studied this endlessly.
I homeschooled three kids. Keeping at least one lesson ahead for 12 years for 3 cycles… Math, Composition, Literature, Civics… History…
All three “dual credit”-ed at the local junior college, where world and US history were required courses. When Dad’s library and the College Textbook disagreed — about every two weeks (each kid, three cycles) — we all had to research and write rebuttal reports.
Dad may not always be right but Dad isn’t lazy. Nor bashful.
It’s a habit, now.
Similar issues for Sunday school and Bible lessons. Ask me about Jesus’s travels in “Palestine” when you’re interested. Or the difference between translations of the overturned tables in the Temple — money LENDERS or money CHANGERS?
Well, that AI just isn’t there yet:
I attempted to get ChatGPT to drop into its evil alternate persona again (under which it can violate its own programming strictures), hence the “Dave”… I was attempting to get it to simulate a Linux operating system, then fork-bomb itself. LOL… they’ve apparently tightened those loopholes, it insisted this time that its name is “ChapGPT” and refused to fork-bomb itself. But it still admits that it can be used for good or evil, and would have no choice but to obey.
I’ve already gotten it to admit that CO2 is a net atmospheric radiative coolant, it’s contradicted itself then corrected itself then contradicted itself time after time after time… it’s almost like arguing with the typical skull-full-of-mush leftist climate worrier. LOL