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536 points pykello | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.732s | source
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madacol ◴[] No.45537701[source]
Even if Venezuela goes to hell even deeper, she still deserves the prize for what she has already done!

The way she, and her team, managed to convince venezuelans that the election mattered, and to prepare to gather the evidence of the elections under constant threats from the government, that we all knew they were going to steal, and do it entirely peacefully, was an extremely impressive achievement on its own.

What an impressive act of coordination from MCM

:standing-ovation:

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29athrowaway ◴[] No.45541062[source]
The Venezuelan regime makes money from oil. They do not need to involve the population to generate most of the GDP. To them, spending resources to have a healthy and happy populace is just a waste of money that would otherwise go to the rulers of the regime. The CGP "Rules for rulers" explains how this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

They stay in power with the help of a paramilitary group of bullies that intimidates people: colectivos. The Venezuelan colectivos are based on the Cuban CDR (committee for the defense of the revolution). And there are other elements of the Cuban "model" of staying in power that has "worked" for 66 years, that Venezuelan regime has adopted. And the CDR resembles the Nazi Sturmabteilung in their modus operandi.

So in the end what's holding the regime together is all violence, all the way down.

The history lesson is that when the most of the GDP generation doesn't need without the help of the population, the result is a regime. Scalable and cost efficient AGI will do the same to countries that do not make most of their GDP from extracting natural resources because once the citizen is not needed for wealth generation, territorial control, etc., their political representation goes away.

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baincs ◴[] No.45541196[source]
> The history lesson is that when the most of the GDP generation doesn't need without the help of the population, the result is a regime. Scalable and cost efficient AGI will do the same to countries that do not make most of their GDP from extracting natural resources because once the citizen is not needed for wealth generation, territorial control, etc., their political representation goes away.

That's a great insight

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29athrowaway ◴[] No.45541294[source]
It is possible that in a future where territorial control is done by robots and drones that are mass produced and maybe even self-replicating, and the scientific and economic output comes from AGI, there won't be ballot boxes anymore. There will be also no food stamps, hospitals, a justice system or anything that benefits the common person. Everyone will just be building power plants and datacenters and robot factories while being supervised a robot or being implanted with a motor control chip, or being processed into Soylent green to be fed to a chemical reactor to power a data center with the same level of indifference we currently have for animals in industrial farming. All while the people running the dystopia party all day and take selfies while not caring at all.
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1. Retric ◴[] No.45541983[source]
At that point human leadership and wealth becomes just as superfluous as the rest of humanity. However it isn’t necessarily a stable system.
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2. kjkjadksj ◴[] No.45543338[source]
The difference is that leadership and wealth has agency and power. Of course the coming dystopia will serve to benefit them exclusively. Who do you think is calling the shots here today? Billionaires are. These are products designed for them by people they hired. The idea of using profit to create a billionaire is already inefficient and yet, that is how most of these companies are structured to burn profit on enriching the few vs having the ceo live like a monk and putting everything back into the company.
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3. Retric ◴[] No.45543589[source]
Leadership and wealth are quite fluid in major transitions.

Read up on the US robber barons and they didn’t come from old money. The relatively recent (80’s to today) round of Tech billionaires don’t hail back to earlier great fortunes and most VC investors lost money compared to a simple index fund.

The first few rounds of AI investors are already getting screwed.