• PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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    19 days ago

    But buying them funds the diamond miners to mine more. That’s the point.

    By participating in the market, you’re perpetuating blood diamonds.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 days ago

      only if they existed actively. And when it comes to the secondhand market, someone who no longer wants a product, and someone who wants that product, who can buy it from the person who no longer wants it, effectively means that two people get the same value from one singular product, essentially creating value from thin air.

      The point i’m making, is that as long as you have diamond mining that requires killing people to produce diamonds, those diamonds are an ethically negative commodity, however if you are no longer killing people, those diamonds are already out there, those people have already been killed, there is nothing you can do to undead those people. So you might as well leave it in market circulation at that point.

      You could argue that it would incentivize more illegal mining, but i would argue that bad regulations and enforcement incentivize illegal mining instead.

      • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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        18 days ago

        I think that the market (profit) incentives the mining, and that lax regulations simply fail to curb that incentive. We can see from the war on drugs that simply regulating or criminalizing something won’t stop it if there is a market, it just drives up prices.

        But in any case, this aspect is a lot less ambiguous for LLMs because selling the use of an LLM is legal, and the sellers use the money to train new LLMs.

        So let’s create regulations around LLMs and enforce those regulations, before it starts to really affect the job market and environment.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          18 days ago

          i definitely agree that there needs to be some rewriting of law, specifically copyright, which will inevitably be relevant to AI. But i’m still not convinced it’s a massive market black hole or anything.

          Unless you want to be cucked like farmers in the US who take in massive subsidies and cry and moan everytime something moderately inconveniences them.

            • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              16 days ago

              shouldn’t this be the default position of the economy though? Especially in a democratic society, where voters are actually educated.

              The workforce is your primary labor pool, so assuming enough governmentally enforced labor protections, and significant drawbacks in more exploitation, it will inevitably trend towards less.

              • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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                15 days ago

                It should be, yet it isn’t.
                There was a brief window in north America where that was the case (or at least they were making progress), but that was decades ago.

                  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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                    14 hours ago

                    To be clear, when I said “it isn’t” I meant it’s not the default.

                    I dont really care enough to go dig up hard numbers.

                    But the time I’m talking about is after WW2, when the new deal was still going strong, and the top marginal tax rates for people and companies inhibited accumulation of wealth, and incentivized reinvesting profits into the company and workers instead of into exec bonuses and stock buybacks.

                    The era had lots of other issues, notably bigotry, and consumer protections, but worker protections were moving in the right direction.

                    Heath and safety have kept improving, but employment security has gotten worse because the incentives we had for companies to treat employees well have gone, and put employees at a disadvantageous position when bargaining with their employer