You’re not wrong—the protests in their current form aren’t going to achieve anything by themselves.

But adding some specific set of demands will accomplish even less: it will alienate supporters who don’t agree with all the demands, and it will allow Trump to claim to address the issues by cherry-picking and distorting the demands beyond recognition (see the Black Lives Matter protests a few years ago).

If we reach a critical point where mass protests can achieve some real, concrete good, it will be due to contingent circumstances that neither side was able to predict. But the contribution the current protests can make to that moment is to give everyone the confidence that the numbers are on their side, once a productive channel is found.

If a bus driver is trying to drive off a cliff, the passengers can band together to stop it even if they haven’t all agreed on a preferred destination.

You could specialize in types of crime the cops don’t usually get involved in, like corporate wage theft.

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The way Linux treats many things as part of the file system (devices, sockets, etc.) that Windows doesn’t.

Bureaucracy.

Since a theoretical communist society would be stateless, the idea of a fully communist country is an oxymoron. Instead you have countries claiming to be transitional states that are laying the groundwork for true communism at some point in the future.

The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:

• The end of the Republic
• The Crisis of the Third Century
• The fall of the western empire
• The fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade
• The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire

The one most usually thought of is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries. From an institutional perspective, it was actually a relatively boring period.

(Many of the other comments here are pointing to things that were pretty much constants for most of the empire’s existence, so if you want to blame them for the fall, you need to explain why the empire didn’t fall 500 years earlier.)

I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)

So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.

But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.

That’s how instant runoff voting works (assuming you’re still starting with a small list of candidates).

Both of them complaining about “kids” (AKA mobile devices) these days.

Like holding companies?

Or you could condition yourself to have a negative reaction to all advertised products, then charge the ad companies a fee to block their ads.

I assume you mean this as a warning rather than a suggestion.

But in any case, actually revoking UBI would provoke more protests from those affected, who would then have nothing else to lose—the only coercive power would come from threatening to revoke it without actually doing so.

But even threatening UBI would cause a widespread electoral backlash from the rest of the population, who would rather have a reliable income not dependent on the prevailing political winds.

To be fair, the community name is semantically ambiguous.

I can see the point: if I’d done potentially Nobel-worthy work, I’d rather be honored while I’m alive—after I’m dead, they might as well award it to someone who can still appreciate it.

The Alans, from 1st-century Central Asia through late antiquity.

Court cases are all about constructing narratives—AI is just the legal system distilled to its essence.

I think you’d have better luck doing it the other way around: fingerprint known non-AI content, and treat everything else as potential AI.