Where broker’s fees are concerned, up-front cost is typically first and last month’s rent, plus the broker’s fee, which can be as low as one month’s rent or as high as 15% of the annual rent total (almost twice the cost of a single month’s rent).
Apply the rules above to whatever the average rent is for a given neighborhood, and there you go.
There’s nothing about a “fight the status quo” mentality that inherently favors authoritarianism and it’s not helpful to claim otherwise.
That said, it is helpful to remember both knowing- and unconscious authoritarians will twist any framework into an excuse to establish and flex authority — that’s their whole modus operandi, after all.
This is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't go unacknowledged.
In a vacuum this shouldn't be an issue at all. We make stuff, we honor and benefit the creators, we share as needed and progress humanity as a whole. So I can understand the more optimistic approaches to AI as a tech revolution.
But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one.
But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill.
The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.
There are hundreds of millions or billions of us, though, depending on how broad a brush you use. Any given issue or value is going to have someone, in fact quite a lot of someones, on every conceivable side of it. Even if you limit your scope to the people who have a substantial voice in the culture.
Yeah, but it's not a good look when the influence-weighted average of all those people applies double standards for different groups in similar situations. I mean, even when you take just a single person, they're probably going to have a couple conflicting feelings towards any one topic. And yet, if the emergent result of that internal conflict doesn't produce some level of self-consistency in resulting opinions and actions, then something's not quite right.
Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place.
A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids.
Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.
Depends on your lens. If you view it as "crime", sure. If you view it as "obtaining quality content", you can see why and where these users' priorities are. The web is already this riddled SEO optimized spam-Festa that makes it hard to find what you want or desire, now AI comes in and increases the spam tenfold.
AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.
Everyone should doublecheck sensationalist claims given the well-known incentives to lie, exaggerate, etc.
That said, cutting off contact with an under-age relative over a couple hundred dollars does sound like pretty miserly behavior. A lesson in the tenuousness of familial ties in the face of stubborn ideology, if anything.
Everyone quoted in this article is roughly 60 years old - would have loved to know if other generations are similarly split about this experience.
That said, as a former cashier who mostly uses self-checkout in her 30s: babysitting self-checkout sounds way less fun than chatting with strangers while I checked them out was.
I think the individual you’re replying to may be lying about their identity to make a point (re: the first individual asking a stranger to send them financial info) :)
I think it’s more of a bonding ritual than anything (a moment of false vulnerability/social danger that resolves into safety), with different outcomes depending on the folks involved.
Maybe we (males to other males) do something similar to teasing... But with a crueler streak. I knew I could call my Irish colleague a freind the day he called me an Englsh wanker.
Conversely, a former girlfriend said that she did not consider me as a romantic partner until the first time I teased her. I can't remember what form it took, but there is no way it would have involved me calling her a wanker.
What you describe sounds almost exactly like the definition of playful teasing laid out in the article:
> For playful teasing to be successfully interpreted as affiliative rather than aggressive, the teaser, to some extent, has to understand the recipient's expectations and predict their likely reaction. Likewise, the recipient needs to draw accurate inferences and correctly identify the teaser's intent as affiliative, looking beyond any mildly abrasive behavioural elements.
The stark difference in social boundaries you observe is actually an affirmation of the hypothesis that playful teasing acts as a social tool for discovering how to navigate different individual social dynamics.
Apply the rules above to whatever the average rent is for a given neighborhood, and there you go.