In separate buildings.

Hide WINE in the box

If you work from home it becomes NSFH.

I asked chatgpt for a solution. It’s not promising:-

Even though U.S. policies like equating money with free speech, treating corporations as people, and legalizing lobbying are deeply entrenched, history shows that even long-established systems can change through persistent, multifaceted efforts. Here’s how such changes might occur:

1. Constitutional and Judicial Pathways

Constitutional Amendments: The most sweeping change would come from amending the Constitution. For example, an amendment could clarify that money is not a form of free speech or that constitutional protections apply only to human beings, not corporations. Although amending the Constitution is difficult and requires broad political consensus, it would directly override existing legal interpretations.

Judicial Reinterpretation: Change can also occur gradually by influencing judicial interpretations. By electing or appointing judges who are open to rethinking established precedents—such as those set by decisions like Citizens United—legal opinions on campaign finance and corporate rights can slowly evolve.

2. Legislative and Regulatory Reforms

Reforming Campaign Finance Laws: Even without a constitutional amendment, Congress and state legislatures can pass new laws to restrict political spending. Measures might include public financing of campaigns, strict spending caps, and full disclosure of contributions to reduce the outsized influence of large donors.

Regulating Corporate Political Activity: Statutory reforms can be introduced to redefine the role of corporations in politics. For instance, laws could ban corporate contributions to political campaigns or limit their lobbying activities, effectively reducing the political clout that comes with corporate personhood.

Tightening Lobbying Regulations: Legislatures can also impose stricter rules on lobbying—such as enhanced disclosure requirements, limits on the “revolving door” between government and private industry, or even temporary bans on certain types of lobbying. These measures would curb the direct influence that special interest groups can wield over lawmakers.

3. Grassroots and Electoral Strategies

Building Public Pressure: Change often starts from the bottom up. Grassroots movements, advocacy groups, and citizen coalitions can mobilize public opinion, use social media to raise awareness, and pressure elected officials to prioritize campaign finance and corporate reform.

Electoral Reforms and Voting Engagement: Changes like anti-gerrymandering efforts, ranked-choice voting, and other electoral reforms can help shift political power towards a broader base of citizens. Increased voter participation and support for reform-minded candidates can gradually reshape the political landscape.

State-Level Innovations: States can act as testing grounds for reform. Successful state-level initiatives—such as stricter campaign finance laws or innovative transparency measures—can provide models that encourage national adoption of similar policies.

Summary

Though deeply entrenched, policies like “money as free speech,” corporate personhood, and legal lobbying can change. Through constitutional amendments, new laws to reform campaign finance and corporate influence, and powerful grassroots mobilization, we can reshape our political system to be more democratic and representative.

These avenues illustrate that while the current biases are strong, a combination of legal, legislative, and grassroots actions can pave the way for meaningful political reform.

In Glasgow ice cream trucks deliver drugs.

Hence the need to remove

• money as Free Speach
• corporations are people
• lobbying is legal

But changes to these policies won’t occur because these policies already exist.

Who’s to say that other people’s preferences are more important than their own,

Because communication is about getting your ideas and opinions into other people’s minds. I may prefer to write in swahili, but my audience prefers English.

particularly given that this particular preference is shared by millions of other people.

Over particular mediums for particular topics, yes the all lowercase preference may dominate. ALL CAPS FOR SHOUTING and miXeD CaPs FoR cRAzY provide excellent emphasis. But history shows that capitalization is an advantage. It was invented during the printing press and stayed as convention.

Here’s some more discussion

Having tried to learn a language (Bengali) that does not use capitals, I can attest to their use. If you’re starting out, how do you tell a name from another noun? Are you talking about chandra (the moon) or Chandra (the common surname)? There are so many cases in every language where common and proper nouns overlap, and having capitalization is very helpful.

It is irrelevant that they don’t believe capitalization aids with clarity.

Communication is about what other people prefer, not what you personally like. And they obviously do want to communicate well

It’s just an extra convention to help communication. But I don’t buy your lazy argument because:-

• it is often performed automatically

and

• you take the time and effort to enhance your communications with punctuation and paragraphs.

No, he said they “need to figure out a different open source strategy”. That is completely different.

Don’t you find capitalisation help to define sentences? It’s much easier to read, particularly at speed.

everything is a google search away

Have you used Google search recently?

I called mine Marvin.

I always liked the German “Handy” … cos it’s great for porn.

Bond is Scottish.

Do it before they drag you into an argument, lose, then ban you.

Mostly Agreed. I think the “in your own words” part will be debated strongly over the next few years. Will proof of writing your own prompt be sufficient?

LLMs are certainly trained without consent, but they exist to spot common patterns. It’s only likely to plagiarise if that text is also similar to lots of other text.

In fact, the academic practice of references and exact quotes has actually increased the tendency of statistical models to “plagiarise”.

LLM will continue to be a useful academic tool. We just have to learn how best to incorporate them into our testing.

the parents are entitled and enabling pricks and don’t have legal ground to stand on.

After reading that the exam rules basically said not to use chatgpt or similar, I completely agree.

And what if you had an app on your phone that let you just take a picture of the question, and write out the answer it gave you?

At college level, the question setter should ensure they are testing something where this is not possible.

It’s not really a calculator because it gives different answers. Newer moldels can give attribution (e.g. bing copilot).

My opinion is that LLMs are not going to go away. Testing needs to adapt to focus on the human element. Marks are no longer lost for bad handwriting.