Joe Biden complained recently about “shrinkflation,” when consumer products become smaller in quantity, size, or weight while their prices stay the same or increase.
“Some companies are trying to pull a fast one by shrinking the products little by little and hoping you won’t notice,” said Biden, who called for the companies to stop the practice.
Here’s a classic example of why it happens at a local eatery near my home. When Ingrid Callenberger, the co-owner of The Tria Prima in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, went to place her regular sugar order in mid-February, she was startled by a near-double price increase.
“I knew it was going to happen, but then it happened, and I wasn’t prepared,” Callenberger said. “I felt a lot of panic because the train keeps going. We can’t stop to figure this out.”
Small businesses like The Tria Prima, which serves tea and sweets, have limited business choices.
“Because we’re so small, we can’t afford to buy at volume. Sometimes I don’t order for three months,” she said. Buying larger portions would reduce costs, but the goods could spoil before use.
Callenberger said she believes in supporting small producers, so she buys bulk sugar from smaller-scale companies, not industry giants like Domino Foods. Turning toward alternative sugars like maple syrup and honey is an appealing but pricey move, and using less sugar would limit the variety of products the business can offer.
When goods and shipping costs increase, retail prices must rise, Callenberger said. “When we have to charge more, we’ll charge more.” To support the consumer, The Tria Prima may maintain prices but switch to smaller portions or shrinkflation.
Callenberger said she fears unpredictable market changes will force small businesses like hers to shutter. “We’re fighting something bigger than us to keep going.”
The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.
Jesus Christ: Luke 16:10
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Action
We’ve all had some fun laughing at what we’ve seen from google’s AI from the supposed death of Iowahawk
It got so bad that Google actually turned off the ability to generate images, alas it could still “talk” and express confusion as to who was worse, Christopher Rufo who exposed the plagiarism scandals at Harvard or Adolph Hitler who is responsible for the start of World War 2 in Europe and the Death of tens of millions
Google has taken the “literally worse than Hitler” meme and made it the authoritative voice of its artificial intelligence program. A glimpse into elite opinion with the ideology cranked up to 11. pic.twitter.com/fmRvBFnfhN
The reality that Google AI is just a computer program, a complex computer program, with access to all kinds of data, but a computer program that operators under the parameters that the programmers have given it and if people understood that this is what it is then all of this stuff would be no big deal.
This leads to the most simple and obvious question there is:
If Google’s AI, a program that the company developed over the course of YEARS involving tens of not thousand or hundreds of thousands of man hours of work to do so produces such results to queries, why would you trust the google search engine to produce the results you want vs the results they want to give you?
The short answer is YOU CAN’T. Cue Glenn Reynolds who has come to the same conclusion:
you’d be a fool to trust Google. Assuming this is just bad programming, then, well, it’s really bad programming. That somehow nobody noticed.
if you know a bit about how these models are built, you know you don’t get these “incorrect” answers through one-off innocent mistakes. Gemini’s outputs reflect the many, many, FTE-years of labeling efforts, training, fine-tuning, prompt design, QA/verification — all iteratively guided by the team who built it. You can also be certain that before releasing it, many people have tried the product internally, that many demos were given to senior PMs and VPs, that they all thought it was fine, and that they all ultimately signed off on the release. With that prior, the balance of probabilities is strongly against the outputs being an innocent bug — as @googlepubpolicy is now trying to spin it: Gemini is a product that functions exactly as designed, and an accurate reflection of the values people who built it. Those values appear to include a desire to reshape the world in a specific way that is so strong that it allowed the people involved to rationalize to themselves that it’s not just acceptable but desirable to train their AI to prioritize ideology ahead of giving user the facts. To revise history, to obfuscate the present, and to outright hide information that doesn’t align with the company’s (staff’s) impression of what is “good”. I don’t care if some of that ideology may or may not align with your or my thinking about what would make the world a better place: for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google’s mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility “for the greater good”;
For those too woke to get the concept think Hot Fuzz:
Those in the hood willing to murder for “the greater good” that’s the Google team. This is not only the wrong thing, it’s the stupid thing: Mario Juric again:
After Gemini, rather than as a user-centric company, Google will be perceived as an activist organization first — ready to lie to the user to advance their (staff’s) social agenda. That’s huge. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge? Forget the cookies, ads, privacy issues, or YouTube content moderation; Google just made 50%+ of the population run through this scenario and question the trustworthiness of the core business and the people running it. And not at the typical financial (“they’re fleecing me!”) level, but ideological level (“they hate people like me!”). That’ll be hard to reset, IMHO.
It showed us the man behind the curtain, and not in some abstract way. We got to see the world Google is trying to recreate in pictures worth more than a thousand words.
We see that Google’s world is a carefully constructed lie.
And it’s a lie in words as well as pictures to wit:
Why is Nikki Haley spared this treatment but RFK Jr, Melaine Trump , Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson are not? Well right now Haley is considered a foe of Donald Trump and thus is to be celebrated the others, not so much. Not even RFK Jr. who is far to the left of Haley but now a threat to the retention of power by the left. Storm again:
A Google employee sees an answer calling Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hateful and just nods. He is hateful, racist, or otherwise discriminatory, so he should be silenced. It literally never occurred to Googlers that others might disagree, so when they tested the product out the answers seemed obvious to them.
And it’s not “A” google employee, it’s the entire staff who tested and wrote this stuff and the entire management team that approved it. Nobody saw a thing wrong because they all live in the same bubble that believes those whose public thoughts disagree with theirs should be gone.
When Youtube banned me for questioning the honestly of the last election not too many people cared but me because they didn’t see what was going on. When the left which used to love and for decades celebrated J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk and even Donald Trump turned on them. The media left and the google team cheered. After all their actions threatened the power and narrative of the left and thus threatened the greater good:
But now thanks to Gemini it’s all out in the open as to what is going on. The only question is will people choose to see what is in front of their faces or will they accept it…
…for the greater good of course.
Closing thought: Without realizing it or perceiving it Google went from a company whose motto was “Do no Evil” to becoming the Sandford Neighborhood Watch Alliance from HotFuzz in just over one generation.
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