ai art is art because people are mad about it.

Most persuasive point here haha

Also seems useful to separate the economic impacts of AI art (on artists, on the environment, etc.) and larger criticisms of how AI is currently used (destroying the usefulness of search engines) from the question of whether AI art has artistic value.

The point I bring up is that the peace terms are just going to get worse. The only way Ukraine turns this around is expanding this into a great power war, which is insanity, especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

Of the 31 Abrams tanks the U.S. sent to Ukraine

At $10 million apiece, tanks like the Abrams are not easily replaced.

They’re missing what makes these hard to replace. It’s not the sticker price – “just” 1 billion could buy you 1000. It’s that the U.S. currently lacks the production capacity to quickly manufacture replacements.

Unintentionally a great demonstration of the “industrial capital vs. finance capital” conflict in this war.

Survivorship bias

The financial industry is heavily regulated by the US Gov’t

Lol

Not just a time invesent – if you’re biking 18 miles you’re going to need a shower where you’re going, or you’re going to need a job where you can show up drenched in sweat.

And that’s not factoring in rain or snow or having to transport large objects or people.

The response here to “people must be financially illiterate if they can’t live without income for months!” is no, they aren’t illiterate, they live in an economy designed to keep a ton of people in precarity.

Everyone understands it’s nice to have some money set aside for rainy days. It’s such a simple lesson that calling it “financial literacy” is almost condescending. The problem isn’t that people haven’t heard of saving, it’s that decent-paying jobs aren’t common, basic costs like housing and healthcare are rising rapidly, and even if you do everything right there are a thousand ways to get a fat bill dropped on your lap that takes you back to square one.

It’s a little different when much of that net worth is tied up in your house. You can leverage that for cash to an extent, but you can’t simply subside on it for decades the way you could $800k in the bank.

But the larger point remains regardless of where exactly the line is drawn: “wealthy” in global terms includes people in developed countries who are not multimillionaires. These people have massively outsized carbon footprints, even if they aren’t as damaging as people and organizations far wealthier than they are. It’s fair to expect them to cut back on things like air travel and meat consumption.

Over/under on number of questions about Palestine is 0.5, I’m slamming that under

Many countries had periodic famines in their pre-industrial histories. China had plenty before the PRC, and the Russian Empire had some, too. Agricultural production can be thought of as a machine that would occasionally break down.

If you are given responsibility of a machine that occasionally breaks down, the machine breaks down once soon after you take over, and then never ever again, you fixed the machine.

On the corruption point: corruption is possible in any organization. It’s a concern, but there’s nothing about unions that make them more prone to it than anything else.

It’s even worse than that – there hasn’t been a genuinely open Democratic Primary since 2008.

• 2012: Obama is a popular incumbent, that’s the only one they get a pass for
• 2016: The obvious plan was for Hillary to be coronated, the only serious challenger wasn’t even from the Democratic Party, there was the ratfucking with the superdelegates, Dems argued in court that they had no obligation to run a fair primary, etc.
• 2020: Ratfuck Pt. II with the coordinated dropout/endorsement of Biden
• 2024: No one challenges an obviously senile and unpopular president, then the party forces him out and subs in someone who didn’t even get any primary votes in 2020

Except there is no AI teacher here, because AI doesn’t exist yet. These kids are basically doing homework with a chatbot.

The second step was the law the country passed at the beginning of May—the one that The Publica makes sound like a horrifying, dystopian mess. In fact, the measure had the support of the Belgian sex workers union…

But the law also explicitly protects the right to refuse specific customers, sex acts, etc.

It stipulates that “every sex worker has the right to refuse a client,” that “every sex worker has the right to refuse a sexual act,” and that “every sex worker has the right to interrupt a sexual act at any time.” It also says that “any sex worker has the right to perform a sexual act in the manner they wish” and that “if there are dangers to the sex worker’s safety, the sex worker may refuse to sit behind a window or advertise.”…

“If a sex worker exercises the right to refuse more than ten times in a six-month period, the sex worker or the employer may seek the intervention of a governmental mediation service,” according to UTSOPI. “That service will assess if there is anything wrong with the working conditions, if there is a problem in the employer-employee relationship. The service can also offer professional reorientation possibilities.”

I don’t trust Reason’s reporting on this very much, and the article is full of libertarian junk. I’m curious as to why the sex workers’ union supported this, though. Maybe they think the protections it includes are sufficient. Like 100 other things, it’ll come down to how it’s enforced.

The classic “bad artist to fascist” pipeline

Nah, tons of leftists right here on this site used to be libs. In the U.S. at least, I’d say most leftists went through a lib phase at some point.

I don’t think calling libs fascists-in-waiting, moderate fascists, etc. moves many people in the right direction. People match spite with spite. It should be reserved for those we have no hope of bringing around, not us 10 years ago.

Just go through and count the usage of kkkanadians.

The horror!

“I’ll believe it when I see it” is a better response than assuming he won’t actually do this, or patting him on the back before he does.

What is it you think vapes emit?

Reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography now. He’s in prison in apartheid SA in the 60s, in horrible conditions, enduring forced labor, with one prison guard who has a swastika tattooed on his wrist. And he’s talking about how the ANC prisoners would treat individual guards differently based on how they treated the prisoners. He mentions a series of conversations with one guard where the guy asks what the ANC is about and is surprised to learn it’s not a bunch of terrorists who want to kill all white people.

The contrast between that and the modern online sentiment of “everyone remotely associated with the crimes of capitalism deserves to die” is stark. Not everyone will come around, but a lot can. And even if you don’t bring then all the way to good positions, there’s a difference between an opponent who genuinely hates you and would die for their cause and an opponent who merely dislikes you, and who would choose to go home and grumble rather than fight to the death.