I would like to see this poll again with “no one” as an option. No one won anything at this debate. Anyone pleased by Trump’s performance would have been pleased no matter what, and everyone else is horrified.

This could be this decade’s Citizen’s United. Neo-liberalism especially among the court has been whittling away at the economy of regular people and the ability of the government to regulate business since at least the 70’s. Privatization never stopped or even abated, regulatory capture has been common, and businesses themselves write the bills for the congresspeople whose campaign they bankrolled to pass quid pro quo. We already have a severe lack of regulation and now we’re going to have no regulation. We just handed the entire country over to a class of gangsters whose morals are exactly the same as Donald Trump’s but wield a much greater degree of violence domestically and worldwide.

Good for Goldman Sachs

The GDP is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of people. The difference between perception of economic barometers like this one is that people used to have more faith in capitalism and it has become so painfully clear that this faith is unwarranted. In the past, people in desperate financial situations could easily delude themselves that they were temporarily embarassed while everyone else in the same situation was probably just lazy. Now people are starting to realize the system is causing it and are much less willing to eat the table scraps thrown to them during times of “economic prosperity.”

I have been reflecting recently that I was not learning the same lessons about the Holocaust as some of my classmates. I got the impression nothing like it should ever be allowed again and we should do everything we can to stop it when we see the signs. I assumed everyone got that impression but I’m realizing that was not the case.

Tabletop in person. I miss it. Secondly, in-person co-op. These are two mediums are being extinguished because of how difficult it is to profit from humans relating to one another in person and giving each other things for free.

Satirical, fake AI-generated clips show Rishi Sunak declaring, “Please don’t vote us out, we would be proper gutted!” and making unevidenced claims about how the Conservative leader is spending public money - including how he will send his “mates loads of dosh”.

I thought this article would be making a case against TikTok.

And shockingly, no central command compound just beneath it. Another “mistake” by the idf resulting in the deaths of men, women, and children.

I thought it was moral dissonance. I’m at least glad that in youger generations mass murder is coming to be seen more universally as evil even when committed against groups who are not white. I’m sorry about whatever happened to you to make you this way.

From your initial comment it seems like the main misunderstanding is that nation states unilaterally declared by European powers in Africa and Western Asia from the nineteenth century until around the middle of the 20th century have been utterly disastrous to those places rather than being the only source of order in those places. Although these nation states are seen as legitimate by the powers which established them, in the opinion of many of the victims of these European powers whose population is much larger and much more relevant since they are physically present for the consequences of this establishment, tend not to consider them as legitimate and more of an encroachment. Colonization is not a neutral or natural process but an act of aggression by parties with superior military might on parties vulnerable to that might. If your view is that might makes right, then the issue here isn’t in historical misunderstanding but more of a moral dissonance. If that isn’t your view I’d be willing to entertain a more detailed conversation.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton funded the Donald Trump campaign in hopes to bolster elements of the Republican Party so dangerous that voters would be forced to vote for Democrats under duress. This is the culmination of the DNC strategy since now under duress we must materially support genocide to prevent immediate physical danger from a lawless rogue government who would also continue that genocide.

In 2010 the ability for the United States to exist democratically was ended through the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision. Democracy can’t withstand the full unimpeded force of capital determining the potential candidates for the people to vote for and writing the bills those candidates vote on. This is aside from the fact that the better funded congressional candidate wins election over 90% of the time, and while this correlation does not prove causation, a different correlation is that congressional voting behavior strongly correlates with the desires of campaign funders and correlates not at all with the polling of their constituents.

Voting for Biden under duress at this time is probably necessary (at this point it seems clear losing the election to Trump is not their greatest fear), but unfortunately if we hope to salvage this system more is required of people than voting. I’m not sure if actual non-fictional human beings are capable of what is required right now, so hopefully whatever this system turns into can eventually be overcome and not replaced by something even worse.

All this to say Trump being a king bastard doesn’t negate Biden also being a king bastard who has probably done more damage to peoples’ lives and the health of our society just with the Crime Bill than anything Trump did. Trump has promised to do worse than any president of the last few decades has done and since the ever increasing stress levels in our culture are causing more of us to lose our minds, explicit fascism (Christian Nationalism is our openly fascist movement) is now a possibility in addition to our existing issues of racism and capitalism. Preventing the worse case is not saving anything and also won’t prevent the possibility of a worse worse case in the future. Everyone voting for Biden is doing so against their will. Trump, having cult charisma, has a number of delusional sociopaths who support him. Winning this election means winning the prize of more of our humanity being commodified and a continuation of old fashioned school of “do it or I’ll kill you” in international relations with countries with a non-white majority. With the internet, information is freer than ever and that appears to be having some effect, so if I have any hope it’s that we will hit a tipping point which causes the majority of us to peacefully transition into a system less vulnerable to corruption.

The only thing crazier than this idiot inventing a master race of republican-aligned tech bros whose destiny is to conquer Silicon Valley through police banquets is that an entire audience of people took it seriously. The article promised a crackpot’s raving and Balaji sure delivered.

So many times I wanted to know the name of an actor who played a character after the first episode and the top result was something like “[Character Name] (deceased)” or " Villain: [Character Name]."

Some of my common uses are:

1. Asking extremely niche scientific questions: I don’t depend on these answers but in the answer is usually the specific terminology I can then search and find the answers I was looking for. I have learned a lot about the properties of metals and alloys this way and what the planet could look like with different compositions.

2. Re-phrasing things: At work when I’m drained and out of patience I can tell that what I’m writing in my emails is not really appropriate, so I have GPT re-phrase it. GPT’s version is typically unusable of course but it kicks my brain in the direction of re-phrasing my email myself.

3. Brainstorming: The program has endless patience for my random story-related questions and gives me instant stupid or cliche answers. This is great for me because part of my creative process since I was a kid has been seeing in media something that was less than satisfying and my brain flying into all the ways I could have done it better. I ask the program for its opinion on my story question, say “no idiot, instead:” and what comes after is the idea I was looking for from my own mind. Sometimes by total chance it has a good suggestion, and I can work with that too.

Fun uses which are less common:

1. Comedy use: I once had it generating tweets from Karl Marx about smoking weed every day. The program mixed marxist philosophy and language with contemporary party music to endlessly amusing results. Having historical figures with plenty of reference material from their writings opining on various silly things is very funny to me, especially when the program makes obvious mistakes.

2. Language Manipulation: If some philosophical text which was written to be deliberately impenetrable is getting too annoying to read, the program is decent at translating. If I plug in a block of text written by Immanual Kant and have the program re-write it in the style of Mark Twain, the material instantly becomes significantly easier to understand. Re-writing it in the style of stereotypical gen-z is hilarious.

This is like early CGI effects in film. Some of those effects are the worst in film history (see Reptile from Mortal Kombat), and some were so good that we don’t even know CGI was used (See helicopters in Black Hawk Down). This is a new technology which is going to be abused majorly in tons of notable cases and we probably won’t notice the instances where it was used successfully.

The tech is clearly not sophisticated enough at this point to reliably enhance film images realistically. However, this technology at this stage of development would probably be excellent for old animation or films whose originals have been severely deteriorated.

I think most Westerners would be shocked how right-wing the Chinese political environment is for most social issues.

Welcome to the field of Economics

I have so many memories with this game but I had to quit because of the notorious headaches. There were plenty of flashing lights in arcade games in those days but the way they flashed in Polybius was part of the challenge. I guess having to focus on the lights to play the game caused the headaches but I don’t know. It was always the busiest cabinet at my arcade so at least I saved myself a lot of time. It wasn’t around for long but I can’t really remember much about my life other than this game from back then so I couldn’t say even how old I was when it was out. The friends I would take turns with back then don’t even know what I’m talking about when I bring this game up. It was a long time ago I guess.

What is sad is that the people most capable of redirecting the party are also the least vulnerable to the consequences of losing elections to Republicans. They’ll be fine. If they happen to get voted out, they can get a consultant job the next day and live a far easier lifestyle. No skin off their nose.

This is funny but also an excellent example. There are people who hinestly believe that, and those pretending to believe that because it’s to their advantage that others be made to believe it. They are all humans behaving as humans in the context of the system they are in. Despite having the same tendencies, if these same people were living in a system that leveraged their personalities and talents to pro-social purposes we would have a very different world. The part we haven’t figured out yet is how exactly that system would work and also work despite millions to billions of different people interacting with it in more ways that can be comprehended by any individual. This is quite a group project we’re working on.