uriel238

@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thirsty much?⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
  It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
  You can get yourself clean
  You can have a good meal
  You can do whatever you feel!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨knew a few guys like this⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I was like six years old when I talked to someone, and he said no hablo English, and I freaked out, because it was the first time that I encountered someone who spoke a different language.

  Years later, Sesame Street would start showing segments in English and Spanish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Starvation Wages' at Giant US Corporations Force Workers to Seek Taxpayer-Funded Aid⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  More than that, money in welfare programs continues to circulate. Money going to the ultra-wealthy exits the economy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Starvation Wages' at Giant US Corporations Force Workers to Seek Taxpayer-Funded Aid⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It would not be legal in a society that is actually trying to have consistent laws. The US is not one of those.

  At this point businesses don’t have to adhere to any regulations so long as they bribe the officials that are supposed to enforce them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No ChatGPT for sexy time⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re doing a lot to curb education now, and as it is, STEM and literacy are dropping hard in generation alpha.

  But that also means the US master race is just not going to be able to compete compared to EU and China. If the US was stable, it would mean the US would turn into another North Korea.

  But the US is destabilizing as we watch. We may end up in the same situation that Germany was in during the late 1930s, where they borrowed too much and run out of resources, and have a big ol’ army standing by; it’s time to get expansionist.

  I think Chinese bombers over Washington blotting out the sun is the worst possible outcome, but it’s still on the table.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨three cheers for fate!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, when I took Economics 101: Macroeconomics in 1985, there was a big point about how important it was to maintain a fairly even wealth distribution, with a discussion of how it is a very bad thing™ for all the wealth to consolidate at the top. (In the meantime, Reagan was gutting all the policies that were used to keep wealth distributed and preserve a strong middle class.) So this is something that anyone who took a basic college course should know.

  In time, I got confused that presidents and legislators kept pushing supply side (trickle-down) economics and kept passing laws that allowed the upper class to keep more of their money, while leaving the lower and middle classes to languish, when I was certain these officials were educated (or had experts who were) and should know better. Then I worked out that they are just captured and corrupt AF.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No ChatGPT for sexy time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Here in the States, AI romance is one of the few AI services common shlubs will pay for. Most users only use their free token allotment. Otherwise it’s businesses that buy tokens and drive AI profits.

  And US AI offerings are still plummeting into debt, so any service that makes money is welcome. So far, AI workforce replacement costs more than human workers (by far) and does a poorer job most of the time. Hence Doctorow’s notion of a reverse centaur, the human employee that checks the machine’s work (rather than the machine checking and augmenting human work).

  Also here in the States we have a culture war. Manosphere men (Incels, MGTOW, seduction culture alpha males, etc.) vote Republican, so influencers get infused with billionaire money. But women (even conservative women) find them insufferable. The battle of the sexes, like the war against trans folk, immigrants and libs serves to distract people away from class consciousness.

  Zoomers are not having sex compared to prior generations at the same age, and an AI companion might be a serviceable substitute. They were already taking on waifus anyway.

  The affordability crisis, poor job growth and poorer upward mobility also informs the lowest fertility rate in US history (below 1.6 which some think is critical). To be fair, US fertility has been below replacement for decades, and we made it up with immigration.

  And it’s the ownership class most frightened by depopulation. Curiously they keep makibg policy decisions that are downright antinatal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨three cheers for fate!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Seriously, we have multiple economists saying the only way out of this fine mess (and to save the world) is to massively redistribute the wealth at the top to the rest of the population.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon is so smat⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of pedophilia-adjacent paraphilias. It’s not just size difference.

  There’s the fantasy of having a partner who is innocent and easy to dominate, as per the born sexy yesterday trope. Entire movies have been made about this.

  There’s an intrinsic sexual attraction to youth, advantage of which is taken by the fashion industry, using children in compromising poses to market their wares. Underaged kids presented as sex objects has been an unregulated marketing tool for over a century now.

  There’s interest in teen coming-of-age scenarios, cinema of which was rampant in the late 1970s to 1980s, which did not shy away from sexuality. Mass market erotica in the 1970s featured teen sex, which became more regulated in later years.

  There’s those interested in child sexual experimentation. Children explore their sexuality with their peers, and this is regarded as normal and even healthy according to pediatric consensus. Here in the states, though, we’re puritanical AF, and it’s commonplace for parents to freak out when they catch kids (their own or otherwise) fooling around or exchanging peeks at their bits.¹ I can’t speak for causality but the US has an ageplay community that occupies its niche in the kink sector.

  By far, (according to the very few studies we have on the subject) most people who have an interested in child sex or teen sex scenarios either don’t pursue to explore it at all, or do so with deliberate care to avoid harm and wrongdoing. Since the 1990s, the public has become more aware of the harm that can be caused by sexualizing children and teens before they are autonomously ready, and most folk instead seek to explore their own fetishes in safety with consenting adults. Sadly, there are predators out there, but like other violent criminals in the population, they’re the exception and not the norm. (At the same time, our society struggles to be sufficiently concerned about children’s welfare in general, with food insecurity, family insecurity, housing insecurity and healthcare insecurity being at critical highs in the US.)

  Incidentally, for a while now, Twitter’s CSAM problem has gotten worse since Musk turned it into X. And xAI’s CSAM problem is significantly worse than those of competing AI services. Musk isn’t willing to correct either matter with additional safeguards or human moderation, rather just yells at his user base and points to the xAI ToS. And also Musk’s disclaimers about his acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein being only brief and casual are not convincing, and smack of protesting too much and too prematurely. (Kinda like Melania Trump’s disclaimer.)

  ¹ In the age of cell phones, police and courts of law will bust, convict and imprison underaged teen lovers who are caught sexting each other for creating and distributing CSAM, especially if those images escape into the public. Even if it’s of themselves. Even if they were originally intended to be private. A few states have since passed legislation to allow teens to sext each other so long as they show reasonable caution to keep their pics private, but in most states, police and school administrators still freak out over personal phone snaps of naked teens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can't unsee him⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Infantino delicately informs Trump that he is not a part of the Fellowship.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon is so smat⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Topical, though. xAI is in trouble for allowing users to create CSAM, but instead of adding more safeguards and moderators to the service? he’s just pointing to the ToS and yelling at users on Twitter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  During the enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes discusses the Social Contract, which is the agreement between ruling bodies and the public. It’s to say that as long as live in the working class is tolerable, we’ll continue to let the leadership lead (instead of overthrowing them for someone else, or even to establish self-governance).

  There have since been data driven studies that development of a society: roads, schools, bridges, libraries, hospitals, etc. that increase general quality of life also increase productivity which increases profits, and this is the foundation of a free, liberal society with heavily regulated market capitalism. (The regulations assure that enterprises don’t cause harm, such as polluting rivers or underpaying their workforce or selling a false product, and don’t engage in anti-competitive practices such as underselling the competition or lobbying officials to legislate in their favor.)

  Sadly, the ownership class did exactly what Marx predicted in Das Kapital, manipulated elections, bribed officials and was able to open the US federal government to lobbies and special interest groups. Reagan happened, and what followed was deregulation, the disenfranchisement of labor unions, and the capture of institutions. The US and EU became neoliberal, and has been in the process of collapse ever since.

  During the aughts and 2010s, I got curious why game development companies would crunch to meet deadlines even though this didn’t work. Productivity would decline thanks to the crunch, and the development team’s health and morale would get wrecked. Studies came out that crunching does not work, and in fact has results the opposite of what are intended, but game development companies still crunch to this day in 2026.

  We’ve seen a similar effect with RTO mandates, even after we’ve seen widespread increases of worker productivity through telecommuting. There have been some suggested causes for RTO orders: Companies are stuck leasing large office spaces and management doesn’t like the appearance of unused empty offices; Upper management narcissistically needs to have an entourage of busybodies around them doing the appearance of work. (This hypothesis is consistent with the existence of bullshit jobs.) Upper management distrusts the workforce, expecting that they are intrinsically lazy and prone to freeloading, and hence need to be micromanaged.¹ Essentially, our C-suite can’t get past themselves to keep their workforce happy to maximize production and then just let them work.

  So the conclusion that I’ve come to is that our upper management is mostly incompetent, and enacts policy not based on data-driven best business practices but what feeds their own respective egos. When one is wealthy enough it’s very easy to fail upwards, and they all are that wealthy. The businesses that are still growing are the ones that have market advantage and engage in shenanigans to undermine and eliminate competition. This is how ISP services mostly have regional monopolies across the nation, and how all the big box stores now have their prices set by Amazon, making them essentially an oligopoly or a cartel.

  That is to say our businesses don’t have to run themselves well, and the same culture is informing the capture and corruption of government. It’s also now I can predict that the EU, also trapped in neoliberal policymaking is not far behind the US in being captured by the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations, and are facing the rise of right-wing movements and Overton window shifts towards fascism.

  ¹ This is consistent with conditions in Meta offices and Amazon warehouses under the direction of Zuckerberg and Bezos, respectively. This is also consistent with the market of products and services to combat time theft, even though most instances of alleged time theft are human beings doing human stuff like pooping or talking to loved ones, and wage theft by comparison is a crisis greater than all the petty property crime combined. (Generally, white collar crime causes more lost of life, property damage and cost than all other crime by orders of magnitude. Law enforcement is totally focused on the wrong criminals.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Looking it up, Bytedance still gets half the profit from TikTok and the rest is distributed to Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX, so, no, no profits are going into the US treasury.

  And it’s also observed, capturing TikTok may just be the same move as the German Reich to turn media into a state-sanctioned mouthpiece. But I don’t know who determines the parameters of the TikTok algo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pov It's 2035⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Liz Cheney being president is not a positive. Non-whites and LGBT+ folk are still fighting for their rights and to get representation. No-bid government contracts are going to big construction and big military instead of big tech. Social programs are still gutted and dying or dead. Big religion dominates education. We’re still locked in a war in the Middle East or Asia. The world is still burning while the federal government still refuses to regulate big polluters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The US has already started with Tiktok.

  Trump is in fact our most communist president.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I want the billionaires involved to be disgraced and stripped of their ill-gotten gains as well. Id est, accountability and justice.

  If not that, 🪟🔪⚜️ and seizure of the assets, placed in the national treasury and used to fund social programs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Being too rich should be an actual crime to the international community. Maybe after the oligarchs try to buy up Europe it will be.

  In the classic days, hoarding wealth in excess was frowned upon. Then Spain got rich in the name of the Church ravaging and enslaving the new world. And in the US the California Gold Rush sold Americans the notion that anyone could strike it rich, and as Steinbeck observed, from then on we were temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

  And with time, each new iteration of the ultrawealthy, from the oil and steel magnates to the railroad barons to the automotive industrialists and tobacco tycoons to the tech bros and private equity buyout financiers, all made their riches faster and in greater quantity than the prior one.

  Curiously, recent news tells us that SpaceX valuation is crashing, OpenAI and Anthropic are way, way in debt and vastly raising token prices, and Chinese offerings like Deepseek are catching up and offering cheaper service.

  Many companies who have gone all in for AI to replace or reduce their human workforce are finding that AI does a worse job for way more cost.

  The bubble may be slow-leaking and slow tearing like a weather balloon, but it is coming apart.

  Huh. In the aughts, Enron tried to work legitimately as an electrical power broker, but then it got way overvalued and then started engaging in shenanigans to preserve its high rating and the illusion of growth. I’d say expect more market manipulation and lobbying government from big AI, but I guess they already crossed that line a while ago – I think it’s time to regard that move as in indication they don’t really have any confidence in their product.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israel First Hakeem Jeffries in a nutshell. The Democratic Party needs new pro-worker leadership.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As progressives and DSAs have been winning special elections and primaries, the establishment Democrats have been openly voicing their concern that the left-wing divisions of the party are changing what the party stands for.

  To them, apparently, it’s a big-tent party only so long as we offer our votes but not our opinions.

  Fortunately, the party’s leadership is beginning to recognize that blanket support of Israel has turned into a non-starter position. AIPAC support has become an albatross in many elections, to the point that AIPAC is using shell PACs to anonymously support opponents to pro-Palestine candidates.

  More and more, it’s evident that support of Israel is less about support of the Jewish peoples and more about support of a stratified world order that is controlled by an ultra-wealthy oligarchy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's a major award!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are multiple watchlists!

  Rolex or Casio?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can't wait!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It would be a ghastly scenario in which they decided to start a nuclear war. But I think that that is about as likely as nuclear war breaking out during the fall and dissolution of USSR (which is to say slim to none).

  Firstly, US nukes are under a lot of security, and rogue actors would be hard pressed to commandeer those weapons for their own use. Also, most of them cannot be retargeted without a lengthy process and some sophisticated math. As they stand, they’re set for a specific list of possible trajectories, so they can only be used to target foreign enemies, and outdated targets thereof. (Rick Perry was delighted when he became Secretary of Energy that he was in charge of the US nuclear arsenal in 2017. Then he learned its sorry state of neglect and disrepair. Trump has since really wanted to use a nuke, and has been pushing to modernize said arsenal.)

  Secondly, detonating even one nuclear weapon in hostility breaks some really forbidden ice, and invites all other foreign nuclear powers to use their arsenals as well. Right now we’re just past eighty years without an atomic weapon used in war, and the current stability still depends on the notion that if one nation attacks, the rest of the international stage retaliates with their weapons. Granted, they may choose not to for sake of the species, but provoking them is a terrible risk to take.

  During the first Trump term, I was blogging about Far Cry 5 and ranted about the ending, during which I discussed how unlikely a nuclear exchange was, even though Trump had already made clear he very badly wants to use some nukes. (While I’m sharing old blog pieces, I discussed his fire and fury moment here.) I had predicted Mattis would stab Trump with a steak knife if that was what was necessary to stop him from starting a nuclear exchange, and fortunately, he had far subtler ways of disobeying and distracting. Since then, even in the second term, the US’ armed forces have outright refused to let Trump nuke someone.

  So I’m pretty sure that even if there is a new civil war and even if the military chooses to get involved, it’s very unlikely to engage in tactical nuclear strikes, let alone engage the primary arsenal.

  Huh. Re-reading my blog pieces from about a decade ago, I was far more optimistic about navigating the future than I am today. But even though things are not yet nuclear, they are very messy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can't wait!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Usually, when a society collapses, a bunch of warlords seize resources and then fight it out for a while, until everyone left knew people who died in the fighting.

  During this period, it’s way easy for a stronger colonial empire to come in and take over, and if there are resources to be had (minerals, good farmland, oil, etc.) they totally will.

  The US is an interesting case, since it still has a number of states that are strong self-sustaining economies all their own, and if the US fragmented, we might see those strong states lend aid to the dependent ones, making aid contingent on adopting the host states’ laws and values. Dunno if that will be a bloodless process, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESSOR!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Wasn’t Amontillado the cask of wine used as bait?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Computers can't do everything⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As carrion eaters will quickly demonstrate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Computers can't do everything⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A computer is a machine. It cannot deny consent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Computers can't do everything⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is my argument. Eventually, we’ll have computers capable of generating good art that moves its human audience as intended.

  And in the meantime, there are artists who utilize generative AI as a tool, who learn to prompt exactly, and then curate the best results from the basilisks, much the way photographers determine what to shoot, and how to manipulate lenses, exposure and lighting in order to get the optimal effect.

  Sadly, current LLMs consume a whole lot of resources, way more than the process of human beings doing art. So it’s a long, long road to us getting to where generative AI is actually economic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Computers can't do everything⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the computer told me to can never be a viable excuse when determining responsibility for a poor decision.

  A manager can assert they were advised by the computer, but in the end, the human being must be held responsible.

  Case in point, Iran Air Flight 655

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Censorship" ☠️⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess the main concern is about how this sort of content could coerce people to attempt their fantasies in real life.

  This is the very same argument that has been made about gay persons in times and regions where LGBT+ topics and behavior were criminalized. The same argument was also used in the 21st century about kids playing violent video games.

  It’s also the same argument used in the 19th century to raise a moral panic about women reading romance fiction.

  Here’s the relevant Wikipedia excerpt:

  Cultural anthropologist Patrick W. Galbraith based his research on Japan’s crime statistics, showing that sexual abuse of minors has decreased in Japan since the spread of lolicon media increased in the 1960s and 1970s, argued that cartoon pornographic images do not necessarily influence crime.

  A 2012 report by the Sexologisk Klinik for the Danish government claimed that there is no evidence that individuals that view cartoons and drawings depicting fictitious child sexual abuse are more likely to engage in child sexual abuse in the real world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Censorship" ☠️⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you Australian?

  I’d recommend checking out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund when it comes to the dangers of restricting certain topics in fiction (including child abuse or child sexual abuse), and the dangers of censorship in general.

  The US went over this before in the Aughts with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and the PROTECT act passed in 2003 (with certain parts of it later declared unconstitutional), and later with SESTA and FOSTA, which had a chilling effect, forcing closed online resources that sex workers used to protect themselves. The more recent bills like KOSA and the KIDS act are modeled similarly to close the internet as a vector of free speech under the premise of protecting kids from porn, with the intention to also silence subjects that are ideologically controversial, such as LGBT+ content, ( trans ideology ), sexual education material, women’s health information and political speech that criticizes the Trump administration.

  I still submit that media should be restricted as little as possible. Yes, we should restrict CSAM that creates actual child victims (such as filmed CSA and deepfakes of real kids), in order to protect the victims. And yet, when we criminalize fictional depictions of CSA, it not only starts cutting into legitimate artistic content (such as A Game of Thrones, or The Sandman comic series, Superman 1978 is an edge case), but it then becomes very easy for conservative moral guardians to creep the mission and expand the list of restricted content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep tying healthcare to employment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This time, though, we’re not just talking about Carnegies and Rockefellers. In the 2020s the first estate has four times the wealth that it did during the gilded age.

  It’s not just enough to buy elections and control government, it’s enough to buy all the elections internationally, and control all the governments.

  And we’re already seeing how in the rest of the industrialized world how far right movements are gaining traction in nations that have been weakened by decades of neoliberal policies (e.g. policies that favor private corporate interests and disfavor the public).

  That is to say, watch carefully what happens here in the States, because wherever you are, they’re trying the same thing, and have high tech and lots of money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep tying healthcare to employment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In short term people are going to start dying a whole lot, and the rest of us will realize we have nothing left to lose.

  It’s going to be ugly.