I don’t deny that conspire over pr campaigns happens. What I’m saying is that the same thing happens as a side effect of marketing and polling, in the open with no conspiracy involved. Groups are addressed and in doing so group identities are reinforced which eventually leads to conflict and competition between those groups. Social media, one currently hot area of the ad business, is a great example. To increase ad sales platforms like x (formerly Twitter) optimize engagement which on a technical level means making people angry, typically by culture war content. Gansta rap is another example where marketing just sort of organically lead to a genre of deleterious (for society) music that glorified and thereby exacerbated social problems like prostitution and drug sales. No conspiracy needed, just record companies marketing to white suburban teens who desired authentic sounding ghetto-music.
Why try to explain what is going on in a way that is unprovable and sounds slightly unhinged? There are structural reasons that can be proven to exist (e.g. engagement metrics) which explain the phenomenon. Occam’s razor.
>”It is a conspiracy theory of course (and therefore wrong, of course), but some people are of the opinion that somewhere within the vast unknown/unknowable mechanisms of government, there are forces that deliberately slice the population up into various”
What you are talking about is called polling or marketing. It’s structural, not a conspiracy. It’s inherent to most all statistical analysis, and everyone uses statistics.
I’m pretty sure it’s for 2 reasons: 1) politicians are slick hair car salesman types that have no shame, 2) government being incompetent.
Re 2, if the government could do the things they promised to do, things they charge us for, California high speed rail for example, then people would trust them as much as big business. I can sue a big business, but thanks to incentives I rarely have to. The government on the other hand has lost more lawsuits, screwed over more people, and destroyed the environment to a much greater extent than any single business could manage to do. They use their monopoly on violence to avoid accountability, and waste public funds on their own lifelong political careers, frittering public money away on their own selfish partisan squabbles. Businesses are rarely too big to fail, and therefor cannot behave with impunity. There are only 2 parties. Imagine a world with only 2 corporations!
No. What I want is more unbiased scientific study of the topic before assuming we know for certain that climate change hasn’t altered the relationship between wildfire and forrest health. Funding more research is hardly “playing fast and loose” rather it is the opposite.
I’ll take the other side here. First, ok you were right in that the redwoods of big basin seem very healthy right now. I was swayed personally, as a layperson, by the following argument: it’s possible that current wildfires differ from past wildfires in heat and intensity because of human factors like climate change and too much fire suppression. I hope I was NOT one of the people you felt ridiculed by, my only hope was that the notion be considered with some seriousness and rigor. It still seems possible to me that future wildfires operate differently than those of the past, and I still would favor cautious conservation policies in that regard.
I imagine this information is useful for insurers and large healthcare organizations who may want to limit costs by marketing to high conscientious extroverts.
That the legal system operates differently for those with greater wealth is a more general, certainly important problem, but not specific to LLMs or copyright.
One hopeful thought to consider, if big corporations like Disney use generative ai that have been trained on Joe Nobody’s artwork, and they will most likely, now Joe Nobody can sue Disney, and he may be able to find attorney’s because Disney has enough money to make themselves a lucrative target for lawsuits. Maybe this isn’t how the legal system works, I have very little knowledge of copyright law.
Oh I see, you’re saying we can simply eradicate human life! I didn’t consider that was what the parent was suggesting, but it is true I suppose, in a logical if pedantic sort of way.
I’ll bite: some people want to save more, other people want to spend more. To remove inequality from humanity is to remove human nature itself. Whether or not that’s a good thing is totally besides the point. The premise requires a lack of historical understanding. Maybe we could also end prostitution and violent crime. “If only some politician would make a law… “
People are listing the obvious but missing the correct answer: mental illness causes suicide. The brain goes in old age, which doesn’t just mean cognitive impairment but personality changes, mood and behavior regulation difficulty. Older people may hallucinate, are typically delusional and paranoid, they have trouble controlling themselves including mood and excretory functioning. There are notable examples in the public view right now if you’ve never experienced it. That someone not in control of their own mind might kill themselves is obvious. There needn’t be rational reasons like those listed and I suspect there often aren’t.
It’s not that much worse than the daily mail. I don’t think biased news is failing. On the contrary, the more government spending follows fake news suppression, the more profit in biased news. See American tv news for the same general trend.
Right. I think some people simply prefer less concentration of power. I suspect it boils down to personality, maybe the big five traits largely determine where one sits with respect to freedom/control of other peoples.
Yes, it’s very likely people with sleep trouble (caused by apnea usually) are more likely to consume greater quantities of caffeine to help fight daytime sleepiness caused by the apnea.
I’m not trying to relay information, rather was attempting to make a conceptual point which I’ll restate for clarity: the world is filled with shades of grey. Just as some doctors are bad, some vaccines are bad. You can redefine vaccines to be something that can never be bad, and imbue the word with an assumption of safety and efficacy which isn’t deserved. To the contrary we by default assume vaccines are not safe or effective until proven otherwise. Despite this obvious fact, large portions of society have allowed the definition to be altered to where we aren’t even talking about the same things. That includes various health professionals. I tend to group those vaccines that confer herd immunity and “others” and it seems to me that the wording used for the “others” is dynamic and ought not be the same as the word for those that are intended to confer herd immunity. If we used two words, the problem of anti vaxx would be partially ameliorated it seems. But people want little hills to die on.
Same is true for doctors. Some good, some very bad. In fact, the same is true (don’t hate me for saying so) various other types of pharmaceutical products, including vaccines that rely on herd immunity and those that are merely “vax treatments” or whatever they’ve renamed it to in late 2023 (I think I was told that they are allowed to call it a “jab” or a “spike vax” but not a booster.)
Well, if it’s not good then who cares. If it is good, but subversive for lack of a better term, then that strikes me as worthy. Most work done in that spirit is bad because it’s low quality, not just because it’s agenda driven. I’m all for quality over purity, if it gets more people to read and enjoy.
Of different ways to evaluate translation, whether or not the translator had an agenda against the protagonist of the work they’re translating is a strange criticism. Personally, I became a fan of Wilson after reading her Euripides, I think it was Trojan women or something. I didn’t know why, but I just really enjoyed reading it. I think her popularity is that she makes the poetry come alive. I don’t know if style is the right word but something like that. Translation is always a set of compromises. Better to have more translations, and for translations to be varied in their goals and methods. Her translations make reading enjoyable for me. She wouldn’t be the translation I would choose for other purposes, but to sit down and enjoy the reading, I like her a lot.
“these companies have received significant subsidies”
I think telecom got 100 billion from Biden’s stimulus package. I agree it’s too much but shouldn’t the answer be to just not give billions to the telecom industry?