4,482 karma · joined May 20, 2019
Those watching can see that the oligarchs, the economic platform, and the propaganda delivery system are in position to groom the selected voter base for the long term.
The opposition to this open corruption and mayhem (gerrymandering, voter bribery) is only leading nationally by ... 8 points.
Neither does the US anymore.
US influence has gone up in the smoke of broken economic agreements, psychotic bloviation, and tariff wars.
If all you can do is threaten other people/countries to stand beside you, you have no friends.
Abusing privacy is the lucrative norm. The laws won't help you and the government is busy with its corporate agenda.
I think we have scaled the behaviour without scaling the talent. (^;
Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.
> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
The lense that has replaced religion is callous for-profit exploitation.
> the populus looses a lot of their rights
People will certainly lose the rights that they do not exercise.
The US administration does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. US corporations will take profits over defending ideals or sound principles.
Gulf of America? Lake America? Ocean of America?
Writing is fundamentally an artifact of intellectual work that has been done.
If real work has been done, there should be little work left for me to do.
If no real work has been done, and all the work of validation is now thrown to me, then I am being asked to carry someone else's burden of work.
Thanks but no, I have work to do.
The righteousness of making a fast buck is also burning down the world.
This made me laugh. Thanks for not letting me fall unassisted into such an overpopulated trap. ^_^
> People form religions, the power gets abused, they form new ones, the power gets abused, rinse, lather, repeat.
Zeal in general and religious movements in particular are useful. Power imposes its order on anything useful in the exercise of power. States adopt religions, religions adopt armies, people change religions.
Lather, rinse, syncrete, repeat.
The individual manifestation of religious feeling of a hermit and his favourite cactus is in the main not what gives the "great religions" of today their greatness.
> the book humanizes the power structure [...] it exists because of social momentum and peoples' desire for a social support system.
To be sure, community centres have existed wherever humans have formed community.
I suppose we can agree that our species was living in groups quite early in its evolutionary journey. Group living and pooling resources are fundamentally advantageous survival strategies. But there is order even in such humble groups.
Individuals may agree or not on what they believe. A rapid survey of the present or of any other time/place in history shows that they often disagree. Sometimes with weapons.
Humanised or not, the power structure serves a few main purposes. Among which: imposition of order, economic management, and (in many examples) military support. The power structure expands to meet the expanding needs of the power structure. Which may even result in people praying for its healthy continuance.
Given sufficient human incompetence, the technology doesn't even need to be powerful or efficient (or even work as advertised). It just needs to amplify/scale human incompetence.
"AI hardly needs to wipe out humanity in order to be harmful, though. Many experts predict that more powerful models will lead to a coming wave of AI-assisted cyberattacks. The technology is now widely used for disinformation campaigns, and military adoption of AI is accelerating rapidly."
The "zone" of public discourse is flooded with sewage. US news business has lost its mind. And government...
Humans being "in-the-loop" is not enough. Humans must know what they are actually saying and doing. Humans just being "in-the-loop" cannot fix incompetence in social policy and software design.
Humans are "in-the-loop" in corporations and that isn't working very well for society.
Fixed it for you, Sir.
The whole biosphere is over there in the corner, weeping.
Sir, do you happen to have instructions for doing this? We who benefit from your philanthropy salute you.
In this era, venal actions are official actions. Nothing is even hidden anymore. Racketeering and thuggery are on display even during supposed negotiations.
The US is under mob rule. Sure sure, we gonna make a deal. Da best deal evah. Da deal is dat we won't whack ya.
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
This is the real reason for the panic when Dorothy falls into the pig sty at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. The pigs would crush her and eat her. (But in the movie, her dress doesn't even get dirty!)
"Autocrats encourage fan fiction"
Better is the enemy of good.
Old Italian proverb: "il meglio è nemico del bene"
Shakespeare, King Lear: "Striving to better, oft we mar what's well".
It's the same lesson that we can learn from Star Trek, Star Wars, and all the other self-aggrandising lore that humanity concocts when gazing lovingly in the mirror.
There is no greater enemy than greedy, barbaric humanity itself.
= = =
The image [...] is a 116 kB AVIF with a quality score (SSIMULACRA 2) of 62.8, meaning medium-high quality. To get the same quality, the JPEG XL image would be 134 kB.
At a SSIMULACRA 2 score of 80 (very high quality), the AVIF is 227 kB, and the JPEG XL is 264 kB.
But at lossless, the AVIF is 1.76 MB, and the JPEG XL is 1.45 MB. A lossless WebP is 1.55 MB.
At a SSIMULACRA 2 score of 78 (very high quality), the AVIF is 11.6 kB, and the JPEG XL is 23.8 kB.
But at lossless, the AVIF is 164 kB, and the JPEG XL is 92 kB. A lossless WebP is 96 kB.
Although AVIF tends to produce smaller files at web-quality than JPEG XL, AVIF only has basic progressive rendering support. So, for very large images, it may be worth taking the filesize hit with JPEG XL.
Music and writing will change. The markets for both certainly have changed. It seems that music has proven to be more durable.
"We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market."
[1] _ https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/08/21/statement...
It's starkly ironic that the species that finds it easy to think (or to be conditioned by market forces to accept) that a computer is smart/introspective/sentient is the same species that will dehumanise actual living human beings because of differences in appearance, social status, or political affiliation.
One cannot think oneself into these states. These things grow like good things in a garden.
The world is full of unhappiness that only caring, compassion, and actual effort can fix.