You literally can't be a billionaire without exploiting people. If you're not sharing profits equitably, you're exploiting your work force; if you ARE sharing profits, then there's no way you'll become a billionaire.
- Posts
- 1
- Comments
- 316
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
- Posts
- 1
- Comments
- 316
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
Yeah but that was by inbred, ignorant shit heads with a slightly darker skin tone than this inbred ignorant shit head.
It's not just the body count - Yahweh literally tortures innocent people - the Book of Job is the most notable (though there's many examples of this).
For those that don't know it or who want a recap:
Satan said to Yahweh that his followers just loved him because they were rewarded for it, and if they weren't, they'd turn on him.
So Yahweh...proves it? He destroys Job's livelihood, kills his family, gives him all kinds of diseases and pains, and Job spends the rest of his life homeless and alone, completely ruined, but Job still praises Yahweh. So, hooray, Yahweh wins the bet.
The thing you really have to remember about this story is that--as it was written--it isn't real. Maybe there are some factual elements to it, but for the most part, we have this story, not because it's factual, but because generations and generations of people believed it was a good story to help us understand the nature of God and our relationship to Him.
The cruelty Yahweh shows to Job is not an exception - it's literally exemplary. It's an example.
I'm pretty sure wolves don't really bark. They're all growls and howls. You said you wanted more bike shedding, right?
None of the rules and restrictions that they impose on us will ever impact them or anyone in their families, political power is just about maintaining and increasing political power. If we ever get any protections or services it's just because doing so will enable them to get reelected.
I don't think most people understand how politicians live - every room they go into, everyone in the room is suddenly their servant; they live every moment surrounded by sycophants who are making a career out of preventing access to you. There are a handful of people that have more power than you, but you hardly ever encounter them. A few months of that would change anyone - imagine living years like that?
One day, someone taps you on the shoulder; it's some dirty 20 something who doesn't even know what wagu steak is, much less why you shouldn't be interrupted while it's still hot.
What the fuck do you want, kid?
I'm up to my ears in medical bills, is there anything you can do about socializing our healthcare?
You look around the table apologetically at the people you're eating with, three of whom work for health care companies. They don't say, "that would destroy our line-goes-up" or "any normal job will get this kid health insurance, he just doesn't want to work." They don't say anything. They just roll their eyes and flash a sheepish, such an embarrassment kind of look.
Now's not a great time, ok? But call my office and we'll set something up.
But there never really is a good time, is there? You turn back to your plate, your beef is still mostly hot, and don't bother giving the kid your number. You forget the kid a moment later and don't think of him again until years later. What ever happened to that kid? I hope he figured out his debt problem.
I'm in the same boat, and I have been for a loooong time. It's awesome, because, half the time, I see a game get super cheap, and I'm like, I've been waiting for this moment for 5 years (eg, Skyrim.) Then, the other half the time, some amazing game will just fly by my head and I won't even notice, like, huh, wtf is this, $5 and like 50,000 YouTube videos about it..? (Eg, Just Cause 2.)
I put hundreds of hours into both Skyrim and JC2, for a total of like $10.
I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I don't think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:
I was just rebutting that person's claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they don't; physicality requires resources that "digitality" doesn't.
I feel like you might've agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.
First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & it's physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.
Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value
Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the album's reach was extended.
Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just don't approach their subscription that way - you don't subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, let's be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.
As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services can't correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the "content providers" (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.
This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - they're having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productions' profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a film's profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?
It's a shitty situation, and I don't know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isn't whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, I'm just going to step outside the market for a bit.
I'm not living in some dream world where piracy doesn't reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , it's just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their "line not go up" on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.
Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.
It's got nothing to do with whether it's physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they haven't lost anything.
I like this take - I read the refutation in the replies and I get that point, but consciousness as an illusion to rationalize stimulus response makes a lot of sense - especially because the reach of consciousness's control is much more limited than it thinks it is. Literally copium.
When I was a teenager I read an Appleseed manga and it mentioned a tenet of Buddhism that I'll never forget - though I've forgotten the name of the idea (and I've never heard anyone mention it in any other context, and while I'm not a Buddhist scholar, I have read a decent amount of Buddhist stuff)
There's some concept in Japanese Buddhism that says that, while reality may be an illusion, the fact that we can agree on it, means that we can at least call it "real"
(Aka Japanese Buddhist describes copium)
Canadians for Trump is possibly the cringiest moment in Canadian history.
A recent Behind the Bastards on Alex Jones (part 1) has recordings of Info Wars from January 6 - before Jones had had a chance to call in and tell them to shut the fuck up before they got noticed as being complicit
It's funny (and scary) hearing them being like, "It's all happening! The second American Revolution is underway! The Patriots have control of the Capitol!"
Jones quickly learned that he needs his listeners to be "panic-adjacent" rather than actually in panic mode. Panicking people don't buy brain pills.
My daughter asked me about something that happened back in the nineteen hundreds and I nearly lost it
You seem very upset about this. I doubt this will help since it doesn't seem like your reasoning is influenced by logic, but, the fact that there are fraudulent doctors and diagnoses doesn't mean science isn't real.
You don't have to crack it to make it but you have to crack it to determine whether you've made it. That's kinda the trick of the early AI hype, notably that NYT article that fed Chat GPT some simple sci fi, ai-coming-to-life prompts and it generated replies based on its training data - or, if you believe the nyt author, it came to life.
I think what you're saying is a kind of "can't define it but I know it when I see it" idea, and that's valid, for sure. I think you're right that we don't need to understand it to make it - I guess what I was trying to say was, if it's so complex that we can't understand it in ourselves, I doubt we're going to be able to develop the complexity required to make it.
And I don't think that the inability to know what has happened in an AI training algorithm is evidence that we can create a sentient being.
That said, our understanding of consciousness is so nascient that we might just be so wrong about it that we're looking in the wrong place, or for the wrong thing.
We may understand it so badly that the truth is the opposite of what I'm saying : people have said ("people have said" is a super red flag, but I mean spiritualists and crackpots, my favorite being the person who wrote The Secret Life of Plants) that consciousness is all around us, that every organized matter has consciousness. Trees, for example - but not just trees, also the parts of a tree; a branch, a leaf; a whole tree may have a separate consciousness from its leaves - or, and this is what always blows my mind: every cell in the tree except one. And every cell in the tree except two, and then every cell in the tree except a different two. And so on. With no way to communicate with them, how would a tree be aware of the consciousness of it's leaves?
How could we possibly know if our liver is conscious? Or our countertop, or the grass in the park nearby?
While that's obviously just thought experiment bullshit, my point is, we don't know fucking anything. So maybe we created it already. Maybe we will create it but we will never be able to know whether we've created it.
Things that are scientifically provable are valid.
If I can interject - I don't think the OP is showing an unpopular opinion. The people they're talking to aren't mad. It looks to me like an opinion whose wisdom isn't generally accepted - and there's a difference.
Unpopular opinion: pedophilia is a mental disorder; child rape (including "statutory" rape) is an act of violence, cruelty, and power - or, in arguably the worst case, crimes of opportunity. Not all child rapists are pedophiles and not all pedophiles are child rapists. Pedophiles should be treated; child rapists should be imprisoned forever. (Those that are in the overlap can be treated in prison.)
This opinion is (I think) probably true, but if you go around talking about it, you will be unpopular.
Unaccepted opinion: well, there are a lot of them here, but this one - about teachers - could be tweaked into one: the only way we are going to see changes that would actually benefit our society and country, the things the news and politicians say are "luxury expenses" - aka health care, teachers' salaries, rent and real estate regulation, etc - is with a general strike. The propaganda and gaslighting and victim blaming are so deeply entrenched that they have become the most profitable sectors of our economy.
This opinion is - again, in my opinion - probably true, and there are a lot of people who agree - but not enough. If the crowd in that picture represents a country of 350 million, then that one person represents maybe 0.5-1 million people? Which is way more than the supporters of a general strike.
Why did I say all that? Mostly because I'm bored - but I think it's a neat distinction to make.
This whole open AI has Artificial General Intelligence but they're keeping it secret! is like saying Microsoft had Chat GPT 20 years ago with Clippy.
Humans don't even know what intelligence is, the thing we invented to try to measure who's got the best brains - we literally don't even have scientific definition of the word, much less the ability to test it - so we definitely can't program it. We are a veeeeerry long way from even understanding how thoughts and memories work; and the thing we're calling "general intelligence" ? We have no fucking idea what that even means; there's no way a bunch of computer scientists can feed enough Internet to a ML algorithm to "invent" it. (No shade, those peepos are smart - but understanding wtf intelligence is isn't going to come from them.)
One caveat tho: while I don't think we're close to AGI, I do think we're very close to being able to fake it. Going from Chat GPT to something that we can pretend is actual AI is really just a matter of whether we, as humans, are willing to believe it.
Donkey Kong wishes! No, Dead Kennedys
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.