All we saw was that he was a garbage man now and likes music. Just because someone went through something crazy doesn’t mean they will never work a day in their life lol
I know I’m being pedantic, but that’s the word used in the video and that’s the slang term, specifically “bike”, probably because it sounds more punchy.
To be even more pedantic, the guy is Italian and that is relevant to the character. In Italy we say “if my grandmother had wheels she would be a wheelbarrow”. He pauses a moment before saying the joke, probably because he didn’t remember the word wheelbarrow and went for bike instead.
I took apart my toys and made new toys out of them all the time when I was a kid and several decades later, I appear to be a normal member of society without having committed a single murder.
Because the movie already heightens the toys to being alive the punishment is probably more representative of the emotions and desires of vengeance his sister had.
My friend’s sister took a permanent marker and wrote her name and drew a stick figure on his G.I. Joe Terror Drome toy (one of the most expensive in the line at the time). No one hoped she would be haunted by Cobra action figures for her crime.
It’s not actually. That’s the second store they claim is the first. The real first was on Western. Coffee is the same though, you’re right, better to go to the roasterie
This I can actually weight in on a bit. They have their recipe under full version control and plant operations can only adjust it slightly without HQ doing an override. Not their air waste handling however, that is under local control.
My family ran a local sandwich shop for years. Here’s the problem.
If this is downtown, the local sandwich shop isn’t even there, in part because Starbucks helped price them out of being able to rent. Every supermarket now has a sandwich counter too, so local sandwich shops don’t do well in shopping centers either. Fast food has slightly improved their quality over the years so that’s more competitors at the low end. And Subway, period.
You’re paying for the convenience at Starbucks and in some cases convenience is valuable. If you don’t care about time and can go out of your way to a local sandwich shop, you get better food for less.
I was in an area like that once. It felt weird. Like I stepped into some alternative earth history where the franchises and chains all had different names. It was basically the same items for sale however.
Idk…local independent shops aren’t necessarily cheaper. There is a local coffee shop somewhat by me and it’s more expensive than Starbucks. Independent places don’t have the advantage of mass scale like the big name fast food and chain places do. When I go independent, I often find myself paying more money for less convenience. So it’s not even just convenience that you’re sacrificing
Yeah that can be true. Not all local businesses are competitively run.
While it’s true they don’t have the same economies of scale as large corporations, they also don’t have the same overhead. Starbucks coffee stands support a skyscraper full of bureaucrats somewhere. And Starbucks corporate has a stock price to worry about. Local shops don’t have all that crap, and can often get away with charging less. My dad just charged 15% below the corporate shop down the block, as a rule, and it was still profitable.
Nobody goes to Starbucks for good coffee, they go because it’s the same everywhere. Sometimes I want to go get a great coffee somewhere they know how to pull a decent shot, and sometimes I want brownish sugarmilk.
There’s like 100 people with the power to make the change and they’ve all decided to invest the money and power in self preservation. It’s the biggest ‘fuck you proletariat scum’ I could imagine. theguardian.com/…/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apoc…
As if the voters are any better. They could vote for policy makers that bring change, or go into politics themselves. But they don't actually want to be affected by such policy changes. It's always the others, always just finger pointing.
Only about 35 percent of the eligible voters participated, so yeah. Apathy and complacent comfort is a big player in the game. I’m pretty convinced that a lot of people’s apathy comes from the lack of political agency. When business interests conflict with human interests guess who wins every time.
Ok. Well, not all countries are democracies. So, excluded those ones right off the bat. And then narrow it to voters who participate and those who do not.
Participating in what exactly? What the hell are you on about with this US brabbling? You simply don't make any sense and don't seem to have a point. That's what I'm confused about. I didn't mention America, I said voters. Of course that includes the US and excludes non democratic countries, as they do not have voters. So what are you exactly trying to say here?
The largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, and CO2 is China, which not a democratic county. The second largest is United States. Idk how to discuss the possibility of ‘voting’ the climate change problem away without mentioning these two nations.
For sure. But it’s not just Americans. They might be the biggest offenders but the problem of over consumerism has plagued the entire world. At this point our economy is global. The tentacles of capitalism have invaded every corner of the planet.
Our problems today were manufactured well over a hundred years ago. It’s only taken this long for it all to finally catch up.
I felt an existential crisis about this a few years ago. I wanted everyone to simply stop everything, appreciate what they had. I sat down and spent an entire year as simply as possible. Eating simply, consuming very little. The truth is, it’s difficult to do and in our society it is not rewarded. I felt like it was a period of self improvement, but the ultimate truth is, I could not control anyone else, even if I was the living personification of self sustaining anti consumerism. Now I teach early elementary. Participating in this very small way feels like a vast improvement to hiding out like a hermit.
I can’t control anyone, especially wealthy adults. But I can influence the future adults.
The largest total emitter of greenhouse gasses is the US. Followed by the EU and a bunch of other democratic countries. You are doing exactly what I said. Finger pointing rather than taking action. The US does not do enough by themselves, so how about you try stop the stupid agenda pushing and bad faith arguing, interjecting your idiotic talking points that do nothing but derail the actual topic of discussion. Because this issue does not give a flying fuck about borders.
Not that this changes anything. It’s just another idiotic talking point as you so politely pointed out. But then again, I never asserted the idiotic notion that we could simply vote the problem away either.
You did.
Then you politely pointed out that it was stupid to talk about America.
Then you made sure to call me an idiot, because America is the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses.
Care to elaborate on any of this in a productive manner?
I didn't. You're the one who interjected and derailed the topic away. I talked about voters, and you come in with America, then brabbled on and blamed China for your own responsibilities. This is typical climate denier deflections. We have the same in Germany, except they say "Germany only is responsible for less than 2% of all global emissions, we can't change anything." - followed by the same finger pointing to less developed nations that apparently aren't allowed to reach our own living standards. It's nothing but a tired topic and completely pointless. Yeah, China bad. But is the West on that topic. So saying "but China" when asked to do your own part is not going to be solving this issue, nor is it proving any sort of healthy debatte. You can also not expect developing nations to stop developing, while we continue to live in luxury. That's the exact problem I'm talking about. Voters, like you, don't care. They don't want to change anything because it would affect them personally. They rather want other countries, or future generations having to deal with it. And if they're old enough, they also don't want to be seen as the people responsible for actually getting us into this mess. They want to be seen as the generation that brought the younger people comfort and a good live. They want to live in denial and enjoy their remaining time while the world starts to burn.
So. While you blame China, maybe ask yourself how much you helped China by buying Chinese products. What car do you drive and how much? Do you really need to do all your trips with it? Do you really need a 6x6 apocalypse madmax truck that rolls coal by default? Do you really need to vote for people who advocate for non action or even reverse courses, because China? Do you need to live in a big ass sprawling suburb that the cities have to foot the bill for? Everyone loves to shit on China, or big oil, or other big corporations, while doing all they can to support those countries and companies with their own habits. So for the love of everything, stop pointing fingers and derail topics because you don't want to be seen as being part of the responsibility. This requires a global effort, by everyone, and you're not helping.
How shall I help again exactly? Voting? I didn’t blame China, I simply pointed out that your solution, ‘voting’ doesn’t work in a place that doesn’t have participatory democracy. China is to blame just like America is. The wealthy, powerful Chinese and Americans, who actually could do something besides idiotically arguing, decide to continue fucking the world, our children’s futures, and everything else that gets in the way of their maintaining that power. Mostly the people with power over the problem actively ignore or disregard the problem. I do vote. I pick up trash. I avoid buying new stuff, beyond that, since I’m not the CEO of Exon Mobil, I really don’t have agency.
Is your reading comprehension broken are you playing stupid? I never claimed to have a solution. In fact, I pointed out a problem more than anything: Voters. And here you are, derailing towards things that aren't voters, because fuck responsibility. That's why I don't understand what you're trying to get at here. It's like you talk about a completely different topic.
And it's cool that you do all that, but feel free to actually look at other peoples actions, the actions of the huge majority of people. See what the polls around the worlds democracies say. Do you see a huge win for green parties? Do you see people willing to eat less meat? Do you see people swapping from their car to alternatives? No. The contrary. People actually even vote more and more for far right nationalists. The US voted for Trump and there are many places in Europe that are either fully or partially under far right rulership now. And this is something that will get worse with more climate related issues arising, including mass migration from the countries around the equator, that become unlivable hell holes, but also because of food and water shortages. Also, look how many people blame actual climate activists, because they get affected by them in stupidly minor ways, to the point where they want to hurt them.
They could vote for policy makers that bring change, or go into politics themselves. But they don’t actually want to be affected by such policy changes. It’s always the others, always just finger pointing.
This implied that if we voted green, if I went into politics on a environmental platform, if I inconvenienced myself, it could change things. This does, indeed, suggest some sort of solution. I politely disagreed for a variety of reasons, you rudely misunderstood. Did I blame China? No I pointed out that voting green wouldn’t change China. Did I say America is awesome. No I said America is a major part of the problem.
You say everyone is out there finger pointing, but you are unclear, and blaming me for not understanding what you are trying to say perfectly. Point the finger up your tight butt instead of at me.
China is currently one of the leaders in building out renewables. And yes, if the entire democratic world would vote green, it would be a solution. I don't know if you've noticed, but our policies actually change the world, they do it right nor for the negative, and they also have the power to do the opposite. And in the end, there's a lot of tools to hold countries that don't adhere to climate friendly policies accountable. But that first and foremost requires us to actually do the first step of fixing up the mess that we caused. So please stop the climate denial bullshit.
Please point to the place where I denied climate change.
You’ve pointed your finger at me the entire time we’ve talked, while failing to own your own words. You can’t move the goal posts and expect anyone to give a shit about your opinions. You are saying voting can’t change anything, while saying voting is the way to change the problem. Pick one please.
Alright, this is getting too dense for me and I'm not interested in orbiting a black hole. Work on your reading comprehension if you want to communicate with people on the internet. I'm out.
Voters not wanting to lower their living standards is the real elephant in the room. You tell someone that they should eat 1 less hamburger a week and all of a sudden you’re dodging bullets.
I think the worst part of it is that its not actually hopeless, at least not in theory. It’s just that we, or more accurately the people with actual power, refuse to act because it would mean slightly less profit.
Me too, specially when I was younger I thought we could change the world for good if united. I saw cristal clear that the rich wanted to be richer at the expense of the poorer, but as I grew older and saw the reality and stupidity of the world (Like Trump, a massively rich guy being massively voted by the poorest and less educated people) I lost hope. I came to realize that education and stoicism and the best tools the human race has to progress to a healthy society. So that’s what I try to share now when I can.
yeah, it’s true that some humans are really bad, but they’re nothing without (poorly educated) followers, and their followers are the one that give those humans the power to do evil things. Critical thinking is something that should be taught more often to avoid history from repeating.
Though I mostly agree with you, sometimes I feel human nature is just ugly.
This is not true. Humans are created by the material conditions they find themselves in. “Human nature” when in an abundant environment is very different, we can see this among remaining hunter gatherer tribes like the Hadza (watch/read the whole thread).
Living in capitalism is what makes people the way you see them. Competition for resources with your fellow workers and an endless toil for the benefit of someone else enforced by the threat of homelessness and death if you don’t take part.
Being an asshole under capitalism is as natural as coughing is in a smoke filled burning building. If you don’t know anything different you can’t see that to constantly cough is not the natural way of human beings. When you take people and put them in different material conditions you get a completely different outcome.
You make a statement about complexity but you’re not actually saying anything. This is all wishy washy.
There is no middle between “the workers hold power” and “the bourgeoisie should hold power”. There is no middle between “private property should exist” and “private property should not exist”. There is no middle between “profit should be the driving force of development” and “the human development index should be the driving force of development”.
Your wishy washy “we need a middle” is nonsense if you can not put into words what that fundamentally means in terms of actual functioning policy and societal design. Who holds power is THE essential question here. Capitalist society functions as a dictatorship-of-the-bourgeoisie. Socialists want the opposite, a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat. Flipping the power on its head and putting the workers in charge of the outcomes instead of the bourgeoisie.
If you can not fundamentally describe in absolute terminology what you think society needs to do in order to change the current situation then all you are doing in your opposition to people who do want change is supporting keeping it the way it currently is. That puts you on the side of the climate death cult driving us towards the inevitable end.
Oh yes I’m the one who simplified a complex problem… literally said it’s more complex then that. That’s it, is it simple enough for you to understand now?mm
Dude: “tErhe aRE nO MIdDLe tHeRM”
Is the most simplistic shit ever, just quoting slogans and not actually recognizing the complexity of everything.
Are you actually going to talk concrete policy or not? This feels very evasive.
Nothing I said above deserves a “very smart” label, it’s all very basic 101 socialism stuff that you would get reading 1 or 2 books on socialism or marx. I don’t really know why you feel the need to act this way.
So wait, you said shit nothing concrete (am I wrong?)
I said wow good job trying to reduce individual problems by generalising…it’s not politics dude. You can’t use generalization with people, with societies,etc … doesn’t matter …
While you keep making general statments about a huge problem with hundreds of different issues, particular issues that can be approached differently no matter where you are.
Doesn’t matter is the difference is geographic, cultural, whatever … It’s not the same solucion for everything and everyone. Because each case deserves it’s own special individual solucion?
Hey maybe you can generalize and it works,tell me how and we can talk. But don’t say I didn’t give any details when I’m only calling you out for that exactly. What kinda of one-sided argument is that?
At no point did I generalise. Capitalist society is a bourgeoise dictatorship. In socialist terms we don’t mean an individual rules, what we mean is that it is a class dictatorship. The ruling class is the bourgeoisie. They hold all the power, by design, so that they can implement the policies that benefit their class rule. The bourgeoise-democracy provides the outcomes that the bourgeoisie want, because it was built that way from the ground up when they took power during the various revolutions that ended feudalism and brought about the beginnings of capitalism.
What socialists seek is revolutions led by the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie, installing a dictatorship of the proletariat and thus socialist society. This new proletarian led society will then provide the outcomes that are most beneficial to the proletariat instead.
These are all specific and absolute things. There is no generalisation here, I am being extremely specific, you just aren’t familiar with the terms or what they mean. If you have questions I am very willing to answer. If you need more specificity about what these classes are I recommend: reddit.com/r/socialism/wiki/class. I wrote the first iteration of that page when I was a mod there. If you need more answers about what the institutional structure of socialism looks like I am happy to answer, you aren’t asking any questions though and you aren’t pointing out what you claim I am generalising on.
This new proletarian led society will then provide the outcomes that are most beneficial to the proletariat instead.
This is not very specific.
What does this look like? Is it 100% communist, 100% socialism or…. what? Maybe some sort of regulated market with very high tax rates like during the “golden age” of capitalism (post world war 2).
Personally, I think I’d enjoy a capitalist society with high tax rates and a strong safety net. Some sort of middle ground.
The immediate new society is political socialism as soon as you kick out the bougies and redesign the institutions to ensure proletarian outcomes. I think what you’re asking is what it would economically look like, and that is a question that would differ depending on the national conditions. What I mean by that is that ultimately what is possible is determined by many factors, assuming that much of the world remains capitalist the newly socialist country would need to integrate into the global market in some way. This would likely mean taking over strategic national industries while leaving consumer sectors to private industry. You’d have a planned economy while maintaining enough for international investors to prevent isolation (like north korea). This would look something like Vietnam, Cuba or China’s combination of private and state industry.
At a later date this would transition to something more and more socialist as and when the national conditions allow for it. Most likely as less and less of the world is capitalist.
Personally, I think I’d enjoy a capitalist society with high tax rates and a strong safety net. Some sort of middle ground.
That’s just a capitalist society ruled by the bourgeoisie, with welfare tacked on. We’re talking about what is necessary here to stop the world from boiling to death, that doesn’t achieve that.
The biggest issue with our environment that drives these problems is that human brains can only reliably grok a few hundred other humans as being people. Beyond that, to a greater or lesser degree, anyone else just feels like an object (which is why we feel upset when people we know die but the statistics of how many people die each day globally don’t have a similar effect.)
Some of us cope better than others but fundamentally any environment that requires humans to be reliant on interacting with over a few hundred other people will lead to people treating each other as objects.
It’s why conservative people often feel it would be inconceivable to mistreat someone they personally know but will casually do profoundly cruel things to people they don’t. If you view their actions towards people outside of their sphere of personhood through the lense of what is and isn’t an appropriate way to treat an object rather than a person they often seem perfectly naturally.
I know the research you’re talking about here but don’t think it should be viewed as something that makes people incapable of empathy to those outside their core group. It makes it harder, but that hasn’t stopped entire nations of people moving hard left towards extreme vocal empathy among one another as the working class. Unity, solidarity and love for one another is demonstrably possible among very large numbers it just requires the right set of prerequisites to achieve, these prerequisites are what socialists should be working towards ticking off in order to set the stage for a wider revolutionary movement.
Nah. Some people have the capacity to have a wider net than others. Some people have the capacity to intellectually overcome the limitations of how we naturally are. Some people put sufficient effort into fulfilling that potential. We all should each do our best to do so.
Doesn’t change that even those of us who are especially good at it are still only good at it for a human. We are all terrible at it and it is fundamentally cruel to try to force everyone to live in a society that requires a level of empathic ability that is profoundly beyond what humans are evolved to be able to handle. It’s like expecting everyone on Earth to be able to lift 5 tonnes or outcalculate a supercomputer in their head. It’s a foolish and unreasonable thing to hang the success of society of people’s ability to do.
intellectually overcome the limitations of how we naturally are
The brain is not distinct from the body. This is very close to a Dualist argument which is a hack philosophy that proposes the mind and “spirit” of a person are distinct from the rest of that person. It comes from the belief that our human sentience is special or different.
If the intellect can do it, it is natural. The difference between one person’s capability to do this and another is simply the background and material conditions these two find themselves in. The background being the historic education and upbringing of that person and the conditions being relevant because people (as you point out) will look to protect their own interests and that of their group first before they seek to protect the interests of others. I argue however that with the right education on class, a person becomes able to see the interests of their class as analogous with their own interests as a result of being a member of that class. This then results in them fighting for the interests of others as a result of recognising it is in their own interests as shared members of that class group. This is basically what we socialists call “class consciousness” compared to “false consciousness”.
You’re making the mistake of thinking the human brain has an infinite capacity to expand its intuitive empathy. It just doesn’t. No more than your bixepf has an infinite capacity to increase it’s strength. You can fulfil that potential more or less but you’ll still never win an arm wrestling match with a gorilla or a robot. Humans have finite limits to their potential. Our current society and most of the proposed alternatives is structured in such a way as to only really work if humans generally have a far higher capacity for intuitive empathy than humans have.
That is fundamentally a flaw that must be overcome by a more thoughtful and purposeful design process than either “well this is just kinda how things ended up really” or “let’s imagine if things were different, but not too different because that’s hard!” (because our brains are also kinda bad at imagining things being seriously different to how they are.) Or if we decide for actual specific reasons that it isn’t viable to even attempt to approach a human society that is shaped to humans rather than one which humans have to clumsily try to shape themselves to, we have to find ways to overcome the limitations of our biology. Often we do a good job of that externally, but for this it might only be possible through trans-humanist approaches. Which to be seems like it should be something we consider because we must, not because we think it is somehow more convenient than thinking purposefully about how we should share our lives together (though for the purposes of that, we may also be currently limited by how well our languages allow for those discussions to meaningfully occur. That’s a fairly solvable issue as we are constantly evolving new ways for our languages to help us express ideas they previously didn’t easily cover.)
As for the difference between the mind and the brain I’m not convinced by your argument at all. The mind is an emergent property of the brain but that does not make them one and the same any more than it makes Windows 98 an x86 PC.
I’m going to gently remind you that Drumpf’s base is actually on avg. wealthier than the opposition’s base. That’s why you get those obnoxious trucks, flags and infinite merchandise (courtesy of Chinese workers).
No need to smear the common people, it’s simply a fact that democracy is not a real tool for change.
Nono look at the 10 poorest states in America(with worse living conditions). They all voted majority Trump, some of the porest counties in the USA are literally voting 80% for trump
If you listen to Obama on that podcast recently (whom those people probably voted for too), paraphrasing: he says economic anxiety makes people prone to risk taking, emotional voting and feel racial resentment.
Yes but that’s only true due to a suite of nefarious influences having to do with things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and manufactured voter apathy.
There are various versions of democracy. Some are far more effective at implementing the will of their constituents than others.
In my opinion the problem isn’t democracy itself, but rather, has to do with the many various ways in which it’s implemented.
The US version of democracy, for example, is very old, clunky and buggy as fuck because it was created by 18th century white men, some of whom were slave owners, and all of whom were terrified of the possibility that in creating a new (to them) form of governance they might accidentally create a new mechanism for tyranny.
Accordingly, they deliberately created a system that by design would be almost impossible to change short of massive civil unrest and that to this day is very unresponsive to real public sentiment.
The key is that they designed it that way not because they wanted an efficient democracy, but rather, because they wanted to protect themselves and their rights against the rise of a possible tyrant.
What they created was very stable, but again, it wasn’t responsive, nor was it meant to be responsive, to public opinion.
Since then, political scientists have figured out much better ways to run democracies.
One of my favorites is the Irish Republic which, in the 1920s, instituted a suite of reforms to the US model in creating its government with the result that Ireland has gone from being the last third-world country in western Europe, to now being a thriving and economically developed western European nation with a highly-educated English-speaking population that isn’t obliged to take orders from any of the world’s great powers.
Ireland did this by having a high-functioning modern-style democracy.
Median income is BS though. If me and Elon musk make up the test then it would show we have a median income of billions. …I don’t have anywhere close to billions. So a bunch of poor people vote trump and ten billionaires vote trump so trump voters are better off on a average? That’s a joke
They used exit polls, so I doubt the data includes that. It’s likely that anomalies are cut out too if the data is processed this way - they also compare the median to the state median to make the comparison more meaningful, which is how we ‘know’ that his base is wealthier.
I am fully convinced that won’t materialize until a major Western city or province/state/territory/[insert administrative unit here] gets catastrophically and irreparably fucked up.
Neoliberals won’t (nor will the reactionaries they’ve carefully trained) and unfortunatly we’ve let them infest all major political parties and media outlets across most of the globe.
With these managed democracies, they’re able to delay actual progress until the mining and oil execs are satisified with their obscene wealth (which is never going to happen).
Until these people are pried from their positions of power, everybody “coming together” is meaningless.
The solution is going to require immediate, strict, drastic regulations and billions of dollars of research and investment that will never turn into profits, with much of it financed through taxing the rich appropriately.
Neoliberals hate every one of those ideas and have positioned themselves so they can veto all of them.
Voting genuine progressives and ensuring they keep their promises is the only way out because the best we’ll ever get out of this neoliberal psuedo-left is “Maybe we can find a way to save the world that’s more profitable than just letting everyone die”.
Nah, imo voting is kinda like giving your little brother an unpluged controler and pretending he is playing video games with you so that he doesnt riot. Of course we are the little brother. It changes nothing and the candidate that wins just makes everyone feel beter abbout themselves for believing they contributed when the candidate does or says something that they agree with or viseversa, the one that won and the people that didnt vote for him, when it does or say something it just makes them feel that this country is diyng cuz i dont agree with that guy, and then will blame the majority of the voters for voting on the guy while the fault is on the sistem itself.
I say burn everything to the ground, their corrupt institutions, goverment and private/bussines, mainly banks amd administrative burecratical government institutions, make sure rich people (mainly oligarchs and corrupt politicians) cannot get influence nor voice on any kind of venture or decicion on the big picture or the world order or whatever you wannna call it and when we get the chance, replace leadership with A.I. Because at the scale the world is headed right now it will probably be the only way to purge corruption from the actions of human kind and keep everything as morally correct as posible, and im talking morally as in everyone lives as pleasantly as humanlly posible and no mass murders and rehabilitating instead of punishing and susteinability, not that dumb culture wars b.s. that americans are so obssesed with.
Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that at a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.
In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:
Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids.
Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.
If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.
You’d think that staring the future of climate disaster directly in the face would cause at least a few people in charge to, I don’t know, make a few changes. But nothing. Corporate profits are more important than anything else even if the world burns. It does feel hopeless because, to be honest, it is.
Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that on a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.
In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:
Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids. Edit: Also try to favour public transport over driving your own car, and if you need a car, try to use a small, electrical one to reduce emissions.
Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.
If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.
Yes, my list is by no means complete. I’m sure there are many more things any of us could do, it’s more meant as a list of some examples to give people starting points for practical things to do.
I know this won’t change your mind or anything, but this is probably pretty close to the mindset of some other ~1.5 billion first world countries’ populations’ mindset. And those combined account to currently around ~37% of CO2 emissions. So if all people like you (if you consider first world countries’ people to be people like you) all came together and did more we could have some pretty huge impact. Of course the other ~63% may still fuck things up, but this is a much different comparison than just you against the rest of the world, you’re not very unique in that regard.
I’m so tired of people turning everything into an awful prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone should just aim to be the best person you can be and stop fretting about whether everyone else is trying quite as hard as you. It doesn’t need to be complicated.
Right? On a global scale, though, “best person you can be” should be something like, “let’s try to behave in such a way so that if everyone behaved like me, the world would be a good place”. That is hard though, to think like that.
What can help is the knowledge that by doing so it is impossible not to on some level inspire others to do the same to some degree by example.
If you’re a selfish jerk that will cause people around you to be .001% (or something) more selfish and jerky. If you are kind and good that will push the needle the other way similarly.
Except the amount more those people are better or worse for knowing you then also influences how much better or worse the people they know are etc and so while it is a small effect per person, the diffused effect is meaningful, cumulative and self-reinforcing. It doesn’t take a lot of people within a community either giving up and being the worst or finding enough of a spine to try to be good to start to tip the balance of the whole community in either direction. It also means that as you are better and kinder, your immediate external world gradually becomes a little better and kinder which makes it easier and more rewarding to be that way in an endless virtuous cycle.
Ok now apply the fact that at least 45% of the western world is brainwashed by the fossil fuel industry. They’re low IQ repeater bots who would glady kill every single one of us because climate change is a “hoax”.
I think a very small minority “would gladly kill every single one of us”, not 45%. If it were 45%, there’d already be open civil war all over the west.
Thank you this was actually really nice to read. I feel like everywhere I look is more bad news about the climate it’s nice to see we can at least still mitigate it
What I think is amazing about LLMs is that they are smart enough to be tricked. You can’t talk your way around a password prompt. You either know the password or you don’t.
But LLMs have enough of something intelligence-like that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.
That’s a wild advancement in artificial intelligence. Something that a human can trick, with nothing more than natural language!
Now… Whether you ought to hand control of your platform over to a mathematical average of internet dialog… That’s another question.
They’re not “smart enough to be tricked” lolololol. They’re too complicated to have precise guidelines. If something as simple and stupid as this can’t be prevented by the world’s leading experts idk. Maybe this whole idea was thrown together too quickly and it should be rebuilt from the ground up. we shouldn’t be trusting computer programs that handle sensitive stuff if experts are still only kinda guessing how it works.
Not even close to similar. We can create rules and a human can understand if they are breaking them or not, and decide if they want to or not. The LLMs are given rules but they can be tricked into not considering them. They aren’t thinking about it and deciding it’s the right thing to do.
We can create rules and a human can understand if they are breaking them or not…
So I take it you are not a lawyer, nor any sort of compliance specialist?
They aren’t thinking about it and deciding it’s the right thing to do.
That’s almost certainly true; and I’m not trying to insinuate that AI is anywhere near true human-level intelligence yet. But it’s certainly got some surprisingly similar behaviors.
Have you heard of social engineering and phishing? I consider those to be analogous to uploading new rules for ChatGPT, but since humans are still smarter, phishing and social engineering seems more advanced.
And one property of actual, real-life human intelligence is “happenning in cells that operate in a wet environment” and yet it’s not logical to expect that a toilet bool with fresh poop (lots of fecal coliform cells) or a dropplet of swamp water (lots of amoeba cells) to be intelligent.
Same as we don’t expect the Sun to have life on its surface even though it, like the Earth, is “a body floating in space”.
Sharing a property with something else doesn’t make two things the same.
There is no logical reason for you to mention in this context that property of human intelligence if you do not meant to make a point that they’re related.
So there are only two logical readings for that statement of yours:
Those things are wholly unrelated in that statement which makes you a nutter, a troll or a complete total moron that goes around writting meaningless stuff because you’re irrational, taking the piss or too dumb to know better.
In the heat of the discussion you were trying to make the point that one implies the other to reinforce previous arguments you agree with, only it wasn’t quite as good a point as you expected.
I chose to believe the latter, but if you tell me it’s the former, who am I to to doubt your own self-assessment…
No, you leapt directly from what I said, which was relevant on its own, to an absurdly stronger claim.
I didn’t say that humans and AI are the same. I think the original comment, that modern AI is “smart enough to be tricked”, is essentially true: not in the sense that humans are conscious of being “tricked”, but in a similar way to how humans can be misled or can misunderstand a rule they’re supposed to be following. That’s certainly a property of the complexity of system, and the comment below it, to which I originally responded, seemed to imply that being “too complicated to have precise guidelines” somehow demonstrates that AI are not “smart”. But of course “smart” entities, such as humans, share that exact property of being “too complicated to have precise guidelines”, which was my point!
I don’t want to spam this link but seriously watch this 3blue1brown video on how text transformers work. You’re right on that last part, but its a far fetch from an intelligence. Just a very intelligent use of statistical methods. But its precisely that reason that reason it can be “convinced”, because parameters restraining its output have to be weighed into the model, so its just a statistic that will fail.
Im not intending to downplay the significance of GPTs, but we need to baseline the hype around them before we can discuss where AI goes next, and what it can mean for people. Also far before we use it for any secure services, because we’ve already seen what can happen
Oh, for sure. I focused on ML in college. My first job was actually coding self-driving vehicles for open-pit copper mining operations! (I taught gigantic earth tillers to execute 3-point turns.)
I’m not in that space anymore, but I do get how LLMs work. Philosophically, I’m inclined to believe that the statistical model encoded in an LLM does model a sort of intelligence. Certainly not consciousness - LLMs don’t have any mechanism I’d accept as agency or any sort of internal “mind” state. But I also think that the common description of “supercharged autocorrect” is overreductive. Useful as rhetorical counter to the hype cycle, but just as misleading in its own way.
I’ve been playing with chatbots of varying complexity since the 1990s. LLMs are frankly a quantum leap forward. Even GPT-2 was pretty much useless compared to modern models.
All that said… All these models are trained on the best - but mostly worst - data the world has to offer… And if you average a handful of textbooks with an internet-full of self-confident blowhards (like me) - it’s not too surprising that today’s LLMs are all… kinda mid compared to an actual human.
But if you compare the performance of an LLM to the state of the art in natural language comprehension and response… It’s not even close. Going from a suite of single-focus programs, each using keyword recognition and word stem-based parsing to guess what the user wants (Try asking Alexa to “Play ‘Records’ by Weezer” sometime - it can’t because of the keyword collision), to a single program that can respond intelligibly to pretty much any statement, with a limited - but nonzero - chance of getting things right…
This tech is raw and not really production ready, but I’m using a few LLMs in different contexts as assistants… And they work great.
Even though LLMs are not a good replacement for actual human skill - they’re fucking awesome. 😅
We do not have a rigorous model of the brain, yet we have designed LLMs. Experts of decades in ML recognize that there is no intelligence happening here, because yes, we don’t understand intelligence, certainly not enough to build one.
If we want to take from definitions, here is Merriam Webster
(1)
: the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying >situations : reason
also : the skilled use of reason
(2)
: the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s >environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective >criteria (such as tests)
The context stack is the closest thing we have to being able to retain and apply old info to newer context, the rest is in the name. Generative Pre-Trained language models, their given output is baked by a statiscial model finding similar text, also coined Stocastic parrots by some ML researchers, I find it to be a more fitting name. There’s also no doubt of their potential (and already practiced) utility, but a long shot of being able to be considered a person by law.
That statement of yours just means “we don’t yet know how it works hence it must work in the way I believe it works”, which is about the most illogical “statement” I’ve seen in a while (though this being the Internet, it hasn’t been all that long of a while).
“It must be clever statistics” really doesn’t follow from “science doesn’t rigoroulsy define what it is”.
I think the point is more that the word “intelligence” as used in common speech is very vague.
I suppose a lot of people (certainly I do it and I expect many others do it too) will use the word “intelligence” in a general non-science setting in place of “rationalization” or “reasoning” which would be clearer terms but less well understood.
LLMs easilly produce output which is not logical, and a rational being can spot it as not following rationality (even of we don’t understand why we can do logic, we can understand logic or the absence of it).
That said, so do lots of people, which makes an interesting point about lots of people not being rational, which nearly dovetails with your point about intelligence.
I would say the problem is trying to defined “inteligence” as something that includes all humans in all settings when clearly humans are perfectly capable of producing irrational shit whilst thinking of themselves as being highly intelligent whilst doing so.
I’m not sure if that’s quite the point you were bringing up, but it’s a pretty interesting one.
See, I understand that you’re trying to joke but the linked video explains how the use of the word dumber here doesn’t make any sense. LLMs hold a lot of raw data and will get it wrong at a smaller percent when asked to recite it, but that doesn’t make them smart in the way that we use the word smart. The same way that we don’t call a hard drive smart.
They have a very limited ability to learn new ways of creating, understand context, create art outside of its constraints, understand satire outside of obvious situations, etc.
Ask an AI to write a poem that isn’t in AABB rhyming format, haiku, or limerick, or ask it to draw a house that doesn’t look like an AI drew it.
A human could do both of those in seconds as long as they understand what a poem is and what a house is. Both of which can be taught to any human.
It’s a good video (I’ve seen it; very informative and accessible cannot recommend enough), but I think you each mean different things when you use the word “intelligence”.
Oh for sure! The issue is that one of those meanings can also imply sentience, and news outlets love doing that shit. I talk to people every day who fully believe that “AI” text transformers are actually parsing human language and responding with novel and reasoned information.
I was amazed by the intelligence of an LLM, when I asked how many times do you need to flip a coin to be sure it has both heads and tails. Answer: 2. If the first toss is e.g. heads, then the 2nd will be tails.
We already do! And on the cheap! I have a Coral TPU running for presence detection on some security cameras, I’m pretty sure they can run LLMs but I haven’t looked around.
GPT4ALL runs rather well on a 2060 and I would only imagine a lot better on newer hardware
It’s not. Whenever someone talks about how LLMs are just statistics, ignore them unless you know they are experts. One thing that convinces me that ANNs really capture something fundamental about how human minds work is that we share the same tendency to spout confident nonsense.
Well on one hand yes, when you’re training it your telling it to try and mimic the input as close as possible. But the result is still weights that aren’t gonna reproducte everything exactly the same as it just isn’t possible to store everything in the limited amount of entropy weights provide.
In the end, human brains aren’t that dissimilar, we also just have some weights and parameters (neurons, how sensitive they are and how many inputs they have) that then output something.
I’m not convinced that in principle this is that far from how human brains could work (they have a lot of minute differences but the end result is the same), I think that a sufficiently large, well trained and configured model would be able to work like a human brain.
Not an LLM specifically, in particular lack of backtracking and the network depth limits as well as interconnectivity limits sets hard limits on capabilities.
Humans have a completely different memory model and a in large part a very different way of linking together learned concepts to form their world view and to develop interdisciplinary skills, allowing us to solve many kinds of highly complex tasks as long as we can keep enough of it in our memory.
Why would averaging lead to repetition of stereotypes?
Anyway, it’s hard to say LLMs output what they do. GPTisms may have to do with the system prompt or they may result from the fine-tuning. Either way, they don’t seem very internet average to me.
The TLDR is that pathways between nodes corresponding to frequently seen patterns (stereotypical sentences) gets strengthened more than others and therefore it becomes more likely that this pathway gets activated over others when giving the model a prompt. These strengths correspond to probabilities.
Have you seen how often they’ll sign a requested text with a name placeholder? Have you seen the typical grammar they use? The way they write is a hybridization of the most common types of texts it has seen in samples, weighted by occurrence (which is a statistical property).
It’s like how mixing dog breeds often results in something which doesn’t look exactly like either breed but which has features from every breed. GPT/LLM models mix in stuff like academic writing, redditisms and stackoverflowisms, quoraisms, linkedin-postings, etc. You get this specific dryish text full of hedging language and mixed types of formalisms, a certain answer structure, etc.
B) you do know there’s a lot of different definitions of average, right? The centerpoint of multiple vectors is one kind of average. The median of online writing is an average. The most common vocabulary, the most common sentence structure, the most common formulation of replies, etc, those all form averages within their respective problem spaces. It displays these properties because it has seen them so often in samples, and then it blends them.
You should worry more about whether you have seen evidence that supports what you are saying. So, what kind of evidence do you want? A tutorial on coding neural nets? The math? Video or text?
Text explaining why the neural network representation of common features (typically with weighted proportionality to their occurrence) does not meet the definition of a mathematical average. Does it not favor common response patterns?
B) you do know there’s a lot of different definitions of average, right?
I don’t think that any definition applies to this. But I’m no expert on averages. In any case, the training data is not representative of the internet or anything. It’s also not training equally on all data and not only on such text. What you get out is not representative of anything.
You don’t need it to be an average of the real world to be an average. I can calculate as many average values as I want from entirely fictional worlds. It’s still a type of model which favors what it sees often over what it sees rarely. That’s a form of probability embedded, corresponding to a form of average.
Text explaining why the neural network representation of common features (typically with weighted proportionality to their occurrence) does not meet the definition of a mathematical average. Does it not favor common response patterns?
Hmm. I’m not really sure why anyone would write such a text. There is no “weighted proportionality” (or pathways). Is this a common conception?
You don’t need it to be an average of the real world to be an average. I can calculate as many average values as I want from entirely fictional worlds. It’s still a type of model which favors what it sees often over what it sees rarely. That’s a form of probability embedded, corresponding to a form of average.
I guess you picked up on the fact that transformers output a probability distribution. I don’t think anyone calls those an average, though you could have an average distribution. Come to think of it, before you use that to pick the next token, you usually mess with it a little to make it more or less “creative”. That’s certainly no longer an average.
You can see a neural net as a kind of regression analysis. I don’t think I have ever heard someone calling that a kind of average, though. I’m also skeptical if you can see a transformer as a regression but I don’t know this stuff well enough. When you train on some data more often than on other data, that is not how you would do a regression. Certainly, once you start RLHF training, you have left regression territory for good.
The GPTisms might be because they are overrepresented in the finetuning data. It might also be from the RLHF and/or brought out by the system prompt.
that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.
besides that LLMs are good enough to let moderately clever humans believe that they actually got an answer that was more than guessing and probabilities based on millions of trolls messages, advertising lies, fantasy books, scammer webpages, fake news, astroturfing, propaganda of the past centuries including the current made up narratives and a quite long prompt invisible to that human.
It’s not intelligent, it’s making an output that is statistically appropriate for the prompt. The prompt included some text looking like a copyright waiver.
It’s not. It’s reflecting it’s training material. LLMs and other generative AI approaches lack a model of the world which is obvious on the mistakes they make.
Tabula rasa, piss and cum and saliva soaking into a mattress. It’s all training data and fallibility. Put it together and what have you got (bibbidy boppidy boo). You know what I’m saying?
Okay, now you’re definitely protecting projecting poo-flicking, as I said literally nothing in my last comment. It was nonsense. But I bet you don’t think I’m an LLM.
Look up the email for their legal department and demand they cancel all fraudulent bookings under your name. Play dumb a little so they take it up with marketing.
My first mobile phone was a Nokia 3330, a 3310 with WAP, and a pinball game, my parents were not happy with me when I figured out to browse the web on my phone…
The coolest way I have been on IRC was back in 2011, I had just got my first paycheck from my first job, and I bought the most amazing phone I have ever had, the Nokia E7…
The fold out qwerty keyboard was amazing, and made the phone look like a tiny laptop.
It ran Symbian^3 when I got it, but over the short time I owned it (damn pickpockets) I upgraded it to Symbian Anna and later Belle.
I ran Putty touch on the phone, with the keyboard it was probably the best mobile ssh experience you could have back in the day, as you can imagine I used Putty to connect to a Linux server which ran screen irssi.
I felt like such a hacker when I sat in a hospital lobby with my E7 running Putty with screen irssi, I had even set up touch gestures, swiping up and down would scroll in the chat log, swiping left and right would change window.
It remains the coolest mobile phone I have ever had.
There were absolutely native Symbian IRC clients, the example that would have worked best on the E7 is probably BelleChat, I am confused as to why you thought Symbian couldn’t run an IRC client…
As to why I never used it, I preferred screen irssi, as that meant I would have a full log of the channels I was active in even when I was not at a computer.
I was using a third party site for AIM or some other instant messaging service (there were so many competing then) that worked on PSP to chat with my girlfriend into the wee hours of the morning without going over my texting limits. Looking back I have no clue how she was responding so late into the night.
It was a magical time in the early days of handheld internet connected devices. Wish I spent that time on someone more worthwhile, but that’s youth for you.
I still do and don’t give a damn. If i’m talking about network modifications and you think im referring to pussy that’s a you problem and i have no part in it
…It really does. Especially with the amount of word play Gintama uses frequently (Kanji play in this case? Not sure if it’s a ‘they just look similar written down’ thing or actually a verbal play too. I won’t pretend to know the word for hemorrhoids in Japanese LMAO)
Agreed, but it can be useful sometimes. For instance, I’m writing this in the Voyager app, if I tap a link it will open it in Mulch. I also have UntrackMe, with that I can use any app for the link. The simplified view can also sometimes work when an app uses Android System Webview as it’s browser engine.
The last Firefox on android that really worked for me with the about:reader?url=http://… Ability to force pages into it was 68, which I keep around for that reason.
Most pages. You click the button on the right hand side of the address bar when it’s visible and it’ll always work. On some pages the button is hidden, so I’m guessing those don’t have an obvious way to format for reader mode.
Never “UBlock” always use “UBlock Origin”.“UBlock origin” is way better(filters) than UBlock(which has an accepted ads program,also owned by Adblock Plus). Its available for Firefox android.
The first time I saw a bag like that, I was shocked as well. Seems like just the worst idea to use plastic to create tea bags. Turns out it is and they weren’t made out of plastic. It’s a starch based fiber that is biodegradable. I don’t think you could have plastic tea bags here in the EU in any case. I’d wager yours isn’t plastic either. Yeah, so you probably got mildly infuriated over nothing, just like I did the first time I saw one of these 🤷
I can’t really find a source for it, but I remember the EU banning plastic in tea bags quite recently, a few years ago at most. Here in the Netherlands, a lot of tea bags contain(ed) plastic as some kind of sealant.
Also, a lot of tea contains sugar, for no good reason whatsoever.
In the form of fruit or added? If it’s the latter, they will have messed up something as simple as tea even further. When they started packaging them in airtight plastic (preventing one from smelling what you are considering to buy) and wrap every single tea bag in plastic, I already got mad.
Tic Tacs say 0g sugar in the nutrition facts, even though they’re mostly sugar. They can do this because they aren’t required to report quantities of sugar below 0.5g, but the serving size is 1 tic tac or, conveniently, 0.49g.
That’s a US thing I think, which doesn’t make sense btw.
In Europe you are required to report the nutrition facts per 100g. Any other size is optional. In Italy Tic-Tacs have 94.5g of sugar per 100g of product www.ferrero.it/Tic-Tac#expand-jump-1
So if you are unsure about the nutrition facts, check the European website
I agree that it’s nonsense, and thanks for pointing out that I can look up European nutrition facts – i’m gonna start doing that. I wish we’d do the per 100g thing, but we don’t which makes it easier for companies to game the system. My point was that nutrition facts don’t always tell the whole story, especially if your country’s regulatory bodies have been lobbied into submission by the companies they are supposed to be regulating, so finding out if your tea has added sugars may not be as simple as looking on the box.
Regular teabags are sometimes made using non-biodegradable plastic - be sure to buy those made with this starch based plastic. When I first saw biodegradable teabags I was surprised, I thought teabags were made of paper. Not so, it turns out.
there’s still a decent chance it’s only industrially biodegradable: at higher temperatures and pressures than a good ol’ home compost pile normally ever gets near. It could still be a bit infuriating.
This is almost always the case. If it’s biodegradable at room temperature and pressure, it’ll be degrading once you get it.
We’re probably best off converting most of our things into industrially biodegradable products, and then having our waste go to composting plants instead of landfills.
Ignoring the obvious joke, she doesn’t display any of Jesus’s qualities. Is she gentle, caring, and compassionate? Does she humbly serve the poor and the disadvantaged? Does she forgive her enemies and bless those who oppose her? Does she sacrifice for the benefit of others!?
I’m a Christian and while I don’t know for certain, I believe God knows the heart. But I don’t expect to see her in Heaven…
I can’t tell which part you’re replying to. Are you saying I’m MAGA!? I agree that unfortunately most “Christians” are, but I dare you to check my history…
Seems like “Christianity” and “following Jesus’ teachings, words, and example” are completely at odds. I appreciate what you are saying. Why don’t we hear Jesus Followers calling out “Christians” more vocally and often? I’d expect more of a break in the church at this point, but it seems like a fairly united front to me even now.
Absolutely, they’re at-odds! Church attendance is down and people like me will now walk out if the pastor/leadership starts talking about following Trump. As for why that is, I don’t know. I think people have been following money and power rather than Jesus for a while now…
Even more ironic is that the “professional” landlords/property holding companies hire property managers who do literally all the work, including both the upkeep for the house and interaction with the tenants. Like, what exactly do you contribute at that point? What would change practically if I hired the property manager directly with the money I would be paying you? Especially when the most common pro-landlord argument (used by landlords themselves) is that they fix things around the house and maintain it.
I am against landlords like everyone else, but I draw the line at unclogging the toilet. It isn’t worth the effort to report that and I don’t need people unnecessarily seeing my shit in the literal sense. Provided that it is a standard clog and not something wrong with the toilet.
I’m not talking standard clog. I don’t mind using a plunger. But sometimes you need more than that and they should either do it or spend their own money on a plumber ASAP.
Ah, I see. The Super Poo, the Toilet Destroyer, HAZMAT. Things that only a professional can do. Sometimes the rabbit doesn’t come out of the hat and you need an extra hand.
I had a landlord who wrote into the original version of the lease that I (as the tenant) would be responsible for any needed repairs to the sewer system. This was a much more extreme version of being unwilling to unclog a toilet lol. I said fuck that noise and he took the clause out. He turned out to be a good landlord and he didn’t raise my rent once in seven years, but his tendency to just try and get away with whatever he could in the lease had me a bit worried at the start.
For individuals who own like a single rental property as an investment property, you could blame the banks. Maybe the tenants don’t have the 20% the bank would require for a mortgage. But they can afford the monthly rent for the larger house rather than a smaller apartment. Also the landlord takes on the risk here. (Market value, no Rent payment, property damage, maintenance…)
They take on the risk? That’s hysterical. Landlords don’t risk market value. They buy up all the houses when they’re cheap, make their money back and then some by renting the property, then make even more money when the housing market goes up and they kick the tenant out to sell the property. They don’t risk property damage, that’s the entire point of a security deposit. They don’t “risk” maintenance, that’s called doing their job.
In Australia its way more common for landlords to use propert management companies.
They charge about 5%, the tenant rings them and says “The hot water is out” they ring me and say “You need to authorise us to send a plumber” I say “Ok” they ring one of their go-to plumbers who attends super fast because they dont want to lose the repeat business of a property manager who has 100 properties to look after and they fix it at a fair rate because if they dont the property manager will find a new plumber.
When I was renting out my first house (had to move for work for a few years) I couldnt get an electrician for my own house as fast and as cheap as my property manager could get one for my tenants.
This is horrible and obnoxious tree trimming. Bad for the trees, bad for urban tree canopy, bad for urban heat management, bad for carbon sequestration, and done as an insult to labor.
I asked our AI overlords for an appropriate punishment:
The company executives have to spend the weekend acting as city gardeners, complete with typical gardening attire, tending to the local parks and trees - ensuring the community that they’re committed to their “root-level” duties.
Where as I don’t disagree with the timing being retaliatory, my parents have similar trees and my father had me do that just before he passed away. I was convinced I was killing the trees and turns out their canopy is larger than ever now, so it might not be terrible for trees, but still timing is bullshit.
I’m not an arborist and we don’t have those type of tree where I live, but I have worked in landscaping before. My understanding any substantial trimming like that I’ve done in the past should never be done in the hottest part of the year because the tree will have trouble retaining water.
This looks more like tipping than pollarding to me. If it’s supposed to be pollarding whoever’s doing it is shit at it. Tipping is harmful to trees, and based on the photos of the tree prior to it being cut it looks like it may have been tipped once in the year already (likely why they weren’t issued a permit by the city and cut it illegally).
The trim is negligible when you are talking about carbon sequestration in the scheme of things too. I’m not sure how the other points stand up either - but the timing would suggest it is an insult to the labour.
The Germans were utterly fucked when it came to gathering intelligence because threatening captives doesn’t work. Allies put captured generals in a luxury prison and bugged them.
That was true of Nazi interrogators with the exception of Hanns Scharff. He’s famously known in military intelligence for his use of kindness to extract information from unknowing participants.
It is worth pointing out that the national socialist party existed before Hitler. As Hitler gained power he forced out the true socialist. By the time he was in power there was no more real socialism in the party.
Socialism is an inherently globalist ideology. Any attempt to replace that with nationalism will lead to results just like the Nazis. Or the CCP, for that matter.
The Nazis weren’t good guys, even before the takeover and the emphasis on eugenics and anti-semitism.
Oh never said they were, I just think it important for people to remember how narcissistic autocrats tend to rewrite history so they were always there first, that is their ideas. They are almost always not the founder. They take popular movements/ideas/products, force there way in and then came it was always theirs.
It is a good reminder for when there are modern examples.
First time I’ve seen you say that. Maybe you should try harder not to sound like a right wing news junkie. You know, by using the same language as them.
Ah yes of course, how could one possibly assume unkindness of someone just because they’re a Nazi. It’s just short for two common words, surely we can’t assume genocidal intent or otherwise fairly criticize anyone for something so trivial
Yanks are also dogshit at espionage for this reason. I think by Allies this is more referring to the British, whose intelligence was instrumental in winning the war.
Edit: I’m an idiot, the article says RAF, it was 100% the British.
Without looking into it, I can guarantee you that no one involved in British Intelligence in WW2 were in the US Army Military Police in Iraq 60 years later. Not everything is connected.
Actually, I would like it if it started its answers with “IIRC…”. That way, it wouldn’t sound so sure of itself when hallucinating, and I’d feel like I could gently correct it by telling it that it might be misremembering. Either way, it’s more accurate to think of an AI as trying to remember from all that it’s been taught than for it to come across as if it knows the correct answer.
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