bigbangdangler

You've hit the nail on the head.

Companies pushing for AI are playing a short game, not a long game. They have not considered the consequences of this course after a short term return (which may not materialize anyway).

The whole AI debacle is a great example of why it's bad to have engineering developments without the philosophical conversations. We need the A in STEAM to tell the E's when they're opening Pandora's Box.

You can change your name to whatever you want. Imagine if your last name were Epstein, or Trump. No one would question your motivation.

This is a bit of an oversimplification.

If in the US, you can generally change your name at whim, usually after a petition and fee. But it depends on your state. Some states require a hearing to do a name change. Some require a publication, and some will only allow the change after a waiting period.

All states will generally deny name change requests which are deemed to be fraudulent (details of that depend on state), to avoid debt, or to be harmful/hateful to others. Sometimes the definitions of these terms is not terribly clear, in which case the state can simply deny it with vague reasoning.

Edit: and apologies if this isn't in the US. I'm not familiar with other systems.

No no, real numbers would hurt the bottom line. AI relies on great expectations and overly trusting techbros.

Same. Chalk one up for good conversation on Lemmy.

Playing by the rules went away a loooooong time ago. At this point the Dems just look silly for even bringing it up.

We could be beyond it. What hasn't happened quite yet are things like failing currencies, but it's entirely possible we are beyond the point of no return. Once the giant ring of investments catches up with itself, the snake eats its own tail, the bottom drops out, and the greatest economic crash the world has ever seen stampedes unfettered through the lives of every person on the planet.

Pacing that feels more like an Instagram reel than a feature film.

Excessive use of poor effects or artificial camera shake.

Almost too good to be a dad joke. Almost too bad to be repeated.

To look at this another way: the government of South Korea has decided to give people the feeling of a strike without actually letting it affect bottom lines in any meaningful way. That is, they have relegated the strike (a key utility of those fighting for workers' rights) to being a tool used solely to assuage discontent in the short term. Without economic teeth, it cannot be used to enhance the lives of workers, which is ultimately the explicit goal of any strike.

South Korea is of course not alone in reducing or eliminating the rights of its citizens so that corporations continue to profit at their expense.

A fantastic summary.

Addendum to #2: to add insult to injury, a lot of the training data in AI models was used without consent. That means that the output of skilled people was stolen from them in order to train systems designed to steal from them again.

Aside from scientific research (which can be mostly or entirely done remotely by machines), there is exceedingly little reason to inhabit Mars, or any other planet for that matter.

There are sociopolitical implications of extraterrestrial missions (think: space race), but in terms of human habitation at scale, what would be the point? In science fiction, there is usually a major impetus: the earth is dying, the earth was stolen by aliens, etc etc. In these cases, though, the fiction part handles most of the stuff that would be hardest in real life.

From a practical standpoint, anything that can be done on Mars can be done for mere fractions of the resources here on Earth. At some point, it just comes down to the economics. Even if there were major issues with pollution or resources shifting the planet towards uninhabitability, fixing or mitigating those problems is likely to use orders of magnitude fewer resources than going to Mars. If such problems were beyond fixing, it wouldn't mean Mars gets cheaper. It would mean humans go extinct.

Now, there are charlatans who will say we absolutely need to inhabit Mars and will give you a barrage of tenuous reasons. Musk comes to mind. Usually this is done to drive investment in companies or technologies which have been nudged into seeming Mars-adjacent, but at the end of the day, they're just raising funds for regular rich people stuff here on Earth.

That is a good point. There's a lot of overt cruelty which seems to Literally exist to "own the libs", as Onion-y as it sounds. It's quite disgusting considering the party pretty much owns everything at the moment.

Schoolyard charades, but with higher stakes and real, human victims, at scale.