AppleTea

huh, reminds me of Hillary's campaign aiding Trump during the republican primaries

You'd rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It's fan fic, it's Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That "seed" would not have taken if the soil weren't already fertile. Frankly, I don't think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You'd rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there's a road to 'unfreedom', we traveled down it a long time ago.

Micky Mouse entering public domain is historical benchmark. Cool, but also... that mouse is hollow. Good for a cheap horror game or thumbing your nose at the big theater conglomerate, but otherwise meh

Donald Duck going public domain will be a real treat

The trouble with phrases like 'neural structures' and 'language parsing' is that these descriptions still play into the "AI" narrative that's been used to oversell large language models.

Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn't language parsing, it's still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.

It's stripping out the copper wiring for cash. Buy a game studio, fire all the employees. Now their paychecks can be served up as profit to shareholders. Move all the files to your servers, it's your "Intellectual Property". Sell off the computers and the desks and anything else not nailed down. Do they own the building? Great, sell that too! Or, better yet, rent it out!

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they're eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I'd rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough...

On the one hand, you can read it as a parody of late 20th century life - like, haha imagine a caveman clocking into work

but on the other hand, Flinstones and its far future counterpart Jestsons kinda suggest an inability to imagine anything different. Automobile-ized suburban development frequently gets presented an the human 'default'. As though we just default to this, rather than it being one of many ways cities and society could be organized.

Corporations are an outdated means of organizing industry. While they can innovate upon existing technology, invention and discovery are avoided, as the length and uncertainties in such undertaking can eat into shareholder returns. While there are exceptions, this selective pressure is seldom overcome. This competitive evolutionary model forces participant companies into a race to the bottom. Corners are cut, labor stiffed, and customers squeezed in order to draw greater and greater profits -- or else run the risk of loosing out to more ruthless competition.

In the same way large firms were able to stabilize disruptions in the supply chain through vertical and horizontal integration (thus outliving smaller, regionally managed businesses), mixed economies stabilize the shocks and disruptions of large firms, with the added benefit of re-focusing the output of industry to common goals, rather than to enrichment of a narrow few.

Overall, it is essential to see corporations as a phase in the conscious and unconscious evolution of human endeavor - a tool in the industrialized toolbox and not an end goal unto itself. It's also important to learn to write for yourself, or you'll be clowned on quite easily.

Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.

Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.

electrocuting an elephant to death, and for no better reason than tabloid advertising, kind of stands out in the historical record

that's not to say Edison was PURE EVIL, just that I always remember the elephant alongside the more humanizing factoids. [Once, he asked a math student to find the volume of a lightbulb. The student started doing all kinds of caliper measurements and geometry calculations. Edison just filled the bulb with sand and tipped it out into a measuring cup]

That's the interesting thing about empire, it's self similar. A whole class of people may grow up geographically in or near the core, but their experience of life has more in common with someone in the semi- or outer periphery in terms of access to necessities or stability of life.

Does it need to be instinctual, for some people's brains to be "wired different"? Seems to me that this phenomenon is more easily explained as learned behavior. Since people's behavior changes the environment, it creates a feedback loop; societies form a semi-artificial environment where people learn that domination is successful behavior, and are rewarded for continuing it. Thus, the behavior is propagated across generations, no instinct required.

...and neuroplasticity doesn't really fit well with the idea that people are "hard-wired" to certain behavior. The only thing we really seem to be pre-programmed for is language and communication.

reminds me of Nixon getting blackout drunk and ordering nuclear strikes on Vietnam. Apparently the SS just ignored him whenever it happened.

squatters rights take entirely too long to kick in these days

Rabbit populations have octupled

Deer populations have doubled

Desertification has increased

Local flora has decreased

neuroplasticity is limited to what our genetics will allow

sorry, what do you mean by this? Surely the benefit of a learning and growing brain is that it can respond and adapt to situations faster than germ-line genetics ever could. Why would there be a genetic limiter, what purpose would that serve?

Ah, I see, you just meant that other species don't share our capacity for learning and adapting. Although, why do you continue to describe exploitative behavior as an instinct if you agree that it is a learned trait?

Isn't "the state" just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There's a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.

Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn't necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.

i'm talking about the article, referencing things in it. Do you often classify conversation as 'deflection'?

for someone posting on a politics community, you seem to really dislike actually discussing politics

And there certainly wasn't a neighborhood where your highway on-ramp currently is.

almost like our property codes were written for an era that is more than a century gone

And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.

You seem to misunderstand the Dobbs decision. There was no law in the books, abortion was set by the decision of a previous supreme court ruling, Roe V Wade. Dobbs over-rulled that ruling -- if there had been an actual law, passed at any point in time the legislature, there would have been nothing the supreme court could do.

A month before the Dobbs ruling and until the following November, the Democrats had the house, senate, and presidency. If they had passed a law enshrining abortion as a right, then all court rulings would become moot.

And... the supreme court is already a captured body for the republicans. Too late. There is going to be a republican in office either next year or in another four. That's just how US presidencies go -- no party holds the wing for very long. Pearl clutching about the makeup of the court is a little late at this point.

Well, I admit I'm enjoying this on several levels. On the one hand, it's funny to collect downvotes. Half the time, it works like a little ticker that says, "Someone has acknowledged what you said, but doesn't have the time or capacity to reply"

On the other hand, I do genuinely enjoy talking about politics. I've been following US elections since I was in middle school. I like to remind people to think about more than this narrow view of this specific election; the reporting and posting and commenting all tends to have such a very short-term memory for these things.

What mask? What are you even saying? You seem to only communicate in cliches

We're both doing now. That's how this tango works.

I pointed out Democrats are not particularly strategic or serious when it comes to wielding both the legislature and the presidency, you didn't have a response to that, here we are

Ok, I think Gaza will actually do better under a Trump administration because liberals actually scrutinize Trump and rally against what he does. Whereas, we get nothing but excesses for the failures (to say nothing of the humanitarian crimes) of Biden's administration.

Oh, are you like, a bot trained on redditor's comments? Is that why you only have old memes to reference?

Like, do you have any response to what I'm arguing besides various iterations of "Nuh Uh!"

Really, though, do you think Biden has the political willpower to pull enough swing states? People tend to vote how they feel; keep the incumbent if they're happy, kick 'em out if they're not.

The conservatives seem to think they have this one in the bag, they're already outlining their policy plans, as this article highlights.

Neither candidate seems likely to do anything but perpetuate the genocide, that does appear to be the case.

im just typing

but sure, i'll cop to those labels, if you like. One Trolling, Nacissistic screed, mon sieur;

Let's talk about the Obama administration! What a campaign they ran, and what a voter mandate it got them to boot! Can you imagine if they actually used that mandate? If Obama had actually closed Gitmo and pulled out of Afghanistan, like he had said he would. The lives that would have been saved, the blood unspilled; it's beyond calculable.

And what was his legislative achievement, for all that mandate could have done? He passed the Affordable Healthcare Act. A bill modeled on proposals made by the Heritage Foundation. The very same Heritage Foundation that's giving us Project 2025. Imagine that.

christ it's like i'm talking to 2016.

is it nice? moving through time without noticing or remembering it's passing? As static as a simpsons character?

That is my primary criticism of democrats, yes

How is any of what I've been saying "GOP talking points"? Do the conservatives in your life pay nearly this close attention to what the democrats do? Because all the conservatives I know are freaking out over Facebook stories of kitty litter in classrooms or Heather Has Two Mommies being available at the local library.

If your reaction to criticisms of the DNC is to immediately assume i'm some spooky agent provocateur, then you're approach to politics is just as mindless as the Facebook conservatives.

I'm not saying conservatives are good, I'm saying democrats are not very serious about opposing them.

Are you a child, or have you only recently started paying attention to yankee politics?