Well they do claim to be a free, democratic nation. “Claim” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, but it is accurate.

On the one hand, if you’re walking into a totalitarian state and criticizing the ruling autocrat, then sure, that’s a skill issue. That’s not supposed to be how it works in countries that at least purport to be free. At the very least, we can at least be frustrated at the false advertising.

I think we’re all clear on the assignment. We’ve all taken a hit for the sake of “Buy Canadian” and other movements, to help with re-alignment, and we all know we’re going to have to support each other as shocks continue to hit. An important factor, however, is the pain needs to be distributed in a reasonable way. The TSE index funds are seeing solid and gaining dividends. We need to see some more movement from the top income brackets in putting those dividends back in to domestic industry to help compensate for inevitable job losses.

A little bit of a tempest in a teapot. It doesn’t sound like they’re actually going to stop distributing existing drivers, they’re just not accepting any new drivers or updates (unless they’re critical security updates) for those packages.

Unfortunately, we’re not all the ones that decide if we’re on board or not. Our employers are. We live in a world where profits are privatized and losses are socialized, so when this goes, it’s going to hurt the general public a lot more than it will every hurt the Epstein Class.

The problem is the cost of that correction is going to fall on us. Or did we forget that the flavor of capitalism we live under is the “Privatize the profits, socialize the losses” kind. We’re not the ones in the casino, but we’re the ones who will lose our shirts when they lose.

“You know who doesn’t buy my drugs? Maidenless losers.” Said every drug dealer in history. It’s not even good marketing hype, it’s just sad at this point.

Their capture by US feds and banning people who speak out against US foreign influence operations would lead me to believe otherwise.

medical terms are now no longer medical terms and just purely an insult

Language drifts over time, that’s normal, always has been. Stay on target soldier. FORMAL language however needs very strict definitions or it just stops working. Words mean things is true. That still doesn’t mean you get to say the “R” word.

What I’m hearing is laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation?

We spent 100 years engineering the world to decrease birth rates and punish people for having children “they cannot afford”, then immiserate the majority of people, eliminate any kind of opportunity to enjoy life, community, family, or recreation without spending ungodly amounts of money to enjoy simple human pleasures that have been part of being human for hundreds of thousands of years, work them relentlessly 24/7/365 (or as close as we permit them) for the sake of business efficiency, destroy the environment so survival itself becomes dependent on the business cycle, and we wonder why no one wants to raise a child in this environment?

Honestly, we have spent a century ruthlessly punishing people for even thinking of making a marginally irrational decision and then wonder why they won’t indulge in an objectively irrational activity for the emotional fulfillment.

As far as I’m aware, no on officially still worships Baal, although there might be some surviving fragments of that tradition in Tunisa oddly enough. Carthaginian beliefs pre-Christian/Islam was deeply Phoenician.

Edit: Grammar

Moloch (seemingly derived from the words for King and Shame) was the one who required child sacrifice. Baal was a storm god, like Zeus. Often considered the chief rival of Yahweh (YHWH) during the Jewish conquest of Canaan as they were, at the time, both storm gods.

There’s nothing intrinsically bad or “archaic” about forums. It’s the forum platforms that sucked for some people. It took some thought and work to manage a forum. The only advantage a Discord server had was that it’s simple enough, a brain damaged squirrel could run one. It saved you from having to do your homework and just created a simple plug-and-play space that required no skill on the owner/mods part.

Not sure if Stoat does audio rooms, but I know you can use SonoBus for that

Yes, I do think so. And I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

What is the endgame here? If you were dictator of the world, how would you even propose ‘fixing’ this? It’s one thing to be angry, but point that anger in the direction of something that is actually possible to change.

Ban all for-profit use of LLMs or generative AI products. The models are in people’s hands now, we can’t stop that, but we can end their monetization. Selling AI tools or products should be considered on the same level as human trafficking with similar penalties.

An AI tool is not going to produce higher quality work than a professional human.

Yes it will, because there will cease to be professional humans. If there’s no development pipeline, no one is going to achieve the pinnacle of art, because there’s no return on that investment. The AI will become better than any human, not by raising the standard by by kneecapping our ability to reach higher.

It’s ironic you chose to compare it to computers because we’ve seen that the generational decline in mathematical ability has fallen off a cliff as people now don’t even have to think about how numbers work. We have college graduates with zero reading comprehension or writing ability because they’ve never had to independently develop those skills. We have vanishing competency in critical analysis and the ability to carry a dialogue at levels that were considered natural and intrinsic a handful of generations ago. Everywhere we see the constant erosion of the capability of achieving objectives that are less than a generation removed from us. We’re not talking about forgetting how to knap flint or the decline of the buggy whip maker. We’re talking about the intrinsic capacity of the human mind to engage with the world suddenly becoming an investment on which there is no chance of return in a single human lifetime, because there is no economically sustainable path from raw novice to professional.

AI will absolutely surpass us, not by raising the bar, but lowering it into hell under a firehose of garbage.

Or, better idea, stop using AI for creative work people find genuine personal fulfillment in, and eliminating any pathway to excellence. If you can’t afford to pay real people to create genuinely human artistic works, you’re a terrible business person and deserve to fail. It doesn’t make you a “Genius Creative” finding shortcuts to success, it makes you a pathetic hack with no independent talent, a parasite, and a miserly cheapskate on top of that.