I don’t know who is right, but this is the greatest nerd fight I’ve seen in years! 😁

This is just the gender fraction among the working age casualties of the bombing campaign. Men are more likely to be outside the home. Israel has been targeting all the infrastructure they can, including hospitals, schools, emergency services, etc.

Think about how societies would act when under constant bombardment. You still need to find a way to support yourself. The proverbial rent doesn’t stop just because of the war. Especially in more traditional societies, you would likely see men doing most of the work outside the home, while women stay in whatever place is safest with the children. The wife stays back in the half collapsed building, while the husband goes to risk the crowds, riots, and potential machine gun fire at the aid trucks.

What war in history hasn’t seen the male population, even the civilian population, be placed at a higher risk of direct violence than the female population? Especially in more traditional societies, men will be highly likely to place their wives and children in the safest places they can find, while they go and take on a disproportionate share of the risk of leaving relative safety.

And for their sacrifice and bravery, the men of Gaza are rewarded by being slandered. Are you a male of working age killed by an Israeli bomb? You are assumed to be a member of Hamas.

I mean, 4x the market cap of Meta, 80x, it makes little difference. The key is the book publishers should end up owning Meta. Again, I wouldn’t expect them to necessarily turn Facebook into some revitalized utopia. But I think at least a bunch of stodgy old book publishers wouldn’t be so overtly cartoonishly fascist at the very least.

Exactly. Of course, I need to make sure the files are appropriate for AI training, so it’s imperative that I review the media in its entirety first.

That’s one of those things that fridge logic really hits hard. Because there are no fixed prices under Earth’s laws. So in exchange for quintillions of dollars of Earth’s music, the aliens could just sell us technology at the same or similar price.

Let’s do some math. Some searching suggests the average size of an e-book is about 3 MB. 82 TB means they pirated about 27 million e-books. At the rate of Russet’s fine, that would come to damages of $2.2 trillion. So not more money than has ever is about 4x Meta’s entire market cap.

I hope the book publishers sue Meta and end up owning Facebook and Instagram. Not that I expect one evil megacorp to inevitably fix all the ills of another. But it would be hard to make Facebook any worse than it currently is.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t pirate media. I’m just slowly gathering a collection of AI training data.

I don’t think many people actually thought Trump would be an improvement, aside from the Christian nationalists.

When your life is misery, a chance, any chance, no matter how small, can often be or at least seem worth it. Rents are through the roof, pay is stagnant, health insurance is complete scam, and people have lost any hope of improving their lives. For tens of millions of people, the probability of them ever actually improving their lot in life is next to zero.

Someone comes along and says, “I’ll smash the current order to pieces and reshuffle the entire deck.”

Imagine you’re a person in desperate straits. You think that overall, that potential leader will be a net negative society. But in the current system, the probability of anything improving in your life is zero. With a complete shuffling of the societal deck, well your odds aren’t great, but they are non-zero. You’re not going to end up an oligarch, but maybe you’ll be one of the minority that ends up slightly better off. After all, some ordinary German citizens did actually materially benefit from the Nazis. Most didn’t, but some got lucky.

This is why many people aside from Christian nationalists voted for Trump. The saw him as someone would would come along and knock over the Jenga tower of the existing sociopolitical order. They knew that the odds of their life being directly improved by this were slim. But they thought a slim chance was still there. And if nothing else, it would punish the bastards who have been keeping them down for years.

This is the fatal flaw with milquetoast Democratic centrism. It ignores that if you go long enough without actually helping millions of people who really need help, eventually those desperate people will vote to burn it all down out of sheer spite.

Is such a vote rational? No. But human beings are not rational. Human beings are not perfect utilitarian optimization engines. They vote with their hearts and souls, with both hope and rage. And that is what Democrats have repeatedly failed to realize.

Are you out there being the change in the Democratic party? Are you out there forcing change with your actions? Are you actually doing something to have a choice between something other than two parties?

We live in a world of specialization of labor. That is how civilizations are built. I don’t have to be a blacksmith to know that a crooked nail is a poorly made one. I don’t have to be a doctor to know that a witch doctor is not a real physician. I don’t have to be a politician to know when a politician is utterly failing at their job.

I think you fail to understand that 2024 was not the anomaly. 2020 was the anomaly. The Democratic Party, as it exists now, is fundamentally incapable of winning a presidential election. They are as incapable of it as the Libertarian or the Green Parties are. We currently have only a single viable party for the US presidential election.

DNC milquetoast centrism has been electorally dead since at least 2012. It failed in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Biden only managed to win in 2020 not because of his platform or message, but simply because of covid. Make no mistake, if not for covid, Trump would have easily won in 2020. They’ve been selling the same slop since Clinton ran in 1992. And the brand is old and tired.

There weren’t actually that many people who wanted to stop the Palestinian genocide but then voted for Trump. The vast, vast majority of the people you saw pleading online for Biden to do something ended up voting for Kamala. I certainly did.

Did Trump make inroads among the Muslim community? Sure. But he also made inroads among the Hispanic community. The anti-trans ads got way more Muslim votes for Trump than Biden’s Gaza policy ever did. The truth is just as plenty of Hispanic voters will vote for an anti-immigrant candidate, plenty of Muslim voters will vote for an anti-Palestine candidate. Palestine is just one of many nations in the Middle East. It’s supremely racist to lump all Muslims together as a single monolith and think all they care about is Palestine.

People were pleading with Kamala to make a change because it was one of the few opportunities she had to actually win the race. The DNC centrism is a politically dead philosophy. A radical departure from past policies was needed to give her any chance of victory. Making a hard break from Israel was just such a chance. It was one of the few slim chances she had to actually pull off this win. People were pleading with her to change policy on Gaza because they were trying to help her win. But she ignored them, and she also failed to make any meaningful change on any other substantial issue. Because of that she lost.

Kamala didn’t lose because of Gaza. She was already destined to lose before Gaza. But changing policy on Gaza was a squandered opportunity that could have saved her otherwise doomed campaign. It was an opportunity to make a clear sign saying, “I’m something new, let’s strike a new course.” But she decided to campaign with Liz Cheney instead. And she secured her place in Hell because of it.

“No, this pair of shoes must be better, it’s from that brand I like! I know it’s made of cardboard and duct tape, but I swear, it’s from that brand I like, so it has to be better!”

How well did that work for them? They had a billion dollar campaign, most of which was utterly wasted on advertising in already-saturated TV markets and pointless celebrity endorsements. Maybe they could have accepted less corporate money, been content with a mere $500 million campaign, and not driven their base away.

It reminds me one of Asimov’s robots trying to reason a way around the Three Laws.

Replace Tienanmen with discussions of Palestine, and you get the same censorship in US models.

Our governments aren’t as different as they would like to pretend. The media in both countries is controlled by a government-integrated media oligarchy. The US is just a little more gentle with its censorship. China will lock you up for expressing certain views online. The US makes sure all prominent social media sites will either ban you or severely throttle the spread of your posts if you post any political wrongthink.

The US is ultimately just better at hiding its censorship.

I don’t see anything in there that doesn’t also apply to OpenAI and other western companies.

Ask OpenAI’s products to explain the absurdity of conservative Christianity, or any number of bugbears the West accepts censorship over.

Honestly, this all seems like small potatoes. We’re trying to save our species from extinction here. We’re trying to maintain the standard of living that came with the Industrial Revolution without burning out planet to a cinder.

If doing so means our steel industry runs 10% less efficiently, I really don’t give a damn.

Another option is to skip most of the grid storage and just spam solar panels. Rely on batteries only to get you through the night, not to bridge power across seasons. Build enough panels that your country can meet its needs even on a cloudy day in winter. Then you have reasonable power costs in the winter and nearly free electricity the rest of the year.

You could see a lot of energy-intensive industries becoming seasonal. We have a crop growing season, a school season, and sports seasons. Why not an “AI model training” season?

They’re building an AI Stasi.

It really depends on the location I guess. I ride the bus a lot in my city. And the bus drivers here do a lot more than just drive the bus. Their most important secondary duty is helping users of wheelchairs and other mobility devices. The buses have wheelchair ramps that fold down, which the drivers manually operate. Then once on the bus, a front section of seats will fold up, and there is a system to strap a wheelchair down securely. It is the bus driver that does this.

Now, one area automated buses could really help would be expanding the pool of potential drivers. Our system has a hard time recruiting new drivers, as a CDL (commercial drivers license) is required. And people with such a license can usually make better money driving trucks for for-profit businesses. So it’s really hard to get, train, and retain bus drivers, as few people are actually qualified to drive a bus.

So in our city, we would still need an employee onboard to help with these secondary duties. However, with an automated bus, they could be done by anyone. Instead of a driver with a CDL, we could hire some college kids to ride around the city in the auto buses. They could offer assistance when needed, but spend the majority of their time just working on their studies. As such, they could be hired at a very affordable cost to the city.