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  • Certainly that goes a long way to explain why so many think LLMs are actually intelligent.

  • Have you somehow missed just how car-centric just about everything is? I mean, most public space out there is taken by roads and public transport is generally insufficient.

    Granted, there are much better countries in this than others.

    Ditto on other things imposed on people such as planed obsolence: Can you still buy a fridge that will last you a lifetime? Does your 15 year old original iPhone still work well? How many of the electronics out there are not repairable?

    Then there's all the pressure to make people consume, using techniques from Psychology (you can go read all about how the nephew of Freud introduced into Marketing techniques from Psychology back in the 50s). Absolutelly, people should be stronger and wiser than that, but most are not and just claiming that "it's people's fault" when others take adavantage of natural human weaknesses is just victim blaming.

    Absolutelly, Consumerism is a big part of the problem and it's a lot down to individuals to do less of it, but lets not deceive ourselves that the environment we're all in not only promotes it massivelly and relentlessly, but plenty of decisions which were taken for us by others mean individuals often don't even have a choice not to buy new junk or ride a personal-polution-device, and in Capitalism those decisions were taken mainly by large Companies directly or by the politicians they bought.

  • Listen

    Jump
  • The very same people whose Election Campaign Strategy was "Not voting for us is the same as voting for a guy who will round up Transexuals and put them in concentration camps whilst turning America into the Fourth Reich" rather than, you know, actually having a list of measures to make life better for most people, have continued with the hyperbolic alarmism so as to keep their supporters enraged against the "other" lest they stop, think, and figure out that the Democrat Leaders could have done way more than they did to appeal to voters and hence have a large slice, maybe even most, of the blame for Trump getting elected again.

    The reality is that people mostly have to wait and see, since there are a lot of ways to stop or at least undermine the most autocratic Republican tendencies, plus the most intelligent Republicans (i.e. the sociopaths at the top of the party doing it for their own personal upside maximization rather than the "true believer" useful idiots) are well aware that the system only works as well as it does (i.e. from their point of view, only produces maximum wealth for their wealthy patrons and hence they themselves) if people in general think they live in a Democracy and their vote counts.

    Also keep in mind that the factions of the real power in American - the Wealthy - will carry on fighting for themselves as they've always been doing, no matter what the façade which is the Theatre of Politics looks like (they're apolitical and buy, bully or swindle people on both sides of the aisle).

    America is an experiment in seeing how far the squeezing machine can be made to squeeze the masses without breaking, but none of the real power of the land is interested in it actually breaking and stopping delivering them maximum wealth increases, and as a country which doesn't have enough natural resources for the wealthy to extract maximum wealth without most of the population going along with it, they too are not interested in letting it get to the same kind of situation as for example Russia. Absolutelly, their process doesn't deal well with systemic problems of the Tragedy Of The Commons kind - hence things like Housing Inflation starting to asphixiate the rest of the Economy - but it does work for stopping direct singular actions that would mess with the interests of Wealth, such as the kind of legislation required to establish an Autocratic Regime in the US.

    I'm not saying that the Wealthy will save the rest because they care, but as it so happens it's in the best interest of the real power of the land - Money - that the machinery that keeps the rest producing wealth to enrich them does not break, so their interests are aligned which those of common people who don't want Autocracy.

  • Of Democrat Politicians, sure.

    Of Democrat Supporters, it's almost the opposite - if I remember it correctly over 70% of Democrat Supporters were against what Israel is doing in a poll not that long ago.

  • Obama was incredibly "friendly" towards the worst amongst the Finance industry in how he chose to "rescue the Economy" by basically sacrificing everybody else to make them get away with minimal losses in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash.

    Obama also made a ton of money in the speech circuit after that (he is very literally a multimillionaire) a lot of which paid directly and indirectly by Finance Industry companies.

    Feel free to connect the dots.

  • Corruption makes a lot of money for politicians on both sides of the aisle in America.

    Democrats didn't go after Republican corruption because they too would be caught in the net if it was indeed done via an independent Justice System.

    You see this exact same effect in other countries with voting systems that boost the representation of the two largest parties - neither of them ever goes after Corruption because both of them have been thoroughly captured by corrupt politicians and you even get the effect in Parliamentary systems that some of the few things they both vote together on is weakening existing anti-corruption legislation and defeating new anti-corruption legislation.

    Parties which regularly get real power, such as the two main parties in Power Duopoly "democracies", always attract the most crooked people around (similarly to power monopolies - I.e autocracies) and are guaranted to turn rotten even when they start from the most honest and fair beginnings.

  • This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they're overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.

    Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.

    It's not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.

  • Surelly as the descendants of the Vikings it's not completelly senseless to think they might be fine with boarding ships on the high seas to take their stuff and with a little plundering of ill-defended costal villages!???

  • It's my impression that the ability for Instrospection is a rare trait in people as is Self-Criticism.

    Not that I think Carl's dictum doesn't apply to those who have those traits: I just think it's harder for it to happen to them and it's easier (but not guaranteed) for them to spot that status of being captured by a belief in themselves and get out of it or at least try to work around it.

  • One would expect that any competent national leader would've requested an intelligence folder about Trum,p at the lastest when he was elected POTUS, and this being Germany, they have the capability to produce one which is very complete and beyond what we common mortals can deduce about the man's nature.

    Whilst a politician in such a high position in a country isn't necessarilly more capable of analysing things than a common mortal (though it's logical to expect they're significantly better at judging people than most, since that's a requirement in their profession and to reach such a high position they must be top performers at it), they most certainly have access to much better and deeper information than any of us and to people who can do the analysing for them.

  • Let's be fair: "I was wrong about the bad nature of somebody else" is pretty much the lowest, mildest, weakest possible form of self-criticism there is, to the point that it's quite common for posh manipulator types to use "I was wrong about your ,

    <proceeds to criticized the other person>

    " format of discourse to criticize others.

  • Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.

  • It's funny how the criminal immediatelly implied that it's a Jewish characteristic to be a criminal like him, just like he and his minions (which includes the American Administration) have been continuously implying that commiting all manner of horrid crimes, from theft and rape all the way to Genocide and purposeful child mass murder, is a Jewish chacteristic.

    Like the last bunch of Nazis, these people aren't merelly immoral, they're so depraved, disgusting and devoid of even the most basic humanity that they'll slander millions of those they claim to defend in order to avoid the consequences of acting like the most extreme and out of control psychopath (far beyond mere Serial Murderer and well into Hitler-level).

  • The original Nazis would always claim that they represented the Arian Race and that any criticism of them was "against the Arian Race" and the Zionists, a Neue Nazi group, do the same only using a different ethnicity.

    This is far from the only way in which these Neue Nazis are the same as the original Nazis.

  • Clearly at least some of the Democrats are a Nazi as the Republicans.

  • By this point it's more like a new Holocaust, using starvation rather than gas chambers.

  • Seems weird to ask the US for glass when they can get it from a lot closer, assuming we're just talking about normal glass.

  • Had one too many succulent Chinese meals...

  • Maybe "travelling as a hobby" as a women's preference with regards to men is at about it being a man's openness and ability to deal with totally different environments, disposable income, time availability and possibly foreign language skills.