中國香港
I want to suggest to people reading this and picturing chaotic sky traffic with random crashes and cars crashing down onto the towns below... maybe give China a bit more credit than that? They're not stupid. They'd have to be monumentally stupid to grant public access to flying cars without a traffic plan.
And what the comic is saying is that the two governments structure their economies around catering for a different one of those two appraoches. You can have M-C-M' and C-M-C occur in the same economy, but the degree to which they each occur is vastly influenced by government and regulation.
these C-M-C and M-C-M chains are totally not describing the same society from different points of view!
Read theory (not sarcastic).
Yeah, in international markets where predatory pricing isn't regulated, the game fucks with gacha mechanics to make money. And in the Chinese market, where its behaviour is regulated, people pay fair prices for the extra content they want. Go figure.
Privately-owned Mainland companies are textbook examples of the difference in how capitalists are allowed to operate in a socialist market compared to a 'free' market. It's the Chinese government's responsibility to protect its people from predatory capitalist behaviour. It's not the Chinese government's responsibility to protect Americans from predatory capitalist behaviour.
As for the AI thing, again, it's not AI itself that's the problem, it's the captitalists controlling it that's the problem. I have zero misgivings about supporting tech companies based in Shenzhen and Hangzhou when the Chinese tech sector is bankrolling research that's making actual progress on fusion energy and actively improving people's lives.
Comic is from AI, idea is from a Marxist experiencing that phenomenon where when you play a video game too much your mind starts giving you dreams where it reframes the day's thoughts and experiences into the game.
One of my colleagues teaches Art and English as a foreign language. She's not even poor because we're in a country that doesn't shit on teachers, but even she uses generative AI to illustrate her slides and create grammar posters. She's time-poor, and she's not giving the school any labour for free making posters in her free time when she's got a family life to live. Nobody cares if the capybara character on the poster has 5 or 4 toes. It's not a maths poster. The students think it's funny and we move on. No artists are losing work, because even without the AI option there's no budget for decorating lesson slides or making posters to take home. Unless anyone wants to work for exposure. Can pay plenty in exposure.
And on the flip side, neither of us is using AI to replace artists in situations where we use artists. She still does her own personal art, and I just wrapped a Christmas gift for a valued friend that I paid another artist friend to create. Took her seven months because she's also pressed for time, and the chats we've had over the creative process are one of my fondest memories for this year.
Is this a regional thing? Is it different in your country, wherever you are? I've got musician friends using AI to help make music videos and artist friends using AI to make music for their comic strip posts, and nobody's losing any sleep over it. There's some other variable and it's not the AIs.
Educate me: what's terrible about it?
This, unironically! If we didn't set some standards, then even poor people could do it! 🧐
This is why I always branch a repo before letting AI anywhere near it. Sometimes you get fantastic results (like a day's worth of code monkey grind in 5 mins) and sometimes the results are just preposterous. You always want to be able to review the results before anything touches main.
I think any praise directed at Valve should be directed at Newell.
Valve is a private company and therefore reflects the values of its owner.
Another similar example is Larian Studios and its owner Sven Vincke (sp?).
Both of these companies have done/are doing good things. But they don't refute the criticisms of capitalism.
- People like Newell and Vincke can create these privately owned companies with their wealth, but where did that wealth come from? I will applaud both those men for choosing to do good things but with the caveat that those decisions don't exist in isolation and the acquisition of the wealth they needed to do cool things with their cool companies was definitely not an exploitation-free process.
- What happens to those businesses when their owners retire/die? Valve and Larian are reflective of their owners, and their owners are swimming against the current. Capitalism rewards shitty behaviour, and ownership of those companies can easily pass to shitty people.
Valve is a blip in the system. It's a good blip, but it's not indicative of any redeemability in the capitalist system.
That's true. I have friends who were harmed during the riots in Hong Kong and I'm angry about it.
"They see art as a threat because it questions and deciphers the myths, dogmas, lies and illusions that fascism is built upon."
Bullshit: it just as easily supports the 'myths, dogmas, lies and illusions' that fascism is built on. Panzerlied was a banger of a song and carries just as hard as Bella Ciao, and Hugo Boss' uniform designs put all the Allied uniforms to shame.
AI is a problem because the capitalists control it, and anyone who ignores that qualifying clause and calls AI 'unconditionally' a problem is a fucking idiot, and a useful idiot to fascists. It's the same thoughtless lack of nuance that ACAB has when it includes police in China. Police are an arm of the state and they are a problem when capitalists control the state. That kind of myopic stupidity had so many western leftists supporting the wrong side in Hong Kong which caused such a high degree of harm that it nearly passed a catstrophic tipping point. And now they're doing it with AI. They're making it cultural anathema for a 'progressive' to touch what could be one of the most powerful progressive tools that Educators in the West have in their struggles as the fascists take their textbooks away.
It's the Western left. You can't raise the bar with the Western left without standing waist-deep in shit and bending down to pick it up.
I agree with all of what you're saying, but this:
Take a breath, break the rumination spiral, and remember what a loving world that values human life is about.
Is easier said than done. You'll maybe break out of the spiral for a few days or even months, but it's so easy to slip into the spiral again and the further you spiral the easier it is to drop back into it, until one day even on the days where you're mentally healthy in all other respects, you live the fuck out of those days because the realist in your mind knows those days are numbered.
And I'm willing to bet the 12 feet of rope that I ordered off the internet that OP also agrees with everything you said and won't break out of the spiral so easily, either.
I have a few different plans for ways to check out. One of them is designed so that it'll just take one moment of courage and then I won't be able to back out of it. Another is really slow and painful by design. Another one is designed so that no one would find my remains - and if I quit my job beforehand, the few people I care about not hurting would never find out.
When I ask myself why I haven't done the deed yet, I don't actually know how to answer. But I do know that there's no reason to hurry, so there's also no reason to answer the 'why' yet.
Typing all of that out hits home how fucked up those thoughts are. But on the other hand, having those plans gives us a sense of agency over it. Whatever shit you're dealing with, you're making the choice to keep dealing with it and I think there's a comfort in that. There's also a bit of freedom in the perspective that I'm already dead and none of what I do from this point on matters.
It's not getting worse here in Hong Kong, it's slowly getting better. The British brainrot is taking a long time to unfuck; there are full grown adults who were babies at the handover passing down romanticised stories about British rule to their kids that they were told by their boomer parents, and the eldest generation who remember how it was practically apartheid pre-Maclehose reforms are all elderly. But the education system and the reality checks from what's happening in the States, Ukraine and Palestine are all pushing back.
It might seem like a strange question but people tend to have wildly different pespectives and understanding about China depending on what part of the world they're in, what the media they consume says about it, and whether they've lived there or not. So even if we agreed with each other it'd still be worth going through because we're in a public forum where it's helpful for others to be more illustrative.
"up to a point" is doing massive work here.
China has capitalism: in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in Macao. When you cross the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen it's like night and day. Shenzhen ain't no backwater either, but the cost of living, quality of life, environment, air pollution (the prevalence of electric cars makes so much difference that despite being less strict about smoking in public, it's still cleaner in SZ), advertising, cleanliness of public facilities, parks in walking distance of everywhere... when they say 'take the bad with the good' that doesn't mean not doing anything about the bad, and the difference a government can make in dealing with the bad is huge.
but up to a point the government will allow capitalists to do the same harmful things they do in the west.
Can you please give any examples of the Chinese government allowing capitalists to do harmful things to the Chinese people?
They are against it because anything bad that could come of further adoption of AI will happen if it's profitable for the capitalists. Even now NVIDIA is continuing to pump the bubble when everyone knows it's a bubble, because of the profits.
The prospects are entirely different in China, because capitalists are regulated. But nobody who is vehemently against AI is aware of the difference and likely will tell you China is capitalist. So all the problems that arise from capitalist control of AI are ascribed to AI alone as well.
Whenever I hear people posit that the US aggression against Venezuela is a distraction from the Epstien files, I can't help but think it's the other way around.
Whatever happens with the release of those files, the Capitalists don't have a lot to win or lose from that situation. If by some miracle Trump actually faces justice, he'll just be replaced by another puppet.
But with Venezuela, things can go really well or really badly for them. Venezuela's fate is the issue that capitalists have a significant stake in.