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UnderpantsWeevil

@ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Pete Hegseth meets with Anthropic CEO over disagreements about AI guardrails for military use | CNN Business

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  • "Text generator to"

    • Identify the next target to attack
    • Justify the latest military operation to the press
    • Induce a panic in Congress to get the Pentagon more money
    • Lie about how the latest military engagement is going

    Seems to fulfill all the basic responsibilities of a modern Secretary of Defense Offense. Why do we even need Hegseth at all? Hell, why do we need the Joint Chiefs? Just direct all future queries to the GenAI.mil platform. We can scrape every bureaucrat over the rank of Major with this thing.

  • How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?

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  • Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes.

    One of the more notable achievements of the last two decades of Chinese economic improvement has been the degree of urbanization, particularly in the western end of the country. This used to be a point of criticism among western economists (Chinese Ghost Cities being a popular meme during the '00s/'10s). Now we just don't talk about Chengdu or Lhasa or Lanzhuo at all.

    It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US

    In my experience, having done a little traveling through Appalachia and the northern end of the Gulf Coast, urban migration has solved a lot of the back country issues by hollowing out the country's interior. If we didn't build a highway through a chunk of the state, people just stopped living there.

    Chinese rural communities have experienced a similar hollowing out, particularly in the 80s and 90s when the prosperity on the coasts fully eclipsed the poverty of the western interior. But because agricultural labor was seen as critical to social stability, the state simply refused to let people leave. The end result was an enormous black market population that became a nightmare to manage. And so the late Deng and Hu governments (and early Xi government - although by then much of the work was done) spent a significant amount of resources and labor back filling rural development. Hu, in particular, was a champion of the rural west thanks to his policy of low taxes and high investment.

    This didn't eliminate the developmental black holes on the Chinese map. But the expansion westward was its own kind of economic revolution. One that culminated in a virtual elimination of the poverty the country had become known for during the Reagan Era.

    The difference in approach - demanding people move to the cities rather than demanding public spending move to the country - is a critical point of divergence between American Neoliberal and Chinese Socialist domestic policies.

  • How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?

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  • I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”.

    American public school kids don't normally get access to electives until at 6th grade (sometimes not until 8th or 9th grade depending on the state and district). So "optional" in theory is a deliberate effort to delay bilingual learning in practice.

    Mono-lingual populations are more easily primed towards hostility against minority speakers. So your senior staff is biased towards English as a primary language when hiring the next generation of public workers. And these workers are increasingly both unable and unwilling to provide services in secondary languages. This creates a natural barrier for any minority speaker from even interacting with public bureaucracies.

    In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.

    Bigger and more egalitarian cities, with large minority-language populations can staff their departments with fluent minority-language speakers. And under more liberal and egalitarian governments, they do. But as the population grows more reactionary, these kinds of skills get drummed out of the bureaucracy.

    This isn't even a new problem in government.

    Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.

    But it has become an increasingly domestic issue, as fascists take command of the bureaucratic core.

    On March 1, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 13166, which designated English as the United States’ official language. This Executive Order is no longer theoretically in effect, and existing federal civil rights laws and regulations require language access for individuals with limited English proficiency in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.

    Nonetheless, numerous federal entities are pursuing policies prioritizing English as the only language, effectively reducing or eliminating Spanish.

  • Something about work / life balance

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  • ACAB

  • 'I can destroy the country': Trump's threat after Supreme Court strikes down his key policy

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  • couple more years until AI is going to be indistinguishable from actual footage

    Eh. We've had the capacity to fake footage for a long, long time. Con-artists were faking UFO sightings in the 50s and fooling people. Skeptics were questioning holocaust photos and 9/11 footage a generation ago and straight up denying dashcam footage of police brutality straight into the modern moment.

    AI can fake a particular moment and whip people up, but it can't stand any serious interrogation or follow-up. It is only good at showing people what they were already primed to believe.

  • 'I can destroy the country': Trump's threat after Supreme Court strikes down his key policy

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  • No stopping him.

    America fucked around.

    Now it gets to find out.

  • Floating turbine towers above — the S1500 hovers to harvest wind at 131 feet

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  • Unfortunately, I could not find a link to the manual.

  • How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?

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  • meanwhile a lot of american’s were learning half of the horrors of china were extremely overstated or manipulated.

    Crazy how quickly the Chinese travel vlogs get demonetized on YouTube. Google execs really do not want you knowing how nice East Asian cities are.

  • How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?

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  • English has 1.5B fluent speakers spread across the entire globe. Hardly an insular language.

    This is far more about discrimination - freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services, segregating English speakers from minority speakers, abolishing First Nations language and culture.

    Also very important to keep Americans from reading foreign language press.

  • Know the real culprits

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  • I don’t think the consumption of even a few extra degrees of the whole population of NYC is even comparable to the consumption of Times Square.

    I mean, YMMV. Lots of math behind the hardware that generates the climate, the insulation (or absence therein) that degrades unit temperature over time, the efficiency of Times Square light fixtures, yadda yadda yadda.

    But there's definitely a Bloomberg Era attitude towards resource consumption that amounts to "rich people can afford to live richly, poor people must learn to live poorly". And then there's a more materialist response, which asks the question "How do we maximize the quality of life at the minimum long term socio-economic cost?"

    A regional government that tackles unit insulation, efficient energy transmission, and clean power sourcing does infinitely more to reduce carbon emissions than one that just hangs up billboards saying "Please Use Less".

  • Mamdani signs New York executive order targeting ICE

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  • But isn’t the second part basically like creating a law saying murder is now illegal?

    It's a law saying these agencies need to audit their internal operations and document any murders they may have forgotten to report.

    The illegal search and seizures were always illegal without a warrant.

    Because of the slapdash way these agencies often function, they'll do the crime first and then build the justification after the fact.

    Raising bureaucratic hurdles for police operations means increasing the risk that their bullshit won't fly.

  • Jeffrey Epstein Was Vladimir Putin's Wealth Manager, FBI Source Claimed in Newly Released Epstein Files

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  • shrug Lemmy's a tough crowd. But tough crowds make hard posters.

  • US government drops case against Democrats in 'illegal orders' video

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  • Truly Kafka-esque to try an indict someone for saying "Don't do crimes"

  • ‘Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full’: Iran’s students on why they are protesting again

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  • Iran supports the resistance behind the scenes not in front of it like Yemen.

    That stopped being true years ago. They've fully retreated from the regional stage.

    they are already doing a million times more than every other country worldwide

    They're unable to keep the water flowing and the lights on, because they keep trying to make deals with Western imperialists and getting played

  • ‘Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full’: Iran’s students on why they are protesting again

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  • Iran is currently the only major party fighting Israel

    No, they aren't. They're rolling over for Israel time and time again.

    They withdraw support from Hezbollah, from the Houthis in Yemen, and from the Taliban in Afghanistan for a few temporary sanctions suspensions. They actively collaborate with Israel's friends in Russia and Saudi Arabia. They collaborated with the fucking Americans during the initial Iraq War. They crack down on their own domestic civilians when those populations want more aggressive Palestinian support. They've been "six months from producing a nuclear weapon" for thirty fucking years.

    Yemen is still receiving Iranian weapons

    They are not

    The only thing they know how to do to Israel is to fire Warning Shots. Over and over and over again. Even as Israelis butcher their people at home and abroad.

    They aren't fighting them in any material sense.

  • ‘Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full’: Iran’s students on why they are protesting again

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  • left-of-centre british reporting

    Insane that people believe this even exists

    The Guardian is TERF central

  • ‘Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full’: Iran’s students on why they are protesting again

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  • How, exactly, will bombing Iranian cities help their liberation?

    Same way that kidnapping Maduro liberates Venezuela. And embargoing gasoline liberates Cuba. And sending ground troops into Denmark liberates Greenland.

    The Iranian people, not just the current regime, are supportive of Palestine, and Israel and the US absolutely cannot accept that.

    Under Shah Reza Pahlavi, they will crush Hamas and Hezbollah, defeat ISIS, and end Woke Gay Iranian Antifa once and for all.

  • ‘Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full’: Iran’s students on why they are protesting again

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  • Iran literally sentencing kids to death

    This isn't novel to Iran. The US was sentencing minors to execution until as recently as 2005, when the SCOTUS struck down junivenille executions in Roper v. Simmons.

    And that was under a relatively liberal majority. No way Roper would have gone 5-4 under a Roberts court.

  • ‘Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full’: Iran’s students on why they are protesting again

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  • Yawn more Western propaganda to justify war against Iran.

    I mean, it can be both. The Iranian government has been an oppressive theocratic reactionary force practically since day one of the revolution. They rejected socialist reforms and partnered with Ronald fucking Reagan to start a turf war with Iraq using chemical weapons. They've flubbed any effective containment of Israel, failed to integrate their economy with Pakistan or Turkiye or Afghanistan, gave up backing Yemen, and never finished their nuclear deterrent.

    The current crisis they're in wasn't unforeseeable. But when even Ahmadinejad is too far left for your Guardian Council, it locks you into a dark future.