It is not meaningless. It shows how the AfD is going to do business if they get to power.

Konkret vorgesehen ist demnach nun, dass ab dem 1. Juli 2027 auf zuckergesüßte Getränke mit einem Zuckergehalt ab fünf Gramm pro hundert Milliliter ein Steuersatz von 26 Cent pro Liter erhoben wird; ab acht Gramm sollen es 32 Cent sein.

Laut Finanzministerium gilt das zum Beispiel für Limonaden, Eistees, Energydrinks und Fruchtsaftgetränke mit Zuckerzusatz. Nicht betroffen sind Getränke mit Alkohol sowie alkoholfreie Biere, Weine oder Cocktails. Auch reine Frucht- und Gemüsesäfte oder ungesüßte Schorlen werden nicht zusätzlich besteuert, genauso wenig Getränke mit Süßungsmitteln.

Der Alkohol ist den Deutschen heilig, auch wenn er krebserregend ist und es bei handelsüblichen alkoholischen Getränken kein gesundheitlich unbedenkliches Konsumniveau gibt.

Gegen die Steuer gab es bis zuletzt erhebliche Widerstände. Vor wenigen Tagen hatten sich auch die neun Agrar- und Verbraucherschutzminister der Union aus den Bundesländern in einem Brief an Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz (CDU) dagegen ausgesprochen. Eine Zuckersteuer setze auf staatliche Lenkung und belaste den Kauf bestimmter Lebensmittel unnötigerweise zusätzlich, kritisieren die Ressortchefs in dem Schreiben.

Staatliche Lenkung ist sinnvoll, wenn Zucker ohnehin überall reingeballert wird und die Leute gemeinhin nicht die Zeit, Aufmerksamkeit, oder den Grips haben, sich zuckerarm zu ernähren. Hier ist der gesundheitliche Schutz der Gesellschaft durch diese milde Lenkung sicherlich kein verkehrter Schritt. Es wird ja nicht verboten. Es werden Anreize für eine Verringerung des hohen Zuckerkonsums auf Verbrauchet- und Herstellerseite geschaffen.

Weiterhin sind die betroffenen Lebensmittel nicht essenziell zum Leben und insofern auch keine Belastung für Verbraucher. Wer regelmäßig Limonaden, Energiegetränke, usw. mit hohem Zuckergehalt konsumiert, für den ist das eher ohnehin ein Todesmittel. Hier ist die Lenkungswirkung erneut sinnvoll.

Zudem gefährde die Steuer Arbeitsplätze in der meist mittelständisch geprägten Getränkeindustrie.

Dann möge die Industrie doch mehr auf gute zuckerärmere Alternativen setzen, um die Arbeitsplätze zu sichern. Das betrifft ja nun die gesamte Industrie und nicht nur vereinzelte Hersteller. Die Wettbewerbsbedingungen werden also nicht unfairer als vorher.

Sorry für die Textwand - ich bin in info-dump-Laune Ü

Alles gut. Vielen Dank für den Info-Dump! :) Das ist sehr informativ für mich, da ich mit dem Thema bisher nur selten Berührungspunkte hatte.

Klingt danach, dass Hessen um ein kompetentes Logopädy reicher geworden ist. ;)

You already are.

Welche logopädischen Störungen außer Lispeln und Stottern gibt es?

Kann auch eng mit der psychischen Verfassung von jemandem zusammenhängen, oder?

I love this. So inspirational. Much healing. Wow.

Super Idiots.
It’s funny that usa citizens managed to vote this super idiot twice into a position of power. Let’s hope he continues his policy of throwing his nation behind. Then the rest of the world might finally start suffering less because of these super idiots.

Connect with other people and no longer be a single individual fighting this fight. Reveal to others why you think those are evil companies, encourage them to boycott them, build a community of likeminded people, use this to influence politics or become politically active yourself.

wtf did I just read

At a first glance it looked like birb has really long legs on the first picture.

“Get off my lawn!”

And on the person.

Does ass hair count? I am bald.

This is why I love fall and winter.

Pregnant people must scare you. As do synthetic bacterial cells, artificially synthesized viruses, cloning, organoids, etc.

god-like isn’t religious mumbo jumbo. That’s standard sci fi talk.

I am talking rather about the Sci than the Fi.

Define “god-like” if you do not mean it in a religious manner.

Regarding your question: it makes sense to continue research and educate people, yes.

Are you really requiring that we allow research in one field only after we have advanced research in another entirely different field? That seems arbitrary.

Humanity can already create life.

Creating conscious entirely artificial things is a different pair of shoes.

I would cut out the whole religious “god-like” mumbo-jumbo though, because that does not necessitate any progress in such research directions.

The fruit fly may feel pain as a stimulus. Even if not: you are interrupting it’s normal biological function and disabling it of living its life normally. This may even be a disturbance of local eco-systems and thereby affect more forms of life, both feeling and not-feeling.

EDIT: Just realised that the following might be beside your point, misread your comment, lol. Will leave it as is now, because I think it’s worth considering when thinking about consciousness, experience, etc. in the context of LLMs.

But more importantly: LLMs are trained to model patterns and make predictions. This is indeed something our brains do as well. The difference lies in a state of mind and ‘understanding’ though. I will detail this:

Reminiscient of the chinese room thought experiment: Consider you are imprisioned in the chinese room and have to figure out yourself which chinese characters you have to slip back under the door depending on which ones you receive. (Or in any other language that you have absolutely no understanding of. I will assume chinese for this now.) If you provide a correct answer, you will get food. If not, you won’t and maybe even get additionally punished somehow.

Over time you will start to see patterns and remember which characters to correctly provide. However, you will never hear someone speaking, and you will never really associate the characters with things you know from life. For example, you wouldn’t notice you were talking about an apple when slipping 苹果 through. You would also not know how to pronounce it. You would just know this is the desired answer to draw and slip back.

Now, a native chinese person is sitting in a neighbouring room. And some experimenter who doesn’t know in which room you or the native speaker sits, will slip the same ‘input’ characters to both of you and may ask how the acidic-sweet, fruit is called that is round and grows on trees. Assuming you have trained long and well enough, both of you will provide the correct reply, 苹果, and from the perspective of the experimenter it will be impossible to distinguish who the real native speaker is and who you, the prisioner is.

Now, the chinese person would have had an image in his head when thinking about the apple, would know how it tastes like, etc… You on the other hand wouldn’t even have noticed that you were talking about apples. The 苹果, is just some symbol to you that seems appropriate.

For the experimenter though, they might think they were speaking to two real chinese speakers although you were just ‘faking’ it.

Next, we place a computer in the third room that uses our current LLM technology. Those are trained in a manner that is in principle similar how you were trained: roughly speaking, negative feedback for bad replies, positive feedback for good ones. A mathematical optimization algorithm then modifies the model such that the desired replies become more likely to happen.

After a while the experimenter returns and now has to distinguish behind which door the computer is, the prisioner, and the native speaker. It will be impossible. It may be easier to test with more difficult ‘questions’, there the native speaker might perform much better than you or the computer. But in theory, we assume the computer and you have learned the patterns perfectly. Then it really is impossible to tell who is faking it and who the ‘true speaker’ is.

But, there is still a difference. You are not the LLM. You got hungry, you may have even felt pain, you have wondered what those symbols mean, you may even have remembered some symbols that you found especially beautiful. And of course, you wondered when those maniacs would release you.

All of that does not happen in LLMs. They do not have a thought-loop. They do not feel anything. No pain, no hunger. They have no awareness of their situation and no sense of being or something that might resemble consciousness. They do not strive for anything, have no motivation or aspirations. They are fire-and-forget machines without any state of mind. Receiving input on one side, providing output on the other without any reflection or retention. Their only memory is how they should answer provided some input, since they, same as you, just modeled the patterns.

This can appear eeringly authentic. If the experimenter would have asked you on chinese what your life goals are, both you and the LLM would provide an answer that would be likely accepted by the experimenter. But both you and the LLM actually have no idea what you have just said. It would be fakery.

If the experimenter would have asked about what your deepest, darkest fears are, same thing: you would provide an answer that would be acceptable when someone asks about deep dark fears, but you would again have no concept of what you have just talked about. This doesn’t make you or the LLM good chinese speakers. It makes you convincing fakers.

So there are two levels of difference here between a human and a LLM as we currently have them:

1. The conversation is convincing fakery.
2. There is no experiencing subject behind the conversation. The LLM does not know that it is having a conversation, does not understand the meaning of what it says in the experiential sense described above, and does not feel or experience anything while producing its answers. There is no inner perspective to which the conversation is happening.

That may change in the future. But currently, there is no established evidence of an experiencing subject behind the conversation. Moreover, it is technically unnecessary, because nothing about how current LLMs operate requires subjective experience, awareness, or an inner perspective.

And this is precisely where the convincing fakery becomes deceptive, since language is normally one of the strongest ways humans infer another person’s state of mind. If someone tells you that they are scared, lonely, excited, or in pain, it is usually reasonable to infer that there is a person behind those words actually experiencing something. An LLM can produce exactly the same statements simply because they are appropriate responses in that context. The statement itself therefore cannot tell us whether there is an experience behind it.

A recording of your parents telling how disappointed they are. /j

Maybe just uneducated in how LLMs work. If you have no sufficient understanding of the technology it is easy to be impressed how human-like LLMs talk to you, almost magical.

It foreshadows an issue that will be a reality one day nevertheless. The work on AI continues. We may one day very well have conscious AI. This will be the start of a whole bunch of ethical and legal problems. It might be meaningful to regulate / guardrail such research directions.

Be kind. Absolutely. But anthropomorphising lifeless and consciousness-less objects is not always meaningful, sometimes even detrimental. As in the case with our current LLMs.