Please don’t ever be lulled into believing that there is anything normal or sane about having a carve out that makes the President not subject to laws. This country was full on founded on the idea of rejecting kings. What an absolute joke of a nation we are. It’s just mustache twirling oligarchs and drooling peasant lemmings all the way down.
As we transition into full-blown tyranny, and the out-group begins to grow, I’m trying to educate myself about how to cope with it, survive and maybe even resist. I have found that discussions among black Americans online are extremely enlightening in this regard, presumably because they have existed forever in a precarious state, something like that which many more of us are about to be thrust. I’m not interested in scapegoating black males over this election. This happened because too many Americans are dumb fucks, ruled by emotions, and gullible as hell. End of story.
Peace through capitulation. What a strong leader we’ve empowered.
It’s time for the world community to start treating the United States as an environmental, economic, and military threat. We are not a partner. We don’t value the wellbeing of anyone, be they in other countries or our own for that matter.
Apparently, Putin too.
This piece of shit is going to kill lots of innocent people before he’s done.
JFC this may be the most depressing thing I’ve ever read.
If Harris doesn’t forcefully break from the Biden administration on this genocide now, I fear that she will lose to her fascist opponent. It just cannot get clearer that Biden is ideologically invested in prosecuting these atrocities and appears to be unable or unwilling to bow even a little bit for political expediency. I don’t know if Harris supports the genocide ideologically, and it doesn’t really matter. She is a political opportunist and should wake up to the electoral implications of continuing to bind herself to Biden on this. She is perilously close to not only going down in infamy as one of the historical architects of a genocide, but also the person who lost US democracy.
At the height of digg, I thought Rose was kind of cool. One of those Silicon Valley success stories that used to inspire tech enthusiasts like me. I watched diggnation and bought in to the culture being presented. But I’ll never forget that when digg 4 released, and bombed, Kevin threw his own employees and developers under the bus instead of taking responsibility for strategic mistakes. It was really eye opening to me about him and many of the other frauds that Silicon Valley hoists up as role models. Since then, he’s done nothing to dissuade me that he’s just another talentless tech-bro asshole that got way more attention and money than he deserved.
Speaking as an American, it’s because we are bad guys. I’m not saying all Americans are bad. I’m not saying that everything we do is bad. But as a collective, in the context of our actions and their consequences, we inflict tremendous harm on the world and our own citizens.
I should also point out that invoking “secularism” in defense of Israeli brutality is absurd. Religious exceptionalism is a foundational characteristic of that state. The fanatical zealots that run their current government invoke religious providence all the time when rationalizing their own brutal policies. Lastly, the root of US patronage for Israel, the thing that allows the state to persist at all, is evangelical Christians who hope to usher in the end times described by their religion.
Every single rationalization that I’ve heard Israel and the US use for the inhuman violence they are inflicting, if applied consistently, would also justify both October 7 and the behavior of Hezbollah. “We have a right to defend ourselves.” “They deserve it because they are terrorists that target innocent civilians.” “This is our land.” “They hide behind civilians.” “We support our Allies without condition”. Secondly, “secularism” is worthless if it is employed in the the service of racism and fascism. Thirdly, please examine history and realize that all of this brutality always, always sows the seeds of more violence that will be visited upon you later. Israelis are sacrificing their own long term security for the sake of wanton short term bloodlust. It’s sick, self destructive and short sighted.
There is no depth to which Joe Biden will not sink to prop up, arm, cover for, pay, or deflect accountability from Israel. He is a zealot, devoted to a racist, un-democratic state and its culture of ethnic purity and regional domination. He is a monster who would be undeserving of his role as president, if the country he presided over wasn’t itself a violent, racist stain on humanity. Harris should be given an opportunity to course correct, but we all know that she won’t. She has no actual ideology other than self promotion. Her party has been captured monetarily by the Israeli lobby, as has most of congress. Despite a lot of flowery rhetoric, the only consistent US principle is a willingness to ignore US principles if there is profit or power to be had. As a US citizen, I hope our allies realize how duplicitous we are, and how shallow our calls for unity, peace and order are. The US should not be trusted, and our demon child Israel should never, ever be legitimized as anything other than the cancer it keeps choosing to be.
I really cannot fully express how much I have grown to hate all these motherfuckers and their awful work - and I work in Silicon Valley.
This is part of Obama’s legacy.
This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.
I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.
We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.
Rich idiots failing upward, unite!
The problem with what creeps like Mann are claiming comes down to the difference between “art” and buying an “interest” in art as a speculative investment. Mann conflates these two ideas, trying to bestow the wholesomeness of artistic expression with his investment business venture. I’m all in favor of getting artists paid, and structuring society in a way that encourages the production of art, but Mann wants to weaken securities regulations and consumer protections to do that. That’s a terrible idea because it will lead to many more people being conned and defrauded.
If investors were merely trying to support an artist’s work, and not seeking to profit from their investment, they wouldn’t need a securities mechanism like NFTs to do it. We already have money for that.
If a side effect of regulating NFTs as securities is to somehow damage the regular fine art marketplace, as I think Mann’s suit is warning, that is no great loss for society. The fine art market is a blight, a fraud-riddled playground for ultra wealthy douchebags to sequester wealth and does nothing to advance art or promote the creation of artworks writ large.
Mann has ridden the crypto speculative bubble and has an inflated impression of the value of his work. He’s carved out a niche as a sort of court jester for billionaires like Mark Andreesen who want to rebuild financial systems in a way that would dismantle the regulatory state and enshrine an elite class as technologically empowered feudal lords. He thinks the money is compensation for his songs, but it’s largely just a side effect of crypto bros forever trying to find a greater fool to hold the bag in a pyramid scheme. In that effort, his lawsuit is basically a marketing campaign for his investment business. I hope the court puts an end to this once and for all, but I’m not optimistic.
Dumbest motherfucking people in the world elected the dumbest motherfucking administration ever. The only upside that I can anticipate is that these dumb motherfuckers may greatly hasten the weakening of this country, and hopefully speedrun toward something like an end to US hegemony around the world.