All it takes to permit atrocities is to say you're disturbing someone's peace?

But of course whose peace matters. The peace of a marginalized group? The peace of billionaires and their money machines? The peace of the status quo?

Everyone who is only one paycheck from bankruptcy or homelessness, everyone who is living comfortably, is incentivised to encourage that "keep the peace" mentality.

Not talking about politics (whose politics?) is what gets us into this mess. Avoid the trolls and anonymous Internet forums, but absolutely talk to coworkers and friends and family honestly about all of these things. It's the only way to affect change. Secretly voting for your candidate of choice in a vacuum, and then going back to your "no politics" workplace, isn't enough given the *waves hands around wildly*

If it has happened in humans then it's possible to happen in our technology, eventually. It's not something we're currently geared to make happen, though, because we lack the hardware and software to mimic our own consciousness, and the patience to do so without expecting to see a payday out of it.

The path to Artificial General Intelligence will likely require computable storage, exponential parallelization, a new paradigm for process interaction, cyclic input/output interaction, and modeling creation as 'growing' instead of 'training'.

Maybe once we've done all of that we'll identify ways of doing it more efficiently for the same result, but by that point it'll be able to do that for itself and it won't be hampered like we are by our inability to adjust our own meat code on the fly.

Cleaners are expected to clean 15 rooms per 8 hour shift. Assuming they work 5 shifts a week and 50 weeks per year that means they are cleaning 3,750 rooms per year. 67000/3750=17.87 per room per night. Giving them an extra 2 weeks off per year only increases the cost per room to 18.61. Decreasing the number of rooms cleaned per shift to 12 only increases the cost per room to 23.26. That is still a massive difference between the typical 100-200$/night paid to stay in at a hotel.

NPR's Planet Money did an episode exploring just that. They will ask context questions about where they grew up, if they're a vegetarian, and other aspects that are more common to certain castes. The same way you could ask a person in America if they've ever travelled outside of the country to determine if they're well off or not; the working class doesn't have the time or money to spend 3 weeks backpacking in Italy (or wherever across the ocean) on a soul-finding vacation when they're just 18 years old, but the well-off will. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14...

legal music is only $1 a track on iTunes, more than reasonable.

Well, iTunes might be a viable alternative for some, but not everyone. What about people who don't have a Macintosh or Windows XP? I only have access to Windows 98 SE. It's also pretty hard to play your "legal" music in Linux when you have to make it "illegal" to do so. On top of that, I entirely disagree with how much artists get short-changed when buying from iTunes and other places.

The only answer for me is to either buy the entire CD (a waste of money when I only want one or two songs off the entire thing), or listen to Pandora.