People giving up their thinking abilities is nothing new.

What part of that fiction has any connection with the reality of the 1%?

The social media platforms would rather have it treated like an R rated movie that kids can't get into than simply not run ads or show content for people they aren't explicitly connected to on the platform.

Because most people would opt for that.

Imagine only seeing content from people you follow and who follow you back.

The British traded spice. They didn't use it.

Even if we want oil to be the currency we use to manipulate the world, us using it is a very silly way to go about it because it just makes us susceptible to manipulation.

We're supposed to want OTHER people to be dependent on oil and for US to control it.

Instead it's just us shooting ourselves in the foot constantly. We're supposed to be hoarding oil to drive up prices. Not consuming it.

- hosting child sexual abuse material and taking a year to remove it
- creating a means for sex traffickers to turn their victims into $$$
- providing a means to sell sexual content of others (e.g revenge porn) without consent

I've seen a lot of comments here in discussion to gig work where it's considered exploitive for Uber/Lyft to not provide health coverage and other benefits, minimum pay accounting for externalities like vehicle wear, etc. Does OF provide any of that?

They can certainly be "better" than other porn sites in ways (although the lack of any physically present third party seems like a major exploitation risk, per links above) but that isn't itself some moral achievement. The guy who peddles crack is doing less harm than the guy who peddles heroin but I don't think he's due for any citizenship awards.

And OF is absurdly profitable so if they really wanted to engage in a humanitarian mission to make porn "ethical" they have lots of financial buffer to combat exploitation. It's clearly not their objective.

Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

Stuff like this effectively winds up very economically progressive because people for whom that discount matters will go to the extra effort to get it and people with high-incomes won't care and will effectively subsidize the low price. What do you think that $2 coupon from the newspaper is doing? Setting up exactly the same $16.99 vs $14.99 price differential.

Conversely, consider on Saturday the person who absolutely needs the tomatoes to finish a dinner already in progress can pay the high-demand price and the person who was just thinking about things nice to keep stocked in the pantry can wait, vs pricing low so that the item is already out-of-stock from indifferent shoppers when that person who really needs it walks in.

It's easy to sell people a story in which price differentiation is a means of screwing them over but it is just as often to their direct benefit. People implicitly accept the good of this for things they already experience like coupons, but anything new sounds scary.

De Immenso et Innumerabilibus On the Infinite and the Countless By Giordano Bruno Of Nola

is essential reading. It sounds like 1950's sci fi.

Here is the actual story, transcription repeated from here:

So, no, contrary to your unsourced claim, it was based on (a) a specific incident (b) material concern about the implications of the specific incident (c) escalation through the chain of involved parties (d) without apparent direction by the "convicted felon president and war criminal in chief".

Also pretty clear from the anecdote how it is that DoD has sincere concerns with actual grounding. Debate over the legitimacy of those concerns, the ethicality of what they want the software to do, etc. would all be reasonable to discuss. But it really does help if you want to argue against something to start by properly understanding what you are debating.

They didn't exactly whittle down their options before settling on sending missiles and drones at the civilian populations in neutral neighbors. It was among the first things they started doing.

In fact, during the 12-Day War Israel took out their missile command so thoroughly that for a long time there was no one to launch missiles in retaliation. Iran learned from that and had given the IRGC members pre-determined launch orders so they could at independently. That means shooting missiles at everyone in the vicinity was their plan even before any operations started.

I think people struggle to grasp that when it's called a "terrorist regime" it's not name-calling, it's actually how Iran's insane theocratic leadership thinks. They kill their own people by the tens of thousands and don't bat an eye. They would legitimately struggle to answer why killing a few civilians next door for leverage should be considered an immoral act.

The fact this was ever a question is a farce.

We all pay for the gas in our cars to get to work. We pay for the electricity that runs our homes and computers.

Somehow, big tech thinks they can just mooch instead of paying for the batteries for their toys.

Crypto and AI should have launched a great leap forward in clean energy.

All the oligarchs care about is profit, not legacy.

I hate that I can't run MS Office on my cluster of headless Linux servers.

Can't believe "it's the Jews!" gets +5 here. Same any century I guess.

Iran and it's proxies have killed hundreds of not thousands of Americans over the years. In US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hundreds were killed by Iran backed militias which were supplied with Iranian weapons. Retaliation for that was the justification for the US strike to kill Iran's extraterritory general Soleimani who was still operating in Iraq in 2020. Iran has frequently harassed ships and threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz through which ~20% of global oil passes. Just recently the Iranian assassins who tried to kill an American in New York (Masih Alinejad) were sentenced. Two years ago they tried to assassinate the same American who has now ordered the strikes against them. The Iranian response to that stine has been to fire missiles into all neighboring countries including their specific *allies* like Qatar, hitting a number of civilian targets including multiple hotels, commercial buildings and airports, in hopes of blackmailing those countries into pushing for a ceasefire. Would the US be likely to let a country that does that get enough missiles to have effectively nuclear-level blackmail and be untouchable? Right now they have ~2000 missiles but they were producing 80 per day with a goal of at least 8000. To say nothing of actual nuclear deterrence; Iran openly admits they have enough 60% enriched uranium to make ~11 bombs and throughout the negotiations has refused any possibility of sending it abroad.

The US obviously has a lot of interest here. It doesn't always have to be Jewish masterminds behind everything to where you say "that's all you need to know" and don't even bother to think that in complex geopolitical questions, countries strategic decisions might be based on a range of inputs. Maybe those inputs are even wrong. But the us notoriously considers its own interests and not really those of other countries when it makes strategic decisions, especially DT.

It was just 7 weeks ago the people across every strata of Iranian society were pouring out by increasing millions to protest his government and seemed like he was about to be ousted (to the point that many top government officials were wiring all their money out of the country in preparation for exile).

Then, also just 7 weeks ago, he ordered his forces to just... kill all of them. Machine guns fired into crowds. Survivors were found and executed at the hospitals. In one case they set a market on fire, trapping the protestors, and then shot anyone who fled. Tens of thousands were killed. More were arrested and sentenced to death. Anyone who wanted to recover their loved one's body had to pay an exorbitant fee to the government for the bullets. The streets were now patrolled by armed militia breaking up groups of even a few people. No more protests.

And your question is - "Why not just let the old guy live out his days"?

I'm sure in your society unpopular leaders are removed from power. That's not how it works in a despotic regime in which the ruling party has a complete monopoly on force.

The key problem is that AI isn't being used to make the final draft faster to write, it's being used to replace people to maintain a status quo.

They could hire more journalists to go out and do fact finding and come up with key quotes and key statements that AI could then weave into the final article. Journalists could spend a lot more time building the structure of a story than banging out the final article. This would also free them up to cover the local stories that often get ignored because there just isn't time for them.

If you can go to a community meeting with a tape recorder and a notepad and write down the angle and 10 key points, AI would put together a very compelling article so you can go off to the next one.

Most journalism is supposed to be written in a boring, just the facts manner. Exactly the kind of work suitable for a robot. After a human collects the facts.

How divorced can you be from any concept of what is actually going on there? Iran could not care less if any of their citizens died they are by an unfathomable margin the ones killing the. And there very first response on the attack was to launch missiles at all neighboring countries hitting hotels in Dubai, office buildings in the UAE, streets in Bahrain, and of course killing civilians in Israel. Your picture of who the Iranian government is and their motivations doesn't match up with *anything.*