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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I don’t see how this is enforceable.

    Large AI providers will also have high caliber legal teams to fight any incident and demonstrate it it wasn’t the AI’s fault, but the stupid people who gave it control.

    Smaller projects won’t have the same warchests, and eventually they’ll become the target.

    In the meantime, yeah, Zuckerberg and all the other flank-speed-ahead investors will not be slowed in making the AI that will smooth talk our billionaires into a failed trip to mars.



  • What is more interesting to me is he could have persons of interest detained and disappeared as per the still-active surveillance, national security and anti-terror states from the aughts and 2010s.

    I would avoid doing anything to Trump directly as the US wouldn’t want to martyr him but it would be delightfully ironic to detain the SCOTUS associate justices for sake of their own safety where they can stay at black sites within earshot of the screaming.

    In the meantime there are Heritage Society members and other thinktank analysts who have been caught on hot mic or text discussing policies that would drastically change the character of the United States, that are contrary to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States and parallel to the indictments in the Declaration of Independence.

    So it would be entirely justified to introduce them to the US secret detention system and possibly to the enhanced interrogators to remind them what kinds of presidential power they endorsed in eras past.

    I’m sure they plan to remind Trump of these resources when Trump wants to make someone sorry they were born.

    Right I’m having a hard time not embracing my inner Magneto when I imagine being in Biden’s shoes. After all, these guys made it very clear what they will do to me when they have half a chance.


  • I realized today, by giving the president protection from the law, the opinion also implies the court system, including SCOTUS is too incompetent to adjudicate.

    In another country where we had actual jurists on the bench representing the highest council for 320,000,000 people, I’d expect them to be more than capable and willing to wade through the delicate nuances of any presidental action, and determine if criminal acts were justified in the service of the state. But Roberts essentially is admitting he and his associates are either too inept or too corrupt, and either way are not up to the task.

    If the US democracy is to survive, we will not just need a constitutional amendment, but a complete judicial overhaul, and a federal election reform to restore power to elections and thus, to the people. Until all this happens, we are governed at gunpoint, rather than by consent.

    So put away your fireworks. The nation is too unwell to be celebrated.





  • I think you are misrepresenting the take. I’m only describing the situation, which, yes, may lead to some people giving up.

    I’m skeptical of just doing something even if it’s useless, but that’s not to say there is nothing to be done.

    When it comes to solving the rise of authoritarianism and movements towards autocracy, we don’t know what to do. The things we usually do (protest, escalate to violence) either don’t affect change, or can wreck society. But that means figuring out what to do, even if it means trying what hasn’t been done before.

    In the case of the US, ours is a huge society that teams with the chaos of complexity, so we will have plenty of opportunities to sabotage the transnational white power movement’s takeover through local action seizing on this vulnerability. Think of the dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar breeding, migrating to the mainland and finding enough lysine to survive, despite all the efforts to keep them in control. (The infighting and brain-drain within the organizations trying to seize power may eventually drive them to collapse as well, but we have to give that time to fester).

    In the case of the climate and plastic crises, we are fucked. The global food supply infrastructure will collapse and people are going to die. Few people like to look at those models (so most scientists just say this will be bad if it gets to here), so the few estimates suggest that if we act now to mitigate climate effects and drastically drop greenhouse emissions, we might be able to get the world to continue to sustain one billion people on the long term.

    Do note that is seven billion people less than we have, and people who are alive today will get to experience this drop. Famine is going to become the new in thing, and it’s the sort of death we don’t wish on our worst enemies… unless we’re Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Sophie From Mars has a long form discussion video The World Is Not Ending where she discusses the range of outcomes, noting that the concentration of wealth and power to people who cannot think rationally about it, except to hoard it, decides whether we figure out better how to organize and cooperate, or exist in a Mad Max future with far fewer cars and more cannibalism.

    I don’t indulge in opinions, except to say I’m afraid of the cannibal famine future, and I’m afraid we might well kill ourselves, and not in a cool way like AI takeover or robot apocalypse. But I also recognize that we naked apes are not rational and have to be clever even to choose to govern ourselves by logic rather than feelings. We do tragedize any commons we come across, and that’s a habit we will have to break. I don’t yet know how.

    It’s not to say we’re doomed. Rather it’s to say the odds of us coming out of this are really bad, considering the path of least resistance. We better start figuring out how we’re going to cleverly emerge from this fine mess.


  • We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

    We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

    If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

    A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

    And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.





  • Infringement of IP is a crime according to specific states, but if you make art, and I replicate it, it doesn’t affect you.

    If you write a story and I read it without paying you, it doesn’t affect you.

    The only reason IP is a thing is because short-term monopolies on media (or inventions or methods) were enshrined by specific states as law, and then spread through trade agreements, and they were expanded on without concern for their original purpose or for the good of the public. In fact, we’re seeing fair use rights fade since states aren’t willing to enforce them, and platforms like YouTube over censor.

    So at this point, in the US, the EU and the eastern market, no IP law would be better than what we have.

    So no, you have not demonstrated any reason I should have respect for your IP.

    However, if you’re going to insist, and be an IP maximalist, there is one thing I can do for you /to you (or Sony, or Time Warner, or Disney) that is worse than pirating your product.

    And that, of course, is not pirating your product.





  • Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they’ve paid you enough (which is much less than they’re getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don’t like it, they’ll make sure it tanks or at least doesn’t get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn’t have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.

    Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they’ve already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.

    No, we’d get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.

    Intellectual property is a construct, and it’s corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.

    I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.

    But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it’s confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we’ll get culture out of it.

    You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.