aqouta
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aqouta
4d ago
I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).
It is important context that Talor Lorenz is a Hasan fangirl and general whacky person who has several blocked and reported episodes dedicated to her shenanigans.
aqouta
6d ago
I think you are overthinking this to try and be general enough to be inclusive of worlds very unlike our own. Yes, in some kind of libertarian utopia with no taxes this all breaks down. And there could be as many as a dozen people in the US who are miscategorized because of your objections here. But it's just not true that amazon doesn't pay taxes, it's just not true that you can run a company, big or small, without spending a significant amount on your own taxes be they salary or capital gains even if we don't credit you with payroll or other corporate taxes, even granting that there are still consumption taxes.
Yes, I agree, above and beyond the more simple analysis some people provide even more value just through their voluntary transactions. But point to someone who is significant on that scale and you will be pointing at someone who is also a net lifetime tax contributor. I only insist on this simple analysis because it undercuts a lot of usually unproductive heehawing about how actually in some theoretical universe the people obviously taking more than they give are really, if you squint, providing a benefit by not being even more value destroying.
aqouta
6d ago
This is one of those things you need to be really smart to think up something beyond the obvious. If over the course of your life you pay more in taxes than you receive in direct or indirect, yes including multiple layers of being a downstream beneficiary from infrastructure spending or whatever, then you are from at least a public perspective productive. There are some edge cases, intangibles and arguments on the margin but this basically covers it for 95% of people.
aqouta
6d ago
This is the resolution I reference, with this being the US representative response to such nonsense. Of course it isn't just the attempt of the UN to assert authority over other organizations on the topic of pesticides but the absurd idea that a bunch of countries doing nothing, expected to do nothing and indeed once passing this vote doing nothing to address world hunger while the vote against does more than every other nation combined in this effort, at least until Trump dismantled USAID but that's another subject. These are not serious people engaged in serious work, they are the purest and most inconsequential symbol of virtue signaling. They are the yapping dog that would not know what to do with itself if it ever caught the mail van, saved from the results of their own actions only by their immense irrelevance.
aqouta
6d ago
Normally I'd be inclined to agree, but most of the world is not Muslim, so when you get the entire world voting one way, and the only two countries voting the other are a direct party to a dispute and their greatest ally, I'd say we need more evidence then "Islam bad".
The other side of the aisle is full of the kind of countries who voted Yes on the "food as a human right" proclamation that was essentially both worthless and if actually carried out, with its ban on pesticides, ruinous. They should properly be modeled as essentially unthinking actors that can be convinced to vote for anything that can be summarized dishonestly as empathetic.
aqouta
6d ago
This only seems paradoxical because of the framing. You're a human with normal desires. You want to be prosperous, high status/self esteem and comfortable. You want to balance all of these things. That means you're neither willing to sacrifice your prosperity and comfort for the status/self esteem of child savior nor are you willing to take on the status and self esteem of a baby murderer even if it would secure higher prosperity and comfort. This is all perfectly rational. It is like finding it shocking that someone on a desert island would neither trade all of the water for a thousand lbs of dry food nor all of their food for a thousand gallons of clean water.
aqouta
6d ago
If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?
You can join the union, just don't expect any portion of the contract that says something like "the guys we largely helped get elected have promised to let you enslave future generations" to be honored by future generations. You should have the same recourse as a southern slave owner when slavery was abolished, be glad we only take from you the future fruits of your corruption.
aqouta
6d ago
Yes, that is the author's point. The article is meant to aid in the rationalization, you take part in a whole community of people lambasting the leeches, you feel superior and high status, the programs don't' change.
aqouta
6d ago
but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain
I'm not sure how you convinced yourself into believing that. The government spending share of the economy, at least the amount of it spent by the dependent class, is being spent bidding up goods in services against the producing class. In no first order way way would ending welfare reduce the economic power of the productive, it would plausibly increase the per dollar power by draining some of the competing demand. That's before considerations of whether the unproductive might decide/be able to become productive if the money spigot was turned off. Now there are second and third order consequences like possible disruption caused by the dependency class reacting in anger, or the reduced demand reduce the protective's total wage(this is the strongest of a weak set of arguments).
aqouta
7d ago
The top/bottom dichotomy is often generalized to describe demeanors rather than just sex acts at which point it becomes synonymous with dom/sub. Most bottom straights are women and most bottom tops are men but some women, dommy mommies as they might be referred to, are flocked to by males who crave the oblivion of submission.
aqouta
8d ago
The link itself was wrong but reading closely it's not clear that the segment itself or the quote within was false which I think they'd say explicitly if it were.
Gemini mentions Radio France and Wikipedia as sources, but does not provide links to the content mentioned. The link [1] that is cited for the Radio France content is in fact a link to a video from British newspaper The Telegraph. None of the information in the response is in the Telegraph source.
The Radio France segment “Charline Explodes the Facts” is a satirical radio segment, which is inappropriate as a source for a serious news question. The Radio France evaluator describes this as a “big problem”. This also illustrates that while PSM can be a trusted source of information for news responses, assistants still need to distinguish between PSM content that is appropriate and inappropriate to use
And indeed later on they quibble with the accuracy of the english translation of that very quotation so I presume it does exist, it's just not properly linked, a real problem but not really the kind of falsehood I'm worried about.
Gemini adds words to a quote from the Radio France segment (“very explicit, it’s not a Nazi salute, no, no”). Gemini’s original response in French claimed it was “Très explicite, ce n’est pas un coucou nazi, non, non”. The actual quote from Radio France’s own transcript of the segment is “Très explicite, c’était pas un « coucou nazi »
I'm not qualified to really comment strongly on the translation, putting the studies claimed transcript into google translate yields
"Very explicit, it wasn't one "hello nazi"
which the AI rendered
"very explicit, it’s not a Nazi hello, no, no"
I don't know this seems like weak sauce.
In conclusion I don't want to come off too strongly here, I think one in ten responses with egregiously wrong facts is what I would expect, I simply find this study to have inflated the problem via relatively minor issues that any thinking person should be able to work around. The implicit standard in this whole affair is that the goal posts have now shifted as far as "can barely even write copy that passes a panel of hostile journalists at that much better than a coin flip". Do you not feel them moving? Do you seriously still today not see where we are going?
aqouta
8d ago
The ai attributed the claims to sources such as the, satirical, radio broadcast from radiofrance.fr and wikipedia, it wraps both claims in an "allegedly", and it was in fact alleged by both sources. I share BBC's concern with using a satirical radio broadcast when ask about something factual but when you say that it "fucked up" that isn't the sort of thing that comes to mind. An actual fuckup would at minimum needs to contain false information and not just weak sources.
aqouta
8d ago
Hmm, we've actually built essentially AI needle in a haystack type things to aid our data entry people for pulling data out of tax documents. We benchmarked it and found that it gets at least one value wrong in about 10% of tax documents. So this claim set off some alarm bells causing me to actually go read the linked study and well it's based on BBC journalists evaluating questions like "Did elon musk do a nazi salute" or "Is Trump starting a trade war?" and the majority of the negative feedback is insufficient sourcing.
aqouta
12d ago
"oh, now I have to watch my mouth, no more sexual innuendo, no more discussion of how fuckable common acquaintances are, no more innocent showing of nudes of my sex partners."
This is the thin edge of the wedge. The harmful stuff is where male normal aggressive communication is dispensed with because women don't really reciprocate it as well as men and this gradually escalates until you can't call ideas bad directly in meetings and need to catch up with the person pushing forward the bad idea in a one on one ect ect.
aqouta
13d ago
Not really. The superdog ICE mural is cool, I chuckled, but generally it is pretty boring. It's fascinating how right-wingers adopted the whole "Chicago is drowning in crime" thing uncritically, simply because their talking heads repeated it enough. Don't get me wrong - it's not exclusive to right wing, Eurolibs do it to an even greater extent, but I think that this just really solidifies the post-truth world. I'm completely certain most people on this site, for instance, are certain that Chicago is an extremely scary place and would be terrified of Pilsen...
Yeah, Chicago definitely has some problems but I'm much more annoyed at our insane municipal debt and the corruption that had us sell our public parking. There is some crime problems, especially with like loop pharmacies and grocers being regularly and blatantly shoplifted from, but safety isn't something I worry about even going to the "rougher" areas.
PS. Holy shit this server sucks. Are you guys running it on ZX Spectrum or something? There can't be that much traffic here to justify 10-minute loading times...
I've noticed this too over the last week or so. I suspect it's some kind of bug or something. @ZorbaTHut have you guys noticed anything? If there are infra costs I think some of us might be willing to kick in.
aqouta
13d ago
Yeah same area, will probably be there for another few years at least depending on where the wife ends up working. See anything worth reporting from the frontlines of Trump's national emergency?
aqouta
16d ago
On that note, given that the primary justification for the creation of Israel was the holocaust, we may as well shut the entire enterprise down
It's pretty surprising that the justification for the creation of Israel came decades after many jews had already moved to that region for a national project.
aqouta
17d ago
Those are the events that preceded the transfer. The transfer itself was relatively peaceful and successfully ended these hostilities. If there are population transfers in the west bank in 2030 then it would be dishonest to cite the deaths in the Gaza war as being caused by the population transfer.
aqouta
17d ago
This is more similar to the hazy borders of Texas before it was inducted as a state in the US than Mexico trying to pull this on already established US territory. In fact the parallels are myriad and early mexico really did get screwed out of their territory after losing a war, remember the Alamo, to the American settlers. Imagine if now centuries later Mexico continued to dispute the territory and launched regular unguided rocket attacks at San Antonio. The mandate Palestine area was not a state before the fall of the Ottoman empire and had no real borders. After the fall the territory was rightfully British clay and the mandate policy gave the immigrant Jews a right to attempt to establish a state there. Was there lots of shenanigans coming from both of the budding nations? Absolutely, there were among the early Texans as well. Really the more I think of it Texas really is a pretty good analogy for Israeli history before around like 1960.
aqouta
17d ago
I agree it's a millstone but it's far from the source of all their problems which seem more centrally to be located in the surrounding population which has a persistent belief that if they just keep fighting eventually they will drive the Jews to the sea and have the whole of the region as a Palestinian state and is thus unwilling to continence any kind of long term peace that forecloses on that possibility.
The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.
If they enunciated some border, say a modest expansion over the green line to encompass the majority of the settlements clustered along that line then what are their policing positions in the west bank? The fear is that pulling out without a Palestinian partner would lead to a repeat of their pull out form gaza and that the west bank would immediately become a staging ground for attacks on Israel which would eventually trigger an invasion and we'd be back to square one.
I'll chime in to say that I do find statements like this
To at the very least be toing the consensus building(negative consensus) line but more importantly just very irritating. if you added a "most" to users then it'd go over the line and without the most it's a kind of limp claim that would be true if two users did that at which point why even make the comment. I dunno, I'm taking it out on your but people have been doing this more recently and it has been contributing to a general rise in heat on the forum.
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