It’s genuinely great that China offers that to the people they don’t imprison for asking for their rights and speaking out against the state.

I mean that’s the vast majority of the people, looks like they have a little under 10,000 political prisoners in a country of 1.4 billion, so 0.0007% of people. That’s not good and should be 0 but it’s not some orwellian police state with stazi on every corner checking if you said xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.

I’m no fan of Chinese authoritarianism and there human rights record but pretending there authoritarianism is the same as the totalitarianism of the 20th century is naive. It’s Definitely not an “open air prison” and does a disservice to people who live in actual open air prisons like Gaza or North Korea.

I didn’t like this line of attack, yes you’re going to have to negotiate with a terrorist organization after you lost a war to that terrorist organization and that organization is going to take control of the country. The fact that you talked with the Taliban isn’t the problem, the fact that you negotiated a bad deal is.

did you not get sent some fucked up videos

Oh yeah, all that shit, I wasn’t talking about porn and fetish stuff though cause my comment was getting long, was just talking about actual atrocities like war, famine genocide etc. I don’t think preteens have an interest in that stuff. They definitely do have an interest in porn / gross stuff but I’m not convinced that stuff is necessarily detrimental or traumatic. I’m open to being convinced but most of the arguments seem to be pearl clutching about them losing their innocence and anecdotally I know most of my friends watched porn / gross videos at that age and turned out fine and don’t mention it as some traumatic or life changing experience unless they tie it up with some religious guilt.

The video seems to mostly be nostalgia and her lamenting over the death of the consumerist mall based culture she grew up in and trying to naturalize it or imply it’s the right way to grow up, ie. Kids these days. Half the video seems to be about how companies aren’t marketing to preteens which I’m fine with and is pretty normal in even recent historical terms. The 90s-10s marketing specifically to preteens on cable is more an anomaly then anything natural. If you were 11 in the 70s no one was marketing to you and when you went to the department store there was a kids section and an adults section for you to look through, I’m sure people who grew up then had fond memories of first exploring the adult section just as much as the author does of going to Claire’s.

I did find it funny when she said the advertisements didn’t effect her. Those ads and media were selling you a vision of what a happy preteen lifestyle is and you bought it so much you made a whole video years later on how that vision is correct.

As for the atrocities I don’t think kids are watching that. As someone who grew up with full Internet access in my preteen years I could’ve looked up isis beheading videos or famines in Africa, but I didn’t because 11 year olds don’t care about that stuff. Even pre internet if a kid had access to cable they could watch CNN and see all the horrors of the world but they don’t because it’s boring.

None of this is to say that I think social media is fine for preteens, but the reasons I think it’s bad like decreased physical activity, unrealistic beauty standards, social isolation aren’t shown in this video, I’m sure she has others addressing it but the death of the preteen market doesn’t seem like the best reason to ban it for preteens.

They’ll also be exposed to other external views that are a bit more unsavory. For every kid that watches a video by an LGBT creator and learns being gay is okay, there’s another kid who watches some alpha douche Andrew Tate type that teach them women are objects. The internet is the definition of a mixed bag and should not be used to educate children

Which is why we shouldn’t be relying on social media for this stuff anyway, this should be done by schools. If a child is in an oppressive abusive house they probably won’t get social media anyway, but they will more likely have to go to school. Also teachers and counselors are professionals who know how to educate children and handle abusive situations way better then some stranger online.

I mean openais not getting off Scott free, they’ve been getting sued a lot recently for this exact copy right argument. New York times is suing them for potential billions.

They throw the book at us

Do they though, since the Metallica lawsuits in the aughts there hasnt been much prosecution at the consumer level for piracy, and what little there is is mostly cease and desists.

It’s the trans women in sports of veganism, it’s such a small part of the issue and no one in the group will usually bring it up. But people who are against them will use it to discredit and divide them even though they don’t really care about the underlying issues they claim to be for: women’s sports, cat nutrition and the way larger problems with them.

I mean a lot of people are feeding there cats cheap dry kibble that has almost no resemblance to the meat it was rendered from. If your argument is that it’s abuse if you aren’t feeding your cat what it wants then there’s a lot of cat abusers out there.

It’s an easy target but also a near worthless one. What does the CCP gain from getting a bunch of terminally online Linux nerds on their side? No one making real decisions that could effect China is on here.

4chan is also a soft target but you don’t see parties or governments investing in propagandizing there because it’s full of basement dwelling incels who can’t do anything besides maybe shoot up a school.

It will eventually have to happen, cars, including evs, are not sustainable, at least at the current levels of usage. If you look at any climate report looking into it the choice is between Americans driving a lot less or severe climate change. I hope murica will make the right choice but the more we tie cars to ideas of freedom and peace of mind the harder that choice will be. It will be tough to fight considering the tens of thousands of hours of car ads most Americans are exposed to pushing that narrative, so it will require just as much reinforcement on the negatives of cars, traffic fatalities, CO2 emissions, airborne micro plastics from tires, maintenance and repair costs, obesity, sprawled cities, etc.

It may not happen in our lifetime, or at least when your healthy enough to bike/hike , but eventually we’ll have to transition away from personal cars. Id prefer to build towards that future now for the reasons listed above but if you want to delay that’s fine, you’ll just have to explain to your grandkids why you did.

Yeah maybe there are are 2000 mountains, but how many have mountain bike trails? If there are trails then there is probably some organization maintaining them like the state or national park service who can also run the shuttles. Shuttles are also pretty cheap and can stop at multiple trail heads based off requests. You can also rotate where the shuttles go each day / week so if there’s a more obscure trail/mountain then you can just wait until it comes up in the schedule. The towns would also probably want to run the shuttles as well since it will bring business to the area.

Ok, let’s assume we want less people on the mountain, what gives you the right to go to the mountain then? Because you can afford a car? That doesn’t seem fair. Also most people have a car so it’s not restricting that many people. If we say only 30 people should go to the mountain a day that’s way easier to enforce if we say only 2 shuttles of 15 are allowed. It’s also fairer as who gets to go is just determined by whoever signs up first, as opposed to whether someone owns something.

I think many people would like to socialize. There’s a loneliness epidemic and many people are looking for friends but don’t know where to meet them. If I was looking for friends with common interests like mountain biking the shuttle up would be a great place to meet them. Just because I want to get away from civilization doesn’t mean I want to get away from socializing, I hike regularly with groups of people and they mostly enhance the experience. If you aren’t into that that’s fine too, just put on your headphones ignore everyone and set off on the trail solo, nothing stopping you from doing that.

For the last point like I said usage can be controlled, even better then cars, but assuming the same usage a shuttle is less pollution then multiple cars. If like you said there are 5-6 cars at a particular trail head then one shuttle carrying all those people will cause less air and noise pollution and make it safer for animals.

No I haven’t lived in rural America but most Americans haven’t either. Most live in the suburbs, cities or towns. It’s like saying people need to eat less sugar and we should stop using it for every food and people saying “what about the diabetics who need sugar” yeah they do but that’s not the majority of people. We can make exceptions for them while also overhauling our food industry to remove this thing that’s causing health problems for most people.

As for the mountain bike scenario ideally you would take a train to a town near the trail and then the town can have a shuttle up to the mountain. If we did fully invest in public transit this wouldn’t add too much to your trip and has some other benefits.

• This would be good for the park and wildlife in general as less traffic would make it easier for animals to migrate. Less roadkill

• This would lower the amount of development needed in the park as parking lots wouldn’t be necessary.

• It would make mountain biking more accessible for people who don’t have a car or can’t drive.

• It would make it more social, you could meet people on the shuttle on the way up, if there are regulars then a community could form.

• It would reduce the amount of air and noise pollution.

It is a different level of scale, mastodon has about 1 million users spread over a bunch of instances. Threads has over 200 million users on one instance. also due to the network nature of social media the amount of connections and messages sent through those connections can scale exponentially with the amount of users.

That would work if we invested as much into public transit as into cars. This goes back to designing cities for public transit instead of cars. If we did that with the money we currently are putting into cars we could have high frequency metro lines where inner city interstate / highway routes and high speed rail for inter city interstate/highway routes along with frequent bus service in the cities/towns on the lines. We think public transit is inherently slow and unreliable but that’s because we never invest enough money to make it fast and reliable.

You could tie it to your ticket like a punch card. When the bar does the standard Id check they’d also check your boarding pass and check if the name is the same then mark it / digitally update it. Even if they don’t do a limit at the airport it would still be good to let the attendants on the flight know “alright this guy’s already had 5 beers, don’t serve him anything on the flight”

You’ve got it reversed, the u.s. isn’t going to war with a super power over a country most people can’t point to on a map. It’s even a question how far sanctions would go if they invaded, if you look at the Russian example the sanctions are pretty half ass and Russian petroleum is still flowing to the west, maybe less but they’re still taking in money and there economy is doing way better then before the invasion. For all the talk westerners aren’t willing to go cold in the winter or pay more at the pump for Ukraine.

That’s for a country with a way smaller role in the global supply chain, fuck dying for Taiwan the real question is whether Americans could give up their cheap consumerist bullshit for Taiwan. China knows this too, it’s just whether they want to act on it and make themselves a pariah state.

llms suck because they steal content and are unreliable since they don’t link back to sources

Open ai makes a deal to pay media org for there content and makes it so they can link back to original article

“Ars technica sold out”

As long as they aren’t using there platform to promote dumb reactionary views like Kanye or j.k. Rowling just let people enjoy themselves. To the extent that people view snoop as political it’s usually in regards to him representing weed / black stoner lifestyle and it’s broader acceptance and legalization, which I’m all for. Even the article you pointed to where he praised trump was for getting his friend off for a non - violent drug offense which is good, even if trump did it. It would be better if he was letting off the average lower class black person in jail for that but something’s better then nothing.

I feel more comfortable walking around them, they never blow stop lights /signs, always go the speed limit, never honk (except when parking I guess) and are very patient. If they see a pedestrian they just stop instead of creeping forward making you question whether to walk in front of them and then getting mad when you won’t cross in front of their still moving car like people.

1. Sapience is very ambiguous and hard to judge. Could definitely get away with saying chickens are less intelligent than a whale, a cow maybe, but a pig probably not.

2. The whales currently being hunted, the minke whale and byrdes whale, are not endangered. The fin whale which they’re currently considering in this article is vulnerable but not endangered. Probably shouldn’t be hunting if it’s vulnerable but there’s a bunch of other fish that are vulnerable that no one gives a shit about eating.