No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.
There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.
But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.
The core problem isn’t tax policy. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is power. Capitalists have it as an inherent property of their class. Workers can have power, but only collectively. Individual workers can’t exercise much power. Therefore, in the absence of a check to their power, capitalists use it to enhance it further.
Make people poor and dependent on employment and consumption so that they’re desperate enough to accept poor pay and working conditions.
Atomize workers so they can’t realize their collective power.
Use ownership over media and communications platforms to put out favorable propaganda and discredit those opposed to capitalist interests.
Use bribes campaign contributions to subvert democracy and shape the government to their will, such as tax policy , labor law, business and financial regulations, and imperialist foreign policy.
No lasting gains can be made for the working class while capitalists hold this power. Any policy can be watered down, repealed, or resisted by capitalists given time. There is no structural way for a system built by and for capitalist interests to reign in the power of that class.
There are struggling “capitalists” that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business. And then there are rich as hell “workers” like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can’t. And I think most people don’t have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.
These are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Small business owners may often be workers themselves, but they also still profit from minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. They have the same incentives as any other capitalist, even if they have less ability to act on them due to lack of resources and competition keeping them in check. Even to the extent that these are more acceptable forms of capitalists, the trend in the economy for a long time has been towards consolidation and large companies putting smaller ones out of business.
Similarly, while some artists make it big, far more of them end up exploited by record labels, studios, etc. In fact even some of the successful artists have stories about their awful contracts.
There’s also the aspect of this which is that once you have enough money to invest it in significant amounts, you indirectly enter into the role of a capitalist, since the profit you derive from those stocks is the same as the profit made from the companies exploiting workers.
But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.
More to the point though, I ask you why/how they end up paying so little in taxes? Tax law didn’t fall from the sky. It isn’t just that the politicians were stupid or that most people wanted it this way. This is the result of the structure of political power in a capitalist nation.
So how do you address the problem: “Rich people don’t pay enough taxes and poorer people pay too much.” I can come up with any number of clever policies to solve our problems, but what good does that do if you can’t make the government adopt these policies?
This is why you need a theory for understanding how power is distributed, used, and perpetuated in a society. Otherwise you’re doomed to keep asking the question “Why don’t they just do this?” It’s not a new idea, but it’s still relevant.
If you disagree, I challenge you to be able to explain how we got here or how we move forward without any kind of structural critique.
Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.
I’ve been to a few therapists now for my depression/anxiety issues. I’m still not sure what a therapist is even supposed to do. I’ve only ever left sessions miserable and it’s hard to see how it could even turn out differently. They can’t fix any biological factors and they can’t do anything about the environment that contributes to these problems. What the hell is going to get better from paying someone to talk to you for <1hr a week so they can tell you that the problems you have with the world aren’t real.
When I explain to people why I don’t want to keep trying therapists, they always just say something like “oh you just haven’t found the right one.” What? What would be the right one? Why are there right and wrong ones? Aren’t they supposed to be professionals?
Perhaps more precisely, they’re all about your reaction to problems. A lot of “lots of people deal with these problems, it’s about how you handle it.” But to me, this kind of advice feels wholly detached from the realities of the problems I end up encountering.
The example I go back to (not my only problem, but illustrative of something) is when I was in college, I’d often find myself with unbearable amounts of work. Multiple pieces of homework and projects with different duration and due dates, tests to study for, classes to attend, groups to meet with for projects, etc. With how little time I’d have, it got to the point where I wasn’t sleeping enough, I either missed meals or ate some quick, unhealthy food just to get it over with quickly, what little exercise I got dropped to almost nothing, etc.
This is more work than any reasonable person should be able to handle in a healthy way. And there’s the added pressure that if you don’t keep up with it you’ll fail the class and it’ll make it take that much longer to graduate.
You could say that other people went through the same experiences and turned out fine, but I’d challenge whether or not that’s actually true. Most of the friends and classmates I spoke to in my time there were either just as depressed/stressed/anxious as I was, or were coping with it in ways that were just as unhealthy. Massive amounts of coffee, energy drinks, all nighters, alcohol, and I’m sure a non-zero number of them were on the various focus/productivity drugs people sometimes use for academics/work.
The rate of depression and other psychological problems on campus was really high. Personally in just my friend group, one person I know cried over a particularly bad HW assignment, one was doing self harm, two friends had to go home in the middle of a semester, one of them ended up transferring, and one friend disappeared for a few days during a group project and it turned out he was so stressed he was hiding in a shed on some other part of campus.
And yet the school was woefully understaffed on mental health professionals. All we really got were some platitudes about taking time for ourselves. What time? Did I miss the part where the school made the professors keep a reasonable limit on the work they gave out? Or is there some magical work free time set aside for us? No? Then this is useless “advice” that just shifts the blame onto us.
So what good would it do me to change how I was thinking about all this? Regardless of how I thought about it, I needed to get that work done or suffer the real life economic consequences of failing to do so. If I do get it all done, it comes at the very real cost of the physical strain it puts on my mind and body.
The only real “solution” ended up being me dropping out like halfway through my grad program. I had to completely separate myself from the source of the stress. But of course note how this is a burden that is entirely placed on me and my family. Even if I wasn’t a mental wreck, my job prospects are pretty bad.
I didn’t actually have a problem with the way Enterprise ended. Setting aside the actual quality of the episode, I think the framing device connecting the beginning and ending of this era of Star Trek was fitting given that this was the end of Star Trek for the foreseeable future.
I’m of the opinion that time travel stories are never good, at least when time travel is the focus rather than just an excuse to get to a fun setting.
Since time travel seems to be a physical impossibility, essentially any set of rules you create for it are just as valid/nonsensical. So you spend a bunch of time dealing with technobabble and paradox talk that has no hope of making sense outside of whatever the author needs for the story.
I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.
Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.
…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?
I’m not saying to vote for a 3rd party. I’m saying that the solution does not involve voting and that the act of participating in such a vote is an active choice to support cruelty.
Voting, to the extent that it does anything, communicates 2 things:
You accept the legitimacy of the system. That this is the way you choose to express your will.
Your consent for the policies and actions of the government you vote for. When you check the box, there isn’t an optional field where you say “Well I’m voting for this candidate, but I don’t agree with all their policies.” You have given your consent to everything that government ends up doing.
So by voting within such a system, you provide your support for it. You say that you will not otherwise oppose it’s actions. Your choice isn’t harm some people or harm more people. Your choice is whether or not you will make it easier for the government to harm whoever they’re harming. Not only does that government harm people, but it actively works to crush opposition to it. You are supporting the efforts to do that to. You are actively opposing everyone who fights against the system.
More people will suffer every year that the government stays in the hands of capitalists and imperialists. Those people wouldn’t be hurt in the world where we actually did something about that. You can’t just take them for granted as having already been hurt by something other than your decision to continue participating in the system.
I’m not an anarchist either. (At least I think. Admittedly my understanding of anarchism is a little lacking, but from the gist of it it doesn’t seem very practical.) I’m a communist. The path forward is simple even if it’s very difficult. You band together with people, build power through your capacity to withhold your labor, and be ready to fight back when the capitalists inevitably attack.
Power is about the ability to make people do what you want even when they don’t want it. It’s inevitable derived through the means to reproduce society and force to back it up. Right now capitalists have that means and force and thus can impose their will on others. In that context, voting lacks any basis for power to enforce the will of the voters on the ruling class because the capitalists own things and the workers don’t successfully use their collective productive power to oppose them. It can ONLY turn out this way if your only political action is voting in a capitalist “democracy.” The system isn’t set up to respond to anyone who doesn’t already hold power because if it did, they wouldn’t be in power anymore.
It’s important to have an understanding of the how things work structurally, because if your analysis only begins and ends with the actions and professed ideologies of specific people, you can’t possibly hope to ever break out of the cycle of meager progress followed by regression.
Do you not remember the entire fiasco with Obama’s failed attempt at selecting a justice? He picked a “moderate,” the Republicans stonewalled him until the election, and instead of trying to use any of the procedural tricks to push through the appointment that the Republicans would gladly use, the Democrats didn’t put up a fight. Fast forward, Trump wins the election, appoints his justices, and Democrats let it go through.
If this is an issue where democracy and rights are at stake and if democrats actually gave a crap they wouldn’t be playing by the rules and then accepting the slide into fascism that all this represents.
But for the elite of the party, none of this shit matters. They aren’t really bound by the same laws as the rest of us. So who cares if the plebs lose some rights? If anything it’s a positive for them. They get to run on being opposed to the bad stuff they let the Republicans do instead of anything positive and they fundraise like crazy over the fear that generates.
For the Democratic base: They’re just watching a fucking TV show. Politics isn’t a real thing to them. They say they see this slide into fascism, but then the most they’re willing to do about it is go check a box once every 2/4 years and then accept the horrible things that come after because respecting the system is more important than protecting people from it. Maybe the really “radical” ones will go to some march to hold up signs in a spot that’s not gonna bother anyone and then go home after regardless of if that changed anything.
Meanwhile, their continued uncritical support of the government enables that government to keep working to crush more serious opposition to it.
Did I also miss the part where we got Roe v Wade, etc back? Has this translated into changes to defend our rights? If not, why isn’t more being done? Procedure? Rules? Why should any of that supersede protecting real people? And what about the more direct attacks on our rights coming directly from the administration such as once again expanding the surveillance state?
As far as my own participation: I’m not doing anything, and that’s distressing, but were this merely a matter of laziness I’d just be voting. It’s not that hard to vote, at least not in my area. I haven’t formed my entire politics around not wanting to drive like <5 minutes to a local poling station once every few years. In 2020 I actually volunteered for 2 different campaigns during the primaries because I still had some fleeting belief that we could change things that way. I don’t know why, I had already learned a lot of the history which informs my lack of faith in the system. But maybe it’s just easier thinking you can change things without the risk of getting shot.
The liberal’s political responsibilities demand almost nothing of them. Vote from a list of 2 things once in a while, perhaps even less than that if the position isn’t contested or one of the choices is a non-choice. After that, shut up and let others do the thinking and politics for you.
Anything more than that, which risks running into the apparatus of state violence, is “the wrong way to do things.” We should just be patient, trust our institutions, and continue to believe in the myth of steady progress over time.
As scary as that is, there are people out there who are brave or desperate enough to be risking their lives to fight the system. I can’t really blame people for being too scared to join in, but I can blame them for insisting that their minimal political participation to support the government that fights against those people is actually a good thing.
Opinion | Will A.I. Ever Live Up to Its Hype? (www.nytimes.com)
Is Lemmy a good alternative?
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
Is that some sort of non-profit? (lemmy.world)
Zero to hero (mander.xyz)
RFK Jr. Lands Coveted Kevin Spacey Endorsement (www.rollingstone.com)
‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles (www.theguardian.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/15086405...
STEAM starting to issue refunds for players over the 2h playtime limit due to PSN on Helldivers 2 (twitter.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9832fe65-84fa-4f55-9a1e-e8ac068339fe.png
Mine does the exact same thing (lemmy.world)
Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account (www.gameinformer.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/14764738...
A cool guide note (i.redd.it)
cross-posted from: lemmit.online/post/2827544...
The Ten Forward Hot Take Thread
Lets say contentious things about Star Trek! I’ll start!...
YouTube could roll out ads while videos are paused after “strong traction” in experiment - Dexerto (www.dexerto.com)
Aren't you? (midwest.social)