Oy. I really don’t want to see what happens when we’re faced with an actual challenge. This is… yikes.

I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.

She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that “we are all sexual beings”, which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.

I don’t remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn’t the shamey kind.

Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!

Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It’s all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy’s Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.

There’s no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it’s been a year since this information came out.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Yo I self host a Nextcloud server and I don’t know what an apk is. Please stop being a gatekeeper. Grandma Ruth deserves alternatives to big tech just like the rest of us.

All freedom to all the people. These tools aren’t supposed to be some special privilege for 1337 hackers. They should be ubiquitous.

This is an amazing shower thought.

I think the response depends on what your goal is.

I assume that you find it annoying? Or disrespectful? Is the issue impacting work at all, or do you just hate having to talk to them through this impersonal intermediary? I think if that’s the case, the main remedy is to start by talking to them and telling them how you feel. If they want to use an LLM, fine, but they should at least try to disguise it better.

The same ones listed in the article. Property ownership, speech, privacy, etc.

I feel like the rise of corporate personhood is the elephant in the room this article seems to avoid acknowledging.

I don’t really know much about him, and I can’t dispute your personal gut feeling. But I’m not familiar with anything that gives me this feeling.

For what it’s worth, I think in general that if you say, “I just don’t quite trust <name>. I didn’t know why, but they creep me out,” about pretty much anyone in public political life you can probably find a basis for that over a long enough time scale.

He is a former Marxist?? I find that bewildering, hilarious, and doubtful.

I think it’s great when people have open enough minds to radically rethink their beliefs, but I hope I’m never so brainrotted as to somehow strawman my own former beliefs.

This meme doesn’t work because a conservative literally bought me a copy of that book and it’s infantile.

This book is titled “Basic Economics” because Sowel is a troll, and the economics in his book are largely correct but incomplete to the point of misinforming people. This is an incredibly “conservative” book through-and-through.

I specifically said I wasn’t.

I’m not prescriptive in the order, but I would imagine they’re most likely to occur in tandem over a period of years.

I find this surprising, because frankly I agree.

I don’t know much about Dorsey, but in Musk’s case, I think this is another case of him espousing a good idea he’d never actually honor.

I think that anyone should be able to make movies with Mickey Mouse and no one should need to license code. But I suspect that like with free expression, these are values most proponents only like when it’s benefiting them.

Also, as for the alternatives to support creatives, I would say start with universal services. Universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education, universal food. We would have so much more art if we recognized that no one should have to “earn” their survival. Once that’s guaranteed – and abolish billionaires and extreme wealth inequality too – I think discussions over how to support creatives would take place from a much more favorable starting point.

Again, I think the effect you’re describing is real, but it’s also pretty gated in a lot of ways.

We have a lot of treatments first, but also widespread medical bankruptcy. A lot of people lack access to basic necessities.

I’m other words, I don’t think someone running out of insulin gives as Schitt’s Creek…

I get the sentiment, but I think it’s possible we might miss the benefits you’re describing less than you think.

For the average American, the biggest manifestation of what you’re describing was cheap electronics, trucks, and suburban developments. These kinds of benefits are a poor salve for the alienation and atomization that now besets us. We have been trained to try and fill the holes in our lives with crap while losing more and more of the time and security that affords actual contentedness.

I think a generation raised knowing and trusting their neighbors, able to walk to school and bike to work and possibly go home for lunch, where they can eat some veggies grown in a community garden on an apartment roof might not feel like they’ve lost all that much just because they can’t buy an exercise machine they never use for $99 at a Black Friday sale.

There’s a reason a lot of “poorer” countries greatly outpace is in satisfaction and quality of life surveys.

I agree with most of this. However I think there are additional elements that make prediction challenging.

First, if the US undergoes any kind of revolution in the next five years, the cultural effects you mentioned could by overwritten by more recent events. I realize this sounds improbable, but the transition from the New Deal era to global neolibralism was a revolution. “The Reagan Revolution” was an actual economic and social revolution. And we’re overdue for another.

Second, both the markets and the real economy were in an unsustainable condition before Trump. The pursuit of endless growth, the disruption of climate breakdown, the end of the US’ monopolar hegemony, and the return of extreme wealth inequality in the US made the status quo impossible to simply maintain. Big changes were coming even without Trump.

I maintain some optimism. I think anti trust regulation, climate-based financial regulation, and an embrace of market socialism could render the last three months to be the last gasps of the old order instead of another point in what has been a decline decades in the making. But it depends what happens next.

I’m not an expert, but I’m an index fund/mutual fund guy. I’m not looking for a lottery ticket, I just want to keep up with the market.

They’re basically the new savings account, right? If they don’t do well, chances are nothing really is, so your money is stagnating to the same degree as everyone else. No real loss.

Wow!

That’s good world building.

Yeah. I went to a friend’s birthday hangout at a local pizzeria, and there were five of us around a table, and one guy was a city council member. The good ones are not that inaccessible.