TanyaJLaird @ TanyaJLaird @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Pardons don't help you when you're being removed by the military.

There is a big difference between someone like Trump potentially carrying out a coup and actively carrying out a coup. He is now "an enemy, foreign and domestic." If members of the military have any intention of upholding their oath, he and his regime need to be removed by force.

Realistically, if they does face justice, it will likely be mob justice. Trump and Musk are setting themselves up to be in an incredibly physically vulnerable position. What do you think is going to happen in the DC metro area after they fire half of the federal government? The vast majority of the DC population will want to literally see their heads on pikes. And the military? They may uphold their oath to the Constitution not by removing Trump by force themselves, but simply by standing aside and letting the mob storm the gates.

The problem with running a blatantly and undeniably unconstitutional regime is that mobs of angry people will have zero moral compulsion about removing you from this world in justice outside the law.

When this is over, Musk is going to end up hanging from the end of a rope. He will be charged, tried, and convicted, and hanged for treason against the republic. What he has done is literally a capital offense. And those kids who've helped him enact this coup by hacking government systems? They have signed their own death warrants. They will join him on the gallows after they also are convicted for their treason and acts of terrorism against the nation.

It reminds me one of Asimov's robots trying to reason a way around the Three Laws.

Replace Tienanmen with discussions of Palestine, and you get the same censorship in US models.

Our governments aren't as different as they would like to pretend. The media in both countries is controlled by a government-integrated media oligarchy. The US is just a little more gentle with its censorship. China will lock you up for expressing certain views online. The US makes sure all prominent social media sites will either ban you or severely throttle the spread of your posts if you post any political wrongthink.

The US is ultimately just better at hiding its censorship.

I don't see anything in there that doesn't also apply to OpenAI and other western companies.

Ask OpenAI's products to explain the absurdity of conservative Christianity, or any number of bugbears the West accepts censorship over.

Honestly, this all seems like small potatoes. We're trying to save our species from extinction here. We're trying to maintain the standard of living that came with the Industrial Revolution without burning out planet to a cinder.

If doing so means our steel industry runs 10% less efficiently, I really don't give a damn.

Another option is to skip most of the grid storage and just spam solar panels. Rely on batteries only to get you through the night, not to bridge power across seasons. Build enough panels that your country can meet its needs even on a cloudy day in winter. Then you have reasonable power costs in the winter and nearly free electricity the rest of the year.

You could see a lot of energy-intensive industries becoming seasonal. We have a crop growing season, a school season, and sports seasons. Why not an "AI model training" season?

They're building an AI Stasi.

Pride started as a riot.

It really depends on the location I guess. I ride the bus a lot in my city. And the bus drivers here do a lot more than just drive the bus. Their most important secondary duty is helping users of wheelchairs and other mobility devices. The buses have wheelchair ramps that fold down, which the drivers manually operate. Then once on the bus, a front section of seats will fold up, and there is a system to strap a wheelchair down securely. It is the bus driver that does this.

Now, one area automated buses could really help would be expanding the pool of potential drivers. Our system has a hard time recruiting new drivers, as a CDL (commercial drivers license) is required. And people with such a license can usually make better money driving trucks for for-profit businesses. So it's really hard to get, train, and retain bus drivers, as few people are actually qualified to drive a bus.

So in our city, we would still need an employee onboard to help with these secondary duties. However, with an automated bus, they could be done by anyone. Instead of a driver with a CDL, we could hire some college kids to ride around the city in the auto buses. They could offer assistance when needed, but spend the majority of their time just working on their studies. As such, they could be hired at a very affordable cost to the city.

The advantage of busways is that they're a lot cheaper to build than trains. You just need some paint on pavement to build a dedicated bus lane. All you have to really build are some nice bus stops. The big problem with trains is vertical and horizontal alignment. You can't just lay train tracks on top of an existing road system. Cars and buses can handle much greater slopes and perform much steeper turns than trains can.

For example, you can make a busway over an existing road bridge, without any need to rebuild the bridge itself. But you can't just slap some train tracks on an existing road bridge, as the train would be unable to make it up the slopes designed for car traffic.

Reminds me of something I wrote awhile ago...

Water and wood are ultimately connected in profoundly fundamental ways. Trees as living organisms have their structure determined by the acquisition, transport, and use of water. When harvested, lumber must be dried and seasoned to the moisture levels sufficient for use. When installed and in service, wood must be protected from moisture, and the various deleterious effects of moisture must be controlled. And in the most fundamental chemical processes of photosynthesis, the very solid matter of wood itself is formed from carbon dioxide in the air and water in the ground. The story of wood and water are inseparable, as inseparable as the stories of water and life are more broadly. Wood is ultimately formed from carbon dioxide and water, and thermodynamically, it will always seek to return to those base forms. Wood is formed from water and air, and in time, through one path or another, to water and air it will return. It should be our goal to understand these processes. And in doing so, to learn to use wood most effectively and to extend the brief window of time that wood remains in such a useful form. Eventually all wood products will find a way back to their original form. And if done right, such limited time will be sufficient for human needs. No wood or wood product will last forever, but neither do humans or human needs. But properly designed, wooden structures may last long enough for human needs. In time both will fade, and they will find their page in a story longer than history itself. From water; to water. Of water; by water. Such is the nature of wood and water.

Japan is a country that has been living in the year 2005 since 1985.

Why would any Democrat support this? This is Trump they're talking about. Can they not see him just declaring the Democratic Party to be a "terrorism supporting group" because of some vaguery around supporting Gaza?

Ultimately, these mandates are because executives don't work for the same reason normal people do. Most people work to support themselves. But a single year working at an exec at a major company will be enough to let you retire very comfortably, never working another day in your life. Once you have ten million in the bank, you're not really working for money anymore.

Instead, you're working for prestige and power. Execs and high-level managers work for a few reasons. Some work because they want to have power over people. They get a thrill out of having complete authority over other human beings. And sociopathic need to control others is an itch that simply can't be scratched by working remote. Others like to mandate in-office because they're professional shmoozers. They do very little real work. Instead, they just go from meeting to meeting, spend afternoons golfing on the company dime, etc. The company is basically just their own personal social club. Others work because they have a savior complex. They think they're God's gift to mankind, and they need the sycophantic praise that can only come by forcing people to work in person. Finally, some are simply sexual predators. For some, the primary benefit of coming into work is the ability to coerce sex out of their underlings. And it's hard to sexually assault an employee who is working hundreds of miles away.