As opposed to what, Soviet style revolution? People today don't have the same mettle as their forebearers, it's not going to happen. Occupy Wall Street and the George Floyd protests showed to the powers at be that people aren't willing to embrace violent protest for change.
Perhaps I too failed basic chemistry, but I do believe you are grossly incorrect -- maritime shipping is a massive contributor to CO2 emissions:
Ships release about 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, according to the IMO, roughly equal to Texas and California’s combined annual carbon output.
Marine transportation is one of the contributors to world climate change. The shipping industry contributes 3.9% of the world’s carbon dioxide output equivalent to 1260 million tons of CO2 and this is one of the large sources of anthropogenic carbon emitters.
I think there are loads of people who take it seriously but can't do anything about it. The biggest CO2 polluters are mega corporations and things like airplanes and cargo ships. Ordinary people can't fight that. One family living off the grid and producing zero CO2 won't help anything.
Ergo, most people are apathetic, as they should be. You're not going to change the minds of governments and mega corps.
I read the entire article, and all of those shenanigans are being passed in red states, which overwhelmingly vote republican anyway. They disallowed the use of college ID as voter ID in Idaho, but that's completely moot -- Idaho was never going to vote blue anyway.
I'm very keen to see what happens with the newly elected leader of Italy, as she and her party are openly very far right with real fascist ties/history. Will be interesting to see if she and her government remain in power for long.
Also curious to see what will happen with the AfD in Germany. Each election they get closer and closer to holding real power.
I enjoyed your rambling actually! Lots of good points there.
My own two pence is something that Yanis Varoufakis once said in an interview: leftists don't win elections. This has always stayed with me because he is largely correct. The only times you had proper, true left socialist governments elected was immediately after WW2 (Attlee, Hatoyama), or during the great depression (FDR, and some extent Truman). The moment there is any prosperity of any kind, the world tilts back into greed and individualism. Only during times of existential threat does the ego of the average voter subsume enough to adopt a meaningful, collectivist attitude of actually cooperating and working together for the betterment of all. And yet, some of the most championed constructs of the 20th century came out of those leftist governments, such as social security in the US and the NHS in the UK.
But it's just so weird to me that when times are anything but awful (literally mass starvation) everyone only focuses on themselves and their own enrichment, which is why outside of a global depression or world war, most voters elect from centre to the right, but rarely left. Even in China today, they're hardly Bernie Sanders leftists anymore, much closer Andrew Carnegie style laizzez faire capitalists now.
I think the reason for this is because humans are fundamentally shitty creatures, right down to their chimpanzee DNA. We're just not designed to work for a collective good and share resources equitably. And, because chimpanzee society is also based around a 1% top dog who controls 90% of the resources, so too do humans always build stratified societies where all power and wealth is held by some elite 1%. From Mesopotamia, to ancient Egypt, to Rome, to the middle ages, to today, it is always that there is some rich elite that own everything, and struggling peons who hate one another and are always looking for an excuse to fight someone and go to war.
Hence, I don't think it's necessarily about lack of education or propaganda or indoctrination. I think it's more to do with biology and DNA itself. As a species, we're sadly fucked, and setup to fail. And it will always be fascism, racism, and oligarchy which wins out, because that is who we are at an existential core.
I like everything you wrote, thank you, but perhaps disagree with your last part about not remaining in power. It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine. I guess with each of those, they don't even have to deliver any meaningful policy just so long as they keep hurting the people their voters want hurt, they'll keep being re-elected.
Absolutely, I'm gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.
Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.
How could you even track accounting profits that far back in time to repay today? What if the family descendants are poor today? (They lost everything in the Great Depression, as an example)
There is no benefit, I never claimed the launcher within a launcher was a benefit.
The problem is the cancer that is Steam itself. We need more competing storefronts which don't require the Steam launcher, and even better if there's no launcher of any kind at all, just a binary to run to play the game.
Well, in business school they teach you that running a company is an exercise in maximising profits as a constrained optimisation problem, so optimality for a classical company (not one of those weird startups that doesn't make money for 10+ years) almost always is maximum profit.
It's not just a launcher, it's a storefront. Uplay, EA-whatever, and Rockstar Launcher are all storefronts where you can buy the games those companies make.
The launcher itself is a UI which lets you "launch" the game. Steam for example, is a launcher and a storefront, as is Uplay.
Having all your games in a single launcher/storefront is bad, as it gives a single company entire control over your games, and monopoly pricing.
Also remember that Steam takes a 30% cut, which is totally unnecessary, and is what directly caused giants like Ubisoft and Rockstar to make their own storefronts. Because why pay a 30% tax just for selling your game, this ain't the 1990s anymore with CD-ROM pressings.
Fuck Steam and it's monopolistic, 30% rent seeking bollocks.
There are plenty of companies out there (and growing daily) who want to do AI in house, and can't (or don't want) to send their data to some monolithic, blackbox company which has no transparency. The finance industry, for example, cannot send any data to some third party company like OpenAI (ChatGPT) for compliance reasons, so they are building teams to develop and maintain their own AI models in-house (SFT, RLHF, MLOps, etc).
There are lots of jobs being created in AI daily, and they're generally high paying, but they're also very highly skilled, so it's difficult to retrain into them unless you already have a strong math and programming background. And the number of jobs being created is definitely a lot, lot less than the potential number of jobs lost to AI, but this may change over time.
I think this article misses the forest for the trees. The real "evil" here is capitalism, not AI. Capitalism encourages a race towards optimality with no care to what happens to workers. Just like the invention of the car put carriage makers out of business, so AI will be used to by company owners to cut costs if it serves them. It has been like this for over a 100 years, AI is just the latest technology to come along. I'm old enough to remember tons of these same doom and gloom articles about workers losing their jobs when the internet revolution hit in the late 90s. And probably many people did lose jobs, but many new jobs were created too.
As opposed to what, Soviet style revolution? People today don't have the same mettle as their forebearers, it's not going to happen. Occupy Wall Street and the George Floyd protests showed to the powers at be that people aren't willing to embrace violent protest for change.