Incognito
9mo ago
Unfortunately, your beliefs are wrong. There's probably nothing I can do to convince you, except to say I have direct experiential evidence that I cannot square with nonexistence of god.
I did get to this point starting from agnostic materialism. Assume there are no souls. Assume there is nothing special about human brains. You're having an experience right now, how does that work? As far as I can tell, something to do with information processing... why would that be unique to human brains? What is it like to be a bat? Why unique to brains at all? What is it like to be a tree? What is it like to be an interconnected global financial system? Connect two or more "conscious" information systems, is the resulting system conscious? What if you connect ALL information systems?
Incognito
9mo ago
...And that's a good thing!
Listening to music with high dynamic range is a drag. I want to hear the quiet parts over ambient background noise without bursting my eardrums in the loud parts. Normalise normalisation!
Incognito
10mo ago
Bluesky is just the left-wing version of Truth Social. I thought that was intentionally obvious, with "Blue" right there in the name.
Incognito
11mo ago
I see AI art as just another tool.
It's extremely similar to the backlash against Digital Art about 25 years ago. Any art created using Photoshop was low status, debate as to whether it counted as "real art" if you didn't use a pencil/paintbrush/whatever, and produce no physical artefact. But nowadays it would be bizarre to consider all digital art as "not real". Give it a few years and it'll all blow over. Actually I did encounter someone who considered electronic music to be "not real music" within the last year, which was pretty weird, so there will be some holdouts I guess. Maybe in the short term we'll see resurgence in demand for non-digital art, at least until someone hooks up AI to a CNC machine with a paintbrush.
Incognito
11mo ago
It was doomed from the start. The "No" ads practically wrote themselves. The Yes campaign had no path to victory. In the Republic referendum, the No campaign argued technicalities "Even if you like the idea of a republic, this specific proposal is bad" - and that would have worked here too. So they gave almost no details and tried to coast through on vibes, then rightly got criticised for asking the public to sign a blank cheque.
As someone who cares about indigenous rights, I was angry at Albanese for introducing the legislation and it all played out pretty much as I anticipated. I did vote yes for idiosyncratic "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" reasons. The whole debacle set back indigenous relations at least a decade I reckon. Anecdotally, I've seen a marked decrease in "acknowledgement of country" lip service before events/meetings etc in the last year. And now everyone turns a blind eye to the goon squad that rounds up blackfellas in the CBD and dumps them in a park somewhere.
Standard argument often includes something like "Legalise and tax it" Sin tax on tobacco in Australia is around 300% now. (A$1.50 excise per stick, a pack of 20 costs around $40). The government is committed to continuing raising the tax 5% a year every year forever.
This has lowered smoking rates dramatically (from 24% down to 8% of population over 30 years). But now, things have hit a tipping point - most smokers I know are buying black market stuff from Chinese cartels, including normie law abiding white collar types. (Banning vapes and pushing all vape users black-market did not help.)
Legalisation won't eliminate black market, but there's a tradeoff. You could probably model this with a mathematical function - Legal and cheap means no criminal element but also heavy use. As you increase taxes, usage goes down but criminal element increases. Banning something is equivalent to an infinite% tax (which minimises use but maximises criminal element). Plug in harm caused by use, harm caused by criminal element, solve for equilibrium (which probably looks like "Legalised and taxed more than 0% but less than 300%" for low harm drugs like tobacco, but other drugs may be so harmful that there is no benefit to legalisation at any price).
We're also well on the way to legalising weed (you do need a rubber-stamped medical prescription). Medical is about twice the current price of street, but also higher quality (I'm told about 1.5-2x more potent). Use is apparently up slightly since legalisation (from 9% to 12%). I don't know if I trust the numbers, I wouldn't have guessed it to be 50% more prevalent than tobacco.
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