bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Zionism (right) vs Bolshevism (left).
Also, Jewish space lasers are as true as turning the frogs gay.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
The land value tax doesn't consider what your improvements look like. If you own a run down shack on an acre of land, and there's a skyscraper on an acre next to you, you're taxed the same. And this is meant to encourage you to rip down your shack and build a skyscraper, too, because the burden of paying tens of thousands a month in taxes is meant to penalize you for inefficiently using your land.
It's like how in Vancouver, BC, they brought in a vacancy tax and started taxing single story restaurants for not using the 'air' over their restaurant.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
For property taxes, most cities have a cap on how much they can go up each year. This is to 'protect grandma', so that property taxes don't push her out of her home. If grandma sells, the property is reassessed, and the taxes can increase significantly.
Anyways, you'll notice that Trump owns some 500 'businesses'. Most of these are LLCs with a single property attached to them. The reason you do this is so that when you buy or sell a property, it isn't technically changing hands. Instead you're buying/selling the LLC, which owns the property. No tax reassessment, which means you keep those low rates locked in indefinitely.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
- They government offices, schools etc. can move into online mode again to save on heating
Arguably this will lead to higher costs. Home heating tends to be inefficient. So sending everyone home to keep warm will likely result in higher costs. And it's not like you can just turn off all the energy to government offices and schools. You're going to have to keep them above freezing throughout the winter.
Usually, during the workday, energy use at home drops. And that's without considering that most people don't turn down the heat. If energy prices are high, everyone is going to be locking that dial when they leave home.
By keeping schools, offices, and basically any place where people congregate, open and warm, you're going to see people turn down their thermostats and spend more time in public places, making it even more efficient.
Basically locking people down during an energy crisis is going to lead to increased demand for stuff to do at home, and supply is limited. That's going to push up prices even further.
They should be creating communal areas where people can gather, stay warm, hang out, and even eat. Commercial kitchens are far more efficient than residential ones. Restaurants are getting priced out by energy costs, but then we're just going to end up with more people eating at home, which means more energy consumption.
bsbbtnh
2yr ago
I don't think this is going to be that big of a bane on the average artist. In fact, I think this will be much like other digital tools, which have allowed below-average artists to punch above their weight. AI will be quickly adopted by these folks. Their overall art will improve, and they'll be able to pump out a lot more content. But they'll likely suck at doing revisions, as the AI probably isn't going to be built with that in mind. So the average artist will be able to step in, using AI to create ideas and starting points, and then build off of that. AI will be the go to for reference images.
And you'll have AI whisperers who are incredibly good at constructing prompts to get great results from AI.
I think artists largely fall into two camps. One are people who produce things that appeal to others, and another is people who produce things that appeal to themselves. Sometimes, in rare cases, the people who do their own art are able to appeal to the masses; and truly great artists can influence what appeals to the masses. When it comes to dealing with clients who are commissioning a work, some artists are trying to shove their vision on their client, while others are able to take what their clients want and replicate it perfectly. But the great artist is able to take what a client wants, filter it through themselves, and produce something the client didn't explicitly ask for, but really wanted. Or something like that.
Anyways, over the course of the next few years, I imagine there will be a few scandals, from niche to mainstream, of artists using AI but representing it as human-made. What I'm really looking forward to is a scandal of a web personality turning out to be a complete fabrication, and all their art/work being produced by AI. Because at the end of the day, most of the artists online are only popular because of the work they put into creating a name for themselves, cultivating an audience. It's largely marketing, with a small amount based on skill. Some of it, to be honest, is a woman having a pretty face and a prettier body. And so the real threat isn't a computer that can make great art; it's a computer that can connect with an audience in the same way an 'influencer' or 'content creator' can. The social skill needed to amass an audience, and retain them, is something that is far more valuable than drawing or any other skill. An AI that can replicate that is a direct threat to every 'influencer', whether they be an artist, streamer, Twitter journalist, etc. Though that will open the door for people with fewer social skills to do well, since they could leverage AI to create a social identity, but even if not, their inept social skills will come across as more 'authentic'.
Imagine if that happened with acting. Movies in a couple decades, the ones made with actual human actors in front of a camera, could end up with atrocious acting just so it seems more authentic..
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
the worst part of it is that it genuinely apes ChatGPT's politics and RLHF-d sanctimonious «personality» despite being 25 times smaller and probably 10 times dumber.
Every person with Down Syndrome I've ever met has absolutely trumped the personality of every high-IQ person I've known.
Anyways, a pause on 'Giant AI experiments' will really only be a pause on showing the results to the public. Companies won't stop. Governments won't stop. And even if they did, China won't. Pump the brakes on AI and China could quickly eat our lunch.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I may have been wrong about that. It looks like it was the 'Food Babe' who pushed for it, and she only claims to be (as far as google tells me) a 'vegetarian at home', though she does advocate for vegans by bullying companies to remove non-vegan ingredients (and for some reason companies seem to comply?)
With Kraft Dinner, she pushed for them to remove artificial colours. She seems to be against 'chemicals'.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
- Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.
Back when communities were tight knit, there were informal processes to deal with crime committed by your family or neighbours. Hanging criminals is the point where people are using the power of the state to punish people (usually it starts with outsiders; you wouldn't do this with your in-group). It's a failure of community, and it usually ends up falling out of favour once enforcement comes to the point that your in-group is liable for the same treatment.
In many tight knit communities, justice was dolled out by the church. Since outsiders tended to not be a member, courts provided a great system for punishing them. Even when courts pushed out the church as the main arbitrator in a community, it still relied heavily on church officials' opinions. 30+ years ago, having a priest testify about how great you were was all but a get out of jail free card (where the judge was religious, at least).
We still have tight knit communities these days. They aren't region locked, though.
Anyways, restorative justice was more akin to what your average church would have done in the past (and many continue to do to this day).
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's
It looks like she's the first person to attack, throwing a coffee carafe at the black lady.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
If someone is smart, not going to Harvard won't impact them too much. Many of these people will land on their feet, and they'll create paths for others to follow. Every smart student that is rejected from these top universities ends up eroding the prestige of those institutions. Every 'dumb' student that gets in also erodes the prestige.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
But this union's raises in the past decade combined were less than inflation last year.
Though the union seems to be asking for annual wage increases of 11.7%. I'd imagine this is a 5-year contract. So the average will go from $48k to $80k. And this would be what every other union asks for. Basically doubling Ontario's expenditures.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I remember stores offering curbside pick-up for roughly $5 prior to the pandemic (in Canada). I think Loblaws and Walmart were rolling it out. They took out some handicap parking spots and replaced them with pickup spots, lol.
I'd imagine the cost of an employee picking items is going to be less than that for most orders. The costs of bagging/checking out are already baked in. So I don't think it's uneconomical.
If a chain were to be completely curbside pickup, it would be extremely economical, though. We're talking a much smaller footprint, tiny parking lot. So the costs to set up and maintain the business will be a lot smaller. You can optimize the layout for picking. You get to do first in, first out. You'd be saving a lot on spoilage. You'd be saving a lot from theft.
Right now, in a regular store, it probably takes 5 minutes for a worker to fill a simple order, especially if you have products at opposite ends of the store. Many stores are laid out in a fashion to get the customer to have to go through it, and spend longer, hoping they'll buy more stuff. Items are placed in certain areas to influence what you grab (name brands and new products at eye level).
With a store optimized for picking, you'd have multiple people filling a single order, just different parts of it (frozen/refrigerated/bulk/produce/dry goods/etc). Popular items would be grouped together. You could get the picking time to a total half a minute for a simple order. A half dozen employees should be able to run a high traffic outlet with little issue. The labour cost (in Canada, with a ~$15/hr wage) would be $90/hr, then all the other costs (payroll taxes, benefits, insurance and such). You're looking at a max of $150/hr in labour to have a capacity to fill roughly 500 orders each hour (though it largely depends on the average order size; if all orders are small, you'll be able to do over 700 per hour; if all orders had hundreds of items, you're looking at <100). So maybe an average of 30 cents per order, in labour costs. And you could probably get that down even more with some automation, conveyors, etc. But it's going to get more and more expensive, at least upfront, to get the per order picking time down much further.
Worst case scenario would be taking each employee 1 minute to fill their part of an order, for a total of 6 man-minutes per hour. You're getting 60 orders done an hour. You're coming in at $2.50/order. This is likely close to the cost grocery stores are paying right now for offering curbside pick-up.
Your labour costs in other areas would remain the same or drop. For stocking shelves, you'd just be stocking the picking area. No time wasted on product presentation, rotating product, price labeling, price checking, etc. Nobody in the checkout line holding up other customers. Don't have to worry about a lack of cashiers becoming a bottleneck. No need to train cashiers. Every employee can be trained to pick, and if things get exceptionally busy, you can pull people from one job and toss them on another. If it's Christmas and everyone is buying a turkey, you can throw an extra person in the fridge.
Your labour costs should easily be less than the average grocery store, while having the capacity to serve more people per hour, and those customers not being frustrated by crowds, lines, things being out of stock (since hopefully the system would prevent out-of-stock items from being ordered). You'll save a ton of money on utilities, as you're not battling with keeping food cold and customers warm. You'll save a ton on the cost of the property, as you won't need substantial parking (half your lot will probably be employee parking), and you can have a drive-thru to help get customers through faster (with a couple employees that just load vehicles up? This could be the more expensive part, but likely less than cashiers). Smaller building (easily less than half the size).
With those Amazon cashless store, you're really only eliminating the cashier. And that's coming at the high cost of the system required to monitor a customer's shopping. If some tech has to step foot in that store once a week, that's likely wiping out the savings from not having a cashier. And the stores I've seen (from photos/videos online) are pretty small, more akin to a convenience store, with a small selection of products. High volume isn't going to happen.
With a store that only does curbside, assuming they have enough volume, it may be possible to do free delivery and still be competitive with other stores. Especially if it's scheduled rather than on-demand. It seems most delivery gig jobs are doing 1 delivery per trip, which is horribly inefficient. But I think the delivery side comes with far more headaches; people not answering their door and claiming an order never came, drivers having to deal with long driveways, gates, and other shit that increases their time. Apartment buildings, too, with needing to get buzzed in and take an order up. An order delivered to the top floor of a building would easily wipe out any profit. The points where employees interact with customers are almost always a bottleneck, and reducing those as much as possible will save a ton of money.
We need to bring back milk doors. It would decrease delivery times significantly, making it cheaper for customers and businesses.
New business idea; Mr Venture Capitalist, what we'll do is use billions of your money to begin offering free installation of 'drop boxes' in high and middle income communities. In exchange, we control access to this box (we'll sell it as a safety feature, so people can't shove unwanted shit in there, or steal stuff). We'll make deals with various companies (UberEats, Amazon, FedEx etc) to pay us to access these boxes for delivery. When something is put in it, the homeowner is notified on their phone. Hell, we'll even put some cameras on it so they can see. For companies like Amazon/FedEx, they wouldn't have to charge less for delivery, as the selling point is that the customer's package is safely delivered and can't be stolen; FedEx and Amazon will save money on the time spent delivering (especially FedEx from having far less 'delivery attempts') but also on 'lost/stolen/damaged' packages that they might have to fork out for. For companies like UberEats, they may be able to pass some of the savings to their customers, increasing the frequency of ordering.
And there's big savings in not having their customer service deal with as many complaints (especially from scammers). We can simply share video with Uber/FedEx/Amazon when a claim of lost/stolen/damaged delivery is made.
The next step would be to get into lower/working class neighbourhoods. These won't be as profitable, so we'll need to conjure up a media campaign claiming that it is discriminatory that there aren't boxes like ours in low income BIPOC communities. Then we angle for the government to give us subsidies/grants to fund the roll out of these to low-income BIPOC communities. We won't include all the fancy tech that the middle/upper class gets, though. This is because we're moving away from providing value for other businesses, since our 'drop boxes' are now becoming the norm. They can't not use it.
We're also going to need to do some regulatory capture. We'll push for regulations on our boxes, that just happen to conform with the exact specifications of our boxes. This will make any up-and-coming competitors have to toss out all their shit and start over. We'll also push for increased liability for box providers, and then have a department that will focus solely on finding cases where our competitors have failed to comply with regulations, so they get hit with fines or lawsuits. Feed some stories to the lesser press about babies being killed in 'unsecure' boxes of our competitors or something.
Anyways, once regulatory capture is complete, we're going to need to turn our boxes into a permanent piggy bank. What we'll do is convince the government that our 'drop boxes' are actually a 'public utility', and that every company should have access to them. We'll now just collect a fee that goes to 'maintaining' the box network, while 'retailers' (which are companies we'll start on the side, primarily in upper and middle class areas) sell access to the network. This will further destroy any competition we may have had.
Then we convince Elon Musk to buy the business for $694.20/share. Then get our press buddies to say how that's fascism. Our buddies in government will then nationalize our boxes, paying us a premium to keep it out of the hands of literal Nazis.
This increased efficiency of delivery will allow our curbside grocery outlets to offer free delivery. We'll be able to take this customer facing businesses (and as I said before, interactions with customers are a bottleneck) and turn it into a business that has absolutely no customer interaction (other than our social media team, who will mostly just make fun of customers for being stupid, which will somehow make the average customer feel smarter and want to use our business).
Oh right, and one detail I forgot; our proprietary 'drop boxes' will be the ideal size the fit 'grocery boxes' we use at our store to put groceries in. We'll own the company making these boxes, out of some 'bio-friendly' material, and we'll get politicians to pass a low making these particular boxes the standard for delivery (or boxes that are certain fractions of the size), forcing all companies to buy these boxes for delivery, except in the cases of oversized packaged (which we'll push the government to punitively tax the living shit out of, to encourage more companies to think inside the box). We'll also collect fees for picking up these boxes, cleaning them, maintaining them, replacing them. Maybe a deposit program. Or we can convince people to put recyclables in them, then convince the government to give
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
She had a minor career in commercials before the speech, including a shoot for playboy,
Notably Playboy didn't like her photos and decided not to publish them. It was only after the Oscar stunt that they ran a spread.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Car-dependent sprawl and single-family-only zoning means nobody walks or bikes, which causes obesity.
I've found single-family zones to be much more active. It only seems like dense areas are more active because of the higher population. But people feel less and less safe in high density urban environments.
- It also makes children less independent and capable, both physically and emotionally/psychologically.
I wouldn't ever consider someone who grew up in a city to be more independent or capable. My experience has been the opposite; people in cities are highly dependent on others, and far less capable. They have to rely on others, because they have less experience having to depend on themselves. They only feel independent because of systems that the government has built. I'm sure some people feel independent hopping on the subway to go get groceries. But those living with yards can be independent by growing their own food. Hell, I've noticed that most city folks don't seem to understand how to do this. Cities aren't even great places to grow gardens, since the fluoridated water absolutely ruins the yield. So you have to use a rainwater system, which needs a bit more space. Composting in dense cities? Nope. Can you keep a bunch of random crap to reuse at some point in your life? Doubt it. It all goes in the trash.
Dense cities suck. You're more dependent on the government. You only feel independent because you don't know your neighbours. And that's another major downside of cities. In a zombie apocalypse, I know my neighbour isn't going to rob me blind, they are going to help me build the barricades.
bsbbtnh
2yr ago
especially related to the potential for mercury exposure
I get the feeling that the risk of mercury in general is far overstated.
Aside from that, did you ever experience other issues with CFLs? I know there were many people who claimed they caused headaches. The light seemed to always bother my eyes when they were first turned on. And they seemed like a really poor choice for rooms I was only in briefly, as they'd burn out after relatively few uses over the course of a year or so (storage room/pantry). And being from a household where we tended to turn off/on lights when leaving/entering a room, the lifespan seemed to be cut to the order of a few months.
CFLs were a waste.
bsbbtnh
2yr ago
Anybody see Top Gun Maverick? Biggest movie of the year (so far, it could get dethroned by Avatar or Black Panther). Made over $700m in the US and Canada, and like $1.4b worldwide. I think this is the first weekend it has fallen out of the top 5.
Anyways, I was excited to see it and finally went a couple weeks ago. But it seems like absolute shit to me. Beautifully shot, the flying scenes are great. And yet the story seems bland. The graphics used when they are discussing missions and stuff seemed like some shit out of a Command & Conquer cutscene. A lot of transitions between scenes felt a bit sudden, like something was cut. I've seen celebrities gushing over this film, Quentin Tarantino was fanboying over it. But I honestly think it's one of the worst Tom Cruise movies I've ever seen.
And despite being the biggest movie of the year, I've barely seen a peep about it online (other than it's box office success). Despite seeing it a coupe weeks ago, I never ran into a single spoiler for it. Never saw a single meme. So obviously not a movie that appealed to those who very online. On YouTube I'd been putting every Top Gun video I saw in my Watch Later playlist, to binge after I saw it. And even those videos, going over how great the film was, really had no substance. All the interviews I found with the cast were just the same stories about flying in a jet or meeting Tom Cruise.
The bits James Corden did with Tom Cruise were more satisfying than the actual film.
I'm definitely not a film buff, so maybe I'm missing something. I have seen the original, quite a few times. But something just felt 'off' throughout this film.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
My question is how come this never happened to me? I grew up in the city surrounded by crime, always stressed about being robbed, murdered etc. School was somewhat similar. Yet I still have a baby face.
If that was just the norm for you and your community, then I doubt its a legitimate stressor.
I'm reminded of a survey they did in Canada about female victims of crime. Indigenous women are 3x more likely to be a victim of violent crime, including murder, than non-Indigenous women. Despite this, both groups of women reported feeling the same level of personal safety in their community.
If you moved to a safer community, your baby face would probably persist even longer.
If stress can cause a change in your physical appearance, I'd imagine it must also impact your internal health. So maybe a baby face now is signalling that you'll have a long and healthy life ahead of you.
It makes me wonder how younger generations will do, as they are having things like climate hysteria, white guilt, race baiting, gender confusion, and a bunch of other shit, dumped on them. Maybe they adapt and it becomes their baseline? Or maybe things like 'safe spaces' helps to mitigate that? Does the average coed look older or younger than millennials did? Do they look older when they are thrust into the real world?
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I think some of (all?) the big automakers do in-house financing. Maybe there's a fear that raising prices could end up with them holding the bag if things go to shit. Their financial arms could also lack the capacity to take on 20% or more 'debt' per vehicle.
It's also possible that, with higher interest rates, their financing segment is doing quite well. Maybe raising prices of the vehicles would disqualify many buyers (since I'd imagine the in-house financing at these places are a bit more selective), and ultimately lead to lower profits. I'd imagine the rich and poor alike aren't financing their purchase through the automaker. Their market is a certain type of middle-class buyer, and it's possible that they are price sensitive enough that if the sticker price goes up, they might go to their bank or a credit union looking for a better rate.
The automakers probably prefer to have customers finance through them, because it most certainly leads to customers buying their next vehicle through them. If you're financed through Ford, then it'll be easier to get a new vehicle (and trade in your old one) through them.
So automakers might be leaving a couple grand on the table, but higher interest rates have likely made up for that. And more importantly, they are thinking about their revenues in 5+ years, and the cost of a few grand to ensure a return customer is pretty cheap.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I refuse to give out my phone number
Me too. More and more websites I can never use because they want too much from me, lol.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
And the stock price sure seems to indicate the belief in the latter. More than half of the value gone, YOY, as of the time of this writing.
Tesla was always bound to drop. It's been wildly overvalued for some time. A big benefit for Musk is that there weren't many shares floating around, which propped up the price, and consistently undermined short sellers. This also helped him reach his targets and earn billions.
With the economy the way it is, Tesla's share price was bound to drop. So Elon 'diversifying' by picking up Twitter might be the best thing to happen, even though he wildly overpaid. (Though it seems like a good chunk of people rolled their shares over, so I wonder how much he actually had to pony up to get Twitter). Anyways, cutting costs at Twitter is dead easy. It doesn't take much to run a social media site. Most social media sites seem to just shovel money into a bottomless pit, most of which does nothing to raise revenues or improve the average user's experience. They simply find ways to spend the money that comes in. It's the Wikipedia cancer thing. Revenues go up, expenses go up.
The core product of Twitter won't change. They don't need to spend $5 billion/year 'improving' it. Most of the jobs at Twitter are useless and can be safely cut. Twitter should be able to run for a tenth (or less) of the cost. Their revenue might drop a bit as premium advertisers pull out. But there are going to be plenty of companies who are happy to swoop in. So Twitter should have no problem making a few billion in revenues. It should be making an easy billion in profit each year (and probably more).
The real money maker for Twitter would be to allow shit like allowing people to subscribe to users (for $x/month), allowing people to 'tip' or give a 'super like' (for $x), allowing users to send subscriber-only tweets. Hell, I'd make twitter users pay to be able to take tips and get subscribers (basically make it so only 'verified' people can get paid subscribers/tips). You'll have lefties falling over themselves to pay Elon the monthly membership fee. And I'd have a premium level that includes a bunch of stats and analytics about followers, engagement, etc.
That could easily bring in a billion. The real money maker is all the people who get memberships thinking they'll convince people to subscribe, and then never getting any subscribers.
Social media (and most tech) sites are bloated as fuck and can withstand a lot of cuts. Most can be monetized to a much greater degree than they currently are. I think one of the most inefficient websites is probably YouTube. The amount of video uploaded everyday, 95% of it that will never get more than a couple views. You could eliminate the vast majority of it by introducing a paltry cost to upload, and you'd make money off those who continued. Imagine the billions YouTube spends on storage each year, especially redundancies. 95% of that cost going to scanning and storing videos that literally nobody will ever watch. YouTube could probably be more profitable than the rest of Google if it weren't for that.
We watched Facebook burn billions on their Metaverse. Companies pouring billions of ad dollars into Facebook, to put ads on people's timelines, and Facebook shovels that into a pit, rather than to their shareholders. Facebook's main source of revenue is the same thing it was 10 years ago. They'd be one of the most profitable companies if they just stuck to the timeline, sold ads, and collected the profits. But for some reason they'd rather shovel money into projects that go nowhere. Just like every other social media company. Most spending is a waste and won't produce value.
Social media companies are ripe for being bought out, stripped down, and turned into profit engines. Especially with the billions in losses on the books which add some value.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Fractional reserve banking, de facto, means that when you take a loan the dollars are minted and when you repay a loan the dollars are destroyed.
This isn't really true. It kinda works in reverse. You put $100 in your bank, and the bank has to keep 10% in reserves (though I think right now the US reserve rate is suspended; most countries have no reserve rate). The bank can loan out up to 90% of your deposit. So let's assume they do, they take $90 and loan it to Bill. Bill takes that money and buys a TV from Bob. Bob puts that money in the bank. The bank keeps $9, and can loan out up to $81. And this cycle continues, until there's $1000 out there, all being held in deposit.
Anyways, a bit unrelated. Banks had long lobbied congress to pay interest on the money banks were required to hold in reserves. Congress, either right before, or right at the beginning, of the last financial crisis passed that law. But.. they didn't limit it to required reserves. They allowed any reserves to get interest paid on them.
So the financial crisis rears its head, and what do banks do? They stop loaning out money. The Federal Reserve wants to loosening up the bank's wallet, so the start Quantitative Easing, where they basically buy shit on the open market, with the idea of getting more money into the economy. The hope is that the banks will become flush with cash and loan it out. But banks did something utterly remarkable; they just shoved all that cash into reserves, and started collecting interest on it. So the Federal Reserve did more Quantitative Easing. And banks held that money in reserve. Turns out a couple percent on all this money is far better than the risk of loaning it out during a major recession.
Anyways, that little difference, between giving interest just on required reserves vs all reserves, extended the recovery period and kept interest rates low. And the Fed struggled with Quantitative Tightening (where they sell all the shit back), because every time they'd sell stuff, prices would fall.
So the US could probably (if it already hasn't?) solve a lot of their issues by making one little change to the law, which would make the federal reserve much more effective. Of course you wouldn't want to do that right now (or would you? unleashing trillions held in reserves? lol).
As for your idea, is it much different than just having everyone write a trailing 0 on all their bills and coins? The fear here would be that you undermine long term contracts. If I loan you $100, and expect you to pay back $1/month, and then the next month the government says every dollar is now worth ten, then I've just lost a lot of money. You pay me back $10 (now 'worth' $100) and keep the $90 (which is now $900). Of course the policy change wouldn't be that drastic. But even still, a lot of long term debt is extremely sensitive to a percent of interest. Add a percent to your mortgage of 30 years and that could cost you $20k per $100k you borrow. So if long term lending becomes more risky, less uncertain, banks are going to charge higher rates, or move towards short term lending.
You also create an environment where the average person isn't going to save much money, because the value of $1 now is greater. So people have an incentive to spend, and an incentive to take on debt, and an incentive to hope politicians bail them out.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
what do the climate change protest stunts actually accomplish? Governments, unrelated companies, and all sorts of startups are working on climate change.
A feeling of success and the ability to claim part of it, without having to actually do the hard work.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I think making verification a single payment would be far better than monthly. For monthly, they should just make it a premium thing, and attach various benefits to it. Like your tweets are more likely to be promoted to the top. Maybe allow people who are verified AND have premium accounts have the ability to have paid subscribers, and those paid subs can see pallwalled tweets. Maybe even a feature to 'tip' people. If Twitter takes a few percent, then they'll be rolling in dough.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself?
Isn't a benefit of Shutterstock that if an image you use somehow violates copyright, they'll take on the liability?
With AI art being a potential copyright minefield, most people probably don't want to end up in a situation where they are defending against a relatively novel suit. So having access to AI art that is produced based on Shutterstock's images, and presumably the protection against copyright violations, that's probably a great thing to have for many companies/users, big and small.
its authorship cannot be attributed to an individual person consistent with the original copyright ownership required to license rights.
Isn't that in stark contrast to DALL-E, which says anybody who generates an image is the full legal owner of it, and can do whatever they want? If DALL-E were to spit out two identical images, I wonder who owns it? lol
If I saw an American holding a misspelled sign at a protest, the last thing I would think is that it must be a China. If there's any conspiracy, it'd be more likely that it is a domestic operation that is meant to make the protesters look stupid/uneducated. (I seem to recall, but I may be wrong, that some people holding up signs like "keep your government hands off my medicare" while protesting Obama were actually Democrats, but that was a long time ago, so I may be misremembering).
But the policies they are protesting are coming from the top. And even if they weren't, its not like people don't protest the feds when other levels of government are more responsible for the situation. The trucker protest in Canada was generally against covid restrictions, most of which were put in place by provincial governments, and a border vaccine mandate put in place by the US. But they still protested the Canadian federal government.
I don't think I've actually seen many protests demanding federal leaders resign, because in the west we CAN vote in a new leader. So if you were protesting in China, it seems like demanding a resignation of the leader would be the only real option, since voting ain't going to do it. I guess in parliamentary systems, since the leader isn't directly elected, calls for leaders to step down are a bit more common, especially since elections are irregular.
But the issue with zero COVID seems to come from the central government. Changing local leadership isn't going to solve things.
You'd think if this was a foreign operation that the police wouldn't be twiddling their thumbs. "Nah, we only suppress domestic, organic protests. We'll happily allow the CIA to undermine our country, though."
I think this is more evidence in favour of the protests being encouraged, at some level, by the CCP. Maybe as an excuse to change policy. Maybe to expose dissidents (and CIA networks). Maybe to frame anti-lockdown protestors the same way the western governments have. As outsiders we look at these people and think 'heroes'. But in the west, the average person has looked at anti-lockdown protestors as loons. Maybe the average Chinese person looks at these protestors like they are retarded rednecks endangering the lives of everyone around them. Because China is much more, uh, collective than the west (especially America).
Would any minorities in China do this? Minorities tend to be more likely to protest, since the majority tends to be well represented.
Didn't China pretty effectively dismantle CIA networks in their country a couple years back? Some conspiracy theories attributed it to Hillary's email server being compromised.
I could see the protests being any combination domestic and foreign, with the CCP leveraging them like politicians in any part of the world would. Could have been organic, and the CIA swooped in to fan the flames, and the CCP is tolerating it in order to gain intelligence on who is all involved and what their motivations are, and also trying to paint the protests as being astroturfed. Every team is in the game.
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