sohois
2d ago
What exactly is new here? "High class escorts" have existed for many years (see Pretty Woman in 1990). The incredible earning power of female sexuality has been known for not quite as long but a very long time. OnlyFans blew up more than 5 years ago, and the top OF models make far more than the earnings quoted. Even if we're talking only the sale of intimacy, I'm pretty sure pornstars have been selling themselves for very high fees online for quite a while. Or see the numerous stories about Instagram models going to the Middle East for some "Dubai Chocolate". As another poster mentioned, the media has a peculiar fascination with the sex lives of Silicon Valley, but that's the only unique thing about this.
sohois
3d ago
Lawyers and doctors are a rather special case though (and self-driving cars appear to have been solved given Waymo's rapid expansion). When a company hires a product manager, a customer support person, an executive assistant, a marketing executive, a salesperson, a software developer, or the myriad other back office roles that fill a standard corp, they are not especially worried about potential liabilities (financial roles excepted). You don't need many of those roles to be replaced before serious economic consequences become apparent, and the protection of law or medicine is rendered moot.
That being said, I do think there will be a lot of inertia just by the nature of corporations. Most big corpos are already too big and could probably have slashed 20% of their workforce even before AI. It's part of the nature of the firm and not something easily shaken off.
sohois
6d ago
I've got to say, I really don't understand the relation between Google Maps and the election here.
Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I've never met anyone who doesn't have the default maps view on all the time. Is satellite view more common in the US?
Also, are people using google maps to make voting decisions? Do voters not go near the burned areas ever, and one day scroll through maps - for fun perhaps? - and see it all rebuilt and just go huh, must have been rebuilt since I last checked?
sohois
7d ago
The aftermath of the case seems like a classic Toxoplasma of Rage situation - not the controversial, toxoplasmic one that gets everyone whipped up, but the Eric Garner style. The murder, the police behaviour, the family behaviour: everything is so cut and dry terrible that there is no controversy. Even on UK reddits, which are as fortified progressive as you can get, there is almost universal outrage here.
Unlike George Floyd, where his past criminality and the fentanyl accusations gave plenty of meat for culture warriors to help spiral it into a national emergency, Nowak's murder looks destined to fizzle out. There's not even some low sentence for the murderer, while the authorities have been quick to recognize the blowback against his family and sought to charge them with related crimes.
Ironically, if the police had actually found some spicy memes or similar in Nowak's phone, it probably would have helped the overall cause.
sohois
17d ago
I get a distinct feeling of Gellman Amnesia reading a few of the recent top level posts in this weeks thread. And I wouldn't even class myself as a particularly knowledgeable person when it comes to AI, I simply keep up with the news and developments. It's really something to see the number of posters, whether here or the ssc reddit or similar locations, who confidently spout complete garbage when it comes to AI, seemingly unaware of things that happened even months ago.
And now I can't help but worry that many of the other posts on the Motte are similarly compromised. Have we become (or always been) just another midwit debate site?
sohois
17d ago
I lived in Dongbei - well, Heilongjiang - when I first moved out to China, living mostly in Daqing (also tier 3) and a bit in Harbin (tier 2). Later on I moved down to Shanghai, and eventually met my wife, a Henanren. Her family lives in a town, still 500k people of course, though technically their original home is in a tiny farming village an hour outside of the town.
Nonetheless, short of the villages, no matter where in the country I've gone, no matter how big or small the city or town is, it really is striking just how similar they all are when it comes to architecture and design. And I'm not just talking about the communist blocks. In every place, there is always a "Computer City". Probably even with the same name. There is always a once shiny, now dilapidated mall. But the mall always has the same rows of clothing vendors and dodgy sellers as in your pictures. I originally wrote a sentence that you were just missing the plaza with massed granny dancing, before seeing you had indeed mentioned it at the bottom of your post.
I also have the same appreciation for Chinese KFCs, though in my case the far inferior version I'm comparing them to are in the UK. I assume it's mostly because KFC is still relatively pricy for China: 40-50 kuai is hardly expensive, but compared to the 10kuai you would pay for a bowl of noodles or whatever, it does position them a bit more upmarket. So they can afford to get better quality in comparison to the Western chains, who are very much positioned as the cheapest tier of food around
sohois
21d ago
According to the linked tweet, he lost his job, not merely wages, so you'd have to compensate for future wages lost and possibly reputational damage?
sohois
29d ago
That there are some stories of dogs penetrating humans doesn't really tell us much about this particular story. There are going to be extremes in every species, much as the existence of Usain Bolt doesn't demonstrate that every human can run a 10-second 100m.
The question is: can you train presumably multiple dogs to do it on command? Can they even do it, given the size and difficulty of anal penetration? The extent to which the woman+dog meme is true it would very likely involve vaginal penetration.
I've not seen a single proper source for that 500m claim either, but everyone seems to just accept it at face value.
The one time I saw something like an original image for the claim, it was from an Indian subreddit (or twitter, I can't remember exactly) and had no currency attached. So if it were 500m rupees, that would only be 5m USD. That would make a lot more sense to me
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