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Grok will let you make anything right now.
Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.
I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.
Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.
Viscerallly I kind of get it, but legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”? I try not to be too much of a libertarian autist, but I have a hard time not seeing this as a tool which can be misused like any other.
Or the printing press which allows heretics to attack the honor of the holy Catholic Church. Let's pray this doesn't cause schisms and violence.
The Founding Fathers used hand-cranked printing presses and never anticipated there would someday be fully automatic assault presses.
I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British. So the printing presses used by the Founding Fathers did a lot of harm even without being "automatic assault presses".
Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better off than the UK or canada or india or aus.
Australia's doing worse on a couple of metrics (gun control and free speech, although we're not at European levels of hate speech laws), but a lot better on a bunch of others. In addition to what @AshLael said (no cities degenerated into chaos!), our politics are also far more stable; another civil war is unthinkable here.
I'd put Australia first on that list of five countries in terms of my preference to live in; the USA would probably get second, because Canada and the UK have serious problems of their own and India of course is a third-world country, but seriously Australia's not that bad.
After Australia's reaction to covid, i would not put it behind British state control. You guys were chasing down teens and harrasing women stopping on park benches, and restricting freedom of movement and curfews and 'papers pleasing' all over the place. It was insane watching it from the states. How quickly we forget.
The usa is not "close to civil war" That is mostly a larp for the very far right and left to fantasize about in very online spaces. It has about as much chance as "The Purge" or "Running man" at becoming reality. The country is pretty well mixed in geographically despite the voting maps that show the final results.
I also ask, were you born in Australia or was it a choice to move there?
That's not the part that makes Australia leaps and bounds ahead of Britain, indeed. Britain seems to be having a bad time of the culture war recently, what with the rioting, and I hear there are also economic issues.
It would take a big spark, but there are a few plausible ones. A hard hit on the debt ceiling (literally) defunding the police for an extended period. Obvious election fixing. Maybe court-packing. At least one other. None of these things are assured, by any means, but none of them are that unlikely either.
Born here. Think I'm fourth-generation.
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What does that have to do with the risk of civil war? The American Civil War was actually rather unusual, as civil wars go, in its clear geographic lines. Many civil wars don't involve secession attempts.
Compare, for example, the English Civil War(s). Yes, there were some geographic gradients — northwest vs. southeast, but even more city-vs-countryside — but only partially; and, AIUI, the two sides were still "plenty well mixed in," at least initially. Another, more recent civil war of "city-vs-rural" character was the Nepali Civil War. Or try looking at maps of the decades-long conflict in Colombia.
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I would put Australia as a serious contender for #2 country to live in, but I'm curious what the rest of your list looks like?
Who's your #1?
NZ I'd probably put on par with Australia or maybe a hair below due to marginally-greater levels of SJ.
Outside the Anglosphere it gets more complicated (and where I'd personally prefer to live starts to diverge from where I think would be objectively good places to live, as I'm decent at French and have a foggy idea about other Romance languages/Mandarin/Japanese but am only fluent in English). I've also a less clear idea of what's going on there. But of the five main Anglosphere countries I'd say only the UK is having enough trouble to potentially lose top-5 status, because Western Continental Europe is clearly worse in terms of SJ/ethnic conflict issues than anywhere else in the Anglosphere, Free Asia aside from the rather-uptight Singapore is also known as "ground zero bait for WWIII", and basically everywhere else is notably poorer.
I haven't the foggiest idea which African/South American/non-East Asian countries are better/worse than their neighbours. Russia clearly beats China but I'd take the First World over either, and obviously North Korea is terrible.
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I know right? I was just thinking the other day, man it really sucks having a secure border, a quarter of the crime, half the national debt, policy set by elected officials instead of unelected judges, clean cities, etc, etc.
When we talk about a secure border in the US, we're talking about preventing the wrong people from getting IN, not citizens from getting OUT as in Australia a few years ago.
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Canada and the UK are poor compared to the US. And nanny states in the worst ways.
Our unelected Supreme Court is a powerful defense against the obvious failure modes other Anglo countries suffer from.
An unelected Supreme Court is not useful unless you also happen to have a powerful Constitution, a people that still believe in means something, and a Federalist Society.
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Yes, but Singapore is better than the US especially when you adjust for the difficulty level they are playing at. The US has massive land advantages over Canada (too cold) and India (too hot and dangerous neighbors).
Singapore is one city. Not a sprawling world power. They can't be properly compared.
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Britain and Canada are the way they are because they imported American wokeness without having any of the American cultural antibodies to wokeness like freedom of speech or the right to bear arms. If America never existed the point would be moot.
Britain was on the hard downturn way before american media "wokeness" was a thing.
Divorced from politics America’s extremely bountiful natural resources mean it is always likely to be wealthier than Britain. The same is true of Australia, which has politics (and a “nanny state”) closer to Britain’s but which is closer to the US in terms of income because of natural resources. Both countries have been richer than the UK since the 1880s and 1890s, before Britain’s decline as a world power accelerated in earnest.
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With apologies to Voltaire, if wokeness did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.
I don’t think so. Wokeness emerged out of the uniquely American experience of, “oh shit, we have to live next to all these black people we imported now,” which was then imported to Europe after we bailed them out in the World Wars.
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