OpenAI is full of shit, as usual. They want engagement and they need revenue. They’ll do whatever it takes to get those things. Political ideology and sociological ramifications are an afterthought.

no one eats fat, or carbs, or protein. We eat foods

Okay, but pork chops and pasta have very different proportions of the above. You can definitely structure your diet to weight towards one or the other.

In the real world we get all three together every meal, and if you’re not, it means you’re following a diet that you probably shouldn’t.

Angry JBP noises

More seriously, there’s plenty of dumb fad diets, to be sure. And now we’ve got a host of medications for basically shitting out all your calories faster than you can eat them to lose weight. But there’s definitely a problem in our general food delivery system, especially with regards to fats and sugars in fast foods.

Like, you can be blase about food composition. But there’s some shit that simply shouldn’t ever be in your diet (carbonated sodas, heavy preservatives in baked goods, lead). A lot of the “fad” aspects of diets tend to take these fundamentals and extrapolate them out to the extremes.

So you have people running away from freshly made rigatoni because it shares some of the fundamentals with fast food french fries.

IT’S AN UNHEALTHY LIFESTYLE! I’M ONLY MENTIONING YOUR WEIGHT BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT YOU!

Thank you, but I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different options and decided that this is…

YOU’RE GOING TO DIE BEFORE YOU TURN 60! WHAT WILL YOUR WIFE AND KIDS THINK?!!

Plutocrats preparing for the apocalypse while staffing every town cryer job in the neighborhood with a guy who screams “Rain has always happened! Flooding is scientifically impossible! The people installing buoys on their homes over there are the reason you haven’t seen the sun in a week.”

No country devoted to the common good could ever unleash such cultural carnage upon the world.

The biter irony of Gangnam Style was in its original portrayal (embraced by the OG music video) mocking the faux-decadence and rampant conspicuous consumerism of the Gangnam district. Then Psy blows up, becomes the epitome of the Nouveau Riche he was parodying, hooks up with his lead dancer, and just shamelessly embraces the same Gangnam lifestyle.

Gangnam style made me prefer North Korea to South Korea.

I mean, North Korea has its own brand of conspicuous over-consumption. It’s just couched in the language of Juche socio-economic policies. The two countries’ leaders are trapped in a shameless cycle of one-upsmanship and its been toxic for them both in different ways.

Sometimes you have to embrace Death Of The Artist and just enjoy things for what they are, rather than what they were intended to be. If you stand around thinking about the historical context of the Arc de Triomphe or the Great Wall of China or the Hoover Dam, you’re going to have a bad time.

Empty Head. No Thoughts. Just be at peace and enjoy what is.

Can’t do anything that might negatively impact business.

Very useful for job hunting because it’s swarming with head hunters.

LinkedIn gets you access to humans who will help you navigate the shitty HR AI that most big businesses integrate into their job intake process.

Not a terrible resource when you’re actually looking for a job. But that’s because all the automated HR intakes are a dumpster fire, more than anything headhunters bring in value.

Nice

What if I just use AI to generate all my content and then put an intern in a chair to launder it as original human thoughts?

community-policing and disarmament of the first-contact-point is absolutely something that can and (sometimes) does happen

What I’m seeing around the police harassment of Palestine Action protestors doesn’t reflect that.

Nevermind the persistent obsession with Knife Crime, which has become the subject of hysterical news coverage for decades over there.

The Rwanda genocide wasn’t carried out with guns as the primary weapon. It was machetes and fire.

It was volumes of people, primarily. An oppressed underclass poisoned with fascist ideology who overwhelmed they’re wealthier tribal neighbors not unlike how the French ended up butchering their aristocracy at the end of the 18th century.

Had the Tutsis been more heavily armed, they might have given as well as they took.

The first and second images are fantasy.

Even if you concede “Knights exist” and “Astronauts exist”, the idea that you’re going to be a knight much less a fucking astronaut relative to being a subsistence farmer or a digital desk jockey…

How come everyone wants to imagine the future is great and the past was great

That’s the other joke, though. Both these images are of people marching off to war. Presumably, these knights are going to the Holy Land to bake in the hot sun and shit themselves to death from cholera. Meanwhile, the interstellar colony ships are going to be rationing everything from calories to moles of oxygen.

The modern era guy doing a simple 9-5 desk job, getting more wealth in return in a week than an knight errant or an astronaut earns in a month, then going home to fuck his hot wife and play catch with his adorable kids has it pretty great by comparison.

Do artists benefit more from ad-dense, algorithm gamed, corporate controlled media outlets kicking them a few bucks every month?

Or is a guerilla campaign of populist free-at-download distribution better for long term concert attendance and merch sales?

On the whole, there is minimal moral difference between an individual playing an album on Spotify or lifting it wholesale from a seedy site. The actual difference is that if you are pirating or file-sharing, you’re about 30% likelier to actually buy music

There’s a presumption that individuals are less likely to harm themselves or others if they are denied the tools to do so.

Whether you’re dealing with demilitarization (Palestinians are currently being asked to give up any and all remaining weapons, as a condition of permanent peace with Israel while Russia is asking much the same of Ukraine) or local disarment (Reagan’s Mulford Act seeking to deny the Black Panthers the right to Open Carry) or the Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1996 (prohibits those with a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction from possessing firearms) the expectation is that no weapons means a lower and less lethal instance of future violence.

Generally speaking, the idea’s popularity hinges on whether you believe taking guns away will leave you safer (because a suspect cohort is disarmed) or more vulnerable (because the folks doing disarment intend to do you harm after you’ve been stripped of a means of self-defense)

I believe weapons should be banned and that crime should not exist in the first place

Folks fearful of dictatorship can see crime as a necessity for survival in a country that has made it a public policy to torment them.

On the flip side, “weapons should be banned” never seems to apply to the police or the military. There’s a certain attitude of “if disarment makes us safer, you disarm first”.

Try thrift shops, used CD stores, etc if you want to buy.

If you’re buying secondhand, that also does nothing for the artists. You might as well just pirate at that point, unless you’re deeply into the vinyl scene or something

I doubt they notice. Most artists either get income directly from fans at concerts, via merch, or through explicit patronage (Bandcamp, Patreon, etc).

The money they get from streaming isn’t remotely enough to support a professional career. Streaming is more about promotion - to get you in the door at the next concert or promote a product with a real revenue stream - than actual income.

https://1337x.to/ has been my piracy go-to for years and they’ve rarely missed.

Potter is more of a rip off of Lord of the Rings imo.

I’ve always had it pegged as a rip off of James and the Giant Peach, tbh. At the very least, there’s a ton Rowling drew from Roald Dahl (including the raging bigotry).

I’ve also heard her accused of ripping off Earthsea.

Orphan who has to stop a once defeated but now returning dark lord, via destroying object(s) that contain his soul, with the help of a wizard and companions, all while evading the evil followers of the dark lord.

This is 90% of D&D games, though. Voldemort is a classic Lich with a twist. She could have written a first draft of this book in high school using the 2e TSR book.

It’s so easy to claim she’s plagiarized the material because the whole book is so comically generic.