QC is worth catching up on. As Jeph got older his work got more mature, more overtly progressive, and aggressively more queer. It’s the only webcomic from back in the day that I still read daily, because it never fails to brighten my morning a little bit.

You can always be bummed out about ageing. It’s OK to mourn the loss of an identity that you’d grown into. I’m getting my first grey hairs in, and its not easy seeing that in the mirror. It brings a lot of complicated feelings. Humanity has spent our entire existence grappling with the finality of time.

But my wife? She loves those grey hairs. She thinks they make me look even sexier. Time is unrelenting, and brutal. But love doesn’t care about time. Love, and joy, and friendship and kindness… These things will happen at every point in your life, if you let them.

Yeah, most of the people I know who got into relationships young ended up getting out of those relationships sooner or later. I can only think of one exception. But the relationships I see people building in their middle age are so much stronger and healthier.

OK, serious talk for anyone under thirty who is really relating to this; you don’t even know who you are before you hit your thirties.

I’m dead fucking serious here. Under twenty, you’re basically still in the oven, and your twenties are basically spent figuring out who and what the fuck you are. Thirty is when the good shit starts. Thirty is when you start to finally have a grasp on who you are as a human being. Dating in your thirties is so much fucking better. You’re past the idiocy and the drama and you’re into the part where actual human adults learn to understand each other.

Please, please get out of this mindset that anyone over thirty is an ancient crone. You’re not even out of the fucking tutorial yet.

So you primary in Dems who will support ranked choice. This is .ml, surely you’ve all heard of entryism?

Agreed, and I think the context of saying “Something 2…” makes it entirely clear that it’s nothing to do with their fascist bullshit.

The meaning of words is always contextual.

Absolutely deranged that American voters think Donald “Every business I’ve run has failed or been convicted of serious criminal fraud” Trump is the better choice for the economy.

I’ll bet your boot process is a lot shorter too.

The problem is that even the specific things they’re good at, they don’t do well enough to justify spending actual money on. And when I say “actual money”, I’m not talking about the hilariously discounted prices AI companies are offering in an effort to capture an audience.

A bot that can do a job reasonably well, but still needs a human to check their work is, from an employment perspective, still an employee, just now with some very expensive helper software. And because of the inherent unreliability of LLMs, a problem that many top figures in the industry are finally admitting may never be solved, they will always need a human to check their work. And that human has to be competent enough to do the job without the AI, in order to figure out where and how it went wrong.

GenAI was supposed to put us all out of work, and maybe one day it will, but the current state of the technology isn’t remotely close to being good enough to do that. It turns out that while bots can very effectively look and sound like humans, they’re not remotely capable of thinking like humans, and that actually matters when your chatbot starts promising customers discounts that don’t actually exist, to name one real example. What was treated as being the last ten percent is actually looking more and more like ninety-nine percent of the work in terms of creating something that can effectively replace a human being.

(As an aside, I can’t help but feel that a big part of this epic faceplant arises from Silicon Valley fully ingesting the bullshit notion of “unskilled labour”. Turns out working the drive thru at McDonald’s is a more complicated job than people think, including McDonald’s themselves. We’ve so undervalued the skills of vast swathes of our population that we were easily deluded into thinking they could all be replaced by simple machines. While some of those tasks certainly can, and will, be automated, there are some human elements - especially in conflict resolution - that are really hard to replace)

“What are the chances…”

Approximately 100%.

That doesn’t mean that the slide will absolutely continue. There may be some fresh injection of hype that will push investor confidence back up, but right now the wind is definitely going out of the sails.

The core issue, as the Goldman - Sachs report notes, is that AI is currently being valued as a trillion dollar industry, but it has not remotely demonstrated the ability to solve a trillion dollar problem.

No one selling AI tools is able to demonstrate with confidence that they can be made reliable enough, or cheap enough, to truly replace the human element, and without that they will only ever be fun curiosities.

And that “cheap enough” part is critical. It is not only that GenAI is deeply unreliable, but also that it costs a truly staggering amount of money to operate (OpenAI are burning something like $10 billion a year). What’s the point in replacing an employee you pay $10 an hour to handle customer service issues with a bot that costs $5 for every reply it generates?

The reasonable way to approach this problem would have been to ask a follow up question, rather than bitching at someone for not answer in the exact format you required. You’re the beggar here, you get zero fucking say in how much or how little people choose to help you.

Alberta (where the oil sands are located) is known as “Texas North” up here. There’s more than a few reasons why you don’t want to be there if you’re queer. Or trans. Or any skin color other white. Or a woman. Or…

Fuck that’s cool. You lucky bastard.

Seize all his assets, nationalize his companies.

The fact that we even talk about how to “reign in” billionaires is ridiculous. No one should be a billionaire. No one should be allowed to have total autocratic control over vast swathes of humanity’s resources. Every dollar he has represents human labour and natural resources; things that belong to all of us (or none of us depending on your perspective).

Yeah, the crime thing is bullshit. All of their objections are bullshit. Canada is having absolutely zero problems from legalizing weed. It’s been a huge positive here.

The ultimate end result looks a lot like Star Trek. A fully automated, post-scarcity, fully post-capitalist society.

The question is simply what the stepping stones are to getting there. The fact that you can’t just throw out what we have overnight is precisely the point I was making.

There’s no one right answer to the question, but a lot of very smart people have some very good ideas.

The easiest starting point is to look at what everyone most obviously needs. Some basic requirements can easily be laid out; everyone should have housing, sustenance, healthcare, education, and sufficient monetary resources to meet any other basic needs (including emotional and psychological wellbeing; ie, access to entertainment, the time and money to socialize, etc). These are the basic requirements of freeing humans from the yoke of capitalism, so we should endeavour to build a society where these needs, are met for everyone. A government is the most efficient system we have found for organizing resources at scale, so there’s no obvious reason not to continue to have one.

Mechanisms will be needed to prevent individuals maintaining control over capital, because we’ve learned that that very clearly doesn’t work. Nationalizing everything is one approach, but we can also look to strong (most likely mandatory) unions, or the use of worker owned co-ops (Mondragon in Spain is a fascinating example).

Simply talking about “communism vs socialism” is far too reductive. Post-capitalist economics is a vastly more complex field. It’s been over a century since Marx. I suggest checking out Unlearning Economics on YouTube (https://youtube.com/@unlearningeconomics9021?si=947khNPxgU7OppRQfor) some really good introductory material. If you want a more advanced introduction, McMaster University hosted an excellent lecture series (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLUWMt2NZLRmKY_kEiLc-hvOcyOlgE4N&si=4O-Z7tphB5BUcrYu)

However, reforms are still important, because it is exponentially harder for the working class to organize when they are preoccupied with the essential business of survival.

Reforms do not solve capitalism, but they loosen its grip such that we can better educate and organise people towards the goal of its eventual destruction.

Equally importantly, reforms help people to imagine a world without capitalism. When you live your entire life firmly emedded in its grasp, capitalism seems inescapable and inevitable. Larger scale reforms like universal basic income would not, in and of themselves, achieve the goal of eliminating capitalism, but they would allow the average person to acclimate to the underlying ideals of a post-capitalist world, whilst vastly alleviating the immediate harms of capitalism, and freeing up the time and energy of the average worker towards building a better world. Unions do not solve capitalism, but they reduce harm, and act as a powerful political force that can be leveraged towards anti-capitalist goals. Student loan debt forgiveness does not solve capitalism, but it empowers the working class with capital of our own that can be put towards the greater fight. Many, many more examples could be given.

Do not forget that the eventual goal is that capitalism is killed, not tamed, but do not ever dismiss the importance of even the smallest reforms in the process of achieving that end.

My wife would agree I suspect. She’s transfem, and basically considered herself a lesbian until she met me.

Yeah, when I met my wife the first time it was the opposite of exhausting. I felt like I could keep talking all night.

As a bisexual guy, this is exactly why I mostly dated women.