Hmm, I guess theoretically. I bet towns or businesses close to eachother over a state border do something to equalize prices. Or I guess the businesses in the lower taxed state would just raise their prices because they can and still get business.
Yeah, that was definitely the rationale. Satoshi added the message, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” to the first Bitcoin block. In the early days, most of the community were Tea Party, Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, “abolish the Fed” types. There was a lot of anti-Fed propaganda floating around at that time. There was a big overlap with gold-bugs and Bitcoiners, and Bitcoin’s “mining” decay curve was inspired by gold’s.
You still pay taxes in those states, just not income. Most people will pay more taxes in those states compared to places like California (not the rich, of course). Texas chose a system of sales taxes (state and local), which act like flat-taxes, which put more burden on lower income people.
Yeah, I’ve been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don’t recommend using it and it’s turned off by default. Haven’t tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.
General strike with clear, specific demands would work. Easier said than done, especially since most workers in the US aren’t already organized; but it would probably work. It would probably even work if all current major unions striked (a lot of union members are “conservative” though, so if it was seen as political rather than practical, it could break solidarity).
Pocket guns are harder to shoot accurately because of the short distance between the rear and front sights, and recoil is worse. But yeah, should be fine. I really like the compactness of my P938 (discontinued now). P365 is probably also good (higher cap).
The page uses canvas, and Librewolf blocks some canvas functionality by default for privacy reasons. You should see a little icon to the left of the url that you can click to allow the site to run correctly.
For me. I think everything is physical, and there’s always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the “choices” you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.
Communism is a stateless, classless society, and more like a utopian end-goal to strive for. But, yeah, parties that label themselves communist tend to be of the authoritarian type. Failure of certain strategies and implementations doesn’t mean an entire ideology is bad. Democracy failed with Rome, and wasn’t implemented on a large scale again for ~1800 years; and I think most people consider democracy a pretty good system now.
Yeah, that’s what I mean, the workers could go in the factory, produce the goods, and sell them, if the company did not use violence. It’s not clear where the factory came from in this hypothetical. The community could’ve built it, it could have been abandoned, or the company could’ve claimed they “owned” it (which is not possible in the society, so it would be seized).
Well, it’s unlikely the entire world will turn anarchist all at once, and the modern supply chain is global, so the anarchist community would trade for what they need from outside the community. Or they may choose to go anarcho-primitivism I guess. I think some remote indigenous tribes we have now could be considered anarcho-primitivist. The most successful anarcho-socialist community would probably be the Zapatistas.
The company would need violence. There’s no reason for workers to work in a factory for less money than their goods are sold for, and there’s no reason for the company to pay workers more than the goods are sold for. Without violence the workers could just produce and sell the goods themselves and ignore the company.
Lol. This comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I still don’t know if it’s logically correct from a non-physicalist POV, but I did come to the conclusion that I lean toward eliminative materialism and illusionism. Now I don’t have to think about consciousness anymore because it’s just a trick our brains play on us (consciousness always seemed poorly defined to me anyways).
I guess when AI appears to be sufficiently human or animal-like in its cognitive abilities and emotions, I’ll start worrying about its suffering.
Global South basically just means underdeveloped/developing nations.
Capitalism results in the rich, mostly in developed countries, extracting resources for low prices and exploiting desperate workers for low wages in developing countries. The developing countries get little in return. Some of these countries have been able to muster some protectionism to mitigate so much transfer of wealth out if their country (such as China). Developed nations have purposely kept some developing nations destabilised to maximize exploitation.
I think the term fits fine. The surpluses go to the owners of the means of production (barring “state capitalism” I suppose). These surpluses are actually the true value of the workers’ labor that the owners take, which is why I think capitalism is immoral, but that’s not really related to my point. The system incentivizes the owners to maximize these surpluses, which means paying the workers as little as possible, and charging customers as much as possible. I.e. the system incentivizes greed.
Social democracies are absolutely better than unchecked capitalism, but it’s my opinion that they’ll never be able to stop from regressing (they have been, as I understand it). Because of the owners’ place in the hierarchy and outsized wealth and influence, they will always be able to push governments to their benefit, and then it just keeps snowballing as they gain more wealth and influence. Admittedly, very strong unions can counteract this, and were responsible for them becoming social democracies in the first place.
Great. Now we have barred-out LLMs.
Yeah, those were the problematic cases they highlighted. Image/video generation usually involves generating many permutations, perhaps adjusting prompts, and just keeping/editing the parts they want. The Trump video is likely made up of many edited clips from many different prompts, after discarding many more, not just one prompt. The song may be one prompt; haven’t played around with music generation myself.
OpenAI released much more impressive demo videos last year, and I think Sora is available to the public now. I don’t think most proprietary models/systems allow you to use public figures though, so it’s probably an open-source system.
Oligarchs replace most government functions with private entities that they have equity in and funnel tax dollars into their own companies. It looks like they’re trying to cause a depression too, so they can buy everything up for cheap (farms, homes, etc). I think they’re stupid, but not stupid enough to not realize an economic depression coupled with gutting social safety nets will lead to massive crime waves and riots; so I’m guessing they’re planning on a police state and work camps for people they arrest (think that’s what they’re going to do with many of the immigrants too).
I’ve heard it postulated they are realigning with Russia and other dictators because we’d lose our normal allies if we became such a society. And they probably have very lucrative deals with Russia as well.
I sucks we don’t have a good, inspiring opposition party or something to lead or rally around. Without that, anger will just manifest as unorganized, unproductive riots and violence. “Conservatives” are still pretty brainwashed too; believing whatever they’re told by media. They will support the government gunning down and enslaving “criminals,” at this point in time. I’d hope that changes when things get hard, but media will work hard to redirect the blame.