Actually Kbin is great for tracking shitheads, which is why I’m able to call this guy out. Downvotes are visible on the activity tab of each post and comment, and this troll loves downvote spam - as you can see, he downvoted my comment above. He’s the kind that will stalk your account and downvote everything to try and get your attention.

In general, 99.9% of the community here is awesome, and there’s a lot of support between users here. It’s actually the best experience I’ve had online in many years (and I’ve been online since the early 90s). One of my goals in calling out the trolls when they decide to target me is to keep the community enjoyable, as I’m quite certain I’m not their only intended victim.

You’ve got one on kbin too - @some_guy - a racist, bigoted fascist who likes to obsessively troll people and try to dox them.

It took me a moment to determine whether or not you were the same person, but unlike him, you can speak in complete sentences. As such, I thought I’d give you and @someguy3 a heads up that your good names are being dragged through the mud.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

Was Obama a dictator?

Clearly not from the context of the article you provided, as they describe how the cages were part of an expansion to a larger facility that corrected a worse detention situation at the border, where there was no air conditioning. Do I think this was a humane design choice? No, but it was an improvement. At the time they were built, family separation wasn’t performed except in extreme circumstances. Nor do I think that Obama was personally involved in the design decisions.

Trump undid that policy, and filled the cages that Obama built. Family separation was the point. And again and again he bragged about it. He was personally involved in the decision, and lauded it.

The Biden administration is still detaining children, but they’ve drastically reduced the number (see the graph on the article provided), and no longer enforces family separation to my knowledge. More work needs to be done here, I agree, but ignoring the scope to say both he and Trump are the same is lazy thinking.

From a purely leftist standpoint (far left in the US), you’re right - the electoral process and two party system as they currently exist will never allow a true progressive to set policy, and we’re stuck in a cycle of choosing between bad and worse. It’s my hope ranked choice voting starts getting some real traction as a counter, but I’m not holding my breath.

So why should you care?

Because in a choice between bad and worse, if you don’t vote, you end up with worse.

Dictators get elected all the time, Hitler being the one most historians refer to. It’s the policies they implement after election that define them as dictators. Trump began the process while in office, but was horribly incompetent at it, as demonstrated by his flailing coup attempt. Moreover, he didn’t have Hitler’s popular support, effectively getting into office on a technicality.

Biden was elected by both the popular and electoral vote. His policies thus far, while centrist, have been built on bi-partisan cooperation where possible, and he’s been as hands off as possible regarding the political elements of the court cases against Trump. He’s also been supportive of civil rights, and has rolled back a number of Trump’s crueler policies.

The same cannot be said of Trump, nor will it be. You can actually boil it down to one definitive action: Dictators lock children in cages.

Trump qualifies under this definition, having been responsible for the detainment of over 500,000. Biden doesn’t qualify under this definition, nor any other. At worst, he’s a middling centrist who is most concerned with keeping the country running, as a President should be.

As to the legitimacy of America’s electoral process, I absolutely agree that it needs to be reinforced, but I don’t believe that there was any substantial fraud in the 2020 election.

I would ideally like to see all voting machines require paper trails, and have universal mail-in voting, as it’s been a resounding success in OR and CA. I would also like to see a restructuring of the electoral college that more accurately reflects the popular vote while still allowing rural areas to have a significant voice - after all, urban needs can easily override rural ones to the detriment of all citizens. In a perfect world, that balance would also be properly reflected in Senate seats, to more properly represent the country as a whole.

If Trump takes office without winning the popular vote, it will very likely lead to civil war. Not because the people will rise up to defend Biden, but because his policies are simultaneously cruel, poorly implemented, unjust, and most importantly to the wealthy who run the country, unprofitable. There were a lot of people in the business community who haven’t forgotten the China trade war of 2020. And the fact of the matter is that with climate change beginning to have a real affect on the economy, an unsteady hand on the wheel is the last thing Wall Street wants.

Dictators that successfully put such policies in place do so after the fascist state is established to quell dissent. Trump can’t even establish a state of denial.

Could he win? Possibly on a electoral vote basis - I think the popular vote is far out of reach for him. But I don’t see the country lasting for long if he does - he doesn’t have the skill to run a fascist state, much less build one, and he’d be completely out of his depth confronting a real uprising. DeSantis, on the other hand, could build such a state and has been somewhat successful in laying the groundwork in Florida. I don’t think Trump will chose him as VP, but if he does, that’s a match made in hell.

Having done a fair amount of homeless outreach in my time, this is the reason why folks who have been on the streets for a while are so vulnerable to paranoia. If you don’t have a place to live in America, you’re under threats of assault like this all the time, from both everyday citizens and the cops. That constant fear and need to always be looking over your shoulder eats people up from the inside out.

I wish folks would realize this when discussing the homeless problem and the associated behavioral issues. Even if you’re not crazy when you hit the streets, a couple of months out there will either make you paranoid or make you dead.

Let’s call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it’s the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys ‘R’ Us:

This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.

With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people

• the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,

and

• the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.

The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.

KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.

More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

…and now it’s come for your local library.

I have to admit, Barbie becoming a Chinese feminist icon was not on my 2023 bingo card. Anyone taking bets on when we’re gonna get a kpop version of this classic?

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

And of course, it’s a political stunt to please Edrogan:

The Kurdish refugee journalist Vedat Yeler has called the eviction and destruction of the Lavrio camp a “NATO gift to [Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan.” The eviction took place only a few days before the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on July 11 in Vilnius, Lithuania, where both Greece and Turkey were to be present. The two NATO members have wrangled over the Cyprus conflict and territorial disputes in the Aegean Sea for many decades. In mutual populist slander, Turkish politicians have been accusing Greece of harboring “terrorists” in the Lavrio camp and pressuring the Greek state to close it down for years. However, since the re-election of both Erdoğan’s Sunni-nationalist regime in Turkey and Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government in Greece in May and June, 2023, respectively, there has been a shift in bilateral relations between the two countries. During a visit in Cyprus a few days before the eviction, the Greek Foreign Minister expressed a commitment to improve relations with Turkey. The attack on Kurdish political refugees in Greece can be understood as an attempt to showcase these efforts before the NATO summit.

Greece should be ashamed of itself - evicting innocent families at gunpoint to appease a foreign autocrat. I’m not familiar with EU law, but I’m hoping someone in the comments has an analysis and legal case for the Lavrio residents - given that the camp was established community for over 50 years, there has to be some legal recourse they can use to push back.

A fine namesake, passed down through the generations, a mark of greatness none could have foretold, for his would be the seed that gave birth to a dynasty, and in 40054, Lord Syntax, Emperor of the Error, takes arms as Twelfth Commander of the Line against the Googlish heretics and their daemonic servers.

chainsword revs

It’s not necessarily unethical, but it’s usually a waste of time. Kinda like Twitter.

Personally I’d prefer not to have someone speaking for me, despite the supposed anonymity of the accounts. If you post any amount of content, it’s likely the account can be linked back to you after the sale, which could prove problematic depending on what the new owner does with it.

But I’m a bit paranoid about such things after experiencing internet stalking. I don’t see anything morally wrong with it, just that consequences from the sale might affect me negatively in the future.

My personal ones for corporate use:

• Never use I when you can use we.

• Even if you’re the only one working on a project, never refer to it as yours. Always refer to it as ours.

• Don’t apologize, present solutions.

• Don’t say “read my fucking email again you goddamn illiterate moron”, say “As previously noted in our communications…”