I need everyone to understand how BIG of a theft this is from artists, from all artists.
This Is War
“It doesn’t hurt their competitive advantage at all to tell people what kind of videos they train on and how many they trained on,” Arrigoni said. “The only thing that it would really impact would be their relationship to creators.”
The landlords don't like it when they have to tell us how they finance their ownership of all our homes.
They're lying. They weren't tricked. Trump openly and repeatedly showed how he felt about immigrants of all kinds. Everyone knew it, everyone knows it, everyone will always know it.
This is a cruel delusion you tell yourself, obviously the people you are referring to exist and there are lots of them and they should be shamed the way you are shaming them but there are far more scared, desperate people who feel as total strangers in a crowd of faces that stare at them as if they don't fit in that you casually throw under the bus along with the genuine fascists.. and make that mistake at our peril my friend.
Plenty of people were tricked, no not everybody knew it, heck tons of people didn't even know Biden had dropped out of the presidential race when they went into vote, and no matter how you feel about it I simply will not let you make negative conclusions about immigrants and other minorities that were tricked into voting against their interests without any actual evidence to back it up.
Cite your sources, or stop claiming that immigrants and others weren't tricked. This is a toxic narrative and it must be stopped in its tracks.
It is our job as leftists to speak to these people who are afraid and say "don't take my word for it, see how these people who claim to support you are trying to kill, maim and destroy you and your families", and NOT our job to lambast these people for entering into a cruel battle royale for reasons we could only really ever judge if we were in their shoes and doing badly.
but I make left
Yes that too, I think I would describe the foreign policy strategy of the Biden administration as "keep Russia from winning too quickly and make money from it".
I don't think I would describe the Trump administration's foreign policy as that. More like, the Trump administration wants Putin to win the war, but can't figure out how to make that politically and logistically happen without dropping the ball so hard it blows off the legs of the Republican and Democratic parties' entrenched power structures.
The tensions with the Iran-Israel war, if it can be stopped before it keeps growing (a big or rather possibly long expired if) may provide the political distraction for Putin and Trump to manuever so that Russia can literally or essentially end the war without losing face, but that all hinges on the people involved in these plans being competent which we all know is a folly to believe in.
No, I think the overwhelming VAST majority of all of the money being made by U.S. connected defense industry companies happening right now is happening in profitting off of the Palestinian Genocide and selling security theater to Israel. To a stunning degree, I bet the graphs and figures that will come out of this time period by academics studying the US military industrial complex will be intimidatingly shocking in the sheer size and scale of the movements of death they quantify.
The number of bombs (almost all of them supplied if not directly by the US, indirectly by the US) dropped on Gaza since October 7th is by the numbers one of the most horrific acts of war ever done.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_bombing_of_the_Gaza_Strip
As of Dec. 22, 20,057 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war started, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. During the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took about 240 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israel.
The intensity of bombing in Gaza is something the researchers said they've never seen before.
"It's just the sheer speed of the damage," said Van Den Hoek. "All of these other conflicts that we're talking about [Ukraine, Syria, Yemen] are years long. This is a little over two months. And the sheer tempo of the bombing — not just the scale of it but the sheer tempo — there's nothing that tracks [like] this in such a short timeframe."
The two researchers have worked extensively on Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
"The extent and the pace of damage in Gaza only compares to the heaviest-hit cities that we've seen in Ukraine," said Scher. "And those were much smaller areas. Mariupol and Bakhmut by area are smaller and the built-area density and clustering of structures was also much less."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/israel-gaza-bombing-hamas-civilian-casualties-1.7068647
https://www.statswithsasa.com/2024/06/20/israels-historic-devastation-of-gaza/
powerslides around the corner in a gas guzzling stupid american muscle car that can barely turn to save its life because the engine is too big and heavy
I step out of the car and yell "NONE OF THIS SHIT MATTERS COMPARED TO CLIMATE CHANGE YOU IDIOTS"
I then point to my shitty car and say "I am an environmentalist and I am DRIVING THAT to make a point that at this point me driving THAT piece of shit is irrelevant because we are SO FUCKED right now by Climate Change!"
I get back into my stupid af muscle car and slam the transmission into the raw torque of the engine as clumsily as possible while I chant out the window
CLIMATE CHANGE CLIMATE CHANGE CLIMATE CHANGE CLIMATE CHANGE
My license plate says "E8MYA55HNRYKSSNGR" which is way too long but whatever I am british or something....
I mean seriously, yes Nuclear Weapons are scary but do you know how scientists quantify the amount of excess heat energy in the ocean right now in units that can be compared a la the way astronomers must rectify incomprehensible regimes of force into things that can be compared?
They do it in hiroshima bombs worth of heat energy, in the thousands of hiroshima bombs worth of heat energy.
Is this considered Leaf peeping because I feel like that would be more precisely being a tourist in an area purely to spy on used older Nissa Leafs whose batteries are beginning to reach the end of their life?
Also, the US needs a cottage industry of car mechanics willing to replace old EV vehicle batteries with newer/refreshed batteries because why would we not be doing this...
I don't mean to distract from turning over a new Leaf, just some thoughts I had.
This shit is getting so confusing because it is clear that at least a good chunk of the US leadership doesn't want Russia to lose the war, but Russia is now decisively losing the war against Ukraine even though the political conditions are perfect for Russia to declare victory if Russia could just actually not disastorously fail on the battlefield against Ukraine.. but Ukraine now has a domestically produced 155mm self propelled armored artillery gun (~150 currently fielded, with something like 20+ a month being produced) and recently countries announced providing long term 155mm nato artillery shell supplies (not the US, but it doesn't matter, the amount of 155mm artillery shells floating around in various stockpiles in countries much more reasonable and amenable to limiting the power of authoritarian empires than the US currently is a LOT) so the idea that Russia can actually pull off anything that could be politically spun as a military victory even in Russia or the US is becoming more and more remote even as Russia basically bought the US government without even having to really buy it which again is very confusing.
The thing is, I don't actually think Putin desires to continue an offensive war in Russia for that much longer, or rather if he does he is a fool because he will his ass kicked by Ukraine increasingly going forward... so trying to interpret what is going on here is very confusing even as it is still brutally simple for Ukranians who just want to live a normal life and are being held in hell.
Ultimately, I think the absurdity of this situation is being sustained by the Ukranian military and resistance and whoever is helping them around the world absolutely, as I said, kick the ass of confident authoritarians in a way that makes their political theater start to badly match up with the reality being obscured underneath. Ukraine wasn't supposed to win this war, it wasn't supposed to even really resist Russia this long. Ooops!
Well, now you have the Bohdana to contend with any time you want to blitz Ukranian territory with your mechanized troops (and you thought you the Ukranian drones were the things to fear most wait til you hear from their mother...) ... soo maybe this was all a bad idea for you Russia?
Now is a good time for Putin to end the war, which is hilarious in the confusion of how it looks like now on paper is a good time for Putin to declare victory in the war (in a broader geopolitical sense, not just the invasion of Ukraine).
Yeah but has anybody as dense as Trump come out of Tehran?
Damn you sexy stevedores you
I would but the people in the panopticon tower might be watching right now.
Yes but I think Life is a question, and it can be answered by many different methods some of which are very difficult to prove if they fully answer the question or not.. or impossible to prove at this moment.
Here is a blog post that I think does a good job of describing Christopher Alexander's (he says non-exhaustive and that the number of properties isn't overly special, these can be divided or smushed together into more or less rules depending on your perspective) properties of things that have life.
https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/03/24/christopher-alexander-the-fifteen-properties-in-nature/
Don't treat this as pseudo-science trying to masquerade as science, treat this as a very intelligent architect (as in building architect) making some very compelling points through the lens of art in a way that I think has scientific implications once people figure out how better to translate these ideas into hypotheses that can be tested and such.
Yes, but also at the same time this represents a major shift in military industrial power away from the US, even if a dizzying amount of US defense industry companies are profiting off the process of moving the international "western" military industrial complex away from being based primarily around the axis of US power.
There are companies like Microsoft, Google and others that are hedging their bets by occupying prime spots in the Trump US authoritarian hegemony, but it is ultimately a losing proposition no matter what, all it does is buy these dying companies some more time to figure out how to bullshit their way out of the tyrant's inner circle without becoming a recognizable and culpable target of the rest of the world's moral conscience.