Xenophobia and racism, mostly. And yes, it’s a solution to the aging demographic crisis many countries face (at least in the medium-term).

I remember seeing a video of a presentation back in the Bush years by some neo-con group that advocated for immigration to Pentagon or DoD officials or something. The argument for immigration was mostly the same: we have an aging population, so we could integrate immigrants (who are statistically younger) to solve this issue. I didn’t agree much with the broader idea of the presentation though. The broader idea was that there were still some parts of the world not a part of the global U.S.-led hegemony (mostly the middle-east and Africa), and we must spread democracy and capitalism to them. The argument was that globalism/capitalism ensures peace, and that both WWI and WWII happened because globalism was falling apart shortly before those wars. So, to ensure world peace, we need to globalize the entire earth and bring all countries into the the U.S.-led hegemony, even if that means starting wars to spread democracy, lol.

Poor countries, such as the countries people are immigrating from, have a more terrible environment and higher birth-rates.

If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.

Wealth isn’t zero sum, it’s created all the time (and at a rate literally not achievable simply by underpaying employees, to pre-refute the expected response).

Explain. In a very basic sense wealth is created by acquiring resources (some of which are finite), then adding value through labor. So, the way I see it, the workers are creating the wealth, then the business/owners/investors/shareholders take a significant portion of the employees’ surplus value of labor. I.e. there is a pie of value/wealth that an employee creates, and the more of that pie the business/owners/investors/shareholders get, the less the workers/wealth-creators get.

Lol, good catch.

Wary of the bill. Seems like every bill involving stuff like this is either designed to erode privacy or for regulatory capture.

Edit: spelling

“In an unjust society the only place for a just man is prison.”

Here are some that I’ve liked (haven’t played them in years though):

• Warsow
• Red Eclipse
• Speed Dreams
• OpenTTD
• LinCity
• FreeOrion
• Oolite

It’s also trained on data people reasonably expected would be private (private github repos, Adobe creative cloud, etc). Even if it was just public data, it can still be dangerous. I.e. It could be possible to give an LLM a prompt like, “give me a list of climate activists, their addresses, and their employers” if it was trained on this data or was good at “browsing” on its own. That’s currently not possible due to the guardrails on most models, and I’m guessing they try to avoid training on personal data that’s public, but a government agency could make an LLM without these guardrails. That data could be public, but would take a person quite a bit of work to track down compared to the ease and efficiency of just asking an LLM.

I use LLMs just about every day. It’s better than web-search for certain things, and is useful for some coding tasks. I think they’re over-hyped by some people, but they are useful.

Decarboxylation happens when heat is applied (smoking or vaping, for example), turning THCA into delta-9 THC.

Delta-9 gummies are the real-deal. I can’t tell the difference between THCA flower and regular flower (I’m pretty sure it’s just uncured bud). They also make THCA concentrates.

Yeah, that’s my thinking as well. All these billionaires seem to be becoming doomsday preppers (Zuck, Altman, etc).

After reading about “effective accelerationism,” which many of these people seem to subscribe to, I think they’re worried “technocapitalism” and AI will cause a collapse of society. I.e. they’re purposely funding and promoting projects they think will cause a societal collapse. It’s a really wierd cult-like ideology and worldview. I think they’ve fallen for their own grifts.

But yeah, I’m personally more worried about the destruction of U.S. institutions (which Trump and Republicans publicly admit they plan to do), and the potential social unrest, federal-state conflict, and economic havoc it may cause.

Surprised shooting ranges aren’t on this list.

In my area, drought and heat have been so bad the last few years, a lot of native trees are dying. You could try reforesting with trees native to a dryer, nearby area, but that’s generally thought of as bad practice, and there’s no guarantee they would do well in that particular soil. It seems like the climate in my area is changing to be incapable of supporting forests.

Yeah, back then it took me 6 months of applying to minimum wage jobs every day to finally get a job at McDonald’s.

Yeah, plenty of women are shit people and abusers as well. Sucks that it isn’t typically taken seriously by society.

(I’m not one of those men’s-rights people. The reason abused men aren’t taken seriously is because of harmful gender expectations and toxic-masculinity).

The Stable Diffusion algorithm is strange, and I’m surprised someone thought of it, and surprised it works.

IIRC it works like this: Stable Diffusion starts with an image of completely random noise. The idea is that the text prompt given to the model describes a hypothetical image where the noise was added. So, the model tries to “predict,” given the text, what the image would look like if it was denoised a little bit. It does this repeatedly until the image is fully denoised.

So, it’s very easy for the algorithm to make a “mistake” in one iteration by coloring the wrong pixels black. It’s unable to correct it’s mistake in later denoising iterations, and just fills in the pixels around it with what it thinks looks plausible. And, it can’t really “plan” ahead of time, it can only do one denoising operation at a time.

Hmm, I suspect the pro-Russian Christian people you’re seeing online are extremely-online people with mental issues, or are a part of Russia’s disinfo campaigns, or both. Most of my family are evangelical Christians, and are not pro-Russia (but, are pretty crazy about other things). Many of my friends and associates are either Protestant or Catholic, and are not pro-Russia. I’ve never seen what you talk about online (I don’t use Xitter, or TikTok), but have heard about some extremely far-right “Catholics” switching to “orthodox,” and still, those people are an extremely-online, extremely small group of people, AFAIK.

IDK WTF you’re talking about with the prison rape shit, but it sounds very conspiratorial and homophobic. I could be ignorant, because I’m not too familiar with Russia’s domestic history, but what you are saying sounds pretty outlandish. However, I agree that religion is often used as a tool of control by the state. I.e. “religion is the opium of the masses.”

Being against lethal aid to Ukraine could be about austerity, isolationist, or pacifist principles, but the politicians blocking the aid have no principles, and often advocate for violence elsewhere.

I don’t think most regular Republican voters praise Russia, but many Republican politicians are anti-Ukraine aid, and support policies that could help Russia. I think these politicians are somehow influenced by Russia (money? kompromat? just simply knowing Russia has effective disinformation and conspiracy theory networks?).