HopeOfTheGunblade

The one on the left looks so surprised that the one on the right leaned in.

This is the way.

What do you mean when you say “true AI”? The question isn’t answerable as asked, because those words could mean a great many things.

I can happen to you!

…am I being threatened?

Typo jokes aside, I actually have a minor issue with my pelvic floor that makes peeing a little harder, it takes some effort to go, so hopefully it neither gets worse nor goes that way.

Wait, people actually pee IRL from those? I have bladder pressure induced “looking for a toilet” dreams ever, but I’ve never actually let go, I just wake up near to bursting.

I’m curious what you’d think would be better than the Nordic model; to my current understanding it’s the path the evidence best supports as leading to rehabilitation.

That said, if we just imported the Nordic model and made no other societal changes, I don’t think anything would meaningfully change. Pimps and dealers exist because there is an economic place for them. Even if you arrest people and then treat them with kindness, understanding, and education, it doesn’t remove the incentives that pushed them into that role in the first place, and it won’t stop someone else from moving into the vacuum that arrest creates.

Tad Williams, Otherland. It’s quite good, a series I’ve read multiple times.

Assuming you don’t accept the simulation hypothesis, you can know if you aren’t a chatbot, but to the best of our current knowledge, our chatbots aren’t aware and can’t know anything.

After what seemed an insufferable wait, the sim before her was duly rejected and she at last found herself standing before one of the most cartoonish-looking functionaries she had ever seen. He was small and rodent-faced, with a pair of old-fashioned glasses pinching the end of his nose and a pair of small, suspicious eyes peering over them. Surely he must be a Puppet, she thought—a program given the appearance of humanity. No one could look so much like a petty bureaucrat, or if they did, would perpetuate it on the net, where one could appear as anything he or she desired.
“Purpose in Inner District?” Even his voice was tight as kazoo music, as though he spoke through something other than the normal orifice.
“Delivery to Johanna Bundazi.” The chancellor of the Polytechnic, as Renie knew, kept a small node in the Inner District.
The functionary looked at her balefully for a long moment. Somewhere processors processed. “Ms. Bundazi is not in residence.”
“I know.” She did know, too—she had been very careful. “I’ve been asked to hand-deliver something to her node.”
“Why? She’s not here. Surely it would be better to send it to the node she is currently accessing.” Another brief moment. “She is not available at the moment on any node.”
Renie tried to keep her temper. This must be a Puppet—the simulation of bureaucratic small-mindedness was too perfect “All I know is that I was asked to deliver it to her Inner District node. Why she wants to make sure it has been directly uploaded is her affair. Unless you have contrary instructions, let me do my job.”
“Why does the sender need hand-delivery when she’s not accessing there?”
“I don’t know! And you don’t need to know either. Shall I go back, then, and you can tell Ms. Bundazi you refused to allow her a delivery?”
The functionary squinted as though he were searching a real human face for signs of duplicity or dangerous tendencies. Renie was glad to be shielded by the sim mask. Yeah, go ahead and try to read me, you officious bastard.
“Very well,” he said at last. “You have twenty minutes.” Which, Renie knew, was the absolute minimum access time—a deliberate bit of unpleasantness.
“What if there are return instructions? What if she’s left a message dealing with this, and I need to take something else to somewhere in the District?” Renie suddenly wished this were a game and she could lift a laser gun and blast the Puppet to shards.
“Twenty minutes.” He raised a short-fingered hand to stifle further protest. “Nineteen minutes, fifty . . . six seconds, now—and counting. If you need more, you’ll have to reapply.”
She began to move away, then turned back to the rat-faced man, occasioning a grunt of protest from the next supplicant, who had finally reached the Holy Land. “Are you a Puppet?” Renie demanded. Some of the others in line muttered in surprise. It was a very rude question, but one that law mandated must be answered.
The functionary squared his narrow shoulders, indignant “I am a Citizen. Do you want my number?”
Jesus Mercy. He was a real person after all. “No,” she said. “Just curious.”
She cursed herself for pushing things, but a woman could only take so much.

More than 20 years ago, I seriously contemplated drug use, and I set myself some rules, before I started doing anything. I’ve stuck to them, and I’ve put thousands of dollars over the years into getting high. Yes, I know addicts.

People, even addicts, are responding to incentives. It’s been shown that making people’s lives less shit severely reduces addiction; I’m willing to bet that said meth capital is not somewhere where life is generally good, is it? That’s the place to intervene, in quality of life, if you want to reduce addiction. It’s also a very good idea to provide doses of a non-lethal size and known purity in a safe, sterile, nonsexy environment. Do you think people would have gotten into it in the same way if there were no dealers because the addicts were getting their doses at the hospital where you went and chilled for your time high, instead of providing an economic incentive for people to produce and sell it out of garages (periodically detonating a residential home in the process)?

You’re arguing for an older model of addiction that doesn’t resolve the issues, out of a reaction to the fucked up things you’ve seen. Please don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want the world you’ve seen any more than you do. I just think that there are ways to solve this problem that are demonstrated to be better than the criminal model, which is incredibly destructive both on an immediate level, with gangs throwing bullets indiscriminately, cops throwing bullets indiscriminately, and the incentive gradients leading towards worse outcomes for users.

A gallon of bleach can kill people, and we sell that in Walmart. People don’t want to die, they want to get high. If you can buy 20, 100 microgram doses, why would you take all 20 at once unless you wanted to die, and if you wanted to die, well, there are more guns than people in the US, trains exist, razors exist… Are we to wrap the entire world in bubble wrap?

Disclaimer: if we have an aligned AGI I may well be for some version of wrapping the world in bubble wrap, but I’m almost certain alignment includes allowing people who truly want to die, to die, but having very few such people because of treatments for depression, a world that doesn’t suck, etc.

Known dosage and purity. People die of overdoses, and of adulterated doses. A vast amount of the horror of krokodil is the production method leading to impurities, and much of the demand for it comes from the lack of other drugs and the ability to cook it up in a garage.

Which ways, can you detail them?

The result of banning drugs in the real world (including alcohol) have repeatedly been demonstrated to be:

Users continue to get their drug
What they get is no longer of a reliable potency or purity. Many users are harmed by this
Black market sellers who are providing the product of uncertainty potency and purity have no access to peaceful legal systems for settling disputes, and resort to violence, hurting and killing each other and bystanders

The net effect is significantly worse than if you spend the effort providing education, assistance getting clean, known safe units, and quality of life increases - most people use to escape their lives. If their lives are better, there’s no need to escape.

This article says, in the headline, that it will help tackle underage drinking. So, first, an assertion that the future will be a particular way is not evidence of the claim the assertion makes. Second, in the article there is a statement that banning a particular consumption method reduced consumption of that method. Sure, I’ll grant that, because duh? But do you understand that the United States spent a great deal of money and lives over years to ban alcohol for adults and it simply did not work? We have the data on this, it’s not even a little obscure.

He had a couple of his friends wrestle in diapers (one of them had a swastika tat) and he was selling a plush with his head on a baby’s body for a while, because his fans are the “sweet baby gang”.

Not to mention a diaper obsessed Nazi.

Also his pick, either an idiot or a liar. John Oliver just did a segment on how absolutely fucked it is that people can buy Supreme Court justices, like Clarence Thomas. He then offered Clarence Thomas a pile of money to retire, just like he’s getting from Harlan Crowe to stay on the bench, and Walsh tried to say that Oliver should be arrested for that. You dopey fuck, are you saying that Crowe (a noted collector of Nazi memorabilia) should be prosecuted for actually bribing the guy? Or are you saying that it should be illegal to do so but isn’t? Or are you disingenuously lying, like you did in your propaganda piece, like Ben Shapiro flatly admitted to for their “comedy”, is that it?

I hate the way he can push me away from being the best version of myself because he is so infuriating.

It isn’t obvious to me, and I know a lot of queer people and feminists (there’s a lot of overlap, since queer people, as societal outcasts, can see matters from the outside in a way people plugged into social reality can’t).

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change.

Unpack this, please? What is that agenda? How are trans people and feminists being used to push it? What does skin deep “support” in the form of lip service have to do with it?