As if there ever was a "democracy". You can certainly choose to feel doomed and helpless. It's your choice.
TheObviousSolution is a pretty powerful username, I still hold hope in my heart that you can embody that energy.
M1ch431
joined 4 months ago
Doesn't mean I can't participate in building class consciousness there.
The GOP is clearly heading the country to collapse, I am going to be the person calling for all of those things in their midst while people's faith in the government and the country's two-party system falters.
A surprising amount of contributors there share my sentiment, either on the fediverse or on reddit.
I do have MAGA friends, and surprisingly, they are substantially more disillusioned than my liberal friends. They no longer support Trump and the Republican party, I just wish my liberal friends caught up and didn't support the Democrats unquestionably!
Stockholm syndrome goes both ways. 1/3 of the country is not voting for these parties, and the number is only going to get bigger if they keep representing capital and utterly failing at even that.
If they are the only vehicle for change, I guess it's wrong of me to ask that they represent the people instead of capital. I am going to write apology letter to every Democrat for my criticisms.
I should just shut up, be more meek, stop asking for literally anything to be fixed, and watch as my country goes down in flames. I just need to vote harder.
I have a front-row seat watching everybody I know (and in my community) suffer. Nobody can afford health care, everybody is living with no savings, and very few are able to smile without coaxing.
I am imminently apologizing to the Democrats for wanting to see the people around me live with less struggle and that they are able to be happier and healthier.
They have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they already have immense privilege and a higher standard of living than the child slaves in Africa that their economy relies on — who could ask for more?
How could I be so careless to the Democrats' feelings?
I hear you. I just wonder, will it be worth it in the end to for them to see to it that society rots and capitalism "wins", by shutting down discourse in the limited places that it is able to exist?
I'd reason that it won't be worth it. I just wish they could see it that way too.
That nuance is not important - it's not worth wasting your breath on. If people focused on root causes of the dysfunction and the change needed to solve the issues plaguing our societies - we'd be much better off.
The nuance isn't lost to me, I just don't care to quantify it and then shout it out to the heavens. It makes no difference to me whether Elon Musk is worse than Bill Gates. They can duke that battle out themselves if they care to.
I'll reiterate the point from my other comment. Value judgements are a waste of time, energy, and our voices.
Whether or not Bill Gates is worse than Elon Musk is just as important as to whether Tom Cruise is a better actor than Leonardo DiCaprio. Neither value judgement is worth my breath. It's a pointless exercise.
We are reaching a critical junction in our timeline where these billionaires can not and should not exist any longer. We've learned our lessons, their benefit and merit is irrelevant because even the best billionaires sit silently and are complicit. They have power, influence, and wealth - all the ingredients needed to directly affect change.
At best, they throw around pennies that don't address root causes and play the PR game, or play the blame game by focusing on individuals who are absolutely not responsible for the root causes of various issues that plague our societies.
If engineers/developers directly involved with Microsoft have called out Microsoft, and they were quickly silenced and fired, I'm more inclined to believe them versus a supposed lack of evidence.
Older reporting: https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-azure-openai-israeli-army-cloud/
According to the documents, the AI services that the Defense Ministry purchased from Microsoft include translation (about half of the average monthly consumption during the first year of the war), OpenAI’s GPT-4 model (about a quarter of the consumption), a speech-to-text conversion tool, and an automatic document analysis tool. In October 2023, the army’s monthly consumption of AI services provided by Azure jumped sevenfold compared to the month preceding the war; by March 2024, it was 64 times higher.
AI is a commodity that's being developed by the few. They are shaping it to do things that are not for human benefit, like war and surveillance. It's the truth. They are responsible for their choices and actions, they are consciously making this technology.
If you read the bottom part of my response, you'd hear that I'm just calling out the bullshit you're peddling. You don't really care, you're focused on purity testing impassioned individuals who feel strongly about these subjects.
Microsoft is making the decision to directly sell their AI to that state and its military. It doesn't change the fact that every being on earth shares responsibility as well. But I don't have a direct ability to stop Microsoft from choosing to sell their proprietary technologies to support a country in surveilling, targeting, and killing innocents.
I will do everything in my power to voice my opinion and convince others that AI shouldn't be used for war. I don't want to live in that world and I'm sure many others don't as well.
As for Linus, his stances about the use of his technology in war is pretty clear. He doesn't like it, but he can't stop it. His software is open-source. There's a big difference between open-source software you give to all for free (for the benefit of all of humanity) and proprietary software that you provide only with payment.
I think making value judgements on individuals is a counterproductive use of our time, energy, and voice. That's what I'm trying to point out.
If we focused on root causes and the change we'd like to see to solve those problems, we'd be smooth sailing as a world already.
Capitalism is slavery with PR and programming to convince us to be helpless to change anything for the better and to look at various distractions instead of the reality.
I am not just talking about first-world exploitation, I am talking about literal slavery and child slavery, which our economies rely on — which we unknowingly rely on for many of our goods.
If you factor in 40% (or more) of US agricultural workers being undocumented immigrants, you don't really have to look hard to see that slavery is literally everywhere. It may not be the chattel slavery of past, but it's still modern slavery.
Almost all employment revolves around exploitation, hard hours, asking you to give more than you have for the sake of the business, and so forth, all the while many participating individuals are unable to afford health care or housing. I still liken that dynamic to be modern slavery, even if the individuals reside in the first-world.
We can rise above this, but we must identify what is blocking or stagnating progress to be able to change — such as accepting the reality at hand instead of turning our gaze away.
Doesn't mean we have to play the blame game or reduce nuanced issues down to word-play and labels. A new system is likely the best solution.