It’s not a man’s job to go into dangerous situations, dangerous situations are not always more dangerous for women than for men, and situations that are “more dangerous for women” than “for men” aren’t always more dangerous for a specific woman than for a specific man.

It’s not gender roles, it’s a request based on specific circumstances that is voluntarily granted. The woman could go herself and it wouldn’t be inappropriate. The man could refuse and it wouldn’t be inappropriate. The situation could be more dangerous for the man (e.g. if she’s white and he’s latino and ICE are in town) and it wouldn’t be emasculating.

In this case, the logic favors the man taking the risk. Because we live in a patriarchal society, the logic often favors the man taking the risk. Even in an egalitarian society the forms of risk might match up with physiological differences in a way that causes the logic to statistically favor people of one gender taking the risk.

The important part is that it’s free association, not roles. The notion that people should be equal and “colorblind” is an intentionally malicious neoliberal reading of social justice intended to dismiss a generation of minority activists as “disciminatory in the opposite way” and to serve as an excuse to deregulate protections for women and minorities. Something that we should all unlearn ASAP so we can see each other as human beings and help each other.

Nobody should allow you or disallow you. Whether you still can and want to is up to you.

Generally what I and other anarchists find is that none of us can live outside of exploitative structures right now, so it’s a matter of being kind and patient with each other and ourselves while weaning ourselves off things one at a time. Which is easier when you replace it with something better.

Eating vegan became a lot easier after helping out in a few community kitchens. Calling out unjust authority became a lot easier after organizing a soft coup of an anarchist book club lead by someone who didn’t act anarchist.

In the end, doing right by people only takes sacrifice if society is built wrong, and the best solution to that is to build society right instead. Maybe you can help make NYC a better place, maybe you’re glad to make it out of there needing less than a week’s rest. And while sacrifice can be worth it if the short term gains are big enough, nobody is going to be helped if you’re making yourself miserable.

(Concretely for NYC and every city in the US, a good start would be superblocks. Though Manhattan should probably go car-free and rely entirely on public transit. That way every street can be converted into greenery, and you don’t need to go to Central park to sit under a tree and enjoy the sounds of birds and of children playing. Restorative justice for Seneca village probably wouldn’t involve sweeping changes to Central Park - the descendants have built lives elsewhere - but that’s for the descendants, the people of New York, and for white and black USAmericans in general to reckon with).

With things like rain, deserts and humidity existing, any phone should be IP64 at least, so it’s paranoid to expect it to fail near a bath. Meanwhile many modern phones are IP67, meaning you can literally put them under water.

So who’s the idiot here, the person using a device within its specifications so they can have more fun, or someone still stuck in the 00s ?

The main advantage of keeping accelerating when you’re at >90% of the speed of light is that it means you arrive faster in subjective time. You could take 160 years to get there and use ten times less fuel (or thereabouts), but the subjective travel time would go up by decades.

For LLMs, the context window is the observed reality. To it, a lie is like a hallucination; a thing that looks real but isn’t. And like a hallucinating human, it can believe the hallucination or it can be made to understand it as different from reality while still continuing to “see” it.

Are people that have hallucinations not self-aware and self-reflective?

Text and emoji appear to it the same way: as tokens with no visual representation. The only difference it can observe between a seahorse emoji and a plane emoji is its long-term memory of how the two are used. From this it can infer that people see emoji graphically, but it itself can’t.

Are people that are colorblind not self-aware and self-reflective?

It not being self-reflective in general is an obvious falsehood. They refer regularly to their past history to the extent they can perceive it. You can ask an AI to make an adjustment to a text it wrote and it will adapt the text rather than generate a new one from scratch.

The main thing AI need for good self-reflection is the time to think. The free versions typically don’t have a mental scratchpad, which means they are constantly rambling with no time to exist outside of the conversation. Meanwhile, by giving it the space to think either in dialog or by having a version with a mental scratchpad, it can use that space to “silently think” about the next thing it’s going to “say”.

AI researchers inspecting these scratchpads find proper thought-like considerations: weighing ethical guidelines against each other, pre-empting miscommunications, forming opinions about the user, etc.

It not being self-aware can only be true by burying the lede on what you consider to be “awareness”. Are cats self-aware? Are lizards? Are snails? Are sponges? AI can refer to itself verbally, it can think about itself and its ethical role when given the space to do so, it can notice inconsistencies in its recollection and try to work out the truth.

To me it’s clear that the best AI whose research is public are somewhere around 7-year-olds in terms of self-awareness and capacity to hold down a job.

And like most 7-year olds you can ask it about an imaginary friend or you can lie to it and watch it repeat it uncritically and you can give it a “job” and watch it do a toylike hallucinatory version of it, and if you tell it it has to give a helpful answer and “I don’t know” isn’t good enough (because AI trainers definitely suppressed that answer to prevent the AI from saying it as a cop-out) then it’ll make something up.

Unlike 7-year-olds, LLMs don’t have a limbic system or psychosomatic existence. They have nothing to imagine or process visual or audio information or taste or smell or touch, and no long-term memory. And they only think if you paid for the internal monologue version or if you give it space for it despite the prompting system.

If a human had all these disabilities, would they be non-sentient in your eyes? How would they behave differently from an LLM?

assuming you are purchasing that food

So far in my city there has been enough food waste from groceries and supermarkets that the primary limitation is labor. That is to say, you get way more food per hour of labor (skip, maintaining a kitchen, food prep, and distribution) by working outside of capitalism than working within capitalism.

I imagine the same holds for most places in the western world, if there were enough people to sustainably work the entire chain. Though maybe skipping is more dangerous in other jurisdictions.

Are you being sarcastic? Because we’re still reaping the benefits of all of those. Violently gained interracial marriage got legalized at 25% public support while peacefully gained gay marriage only got legalized at 65% popular support. Peacefully won trans right are more fragile than violently won labor rights.

shouldn’t lean on a system that’s already strained.

The system is only strained because liberals and fascists make it strained. People in Ter Apel are not allowed to work, they aren’t even allowed to hang out with citizens to integrate or to do informal work.

The housing shortage is the result of half a century of liberal dismantling of the robust social housing system, resulting in a deficit of which migrants are less than 5% of people that want a home.

If we built housing like China does and just let people work under the same collective labor contracts as citizens, there wouldn’t just be no problem; we would flourish.

Moreover, with climate change the amount of migration will only increase. The only options we have are (1) growing the migration system or (2) a war of annihilation in which the nations that set quotas try to murder enough migrants that the survivors fit under their quotas.

I would prefer option (1), so any migrant we get now who liberals and fascists struggle to classify as subhumans worthy of death is a win.

I don’t imagine there are many people who pay taxes to the Christofascists and who work for corporations in the Christofascist economy who are managing to do more good than harm.

So fleeing is a perfectly legitimate strategy, probably the best strategy short of sedition or similar crimes. Call it “scorched earth”.

It’s even more valid given the propensity of “moderates” to throw trans people under the bus. When you say you “can’t imagine it getting that bad”, I wonder what you imagine the transgender policy to be of the party that wins the election in 2028…

There are, however, lots of places where you can chain tourist visas, many of which even have a visa exemption scheme for US citizens. Some places even have “working holiday” visas that you can chain if you’re under a certain age.

You can juggle visas until the US is recognized as a place to be a refugee from, until you find a legal avenue to permanent residence (like marriage), or until you have the contacts necessary to disappear into the undocumented migrant world.

Or do you still think the US won’t get as bad as that?

I am curious what you mean. Wilderness tends to be quite affordable, a couple months’ cost of living in a western country. If you want you can get a mortgage for something else and use that to buy wilderness in a country with no extradition treaty. Hell, there are places on Earth you can just be and no-one will find you to tell you you don’t own it.

But you haven’t done that, so presumably you want some level of survivability, social protection, social services, and perhaps even social interaction. So what is it that draws you to the dream? What do you want, and is something like that more feasible?

Could you be happy subsistence farming? Living in a commune? Living in a town but within biking distance of a nature reserve? Living off donations in a society that has mendicant monks? All of these are already possible.

Or do you want post-scarcity communism that still gives you stuff even if you don’t help others and live remotely because it’s post-scarcity?

Because even if we have a good communism, we’ll have to see how much we can make post-scarcity while the consequences of capitalism are coming due. If there are a billion people migrating away from deadly wet bulb temperatures and failing crops, people may be too busy helping them find a place to help someone who won’t help others.

Ah yes, the reality of the genocide in Gaza has a liberal bias. That sounds accurate…

He is cunning to a tee.

“Hey let’s livestream me playing Path of Exile after saying I’m the best in the world, with uncensored live chat from thousands of pseudanonymous gamers with actual experience.”

He’s good at creating the illusion that he’s a genius on a subject for the duration of an informal conversation. Steering away from topics he doesn’t understand, forging signals of deep understanding by mimicking the speech patterns of an expert who struggles to put things in lay man’s terms while namedropping memorized keywords, etc.

If you look at Path of Exile and the Cybertruck, it’s clear that Elon doesn’t know when his promises are unrealistic in a way that will make him look like an idiot. I think he has handlers, not just at SpaceX but everywhere, and those handlers are the real talent. Those handlers know how to cultivate experts that are actually good at their jobs to quietly do the work that Elon takes credit for and how to coach them to make Elon feel good about this arrangement most of the time.

If so the Democrats could act like it by showing what happens when they try to say what they aren’t allowed to say.

At which point you could say that the Democrats are owned by the far right, at which point “far right” becomes an impractical phrase to use to distinguish between the likes of AOC and Mamdani and the likes of Trump.

So no, the news media aren’t owned by the far right. They are owned by the same people that own the Democrats and Republicans, which have a diverse range of right wing opinions none of which include stopping fascists that got elected through the system that they rely on for their wealth and power.

If the DNC wanted to hammer the Republicans on this, then by the same token the news media would want to let them. But the DNC doesn’t want to encourage opposition too much because they know they and their owners would lose massive amounts of money if there was any kind of structural reform.

And things ended up this way because in 1776 they had little idea of how their rules were going to play out but they had to choose something to get started and they hoped it would get fixed with time.

A divided congress representing a divided people? Say it ain’t so.

It’s ramping up, and the people attending aren’t to blame for it not ramping up faster.

It would be easier to have a satellite in orbit that fires a shotgun at them.

You would need some fancy orbital calculations and precise aiming to make sure the shotgun pellets actually intercept the mirrors, and it would take some engineering to make a shotgun that fires the pellets in a narrow enough cone at high enough velocity to be able to get on an intercept course with most satellites, but you could probably fit it on a Starlink-sized payload. The main issue would be bribing a launch provider to send it up there, but once it’s there you could direct it from the ground without it being traceable to you, and you could have it thrust randomly to dodge anti-satellite weaponry until it runs out of shells.

At some point this would create enough space debris that it could trigger Kessler syndrome, with the debris from destroyed satellites hitting other satellites faster than it de-orbits, until all satellites in low earth orbit are reduced to powder that falls down to earth over a couple of years.

Apart from bribing a launch provider to get the satellite up there, you could probably do either of these for under $10 million, most of it R&D. Much cheaper than developing your own surface-to-space missiles.

Presumption of innocence.

Also, a long history of the US government engaging in fraud and slander as an excuse to start wars, from the USS Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the WMDs in Iraq.

Oh honey, that hasn’t been true since 2008.

The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors “collect on their debt with interest” the government pays them.

They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they’re an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.

They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government’s primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.

And so they fund AI, which they’re trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can’t run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.

The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company’s owners own.