Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • That was the point of the action. Iran understands the hatred by the Israeli state for the Palestinian people (condoned, sometimes commended by western imperialist interests, particularly the British empire and the United States) only required provocation before Israel would commit atrocities that could be called a holocaust. So the Iranian intelligence state funded Hamas to cause trouble.

    And they played Netanyahu the way Martin Luther King Jr. played US police departments.

    The difference is, information from Palestine leaks out better now than it did throughout the 20th century, so the global public, especially in industrialized states, gets to look at it. We get to know what is happening and it is more frightening than we imagined.

    The horror of the German holocaust, according to our own nations and their state departments, is not what was done, but to whom.


  • Ever since the civil rights movement and the overturn of the Jim Crow laws (and the establishment of the right to interracial marriage), laws to prevent gun ownership based on race (even by implication, such as based on neighborhood) have been successfully challenged, but that doesn’t stop the police rushing to escalation once it’s established a someone has a gun, and blacks are represented disproportionately in officer-involved homicide.

    But I can’t say I have the data specifically regarding armed black suspects verses armed white suspects. Still if you’re black in Missouri or Mississippi (or Oakland, California – the US teems with a lot of racial-tension hot zones) then yes, the police are more likely to escalate a situation or shoot at you than if you are white, but that’s true regardless if you have a gun.

    Also blacks are convicted of crimes, violent or otherwise, statistically more often than whites with less evidence, and are given harsher sentences than whites for the same crimes, and this includes possession of illegal firearms. I suspect it’s harder for nonwhites to get concealed-carry permits in states they are needed.

    (My impression is no-one really likes open-carry in urban or suburban regions. Even here in California, there are rural towns where one could carry a rifle on their back, at least during hunting season, especially since the local economies depend on hunting tourism. So you’re not going to be bothered by the county sheriff along the California / Nevada border the way you would say, in the Bay Area.)

    The killing of Philando Castile in 2016 serves as an example of what blacks fear. He was pulled over for a broken tail-light, announced he was armed to Officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony PD. Yanez freaked out and shot Castile seven times, two of which penetrated his heart. (Of note is that in the last thirteen years, Castile had been pulled over 39 times in that area for broken tail-light type offenses.) Yanez was tried and acquitted. He was removed from that precinct but as far as we know Yanez is serving as law enforcement elsewhere.













  • Now I sail the high seas myself, but I don’t think Paramount Studios would buy anyone’s defence they were only pirating their movies so they can learn the general content so they can produce their own knockoff.

    However, Paramount, itself, does pirate content specifically to learn its content so it can produce its own knockoff. As do all the other major studios.

    No one engages in IP enforcement in good faith, or respects the IP of others if they can find benefit in circumventing it.

    That’s part of the problem. None of the key stakeholders (other than the biggest stakeholder, the public) are interested in preserving the interests of the creators, artists and developers, rather are interested in boosting their own profit gains.

    Which makes this not about big companies stealing from human art but from IP property of their own kin.

    Yes, Generative AI very much does borrow liberally from the work of human creatives. But those artists mostly signed away their rights long ago to their publishing house masters. Since the ownership class controlled the presses, those contracts were far from fair.

    Artists, today, routinely see their art stolen by their own publishing houses at length, and it’s embittering and soul-crushing. We’ve seen Hollywood accounting come into play throughout the last century. Famous actors are notoriously cheated out of residuals. (With the rise of the internet, and prior to that a few smart agents, we’ve seen a small but growing number of — usually pirate-friendly — exceptions.)

    The artists were screwed long before AI ever came around.

    Instead this fight is about IP-holding companies slugging it out with big computing companies, a kaiju match that is likely to leave Tokyo (that is, the rest of us, creators and consumers alike) in ruin. But we’re already in squalor, anyway.




  • 🤓 In the 1915 air war the Allies didn’t yet have their own version of the mechanical interruptor gear, which fueled the Fokker scourge. Early allied planes used metal deflectors on their props, though the Airco DH2 solved the problem being driven by a push prop behind the pilot and the guns.

    Synchronization of the guns was solved by the deployment of the Nieuport 17 and Airco DH5, both biplanes that brought an end to the Eindekker scourge. /🤓

    PS: You are right, that the mechanical synchronizers weren’t perfect, and there was like some periods of both used on the same plane. Eventually, props were made that spun at consistent rates and the synchronizer was electric and worked very well.


  • Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I’d be interesting if little dogs – the robots – are used for couriers.) So it’s not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.

    For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.

    If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.