Tbh he could probably make plenty as a conservative media personality of some kind. Start some webshow and sell tacky branded garbage and fake health supplements to his supporters or something like that

“just change the system” is easier said than done, which I suspect you realize of course, since if it were so easy, you’d have changed it yourself already. The difficulty in such change is that it requires a very large number of people to act in unison, which is quite rare, especially when most people aren’t literally starving, and have different ideas over what they want the system to be, some of which might be better, but some of which might be as bad or worse. It’s a bit like how libertarian types sometimes remark that, if everyone stopped paying taxes, the government would run out of money and be unable to enforce them anymore: technically true, but requires humans to act with uncharacteristic unity towards a singular goal, against pushback from established power. Not to say that it never happens, but it does not seem to happen reliably or in a way that can be readily forced to occur.

I mean, the greater evil would presumably have gotten us worse. And in a system that is set up so as to inevitably produce two viable parties, and where “good” is not on the ballot from either, what else do you expect people to do?

tbf, arent those border policies somewhat popular among some latino voters? Im not defending those policies as they dont align with my own views on the topic, but theres plenty of room for people that managed to get through the immigration system legally to look down of people who havent, or for people born in the country to dislike migration even if their ancestors did it, or for people that want to “pull up the ladder behind them” so to speak. Biden couldnt exactly expect Trump’s border policies to automatically win him that demographic either way.

Why does it need to be a formal contract? People can engage in relationships without the law being involved. I tend to think we should disentangle marriage and law, have some paperwork one can fill out for the legal affairs like hospital visitation and such that can be changed without the same degree of court proceeding, and have the religious or cultural ritual as just a ritual people can but are not obligated to hold if they feel like with no legal meaning to it.

Id say yes to that statement, but for reasons that dont have to do with AI as I dont really view AI training as piracy.

Doesn’t it demonstrate that the actual dinos in real life don’t have to be big to be popular, because humans will simply portray them how they want to see and bring interest in the species regardless?

I mean, raptors

Would this even be necessary for automated ordering anyway? Given that every company under the sun wants you to use some app of theirs these days, including fast food companies, Im kinda surprised they dont just get rid of the speaker/microphone system, and just put a sign with a qr code in front of the drive through telling you to download and use their app to put in a drive through order

Similar story where I work, manufacturing a type of x ray emitting tool. Never seen anyone having problematic readings on the dosimeter badges, but when I was hired I did get told that they had only once had an incident, where one of the engineers had been for some reason repeatedly testing a prototype by directly holding the sample the x ray was firing at in his hand. Not sure what happened to him

I have a suspicion that we might see some interesting hybridization of the plant based and lab grown meats at some point. Tissue culture is expensive, and while Im sure the price can be reduced, Im doubtful that it will get cheaper than plant protein is. However, it can potentially taste more like real meat than plants, seeing as, well, it is real meat, just assembled differently. Potentially then, one can probably mix in some percentage of plant protein (or possibly mycoprotein as well) in with the meat in ground meat type products like burgers, without the flavor changing too noticeably, and get something mostly the same with a lower cost.

Eh, since going vegetarian in the past year or so, I’ve found that a lot of the meat substitutes actually are pretty good, depending on how you use them. It’s not usually so perfect that one cannot truly tell, sure, unless it’s a dish where the meat flavor is heavily affected by spices and similar like with chili, but I’ve definitely found types of substitute bacon, or burgers, or ground meat that taste quite good. Though in my experience it’s usually been the cheaper or simpler ones, like black bean burgers or tempeh bacon, that taste best. Not the same, but similar enough to be tasty in broadly similar ways.

Some people take “where the sun don’t shine” as a challenge it seems

I mean, it did bother people, it just took more skill and time at using photo manipulation software to make it look convincing such that it was rare for someone to both have the expertise and be willing to put in the time, so it didnt come up often enough to be a point of discussion. The AI just makes it quick and easy enough to become more common.

Trying to educate people to avoid all porn sounds even less likely to be successful than trying to ban things on the internet, because you cant simply teach people to not get horny in response to certain visual stimuli, and trying to make people averse to depictions of anything sexual will just lead to a repressed society that still consumes porn but is even more embarrassed to talk about it, which causes more harm than good and still doesnt solve the problem at hand. Its also a misunderstanding of the issue anyway, because the problem isnt porn as a general concept, or even the use of AI to create it, but the creation of some that depicts real people against the wishes of those people, and secondarily the possibility that it could be used to make other people believe the event actually happened due to the ability to create photorealistic images and video.

Would banning it make it go away? No, of course not, but it would make it a bit riskier to make and spread, and that would reduce the number that do it. We already have certain kinds of porn banned due to requiring abuse to create, like CSAM, and while that certainly hasnt made it disappear, its not something one encounters regularly either. An argument of “we shouldnt ban this because bans dont work on the internet” would apply equally to our ban on that material too after all.

I dont think that this is really true, I strongly suspect that most people I know would consider someone drawing porn of them without consent a majorly icky thing to do, and would probably consider someone doing that to someone else to be a creep for doing so. The reason such drawings are less an issue is at least partly that the barrier to entry is lower with AI, since it takes a certain amount of skill and time investment to draw something like that such as to be clearly recognizable as any specific real person.

If you’re actually curious, or someone else reading this is, you never can get a rocket, or anything with mass, to the speed of light either, not just faster than it, but you can get arbitrarily close. However, you never notice anything stopping you going faster than your current speed, there’s no point where your rockets stop working or anything, rather, time and space stretch and squeeze such that neither you nor anybody else see you going faster than light. If you have a magic rocket that somehow has infinite fuel and can fire forever, you can actually get anywhere as fast as you want, from your perspective.

Alpha centauri is famously about 4 light years away, but you can get there in 2 seconds, from your perspective, if you go fast enough. But, everyone on earth will see slightly over that roughly 4 years go by in the time that for you is just 2 seconds. (You’ll see them move slowly too at first, since they’re moving relative to you just as fast as your ship is moving to them, but when you slow down, you’ll see them seem to speed up until you’ll have seen them do 4 years worth of stuff by the time you stop). Meanwhile on your ship, you don’t see yourself crossing that 4 light year distance in less than the allowed time either, because space itself is squished kinda, so that the distance to alpha centauri is shortened to the point that if you’re getting there in 2 seconds, it’s now less than 2 light seconds away, from your perspective, and you’re not moving faster than light to cross that distance in that time. People outside will also see your ship compressed like this too.

This isn’t just a regular optical illusion either, space and time really are different for the people on and off the ship (and indeed very slightly different for everyone anywhere). Nobody has the “correct” view of the universe, because everyone’s perspective is equally valid.

I imagine any explanation of the expansion of the universe for people that are not themselves studying astronomy is going to be simplified in a way that gives the average person the basic idea but not the complete picture to avoid confusion when explaining the concept. Ive not studied astronomy, but I did get most of the way through a physics degree, and know that at least there, a lot ideas are explained in that sort of way to people without much knowledge of the subject, especially the more confusing concepts. I wouldnt be surprised if thats the case for most fields of science. For a different example as an analogy, its common knowledge that you cant move faster than light (ignoring the whole expanding spacetime stuff), but it isnt always explained why this is the case, leading to questions from some people like “what happens if I fly a spaceship to the speed of light, and then turn on the rockets to try to go faster?” which have easy answers or just dont make sense as a question if one has had the behavior of objects at high speed explained, but which seem reasonable enough questions to ask if all youve been told is that the speed of light is just some cosmic speed limit. People cant reasonably blame you for finding an incomplete explanation you’ve been given, well, incomplete, and then asking questions that come to mind as a result.

Dont we see other galaxy groups though? Im no astronomer, but I do recall the universe having some degree of structure above the scale of individual galaxies, with groups and clusters of them forming larger groups or filaments surrounding voids of space with fewer galaxies in them.

Edit: quick search in wikipedia brings up a list of a few groups and clusters known, of which the local group is merely one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxy_groups_and_clusters

The thing with China imo is that part of the reason they’ve been so attractive for manufacturing has been that it’s cheaper there, and the reason that it’s cheaper there has been lower wages and lower safety standards. That’s bad for pretty much everyone except for companies making stuff in China, and consumers getting stuff cheaper than is probably viable with more ethical labor practices (and even then it’s not really much of a benefit to them, because those people need jobs too and so the negative impact there offsets that). It is sadly ironic that a country who’s stated ideology originally claimed to be in the interests of labor (not that it actually was, but they talked that way), has made it’s competitive advantage in the global economy pretty much be being a way around labor protections and unions.

Something I could see being potentially useful, then, would be a tariff policy that was roughly “if you make stuff using labor that’s significantly lower paid than our wages, or with worse safety standards, we raise the price to be around what it would be if it had been made to our labor standards, so that there is no advantage in not keeping things fair for our workforce and yours”. I’ve never really been a fan of things like tariffs, because I know that they mainly just make things more expensive and can reduce pressure to compete by domestic companies, but at the same time, the current system both makes the US dependent on goods made by exploited foreign workers as most people don’t have good enough jobs to afford much better than that which is made cheap by that exploitation, and incentives those foreign countries to keep their people trapped in those conditions and not raise standards, to avoid losing that competitive advantage to another country that does not.