There are some things it would be nice to have a brain in a jar to do for me.
I do not, however, want that jar sitting in an Amazon-owned server room somewhere, where they can modify the jar to change how the brain works.
Take back your brain-in-a-jars from big tech! /j
Government-provided housing, social housing where your payments get you partial collective ownership, cheaper mortgages now that landlords aren’t artificially inflating the rates?
The key difference is that these goods and services wouldn’t exist if you were not paid to do the job.
If landlords didn’t exist, then all housing would either be government-distributed, socially-owned, or obtained through mortgages.
If the workers building those houses didn’t exist, then the house wouldn’t either.
The only difference between a system for housing with a landlord, and one without a landlord, is that the landlord is an intermediary that shaves some money off the top any time money is used to pay for housing, even when the building is already fully paid off, or they aren’t there, and your money just covers the cost of construction and maintenance directly.
Not necessarily. Similar economic circumstances due to various implementations of UBI generally don’t result in inflation equivalent, or even near the level of money distributed.
you’ve just raised all boats by the same amount. There’s no relative difference, it won’t have any impact on the economy
Technically, that’s not exactly true, specifically because of wealth disparities. If you give everyone $100, someone who only had $100 before will get a 100% increase to their net worth, whereas a billionaire will get a 0.00001% increase to their net worth. It’s effectively a wealth redistribution. If you gave everyone a billion dollars, assuming everyone had nothing to start with before, they’d now have 50% of what a billionaire (now with $2B after gaining $1B from this change) would have, whereas before they’d only have a tiny fraction.
The problem is that it’s just not a very effective method at doing such wealth redistribution. The much more effective one is to print new currency and issue it like you would UBI, but tax billionaires a similar amount to offset the inflation caused. Releasing all this gold would just devalue gold similarly, and a lot of gold is already owned directly or by proxy, by the wealthy, but also poorer members of society, so it would effectively be like taxing billionaires, but also adding a little tax on top of specific working people for the hell of it, which isn’t ideal.
It would have a similar effect to printing new USD and issuing it evenly to members of the population, since our gold reserve is largely a stockpile not expected to be sold on the market.
Gold gets released into circulation, the value of gold decreases, the value people individually receive is similar to the amount lost by those holding gold.
That effectively means it would likely be a transfer of value from gold hoarders, some of which are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the population, to everyone else, rather than some magical new source of value to give to people. (not exactly, obviously, but this is generally what I’d expect based on how the currency dynamic works with our existing USD reserves/printing capabilities, and how the supply rush would be similar with gold compared to USD)
Should we do it? I don’t know, it could be beneficial, but I’d rather we simply issued new currency and taxed the billionaires more to compensate for any inflation caused, rather than the government having to spend all the money on manpower and negotiation for the sale of all the gold we have, so that individuals could receive actually functional currency in the form of USD.
. In absolutely no way did I even mention black people.
How did you not underatand that it was an analogy? I was testing your logic, by demonstrating that your exact argument can identically be applied to racist arguments, yet you would probably not see it as valid in that context, thus your own logic in this situation falls short.
People can have differences in opinion, but sometimes, those opinions are harmful, and there’s a reason why people are so angry at you past just simply disagreeing on logic.
I must thank you for proving my point.
In what way? You just dismissed everything i said by not responding to it then acted like I’d proved you correct.
But you simply can’t accept that people disagree with gender ideology and must try and push your beliefs onto others, in this case, me.
“But you simply can’t accept that black people are inherently less intelligent, and must try to push your beliefs on others”
Do you see how this argument fails? Sometimes, people are just wrong, and hold opinions that cause societal harm. You haven’t been capable of refuting the evidence I provide, instead choosing to ignore it, then continue perpetuating the exact justification used every time trans people are oppressed in any way.
Anything else is a birth defect
Any exception disproves your rule. If you say there are only 1 and 2, and I show you 3, then the statement that only 1 and 2 exist is false, because it’s only true if no other numbers ever exist. Show me a binary, I show you numbers outside that binary, it’s not a binary.
Sex and gender are fundamentally the same thing
What genetic code determines things like:
Oh wait, what’s that? None of that is biological, but it’s all traditionally gendered traits? Interesting, maybe biological characteristics and social ones aren’t the same.
What about someone with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), where someone can have XY (usually male) chromosomes, but goes through female sexual development? Or someone with Mosaicism, who has a split of XX and XY chromosomes in their body, could have the genitalia of either group, or ambiguous genitalia, and who’s split of chromosomes across their cells could be as high as 50%, or shift in one direction or the other over time. Or someone who has chromosome patterns that don’t fit into XX or XY, like XXXXX. (yes, that’s a real combination of chromosomes that humans can have.)
You cannot easily classify these people into sex categories, and no definition you make for sex and gender being the same thing will be capable of properly resolving which group these people fall into. You’ll end up putting ambiguous people into categories that don’t align with how they internally feel about themselves, you’ll find ways to accidentally lump cis people into categories they don’t fit in by trying to define these people into male or female categories, and that means it’s impossible to make a definition that covers every single one of these people and neatly fits them into the categories you think only exist in a rigid binary, and by extension, any attempt to assign them to man/woman categories will only demonstrate how subjective the entire thing is in the first place.
Even just the fact that various traits traditionally assigned to men/women (e.g. high heels originally being worn by men) have shifted over time to being in different categories, and that different ways of self-expression, and experience, have developed over time, disproves the notion that there is this simplistic binary of human experience that cannot be un-aligned from your sex, or that certain traits are tied to sex as opposed to entirely social expectations.
And they absolutely do not have the right to start throwing abuse and words like transphobe around simply because beliefs don’t match.
Your position is categorically hostile to their existence. The definition of transphobia includes “fear or dislike of transgender and non-binary people” If you dislike what they believe, and by extension, what they are, then you are categorically transphobic. You can agree and say that you believe being transphobic is correct, but you still definitionally dislike trans people, and thus fit the definition.
Some of those people may be employees resisting as best they can instead of leaving their jobs.
Personally, I doubt that. There was a joint resignation letter filed a bit ago by 21 employees simultaneously, and dozens of staff were fired beforehand directly at the hands of Elon and co. Any employees that weren’t on board with DOGE’s efforts probably left a while ago. There’s only about the number of people on that list left in the entire organization, and anyone sticking it out with the goal of preventing damage would only be spotted immediately either not following directions, or cutting something they were never asked to cut.
Not only that, but someone else totally did a big oopsie and revealed every other email of everyone at DOGE! What a mistake!
If I were to say “there are two genders (male and female) and you can not change what you were born as” the red mist descends and because my views don’t align I get called a phobe or ist or a bigot. They simply can’t accept that not everyone shares their ideology.
Because that statement is not just fundamentally wrong, (male and female aren’t genders, they’re sexes, even sex is a spectrum of characteristics that can’t be cleanly defined in 100% of cases, so a blanket statement that only 1 and 2 exist when 3, 4, 5, etc do as well fundamentally fails even when it comes to sex, let alone social identity characteristics and expression) but it is used to justify erasing trans people from existence, and is the core statement that allows for anti-trans policies to exist.
That statement is directly used to justify and further policies that directly harm trans people, and thus it isn’t just a difference in opinion, but a clear and obvious case of intolerance that we know leads to real harm.
If you’d like any further explanation of why exactly that statement is incorrect, I’d be happy to provide it.
As for the right starting the abuse just look at the Reform member conference in Cornwall last week.
Apologies, but considering I’m American, I don’t have much of a personal social context for the events, so do take my opinions here with the understanding I don’t follow UK politics much. I agree that any violence there was likely extreme, at least based on my very limited understanding of the party’s politics, but that is, of course, what seems to be an isolated incident.
As I don’t think we share as much direct societal context, I’m fine with dropping this point against your argument if you don’t wish to continue it, especially considering it’s a little subjective in terms of, say, statistically determining which group is more likely to be aggressive, since I haven’t seen many actual studies or meta-analyses on that particular topic in specific.
they preach tolerance but are ALWAYS the ones to start the abuse, insults, name calling and threats when they are disagreed with.
First off, the group that I’ve always experienced starting with outright hate and name calling has been the right. Look at two protests, one by leftists, one by the right wing, on the same issue, and you will almost always find the most aggressive, slur using, name calling people on the right making themselves known far before anyone on the left will actually start doing anything even remotely similar.
And secondly, tolerance doesn’t work when dealing with the intolerant. Consider this: Hitler is a brand new figure, comes into the public square, and starts preaching his views. Do we tolerate him, or do we not tolerate him? We should tolerate him, because after all, tolerance is good, right? Well, of course not, because his ideology is intolerant, and directly attacks the tolerant, extinguishing them from society.
The only way you maintain tolerance is by being intolerant of intolerance.
If a conservative states that trans people shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public spaces, and the left shuns that person and ostracizes them, the left is being intolerant, but so is the conservative, who if they had their way, would have then eliminated far more presumably tolerant trans people from public life, if given the chance.
However, conservatives will then frame this as the left being intolerant, and act as if it’s some kind of hypocrisy to try and preserve tolerance by being intolerant of intolerant ideologies.
On a place light Reddit most subs will just ban you for showing any right leaning opinions.
Because many subs have moderators that respect marginalized groups that are often the ones attacked by conservatives.
If someone comes into your community, and begins spouting off an ideology that’s explicitly harmful to members of that group, the most tolerant thing a moderator can do when given two choices:
is the second, because otherwise your community is now persistently allowing in someone who is intolerant of the others in the community.
For the last time, people need to stop treating AI like it removes their need for research, just because it sounds like it did its research. Check the work your tools do for you, damn it.
Ask the lawmakers who wrote the laws with vague language, because according to them, that kind of activity could be considered a sale.
As a more specific example that is more one-sided, but still not technically a “sale,” Mozilla has sponsored links on the New Tab page. (they can be disabled of course)
These links are provided by a third-party, relatively privacy protecting ad marketplace. Your browser downloads a list of links from them if you have sponsored links turned on, and no data is actually sent to their service about you. If you click a sponsored link, a request is sent using a protocol that anonymizes your identity, that tells them the link was clicked. That’s it, no other data about your identity, browser, etc.
This generates revenue for Mozilla that isn’t reliant on Google’s subsidies, that doesn’t actually sell user data. Under these laws, that would be classified as a sale of user data, since Mozilla technically transferred data from your device (that you clicked the sponsored link) for a benefit. (financial compensation)
However, I doubt anyone would call that feature “selling user data.” But, because the law could do so, they have to clarify that in their terms, otherwise someone could sue them saying “you sold my data” when all they did was send a small packet to a server saying that some user, somewhere clicked the sponsored link.
Some jurisdictions classify “sale” as broadly as “transfer of data to any other company, for a ‘benefit’ of any kind” Benefit could even be non-monetary in terms of money being transferred for the data, it could be something as broadly as “the browser generally improving using that data and thus being more likely to generate revenue.”
To avoid frivolous lawsuits, Mozilla had to update their terms to clarify this in order to keep up with newer laws.
I’m genuinely not sure if I’m being too sensitive or if this is genuinely behavior that shouldn’t be supported.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that content existing, and being something people can pay for, but you’re also not being too sensitive for not personally wanting to pay that artist, if your surrounding circumstances would make the access to explicit content then seem a little unsavory in your particular case.
Ideally, that artist would let you pay for just the non-NSFW content, or simply send a tip/donation directly, instead of requiring the NSFW content to be bundled with any attempt at payment, but that doesn’t mean that offering NSFW content itself “shouldn’t be supported,” even if it’s not desirable in your case.
How the fuck do we fix this?
The primary issue is twofold:
If you try viewing even a tiny amount of right leaning content on a fresh social media account on any platform, you’ll see the type of content that gets perpetuated. People simply become indoctrinated by content recommendations that are practically incapable of showing the other side, not to mention that most mainstream media is entirely corporately captured.
The fact that the Democrats were slow to release official policy for Harris’s campaign, indeterminate on Gaza, and had (or really, still have) a very “this is fine, you’re just overreacting, but sure we’ll fix a few things” attitude towards political messaging, only helped Republicans, because it led a lot of people to just vote for the party that promised the most, and that was the Republicans. All the wars would be over, things would be cheaper, all the “bad” people wouldn’t be here anymore, etc.
To a normal person with very little media literacy, those promises sound downright amazing.
I personally think we fix this by at least starting with messaging, since that’s what actually leads most people to make a decision on who to vote for. There were literally people deciding on election night who they wanted to vote for, so messaging is highly important.
The left needs to speak to the immediately visible, material needs of the working people directly. While it’s important to fight against the right on culture war issues to prevent the ceding of ground on things like civil rights and discrimination, I think a lot of left leaning messaging focuses too heavily on that, and as a result, it can seem to right-inclined people that the left has no economic policy. That needs to change.
See: Bernie Sanders, and how he very consistently addresses specific economic issues people face, and has broader support on the right compared to any democratic congressperson. Hell, even JD Vance said Bernie was one of the people he least disliked on the left, and Bernie’s further left than the Democrats. Populist, economic disparity focused, anti-billionaire, pro-worker sentiment is how you change ordinary people’s minds in the current media economy.
As an individual, the most you’ll likely be able to do in this respect is going to be volunteering for phone banking efforts, donating money to left leaning charities focused on reducing economic inequality, and generally bringing these kinds of talking points up in general political discussion with others.
There’s something else that’s commonly overlooked though, and that’s local policy. Think of a city’s “town hall” type meetings that accept public comment. How many people in that city are actually regularly attending a town hall meeting? Think of how few people it really is during a particularly contentious proposal. Now imagine what it’s like when it comes to something like “housing and urban development: reducing the rate of homelessness - meeting no. 57” Almost nobody. Get yourself and a few friends down to your local relevant policy meetings, make even a little noise, and the amount of change you can make as a result can be drastic compared to the actual % of the city’s population you make up.
Pushing for things like ranked-choice voting in local elections can also be very viable, since it’s proven that tends to push voters further left, on average, and it also adds some extra competition that can spur a party like the Democrats into actual meaningful action.
Not if his net worth drops enough to the point that a few lawsuits can drain what’s left of his assets.
If Alex Jones can be ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars from a lawsuit from a relatively small group of families, then I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of it happening to Musk. (Even if it is still tiny)