This is just a straw man fallacy I keep seeing pushed around, especially on pro-Russia subs in reddit. Elections are about how you choose who takes the role, it's not about what the role is - which can be a fascist dictator with popular support. It is a popular genre in the last 10-15 years, the fascists and dictators with popular support use their control of media, police, judiciary etc to align all the odds in their favor and go ahead and hold real elections and as long as the margin is large enough they don't cheat on the elections.
Even when they loose an election they tend to have loyalists embedded deep in the institutions and take power back through sabotage and legal battles.
For example, they set the governing process in such a way that it's practically impossible to effectively govern by following the rules, when they loose an election the new people are having very hard time, services start to suffer. They need to do reforms and change the laws and if they don't have supermajority they are being blocked and end up either screw up governing or follow the practical paths of governing like the previous government used to do. This results in either losing elections next time as the public sees this as incompetence or being sent into jail as judiciary selectively targets you for corruption when you take shortcuts to get things done.
So it is a fascist dictatorship even if there are elections and official power transfer because the institution than wield power follow orders to smash opponents of their leader during their reign or even after they are officially not in power.
TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s.
Even the photos are not that much better so far, people compare the OG and many like the old stuff better. Obviously its impressive engineering but we have seen it before.
I will be impressed when we have a large city sized space station with a large transparent dome.
> TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s.
People could do backflips and write moving poetry and memorize thousands of digits of pi in the 60s too. Such things were impressive then and they're impressive now.
I could understand someone thinking that the Apollo program was more impressive than the Artemis program, but to think that the Artemis missions are not impressive is completely foreign to me.
Doing it the second time is so less impressive that soviets cancelled their whole human moon landing and Americans stopped paying attention on Apollo 13 and cancelled the program after 17.
Obviously it is huge engineering achievement each time, just not as impressive as it was done before.
We have an incredible eclipse photos with multiple planets in the background. If you don't find photos like that incredible to see I'd guess you need to do some soul searching.
They are impressive photos, the earthrise is my background on my phone and the eclipse is my background on my laptop but they are derivatives of what we had before.
Is one picture of a mountain derivative of another? Are two pictures of a specific human being derivative? No, they are individual creations, even if made using the same camera by the same photographer. Each is an individual work of art, the vision of a particular person capturing a unique, unrepeatable moment.
They are not derivatives, because the photographers are different people and the time and place were decades separated from one another. To call them derivative is to belittle the humans experiencing the events.
In the same way that Cassini was a derivative of Galileo, but around Saturn and with a working antenna. Or Perseverence is a derivative of Curiosity, which is a derivative of Opportunity. Or philosophy is just footnotes on Plato. Or classical music is everyone trying to escape from the shadow of Bach. Or fantasy is just a poorer version of Tolkien.
I suppose there's truth to that, but it unfairly and unhelpful minimizes the accomplishment, and it collapses the awe that the article talks about. If you are viewing the photos as essentially the same, you are shortchanging yourself, because Artemis was not a means for producing photos, those are more like artifacts of production. Again, that would collapse the awe of Artemis.
(Also, technically, I don't think that Artemis is a derivative of Apollo, more like a re-implementation from scratch.)
They are not essentially the same, just not as big deal as the first ones.
Armstrong is the only cooler astronaut than Gagarin even though other astronauts technically achieved much more
than Gagarin. Even Gene Cernan isn’t as cool as Gagarin despite spending more than 3 days on the surface of the moon and probably doing much more things outside of the earth than anyone. He’s cool in other ways of course.
Those not impressive/'I don't see progress' images were sent across a brand new optical downlink. Far from boring or 1960s stuff and very much expanding our capabilities type stuff.
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/esc/o2o/
'I want the I can feel it exponential curve part of progress without the slow, long, hard work part at the start of the curve like new boring optical space communication capabilities'
Most things we do are slight incremental upgrades until we put in enough to get to the more exponential/experiential progress that people 'think' is what progress has too look like. Look at cars. They were pretty basic shit boxes with sheet metal/slight tire changes forever (basically my whole life) and suddenly they got way way way better to the point a grocery runner station wagon Rav4 can have insane performance specs and good mpg from a fairly affordable 250,000 mile capable boring vehicle. It took boring incremental work/infrastructure to make workable, slightly larger tires/brake rotors/pads/engine tolerances, then now with toxic components, then slightly larger again, then a little less toxic, repeat.
Are you expecting one day 'Bob's Refractory' decides you know what, let's start making city/county sized impact resistant high stress transparent domes light enough to ship to the moon for dirt cheap, that would be cool, why haven't we been doing that yet?
Prediction: If USA ends up attacking EU, EU will freeze all the US tech company money and compel them to open their platforms and move all the backend services to EU soil in exchange of unfreezing it and continue operating in a free but regulated market.
For example locked communication devices are huge national security risk, so Apple will have their money frozen and given two options:
1) Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU. Continue business as usual, EU financial institutions may choose to use Apple services as Apple pay but they may choose to bypass it. EU developers may choose to use Apple App Store services and pay the Apple's fees or they may choose to bypass it. Apple may chose to make Xcode a paid software, developers may choose not to purchase Xcode and use other non-Apple tools and pay nothing to Apple.
2) Use credit against the frozen money to refund your users if they bring their devices to you. All the Apple devices will be locked out from EU mobile providers(technically very easy for iPhone, simply by blocking devices with Apple IMEI on EU networks) and any remaining devices of the users will be refunded with the Apple's money. After some grace period, any money remaining in Apple's account will be transferred to Apple and if Apple wants to do business in EU again will have to do the option 1.
I'm bit on the doomer side of things, so I think that if Trump keeps his current course and power, at the end of the term American software industry will shrink by %90 as it will be expelled from most of the world and will be serving to 350M people instead of 8B people. Its amazing how US is screwing up its dominant position in this incredibly lucrative industry that lets them serve a market of 8B people and accumulate huge wealth in the process.
How is that going to work? Apple will still be under the CLOUD Act, so Europe would still be vulnerable. The only solution would be for Apple to fork into two completely separate companies, which is unlikely to happen.
Most likely there will initially just be a lot of chaos, because nobody is prepared for this scenario. There will be huge supply issues, COVID will look like nothing (both in terms of groceries, etc. and getting replacement hardware). Then Europe will on the short term rebase to Chinese/Korean/Taiwanese hardware, with probably an AOSP fork on the mobile side and Linux on the desktop/server side.
But it will be terribly messy. Nobody seems to prepare, because everyone thinks this scenario is unthinkable or they just don't want to put in the effort. Even all the people that I know that are talking about digital sovereignty are still using their iPhones, MacBooks, or GMS Android phones.
I am trying to tell tech people that the time to start switching is to alternatives is now, since tech people are usually early adopters and can help other people. But most switch from GMail to Proton Mail and proclaim victory. January 2026 (remember the good ol' days when the US wanted to take Greenland with force if necessary?) was already forgotten after 4 weeks or so.
If Apple can't work out a legal structure that works, it will be forced to refund for the devices then so the consumer can use the money to buy compliant devices probably from Korea or China. EU can work out special deal with the Asian manufacturers as there will be hundreds of millions of people with cash in hand looking to buy a high end smartphone.
Being messy isn't a worse outcome than US invasion. Europeans aren't rooting to live like Americans or go to wars for America and the tech thingy will be a nuisance at most.
EU freezes/takes over all Apple assets in EU, users with Apple devices get the money in cash upon delivering their devices. If the money isn't enough for the refunds, a finance mechanism can be created that will be settle after the war.
The returned devices may be sold to 3rd party markets if Apple isn't cooperating.
Most value/assets are in the US, I don't see how Apple in the EU would have enough interesting assets to refund. If 30% of the 450M inhabitants in the EU have an iPhone and the purchase price was 1000 Euro on average, that would be 135B Euro. I would be surprised if they have a fraction of that in the EU as assets. The primary useful asset I could think of is if the iOS source code was also stored somewhere in the EU. I guess in war it would be fair game to fork it. Wouldn't help with the existing iPhones, since the EU doesn't have the signing keys, but you could bootstrap a new phone ecosystem (and even revert Liquid Glass :p).
If the money isn't enough for the refunds, a finance mechanism can be created that will be settle after the war.
There are huge assumptions in this, like the EU wins the war, the war doesn't end in a sort-of cold war, Apple cannot get away from liability because it was not their decision, etc.
The returned devices may be sold to 3rd party markets if Apple isn't cooperating.
Flooding a 3rd-party market with over 100M second hand iPhones would drive down the prices by an extreme amount.
Well how convenient that Apple has about $135B in European accounts(that peaked at 200B)! To avoid taxes US companies tend to keep a lot of money in the markets they sell their products.
You don’t go to war with the association of losing it, obviously the risk will ve priced and I don’t think that the risk will be that big considering that US hasn’t won any wars since WW2. Even if doesn’t cover all the costs, national security and independence doesn’t have to come for free.
That's not a US specific strength though, anybody with the ability to strike someone with shorter range than theirs can do that. I.e. Netherland can destabilize South America through attacking Panama and its very unlikely that Netherlands will be bombed.
Sure, when US Brazil etc. are pissed off enough, Netherland can just TACO like the US did.
China and Russia can do the exactly same thing to Iran too and Iran won't be bombing Moscow or Beijing either.
It might demonstrate madness though, which in same cases can be useful.
This is an insane take. Why would Netherlands do this when America exists? And even if they didn't rest on their laurels and let America do it, they would not be able to establish a kill chain the way USA can, and so they would need American support. And even if they forewent the support, they would be denounced on the global stage and suffer massively economically. You are massively underestimating just how much liberty USA has to say YOLO and do whatever it wants.
Russia has established that it cannot in fact do this! That is why the two week special operation has gone on for so long.
China? It remains to be seen.
For now the best assumption is that USA is in a league of its own when it comes to imposing its will on other nations.
Maybe the Dutch are willing to risk it all to annoy the libs so they will elect and transfer all the power to a complete clown and attempt to make some money on the stock market and betting sites in the process.
I don't think parent is arguing that is a wise or prudent thing to do, but merely that violence is very much accessible to the state as an option. Just because it is not exercised with reckless abandon like, especially more recently, in the case of US, does not mean it suddenly does not exist.
<< For now the best assumption is that USA is in a league of its own when it comes to imposing its will on other nations.
You are wrong in general on this point. European countries in general have a long and exciting history of imposing its will upon others ( unilaterally and not ).
> For now the best assumption is that USA is in a league of its own when it comes to imposing its will on other nations.
It literally lost and wasted huge amount of resources in the process. Everyone else politely nodded until insulted too much, but otherwise ignored what USA wanted. When insulted, they exchanged some words while continuing to practically ignore what USA wants.
> For now the best assumption is that USA is in a league of its own when it comes to imposing its will on other nations.
I don't think that is a correct take away.
assuming that this ceasefire holds (big fucking if) it proves that the US is unable to defend it's self and allies against sustained drone attack.
Part of the reason why the middle east's US allies are allied is the implicit deal that they won't fuck with the oil supply, and the US will protect them against their enemies.
In the 90s, the USA would park a few carriers in the gulf and project complete air superiority. They can't do that anymore, and now needs land bases controlled by allies who the USA openly despises.
China doesn't need to bomb places to make its will felt. It's slowly and subtly built out bases over the south sea, effectively fortifying areas that are not chinas. They have also pretty much compromised most of the telecommunications infra through the various typhoons. (I've also heard rumours that intelligence agencies are leaking like a sieve as well.)
Part of the reason that WWI happened was because a massive military power tried to crush a "primitive" opponent, they fucked it up and demanded help from its allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cer this then dragged everyone into a massive fuckup.
There’s an urge down there in the modern people secretly hoping for the destruction the civilization. Get out of the current systems that dictate a life for you. I suspect that’s why very few people are panicking, a lot of people are rooting for it to happen.
It’s not a rational thought, it’s an urge. Besides, people naturally believe that they will survive and the bad things won’t happen to them. That’s how people do stupid things all the time.
Risk to Netanyahu's career or wellbeing can do the trick because as we have seen lately Israel is willing to risk Israel's future and the Jewish communities safety across the world. It's not even as a part of grand strategy or anything, they are pushing to make criticizing Netanyahu a taboo.
I used to admire Israel as the only sane country in the middle east with great culture for entrepreneurship even if they had elements of atrocities(these could be fixed through civil progress in sane countries). I'm genuinely sad to see it has turned into a genocidal theocratic lunacy like the rest of the middle east and theocratic lunatics can do anything.
If the calculus skewed by arrogance and religious delusions is on the positive for the ruling class, they will use a nuke.
I remember when ChatGPT exploded and Bing had it integrated, the idea was brilliant because unlike ChatGPT it didn't have information cut-off since it can access the web. I was very excited to ditch Google for AI chat with web access.
How did MS actually implemented it though? After a few messages the chat is blocked because MS did not choose to walk the extra mile and maybe compact the context so that their product can be actually usable.
Of course OpenAI, Perplexity and others later implemented that properly and its integral part of modern AI chat and I actually ditched Google for the most part. Had Microsoft done it, they might have had a shot in replacing Google and maybe becoming the AI Chat provider. But no, Microsoft can't have a well thought UI to provide a delightful UX.
IMHO it's a culture thing. Lack of cohesion is a result of it, I used to be annoyed by Apple that doesn't allow to ship its own UI libraries together with the app so to support old versions etc. but Apple had it right, thanks to the limitations UI is coherent.
Ironically, the post doesn’t even mention her name, just “musical artist”. This is part of the engagement bait, leaving details out so that people will click to tweet either to pause the vid to read the moving watermark or to find out her from the comments, increasing the signal for the algorithm.
At this point I would say either drop the copyright system or enforce it properly, that is either unlimited derivative works to increase creativity or no one gets to use other people work, not even downloading videos from instagram to “help” a struggling artist spread her message.
(BTF = Blue Tick Fucker, an initialism I'm trying to get to take off, primarily in my WhatsApp groups where there's loads of self-proclaimed geopolitics experts claiming to know exactly what's going on and what will happen and why.)
Why AI is able to do everything except CEO and social media hype up work? Why engineers and doctors still need CEOs to do their job?
From the votes I see that this is unpopular opinion but apparently there are close to 400 million companies in the world, of those 60K are publicly traded.
I am sure that there's enough data to train top notch CEO on this, since they are required to keep records all the time and give speeches for living.
Surely privately owned companies where the CEO is also the owner wouldn't like it but replacing the CEO with an AI in institutions with professional CEOs seems overdue. The radiologist AI certainly will be much better served by AI CEO.
I am pretty sure current AI is not capable of replacing Radiologists, but I am pretty sure is already good enough to replace 90% of current CEOs. I have worked with multiple CEOs...
The job description should be sufficient prompt to replace the HR, add some RAG and skill files based on a few months of in-company chat tool data and paperwork, I don't see why there's still HR around. The AI HR can choose to hire entertainers etc. for some tasks but why would keep HR on payroll al the time?
1. HR doesn’t work with you. They work for your CEO or Board. Consider them a toxic entity if you ever have a real problem.
2. HR is a socially accepted jobs program for people without any discernible skills, beyond basic data entry and organization. Effectively no one else wants to do it. The issue is that with point one, these people are told they are important and it immediately goes to their heads.
Even when they loose an election they tend to have loyalists embedded deep in the institutions and take power back through sabotage and legal battles. For example, they set the governing process in such a way that it's practically impossible to effectively govern by following the rules, when they loose an election the new people are having very hard time, services start to suffer. They need to do reforms and change the laws and if they don't have supermajority they are being blocked and end up either screw up governing or follow the practical paths of governing like the previous government used to do. This results in either losing elections next time as the public sees this as incompetence or being sent into jail as judiciary selectively targets you for corruption when you take shortcuts to get things done.
So it is a fascist dictatorship even if there are elections and official power transfer because the institution than wield power follow orders to smash opponents of their leader during their reign or even after they are officially not in power.
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