I'm pretty sure you read for pleasure, and feeling a human connection is one way that you derive pleasure. If it's the only way that you derive pleasure from reading, my condolences.
Pretty much where my thoughts on this are. I rarely feel any particular sense of connection to the actual author when I read their books. And I have taken great pleasure from some AI stories (to the degree I put them up on my personal website as a way to keep them around).
Trump's for whatever is good for Trump. Stopping a war so he can bring his buddy Vlad back in to the fold? Sure. Starting a war so he can annex Greenland? Probably also sure.
That's the other fun side of Trump. He says a ton of outrageous things but, if you like him, you just pick and choose which bits are ridiculous and jokes and which are truthful when it's actually impossible to figure out which is which. Is he going to take over Greenland with force? His followers will say probably not because they don't see it. Is he going to introduce tariffs to Canada? His followers will say yes because they do see it. Has he done either? Not yet. Will he? Who knows!
But whether he's serious or not about a claim really comes down to whether someone likes it or not. Regardless, I'd argue that's a really poor way to lead.
I don't like Trump at all, but I'm not blind to history. He likes building things, particularly with his name on it. Even with Gaza his inclination is to build something in that completely devastated area.
He's also very sensitive to public opinion of him, and he knows public opinion is against military conflict. People are sick of it.
So war is the complete antithesis of everything he's ever demonstrably cared about. That's a pretty solid piece of evidence that lets you distinguish what seems reasonable, but that gets conveniently ignored by people that let their feelings about him influence their judgment.
I think there's more going on with the war than just he's anti-war, but I can kind of see this argument. But if we take it as true, it would seem that he's bad at working towards the things he professes to want. He either doesn't understand them or he pushes to get the fastest result without thought as to whether that would be the best.
I don't like it, but I can't deny that he's made it work more often than expected. Possibly with some negative downstream effects we haven't seen yet. Time will tell.
Just walking up to a girl in person and saying "hi" is a nuanced thing. If you set off the creeper alarms at all you're DOA, so you need to have an aura of genuine chill and say hi to them in a way that seems completely casual and un-premeditated. Then you need to have them in a captive situation for a while to make some progress (standing in line, etc) and you need to come up with a reason to continue interacting with them later, and you need them to find you funny/charming/attractive/interesting enough that they give you contact information and don't just automatically ghost you.
This applies to when you approach girls cold. If you're really hot it's a different game, girls will just give you that look when you're walking around on the street, at the mall, etc, and if you walk up and say hi to them they will fuck you if you play it cool at all.
There are other approaches such as manufacturing social proof and demand for yourself
Many women are pretty traumatized by the captive situation logic, because a lot of guys do that and its pretty obvious. Like a beggar on the street “asking a question” and you already know to ignore it but want to give the benefit of the doubt that its not about money
Manufacturing social integration is a deep but fairly simple topic that many people find attractive, but it nullifies the need to try to prolong an interaction with a woman and is pretty much the opposite. where essentially you’re too cool and have too much going on to entertain her. if you’re interested in women, plural, it doesnt have to be hard or a coveted thing with much work behind it. and you’re not putting her in a captive situation so your already ahead of the pack
honestly most attraction are gender neutral concepts that work with business partners and relationship partners a like
Oh, people are thinking it now for sure, but it takes a while to retool your relationships and build out a new trade network so you can safely tell a major trading partner to fuck themselves to threats of 100% tariffs.
If Europe and Latin America want to buddy up with the concentration camp gang, I really don't care. We do not need fascists and communists as our partners.
Funny you mention fascists. As for China being a concentration camp gang, that's not going to matter when their former big brother/ally is just relentlessly bullying them and trying to extract all sorts of concessions under duress, and the alternative has demonstrated to be a reliable ally and partner.
Once again, I don't really care if Europe decides that is who they want to be friends with. If your country thinks that trade is more important than the country currently directly committing a modern holocaust, I don't want us to be allied with you at all.
Yeah. I personally think we should just sink the middle east into the ocean because not a single problem there will ever be resolved in a meaningful way.
Ironically, if Trump keeps running this playbook, it's going to end with a USA/Russia/Israel bloc and a Europe/LatAm/Africa/China bloc. Which one of those sounds like the evil empire to you?
The culture war is going to be over soon, the left has basically given up. When we have trillionaires at the same time as social security and medicare going tits up, Luigi-type figures are going to come out of the woodwork. The ultra rich won't be able to hire help because they'll be too scared. At that point the government is done unless it turns hard left.
I don't think the culture war is over, the left seems to be reflecting, and it has certainly taken a motivation hit, but giving up has not happened. The left is lacking a leading voice to rally behind
Keep in mind, Donold only won by ~100k voters across 3 states. There was not a landslide nor is there a mandate
He shifted voters incrementally more red than previous elections across almost every zip code, and demographic. It was very much a wipeout in that sense.
An election where if 100k voters in 3 states had checked a different box, does not make a wipeout. A small movement across some of the demographics, while also others going the other way, does not make a wipeout
The real life way that we'll have Terminator is when the oligarchs make AI to defend themselves, and the AI keeps fighting after all oligarchs have been killed by revolutionaries.
I suspect automated manufacturing and automated maintenance of the manufacturing could lead to a world where the rich can afford to kill off the poor, and then over generations devolve into a society that has no knowledge of how the machine that is providing them with food and supplies works- without any ASI takeoff.
England has the same weak implementation of democracy with the same flaws. You'll want to move a country that indirectly chooses the government and president.
Uhh the only thing positive is the UK citizens finally saw through the conservative bullshit.. this is only because they were ahead of the USA in implementing disastrous policies which played out and showed that they had no clothes.
If the republicans are smart they won’t impose austerity but it won’t matter as whatever they do will have unintended consequences they can’t predict and it will likely tank them in the midterms and in 4 years.
But right now they are targeting the intellectual elite that actually run things/society. All because they can’t handle the truth.
Tech thinks they will be spared by focusing on their magic counting machines. Trump AI will fix everything.
Except that this is the kind of governance that American voters chose. They can't claim to have been misled. They explicitly voted for oligarchy and this is what they asked for.
If you're waiting for American voters to wake up and demand good governance you'll be waiting a really long time.
I don't expect voters to wake up, I do expect the assassins of the rich and powerful to become folk heroes along with riots and vandalism of corporate property, and when the government tries to crack down on it, against the government as well.
That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action. China got there first, the US will rapidly roll out the same playbook but painted with liberal terminology. It's not about harmony here, it's about freedom and protecting ourselves from terrorists and the radical left.
> That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action.
Larry Ellison said it on record if anyone doubts it. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."[1]
The oligarchs are playing a losing game in the long term, they'll always have to rely on people to help them, and it's too easy to kill someone if you're willing to sacrifice your life to do it.
That dystopia will come from an autocratic one party government with deeply entrenched interests in the tech oligarchy, not from really slick AI models.
Even a well intended non autocratic democratically elected multi party system could accidentally pull off a dystopic opening of pandora’s box when it comes to AI. In the grand scheme of things I’m not sure we’re any safer if we live in a democracy.
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