Poll: More Ukrainians disapprove of EuroMaidan protests than approve of it (Kyiv Post, 2014)

This isn’t Russian propaganda. These are all facts you can read up on from western sources. See this for the sources you can follow up yourself.

Just because you call something Russian propaganda or because Russia said it doesn’t invalidate an argument or fact. This is called a “genetic fallacy”. The US did have a leading role in the regime change in Ukraine and who got into power. The US has done regime change and coups a lot of time in the last 70 years, and they said they are working towards regime change in Ukraine before it happened, they funded the movement and applied pressure.

If you deny the historical facts then you are playing right into the hands of the warmongers like OP. All they have to keep saying is that Russia is an evil Nazi regime and a clear and present danger and that any opposition to more militarism in Europe is traitorous.

If Russia was indeed such a grave danger, they would be right too. Turn Europe’s economy into a war economy, start conscription, start a Manhattan project to intercept nuclear warheads and build a billion killer drones to conquer Russia. So your position isn’t even consistent. Because it’s double think. Russia is at the same time weak and has a smaller economy than Italy, has human wave tactics that cannot work, is on the brink of collapse for years now, and at the same time is incredibly dangerous genocidal nazi state that must be stopped at all cost.

The cost being the truth and our social democratic policies.

It’s very pretty and a worthwhile attempt, but personally I think it’s rather unreadable lol. All you need is four circles for the four major groups that defederate.

Yeah Russia under Putin has been interfering a lot, starting with climate change denial - but that is only possible because social media lets them. Without meaningful moderation to stem “agitprop” and hate speech and propaganda, there is no defense. Meanwhile spending more on the military industrial complex to build up this massive lobbying force that undermines democracy is the exact wrong reaction. We need to either demand the social media moderate and properly ban botnets and state agents, or ban them and create a European (moderated) alternative. You can’t have for profit news or social media and expect democracy to work.

Obviously being Anti Russia doesn’t change the historical fact that the CIA/NED funded and facilitated the protests and regime change in Ukraine and empowered Ukrainian Nazis to turn Ukraine Anti-Russia. And that Russia has legitimate security concerns about a Nato aligned, Nazi infested Ukraine. Which again, a military proxy adversary to Russia wasn’t what we needed to fight Russia’s interference. Putin/Russia does want to undermine and weaken Europe, and in that way they also profit from the destabilization the Ukraine war has caused. It’s a similar dynamic to Bin Laden turning the US warmongering into overdrive and therefor ruining the US.

Yeah… even if that makes no sense. It will be easy for criminals to use tools that do not have backdoors, while chatcontrol breaches the privacy of normal innocent EU citizens.

I don’t know? Live your life. And help worthwhile causes around you as best you can. Every little bit helps, just don’t expect that rationality will prevail. And personally prepare for lean times / economic collapse, buy solar panels, learn to grow potatoes etc.

Well that is also true. But we’re definitely in a situation where many of the smartest and most intelligent people work for the worst causes because it pays the most and everyone has been indoctrinated to be self serving and individualist. Or they think “I need to play the game to get more power, and then I’ll be able to do some good” lol.

This is also an interesting article why-some-of-the-smartest-people-can-be-so-very-stupid.

In any case the effects of the growing climate refugees is very predictable. Neoliberal “leftist” parties will push for more immigration while calling opposition fascism and there will be growth in actual fascist parties.

It seems whatever happens, the plutocrats win. US starts foreign wars, refugees increase support for right wing. Economy is being gutted for wealth transfers, more people vote right wing. Crime is on the rise because of poor socioeconomics, people vote for harsher prisons and less spending on wellfare and education. But never ever does the mainstream talk about how the influence of plutocrats actually makes it happen, because they are stupid.

Uno reverse card: If you believe that, you don’t understand enough yet.

You need political power, wealth (economic power) or influence (cult and followers) or military power to influence people. And then it becomes a question of power imbalance - billionaires and governments can vastly outspend our organizing efforts and have more powerful tools (= high IQ specialists) at their disposal. They developed strategies and technology to combat democratic organization over the past decades.

It’s a numbers game: 10 motivated, enlightened people empowered with the power of friendship will never beat 1000 professional dumbass soldiers. That is the big liberal lie.

Well that is the most likely outcome, unless we get extremely lucky.

Because influencing culture requires power and we the 99% don’t have any. Mostly I’m interested in understanding why and what is going to happen. I’m like a /popcornCommunist

The crisis has reopened one of Europe’s most politically divisive debates, more than a decade after over a million people, many fleeing the war in Syria, arrived on the continent during the 2015 migration crisis.

There are some estimates we’ll see something like 1.5 billion climate refugees until 2050, but that might be overblown and globally. But still the numbers will explode for Europe until the rest of the century.

Unlike the USA, many EU countries have much higher population density. It would be hard to physically absorb such scales. And there certainly won’t be a political will by the people to accommodate as many as possible. I’d love an effort to build ultra high density metropolis’s for some kind of post scarcity living for millions, but that seems unlikely. And an unwillingness to address this makes the rise of fascist parties in Europe pretty much inevitable.

As long as there is prosperity and a positive outlook for the future, populations are generally quite fine with things, but that is not the case any more. We have something like 6% Muslim population (only a quarter practicing though) and millions of Ukrainian refugees in the EU. For most people this is already too much.

Ultimately climate change means genocide and we haven’t really done shit. These refugees are only the first waves.

This is good but also feels a bit performative. The local production technology with wood does sound nice and useful, but I don’t think the wood for the blades really adds up to much compared to rigid foam and fiberglass. The concrete needed for the foundation and earthwork will contain much more embodied energy and isn’t recycleable. Plus the steel for the tower. Burring blades out of epoxy and fiberglass should be fine, it’s non toxic and also a way to make sure the carbon in there is sequestered. It’s a drop in the bucket overall.

To really reduce the amount of resources and material needed to harvest wind energy there should be more investment into kite power. A fraction of the mass needed and easier to deploy.

That looks like it should be tagged NSFW

No I’m opposed to the concept of intellectual property, I find the very idea obscene. Humanity has always shared ideas and knowledge. Abolishing it would prevent megacorp from selling books for profit.

Instead you would have payments directly to authors or creators etc based on views or interest, ideally on a progressive scale. So someone who starts out can make a living with even just a few fans, while someone with millions gets a bit less proportionally. There are other ideas on how to manage things and make things fair.

No, corporations love copyright. They can afford to pay licenses and buy every single book they scanned. They are also just “too big to fail”. So ideal for them would be to make the very use of any AI model require a license for IP to monopolize and squash competition. If you consider AI the “means of generation” or whatever, it’s able to do work that humans used to do. If they DO manage to shift the legal framework for this, then they get to own that work. And worse, “we” can’t make use of these AI models.

PS: A good example is how health insurance companies purposefully drive up costs of medications and healthcare. They can afford it and can negotiate in large quantities, we can’t.

This might not seem important right now, but advances in robotics are happening too, and a small LLM that can write “code” for executing tasks and manual labor could enable actual people or actual small businesses to do “subsistence farming”. You build your open source robot like you can build a 3D printer, plop a smartphone in as a control unit, and you get free food for life or make cabinets or build whatever. But not if they extend IP law to AI models because open source couldn’t afford to license the training data and they are considered piracy. Obviously this will take time yet.

IP and patents are a tool for monopolization and oppression because they want you to forever pay rent.

The specs seem fine and would serve me perfectly, but the price of $8,500 still seem pretty high for what you get. Or is that just inflation I haven’t kept up with?

Generally downloading files is pretty much safe and untraceable. At least in the countries I know of, so this might depend on where you life. What is a problem is uploading or sharing with a torrent client. Then you need a VPN.

Yeah read that too, that is just fucking outrageous. I really wish fuckai would channel all that anger into some concrete and sensible demands for regulation. Like making destruction of rare books for scanning illegal, or mandatory metadata tags for generative content and showing watermarks in the browser. Or labor rights. The only country regulating AI at all sensibly is China, like most recently they outlawed making addictive AI girlfriend / boyfriend apps.

PS: Just to add, the rare book thing is a bit hypocritical too. Personally I’m pretty much against copyright or intellectual property on principle, so rare books should be scanned non-destructively and be available as eBooks for free. But the argument against AI will tighten copyright, which is also what the AI techbros want. They are fine with paying some license fee to some fund to use the training data, because that will prevent others from offering AI for free (e.g. no running local open source AI models). Which makes certain they can forever collect rent on AI.

inexpensive meals

Really rubbing the sauerkraut in the wound there

It’s machine learning not copying. They are not copying and reproducing your book - except by accident lol. And they will fix the accidents soon enough. It’s meant to be not just transformative use but actually learning how to write. And clearly they are mostly successful with that goal, even if the quality of the generated text is subpar - it is generating new text by learning from your book.

So this meme is moving the goalpost of IP. If someone goes to university and learns from textbooks the university wrote, they will have to get a license to practice the skills they learn. Like some kind of rent. That is what the argument here seems to be.

It’s a question if history is real and if it matters or not.

Thanks for the work, really interesting graph! I think it *might be easier to read if the rectangles were ovals or some morph between rectangle and oval, so that the overlapping groupings are a bit more distinct.