>Hard to weld doors shut on peoples homes if they have shotguns.
This point is always brought up but is never argued to its natural conclusion.
On the surface it seems you are implying that citizens should have powerful guns so they can threaten and potentially kill police officers trying to do something despotic. However if someone did that, the police would just crack down 10x as hard on that individual with more powerful, government purchased guns and arrest them for life. No matter what guns people are allowed to have, it's not a deterrent against despotism on an individual level.
The argument that the point of the 2nd amendment is for the citizenry to defend against government power is ridiculous. Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter? To argue that that's the point of the 2nd amendment implies the founders didn't believe that the Constitution would be effective in forming a representative democracy.
>Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter?
You're confused that the constitution has more than one kind of safeguard against tyranny?
"The idea that airbags are to prevent injuries is ridiculous. Why would a car have protections stop someone hitting the steering wheel, when there are also seatbelts entirely focused on ensuring that the driver doesn't hit the steering wheel?"
Also note that the guarantee of anti-tyranny violence makes it much less likely that someone's gonna try to do a tyranny in the first place. Compared to a disarmed and helpless population just waiting to be tyrannized.
A mugger is bound by law not to mug you. But he might do it anyway, regardless of what the paper says. However, if he knows you're armed, he's less likely to try. And if he does try, he's less likely to succeed.
The "defense against tyranny" argument for the 2nd amendment was borne out of individual regulated state militias defending against a federal army, not each individual being free to exercise their will as they see fit.
Are you asserting that the American Revolution was launched by "regulated state militias", as in: regulated by King George, or indirectly by his governors in the American colonies?
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Because given the chance, one person at the right place at the right time can make all the difference in the world. See _any_ political assassination attempt/success in recent history.
It's not to defend against the local police force that smashes your door down - it's not to defend against the military that wants to predator drone your hidden compound of Q-cultists in rural Montana because they've been popping shots at National Guard convoys.
It's to give anybody a chance (albeit an infinitesimally small one, with gigantic risks their own life) to immediately and permanently remove a government representative from office.
I personally don't agree with the premise or concept, but that's probably the most likely intention.
In the arts, music, graphic design, animation, 3D models, and eventually realistic looking video seem to be the clear next steps.
The key to AI art is that while the universe is infinitely complex, the visual form of most things humans can recognize follow a collection of natural patterns. Anything humans can do can be computed, the only issue is being able to set up the scope for the patterns we seek to replicate. For games like chess, a bit easier, for images that represent label-able things, harder but still manageable. The main problem of making things beyond this is giving a valid scope to the whole problem: what patterns, precisely, do we intend to replicate?
That's because all the top companies in any sector in China are subsidized and heavily supported by the government. The distribution isn't as organic, it's more a matter of in China, crossing the threshold to being the "golden child" and being guaranteed success right after.
I don't know enough to support their extreme position, but for the sake of information:
Part of it is state-owned banks (the dominant form of banking in China) offering attractive lending to state-owned enterprises, as loan officers avoid the risk of being accused of corruption.
Also, there likely is/was more direct encouragement of exporters (e.g. by subsidies), similar to other countries, but my source doesn't specify if this currently applies to China.
Source: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (2010)
None of the top Chinese tech companies are state-owned. Also 2010 was before Xi Jinping. Things have changed a lot now. Now they get striked left and right by regulations. Just look at their stock price.
I'm not sure where you guys are coming from, but the top officials of China acknowledges this is an issue. Are you saying that they are wrong and that China doesn't have a huge problem with corrupt officials? Or why else are you questioning these things?
In fairness accusations of corruption to remove political opponents or "troublemakers" have a long and storied history of application by genocidal dictatorships like China, democracies, and basically every form of government.
So merely having an accusation doesn't really say much.
From what I know about how things work, the argument makes sense. Just denying won't cut it. You need to propose an alternative view. I am willing to listen.
One interesting next step to the idea is to indicate a continuity of meaning via the edits. For example, for each randomly selected gif, have the next gif share at least one tag. This allows each vaguely connected gif to create a randomly generated narrative by their connected meaning.
It should be possible to be even more prescriptive. E.g. write a "screenplay" (or even let GPT3 generate it) -- basically just a progression of tags -- and then pick random videos that match that.
It's hard to get out of that mindset, especially as a young new hire.
In the United States, your job is very closely tied to your livelihood due to high rents, few social support structures, health insurance often tied to your job, etc.
There's a model of thinking taught in schools and universities that teaches individuals to defer helplessly to their superiors, to be subservient to a fault and respect hierarchies as sacrosanct. When someone abuses that hierarchy, one either has to unlearn their programming, or assume the burden of the imposition of value on their psyche.
The safety net of (primarily European) certain countries is definitely easier to live with when losing a job. In theory you can probably continue indefinitely on some of those welfare payments, although for many people that leads to another kind of burnout (boreout?) again.
It’s also really not comfortable. I am sure you could live on it indefinitely as a kind of ascetic performance but people who actually need that to survive are usually very keen on getting other sources of income. Some of it undeclared and evading taxes, but that’s another problem.
Overall I think there’s a decent compromise to be found there. I am happy for the society to ensure that as many people as possible have a guaranteed bare minimum to survive, which provides opportunities to find better. If some people are content with surviving, well. More power to them. They are not in big enough numbers to matter anyway (the sums involved are dwarfed by companies’ tax fraud).
Yes, many countries that aren’t the US provide health insurance regardless of your employment status.
Some countries (Germany, Switzerland, maybe others) will pay employment insurance even if you quit of your own accord and lower the elimination period if you had reasons to do so (as certified by a MD)
the issue is conflating work/livelyhood/job which arent always synonyms.
your survival being predicated upon engaging in state-enforced financial exploitation by a capitalist and being separated from the value of your own labor
isnt quite the same as
engaging in activities deaigned to produced a beneficial outcome to the self and society at a point in the future
