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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Cowbee is mostly correct so I’m not going to address everything but there are 2 pieces I want to respond to.

    Greed is rewarded in every economy.

    That doesn’t seem to be true. Like an economy that doesn’t funnel money into individuals. Or even moneyless economies like Library or Gift. (Though moneyless economies imply we’re achieving actual communism, going beyond socialism)

    No, socialist systems like free housing, healthcare, education can exist alongside capitalism. Worker owned systems like cooperatives still operate in a market.

    Are you talking about free housing (etc) programs being managed as a cooperative, alongside a commodities market of cooperatives? If yes, that’s not capitalism, that’s socialism. If no, then you must be talking about a welfare state like what’s in Scandinavia, which isn’t socialist.

    Kind of relevant to both points, there are a few different schools of socialism so you could see if any make more sense to you.


  • First, don’t point your finger at capitalism as the problem.

    You already lost me

    Second, acknowledge & understand greed and how it is inherent in all human nature.

    I would rather acknowledge and encourage humans inherent nature to cooperate and grow together.

    Third, build systems that minimize the damage done by individual or corporate greed.

    Like building an economy that doesn’t inherently reward greed? I wonder what that would look like.

    Check against consolidation, monopolization, and short term Wall St like thinking of endless growth.

    These things exist because of capitalism

    Four, make sure socialist programs exist to support everyone

    That’s social welfare. Being socialist means the workers own the means of production

    capitalism is not the only way to live, it’s optional

    It’s so easy to live in the USA and just not do capitalism /s

    the European nations seem to be doing things quite alright

    Do you understand that their wealth was pillaged from the global south?

    Can you give me a description of what makes socialism bad solely based on how it works (not referencing any country who may have attempted it)?


  • I can’t look at NK because the world capitalist economy isolated them, so I’m not going to argue about their material conditions. I don’t think anyone is immune to greed, but I think having a system that rewards greed is going to turn it from an aberration to an epidemic.

    To your first point, let’s pretend you’re right and look at it in the abstract. What is to be done? Do you want to kill greed? How would you do that?





  • I still don’t think your definition is valid or good and I didn’t really see any argument that said otherwise. Immediately after the part you quoted I did say “(but we’re kinda fucked with that right now)” which was in reference to our 2 party system, so yes I understand that part.

    The other option is to slowly replace the members of the party in positions of power.

    This isn’t changing unless one of the parties gains power and essentially gives it up to implement a new system.

    in the positions of power in the DNC.

    Statements like these reveal why the definition I stated is more accurate. That there’s a party line that politicians in that party are expected to follow. You use those statements to argue that we should be trying to change what that party line is, which I take no issue with and seems to be a goal of AOC and some others. But we’re talking about who is a better example of a Democrat which has zero meaning without the democratic party. And Pelosi is an excellent example of what the party is while AOC is an example of what you would like the party to be. You do need to recognize where the party is before you can figure out how to steer it in the direction you’re hoping for.

    And you’re right about this being a different conversation but I still want to say a little something about

    If they are running and not winning that is because they are not popular with the public

    Because this seems like a pretty naive sentiment. First because a large percentage of the public simply doesn’t vote. Also the current tribalism of our 2 party system is the most important thing for many if not most of those that do vote. But most importantly, having good and popular ideas or even saying good and popular things is not what gets you elected in this country. Our political system relies on the advertising model. If you package it right and put it in front of enough people, it doesn’t actually matter what is being said. That’s how someone like Trump gets elected. Which I guess is a form of being popular, but I don’t think that’s what you meant by it.

    Here’s an incongruity that applies to both conversations. A supermajority of democratic voters support government run healthcare, but it’s nowhere to be seen in the DNC platform.










  • From the first article.

    For the human writing process, we looked at humans’ total annual carbon footprints, and then took a subset of that annual footprint based on how much time they spent writing.

    Which seems like a silly method of comparing emissions, given that the human doesn’t exist for the purpose of creating images. The carbon footprint of the human is still present whether or not they are generating art. For an AI, the emissions are an addition to global carbon footprint.

    For the final point, a random social media post isn’t a profit seeing endeavor, which is why it isn’t expected to pay for any images it uses. The normal accepted practice is to just give credit to the source. The same is not true for news articles, which does care about there being a watermark and is expected to pay for image use. Unless of course people start accepting the normal use of ai images in which case disrupts a whole industry to provide worse art.