FaceDeer

As much disdain as I have for those convoy protesters, I did wonder at the time “why not simply arrest them and impound their trucks with normal police actions first? Surely deliberately blocking roads like this is already illegal under ordinary laws.” Only if that doesn’t work would there be a bigger issue at hand.

Seems like my thought was correct.

It’s okay, he’s apparently in pretty dire straits too. His son was supposed to be his replacement, so having them both go out at the same time is even better.

Oh I’m well aware of how weak denazification was. I’m saying I doubt the US will even get that much.

Does this mean that John Tesla is a good guy? I’m confused.

It’s what representative democracy is about. It would be nice if they’d recognize a little more that their personal fiefdoms would be forfeit if the US annexed us, though.

An established dictatorship that you can actually make a deal with and expect it to be respected, and that isn’t currently threatening to annex us with military force.

Nuremberg only happened because Germany was utterly defeated and occupied by foreign powers. I’m not optimistic America will have a reckoning like that.

Wait to see if anyone actually caves.

This will do.

There isn’t exactly a huge market of people to trade Nobel Prizes to in exchange for political favors, so it’s not like a better option is likely to come along.

Because America is a democracy and enough of the voters wanted this.

He manages to also insult Canada with that joke too, by assuming they’ll get past 51.

“COULD???”

It’s pretty standard for American commenters on social media to unthinkingly assume that American law is somehow “universal.” I guess that’s the level that the American government in general has descended to at this point.

I see utterly selfish people taking advantage of each other. I see no “loyalty” beyond the immediate moment.

Yeah. I get uncomfortable shades of the “stab in the back” propaganda from interwar Germany, where the Nazis blamed everyone except Germany for World War I. If the Americans can’t understand that they’ve done this to themselves then they’re never going to recover from it.

Yeah, at the time Voyager came out I considered it the worst of the Star Trek live action series. It’s since been surpassed many times over for that title, but there’s still a lot of episodes that are not very good individually and the overall premise of the show was wasted.

That said, there are a few very good episodes, and a couple of the characters were really enjoyable. The Doctor and 7 of 9 became some of my favourite Star Trek characters across the franchise.

Unfortunately Janeway was an inconsistent psychopath and Chakotay was a block of wood. So they had to struggle against the background.

It’s been too long for my memory to be able to dredge up a recommended viewing list of the best episodes to focus on, but perhaps you could scrounge one up on the web somewhere. Voyager was back in the day when series had a lot of episodes and a lot of them were relatively stand-alone so skipping over a bunch likely won’t hurt if you pick them well.

There is a tiny shred of logic to it. Trump fears being poisoned, and if he eats food that is specifically prepared for him then that’s a perfect opportunity for someone to target him. Whereas if he gets takeout from a random drive-through there’s no way a poisoner would know ahead of time which hamberder to contaminate.

That tiny shred of logic is buried under a mountain of idiocy, of course.

As much as people on the Fediverse or Reddit or whatever other social media bubble we might be in like to insist “nobody wants this” or that AI is useless, it actually is useful and a lot of people do want it. I’m already starting to see the hard-line AI hate softening, more people are going “well maybe this application of AI is okay.” This will increase as AI becomes more useful and ubiquitous.

There’s likely a lot of AI companies and products starting up right now that aren’t going to make it. That’s normal when there’s a brand new technology, nobody knows what the “winning” applications are going to be yet so they’re throwing investment at everything to see what sticks. Some stuff will indeed stick, AI isn’t going to go away. Like how the Internet stuck around after the Dot Com bust cleared out the chaff. But I’d be rather careful about what I invest in myself.

I’m not a fan of big centralized services and subscriptions, which unfortunately a lot of the American AI companies are driving for. But fortunately an unlikely champion of AI freedom has arisen in the form of… China? Of all places. They’ve been putting out a lot of really great open-weight models, focusing hard on getting them to train and run well on more modest hardware, and releasing the research behind it all as well. Partly that’s because they’re a lot more compute-starved than Western companies and have no choice but to do it that way, but partly just to stick their thumb in those companies’ eyes and prevent them from establishing dominance. I know it’s self-interest, of course. Everything is self-interest. But I’ll take it because it’s good for my interests too.

As for how far the technology improves? Hard to say. But I’ve been paying attention to the cutting edge models coming out, and general adoption is still way behind what those things are capable of. So even if models abruptly stopped improving tomorrow there’s still years of new developments that’ll roll out just from making full use of what we’ve got now. Interesting times ahead.

Trump is nobody’s agent. He is a demented narcissistic psychopath who craves attention and adulation. Since he has no understanding of love or friendship, the only tools he has at his disposal to get it is power and dominance. He wants to be a “winner”, which to him means he needs to make everyone else around him “losers.” By hurting them, by degrading them, by taking away their trappings of wealth.

There are other people who try to use Trump, because he’s very easy to manipulate when you understand him. He has no principles or standards other than those I described, so there’s lots of obvious buttons to press. The problem is that none of those buttons stay pressed. Even if Trump had the mental capacity to remember things from day to day it wouldn’t matter to him because no deal or position he holds lasts longer than the moment he thinks of some way to get something “better.” Trump can be manipulated in the same manner that a handful of mud can be manipulated. It won’t stay in the shape you put it in and it’s constantly slipping through your fingers.

Putin may think that he’s responsible for Trump’s actions, but only by coincidence and never in any sort of long-term strategic sense. And the reason Trump is in charge of America is because the Americans wanted him to be.