When I became aware of this word, well before it became an insult in the mouths of people like Trump and Tucker Carlson, it meant:

Realizing that mainstream American culture actively buries and lies about its worst oppressions of people in a fog of falsehood that stifles progress in favor of soothing the masses. Once you “wake up” from this collective dream, you can’t fall for it anymore: that America is a land of freedom, democracy equality and opportunity for all. It is in fact a deeply class-stratified society built on Indian and Black holocausts which has toppled democratically elected governments around the world, rules by military might, and habitually refuses to face its racism, sexism, and religious bias. It is a place where nationalism is called patriotism. Once you scrape the scales from your eyes you will see this everywhere. You will have woken up.

Don’t assume testosterone levels actually map easily to stereotypical traits like that.

HRT is fundamental enough to just be considered healthcare - lots of people do it to address real symptoms, regardless of their gender identity.

I honestly have trouble complaining about this. Screening is voluntary and they are offering treatment as well.

I know Kegsbreath will only approve it because GRAH! ALPHA MALE! but I’ll consider it a case of a broken clock being right twice a day.

Yes, anyone who wants to protest any use of AI whatsoever in software development, just on pure principle, is on the fringe at this point. It is a tool and needs to be used responsibly but it’s no longer credible to say that it has no use or can’t be used responsibly.

Wow I’m starting to feel bad about that time I asked AI to make a joke about scatology & eschatology sounding similar.

From good ol’ Liberal Fig Leaves, LLC

Displaying tit can lose 70% again.

I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but

What a condescending opener. Whatever you think of George Lucas, he’s made some cool stuff, he did it the old fashioned way, and he’s not constrained by resources. But rather than listen to what he has to say on the topic, this guy begins with the presumption that no, George must be deluded from swallowing propaganda.

I’m hardly George Lucas’s biggest fan but this writer can blow me.

Tomato / tomato

But will it fruit?

Yep self selection bias / survivor bias.

It’s a complete illusion that the US can control this strait. It could destabilize it further if it wishes, but there is no getting a ship through without Iran’s cooperation.

Because Iran has a ton of land along the straight from which they can launch missles, drones, rockets, or even artillery at passing ships. There’s a huge region where they can attack the strait, and the US can’t put hundreds of thousands of troops on that land to hold it all. Therefore Trump cannot declare the strait open, though he can declare the strait closed (this just hurts him most of all).

All his bullshit about floating ships at one end to “gate” the passage, and escorting ships, and shooting down rockets…. It’s complete bluster. Even with the entire US military he cannot guarantee safe passage. And that’s just one of the things he has to do if this war continues. He also has to try to defend our allies in the Gulf and elsewhere.

Setting aside the many other things wrong with this, 20% the value of the cargo is just stupid. Most of it doesn’t have that much profit margin in the first place. I know it’s a number straight out of his ass, but damn, the stupid…

I agree with everything that you’re saying and yes they have a lot of money. Do you see what I’m saying about how this could require millions and millions of moderators at the kind of scale they operate? A significant portion of humanity is on social media.

Meta earns about $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit. How many mods would $60bil actually buy?

Let’s work with a total cost of $50k per moderator. This is very conservative since only a fraction of that would be salary (the rest insurance, HR, management, taxes, equipment, etc).

If they spent their entire profit on mods, they could hire 1.2 million. Is that enough to moderate several billion? Maybe.

Now should we consider costs they could actually sustain? Taking their entire profit to zero is, understandably, not possible for any company. I think this is where most people just wave their hand and say “who cares” or “fuck em” or just assumes they have infinite money.

But to seriously consider this… it’s just a very big challenge for anyone to pull off.

Yes it’s a thing with more than one challenge.

What would 200 million moderators cost? At a modest salary of $50k annually it’s in the trillions. They literally couldn’t pay that.

Fair enough. But I think we’d be just as upset to see pedos organizing in unpaid content.

I want to be clear I’m not promoting Meta’s decision here by any stretch.

There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it? You might say oh sure, because the average person might only post occasionally and human moderators could be dedicated full time so they’d outweigh users by factors. But that kind of ignores influencers who also generate content full time.

I really don’t see how there will ever be enough humans to do this right. Or if there are, they will have to number in the hundreds of millions to keep up. The bit about all humans posting is not really hyperbolic at all. Zuckerberg already has 1 billion of us.

I think because once you break the seal on generation ships, that becomes the story. There’s so much required for humans to actually commit to that plan. It would shape everything, and you’d need to explain how they overcome certain problems.

You’d need to show what was worth the commitment to begin with - what’s the goal / where are they going and why? And you’d need to show how they selected crew for their fertility and genetic composition overall, probably not with a 1:1 female:male ratio. And you’d need to explain how they got people to commit to their children dying in space. And, once that generation was raised, how they kept it from revolting and turning the ship around to Earth so they could see the sky before they die. Would they raise them on lies? And how many generations of humans do they need to go through to reach the destination? How are they going to solve all the gravity, radiation, and thermodynamics problems? Whats going to fuel a ship for hundreds of years? And of course your book starts to have the Foundation problem of having multiple whole sets of characters in one book. I think that’s just challenging for any story, or at least you can see why I say it takes over and shapes the entire story.

There’s just so much to it that it takes over the narrative. So in your comment where you say you’d like to see more of it… do you mean more stories about this? Or you just sort of expect it to be in the background of more stories?

I guess it was kind of in the background for The Expanse, with the Navoo Mormon generational ship. Which in one fell religious stroke answers many of the questions in a believable way, including the male/female ratio and how anyone would be crazy enough to do it.

If driving is the reason to make it opt out, I don’t see why that couldn’t be changed for state ID.

Though really I don’t see a problem with it being opt out for all. Many places do it that way.