I mean it’s your choice to walk around with shit in your hat, but you do you.

Politics is not a zero sum game. You don’t vote for the good choice. You vote for the less bad choice.

Might as well just shit in your own hat for all the good that will do anyone.

Best case scenario at this point is one of them croaks before November. It’s insane to me that Biden even contemplated a second term, when the whole point of picking Kamala Harris as his VP was so she could be the young fit successor. It’s time to roll out plan B, guys.

It’s always sad when someone who clearly cares so much gives up or resorts to irrational methods to fight against what he perceived as an insurmountable threat.

The world has always been run by self-interested bastards who will gladly sacrifice thousands and millions of people to enrich themselves. This is nothing new to anyone who has studied any history.

2 feet of snow is no joke, especially in an area without a sufficient fleet of plows.

Inbred racists gonna do what they do.

Okay, sure, but voting on a single issue is what fucking morons do.

Sounds to me like those are shitty safety limits then. Fix your nuke plants, Japan. You’d think this would be a priority after the last time.

Assuming those programs still exist by the time you get to that point.

If the oligarchs continue to get their way, those programs will disappear. It doesn’t serve them to have a class of people whose labor or income they can’t exploit.

Because the system isn’t designed to work for even the upper middle class, or even the comfortably independently wealthy. The system is designed to continue diverting all of that hard work’s rewards towards the wealthiest tier of wealthy.

Nobody is safe from this vampirism, not even those who would call themselves rich. As it is, wealth will always siphon down to the parasites at the bottom. We’ve all been fooled into thinking we’re at the bottom of a pyramid (or, if you’re lucky, somewhere in the middle), but it’s really just a funnel, sucking everything down to a single point.

I hate this “I got mine”/“I’ll get mine” attitude. If I were wealthy, I’d gladly pay higher taxes to support social programs. Shouldn’t that be the whole point of accumulating wealth - to be able to give back? It should be hard-coded into the very structure of society.

The whole point is that it’s not really an old person problem. It’s a poor person problem.

We rag on the boomer generation for sponging up all the wealth for themselves, but what gets lost is that this was also at the expense of large swathes of less fortunate boomers. They weren’t just hoarding from other generations, they were hoarding from their fellow boomers. The exploitation class did not discriminate by age.

Tax the wealthy more, they won’t lose any quality of life whatsoever, and the money they extorted from their fellow humans gets paid back to support them in their old age.

This isn’t actually a hard problem to solve if you take greed out of the equation.

The conversation shouldn’t be about restrictions as much as it should be about compensation. AI “art” like this only exists by ripping off original artists.

You’re not wrong to compare this fanfiction.

In that light it’s important to note that fanfiction writers don’t have the right to make money off of their fanfiction without an explicit agreement with the original creator. This shouldn’t be treated any differently.

AI creation is incredible in what it can do, but when it’s this direct of a ripoff, the person it’s ripping off should be granted a share of any money it makes. In this case, that person is dead, and I suspect Carlin didn’t have a high opinion of inheritance and intellectual property estates, but it still feels wrong to profit off of the life work of somebody who was still around in your lifetime.

Your heart is in the right place, and I understand what you’re saying. Impressionists have always been a thing. People who emulate the art styles of greater artists have always been a part of the culture, and should be.

But there’s a critical difference with AI, because it is quickly approaching a point where it can create copies so high-fidelity that they are indistinguishable from the originals. Crucially, they will be doing this with a relatively small amount of actual effort from those who wield them. We need to put protections in place for original creators, or before we even understand what’s happened, all of culture will be driven by AI-produced remixing, and as those technologies are controlled by mega-corporations, everything about art we hold dear will be sold to appeal to algorithms. It’s not too late to put the brakes on yet, but that won’t be true for long.

Honestly it came off on the level of a pretty decent impressionist. Not quite on Carlin’s level, but evocative enough of his patter and sensibility to make me wish it was the real thing, and there were moments in it where I could almost pretend that it was.

Man, I miss Carlin.

Boy though I would love to hear Carlin’s opinion on all this AI shit. I think he would get a perverse kick out of seeing himself poorly re-created in such a manner, but I also think he would tear to shreds the kind of people who think it’s a good idea to use it like this.

It also contains the filthy words penis, vagina, scrotum, vulva, and gay.