What about vegans that don’t have pets on the grounds of not keeping animals at all?

We can play this whataboutism game all day long but at least vegans get to sleep at night knowing they’re not directly contributing to animal suffering, mass emissions and antibiotic resistance just to be able to eat some le bacon made from poorly treated, tumor ridden, "fed back" pigs…

Under MMT taxation is just a tool to reduce inflation - why not introduce a yearly maximum income and collect everything else above as tax to manage inflation?

Here’s some math on that “revolutionary” idea to put things into perspective, as it turns out, it’s pretty underwhelming:

• If we used ALL the aluminum produced globally in a year (about 65 million tons), we’d get around 7.30 million tons of hydrogen.
• While that might sound like a lot, it really isn’t… That hydrogen would contain about 8.30 x 10^14 BTUs of energy.
• Meanwhile, our annual global methane production is sitting pretty at 1.14 x 10^17 BTU.
• Doing the math, and our “amazing” aluminum-to-hydrogen process gives us a whopping 0.73% of the energy we get from methane…

And remember, this is assuming we use EVERY SINGLE BIT of aluminum we produce globally!

Obv hydrogen is “cleaner” than gas, but the point is the scale - this method is a drop in the ocean compared to current energy usage.

TL;DR: Using ALL the world’s annual aluminum production to make hydrogen would only give us 0.73% of the energy we get from natural gas…

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For the math nerds, here’s more detail on the chemistry and energy calc:

• The reaction: 2 Al + 6 H2O → 2 Al(OH)3 + 3 H2
• Global aluminum production: ~65 million metric tons/year
• Molar mass of Al = 26.98 g/mol
• Moles of Al = 65,000,000,000 kg / 0.02698 kg/mol = 2.41 x 10^12 moles
• H2 produced = (2.41 x 10^12 moles Al * 3) / 2 = 3.62 x 10^12 moles H2
• Mass of H2 = 3.62 x 10^12 moles * 2.016 g/mol = 7.30 x 10^12 g = 7.30 million metric tons

BTU Calculation:

• Energy content of H2 = 113,738 BTU/kg
• Total energy from H2 = 7.30 x 10^9 kg * 113,738 BTU/kg = 8.30 x 10^14 BTU

Methane Comparison:

• Annual natural gas production ≈ 4,000 billion cubic meters
• Assuming 80% methane content: 3,200 billion cubic meters of methane
• Energy content of methane ≈ 35,663 BTU/m^3
• Total energy from methane = 3,200 x 10^9 m^3 * 35,663 BTU/m^3 = 1.14 x 10^17 BTU
• Ratio: (8.30 x 10^14) /(1.14 x 10^17) = 0.0073 or 0.73%

it’s still a Li-ion (like most current rechargeables) but the electrolyte - the medium that transfers the ions from the anode to the cathode - (the + and -) inside the battery is made of a solid material instead of the current gen liquid ones. The benefits are less weight/size (as liquids take up more space than solids) and a more stable composition - the liquid electrolyte can’t leak - the way batteries get gunky and corroded if left for a while

What I don’t get is why spend the effort dealing with YTs shit just to increase their userbase when we should be focusing on shifting people away from YT and into decentralized solutions like PeerTube anyways?

Isn’t this just a DIY brushless dynamo? Am I missing something? Still cool tho

In my country here’s how it works:

0. Parties provides free food and transport to unemployed masses they know will vote for them
1. Wait 3-4 hours in queue at polling station to receive ballot in person
2. Drop ballot in secure box
3. Go back to work for a few days
4. See on election day that the party that spent the most on voter courting wins

How would you propose we deal with this when people who are working (and can’t take a day off to go vote) would come out in much smaller numbers than ones that have nothing else to do (and get free lunch and transit to and from the polling stations) and even when voting happens on a weekend you have to trade your only time off to go and vote out of the goodness of your heart.

I think this is one of the reasons for digital voting - I’d much rather be able to vote from work or home or anywhere when I don’t have the time to sit on a queue for 5 hours just to have my vote diminished by a group that isn’t politically active but loves a free lunch and something to do

What if it was so small and light it was only electrons? And what if it accrues its value from the energy expended to create it? Maybe using some sort of cypher to ensure anyone could verify it? Idk maybe we’re onto something…

then again it still syphons value to the top so maybe not…

If you don’t think building chairs or sculptures requires solving “intellectual” challenges you’ve never tried building a completely wooden multi-axial interlocking joint furniture…

I guess we’ll have to start calling it the environmental calamity? or how about we’re-all-going-to-boil-to-death-because-of-dumb-fucks-that-are-too-stupid-to-be-allowed-anywhere-near-positions-of-power or is that a tad too long?

My dude, my grandfather got fired after the collapse of the soviet economy because “artist” wasn’t a productive enough job to be kept around, but he still made art for 20 years after without getting paid because his purpose in life was to create art, not to sell it.

And sure the theft argument would be valid, but that’s a strawman, because Adobe have already trained their own image gen model on fully licensed images and real life artists are already paying money to use it, so they must see the value in it.

But like, it will happen anyways. You can’t stop Musk from shoving Grok down everyone’s throats and firing 80% of his work force to replace them with AI drones.

If we saw the potential in these tools, and decided as a society to just let the machines do all the stuff we don’t want to do, and we all got to do whatever meaningful beautiful things our hearts wanted, then sure.

Yes, literally this, my argument is literally we use all our efforts to fight for this, as making something beautiful out of a shit situation is literally all life has and I feel always will be.

Any artist who stops being an artist because someone else can put words into a computer and get a big tiddy goth gf pic out, wasn’t really that interested in making art in the first place.

That’s a good attitude to have and I’m not advocating for putting down our arms and waiting for big tech to steamroll us all.

But as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the people making the AI models are fully aware they are contributing to a technology that will take away their own jobs, because they think that it will create other, even more interesting jobs in the process. (see trad artists swearing off photography in it’s early days because it was “mechanical and soulless”, only to realize it’s creative potential years later)

My advice would be to continue being aware of the negative history of things, but don’t let it blind you to the positive aspects either.

See, that’s the crux of the argument I feel. You can’t have one without the other, you can’t have voice generation for the mute without that technology also displacing voice actors in the process.

That’s why I think the Luddite approach doesn’t work, we can’t forcefully break the machines that are capable of so much good because they’re also capable of so much bad.

Instead we should focus on helping those that are most negatively impacted by their existence, while supporting everyone that is already being positively affected by them. (like the UBI mentioned in my other comment)

PS. Totes down for replacing CEOs with AI and distributing their salary among the workers

It’s fine to get paid for your skills, but from experience I can say that developing skills just to get paid is also rather soulless.

Since, sure, I can bet there’re furry artists that love drawing sexy tigers to bits, but I can guarantee there’s a not-so-small percentage that would much rather draw something else, but the yiffing money is too good to pass up on.

Do you think the software engineers who are developing the AI models (which have been trained on freely given away code) are just stupid and are willingly creating a machine that will take away their jobs because they don’t understand the impacts? Or could it be that they do understand the stakes, but continue on despite that because of (as you mention) the unfathomable good the technology can bring? I would hope most people would be willing to sacrifice their wellbeing now for the betterment of everyone else in the future.

If you’re still understandably worried tho - just start a garden and begin building tightly knit communities now, since you never know when a solar flare will wipe all our technological progress away…

Ah yes, because the favorite part of the process for every artist is the hours spent going back and forth with their client touching up the most minor details instead of creating art they actually want to make…

Idk, I feel AI art only affects commercial artists who first and foremost care about making money off their art form. The ones that actually make art for the love of the craft (without expectation of getting anything in return) aren’t really affected in any way.

TL;DR Let UBI free artists from the capitalistic yoke and let the oligarchs use AI to automate the soulless part of art creation that nobody enjoys anyways.

Look I’m not supporting mega rich assholes extracting even more from working people, but would you use the same argument for textile weavers and the Jacquard loom? Sure a lot of people lost their jobs at the time, but most, if not all, respecialized and we got computers in the end so would you say it wasn’t good progress? 🤷

The real estate company’s ads for ‘presale’ lots in Gaza and plans to ‘prepare the groundwork for a return’ to the enclave were meant to be ‘a joke’ for its followers

Ha ha, what if we pretend to build houses on bombed people’s land. that would be funny i think.