I’m directing my criticism specifically on the technological advancement which is devoid of communal spirit, not on all technological advancement categorically.

Crediting human achievement to technological advancement is a mistake in my opinion. Technological advancement is not inherently good or bad. Communal spirit is what determines whether technology yields positive or negative outcomes. That’s the real ingredient behind everything humans have achieved throughout history.

Sadly techno-optimism has become a prevailing mindset in today’s world where people and institutions don’t want to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions because of belief that as-yet-unknown technological advancement will bail us out in the future, even when there’s no evidence that it will even be physically possible.

But what I said is that your view is a sad one, not an incorrect one. The truth is, technological advancement may truly end up being the defining characteristic of humanity. After all, when we think about extinct species, we tend to associate them most strongly with what made them extinct. Just as we associate the dinosaurs most strongly with a meteor, maybe an outside observer will some day associate humanity most strongly with the technology that sent us out in a blaze of glory.

What a sad view of humanity to think that our one defining characteristic should be pursuit of technology rather than the ability to intelligently collaborate and thereby form communities with a shared purpose.

I can assure you that the success of human survival throughout the history of our species has had far more to do with community and resourcefulness than with technological advancement. In fact it should be clear by now technological advancement devoid of communal spirit will be the very thing that brings an untimely end to our entire species. Our technology is destroying the climate we depend on and depleting the soil that we need for growing food, to say nothing of the nuclear bombs that could wipe us out with the wrong individuals in positions of power.

If they ever go public then yes, enshittification is guaranteed. As long as they remain a privately held company, there’s a chance they can hold the enshittification at bay.

I’m not trying to shill for Google but I really think it would be a mistake to break up Google without breaking up Microsoft simultaneously if not first. If they actually manage to crack open Google’s search and browser monopoly, who do they really think is going to start filling in that void? Local mom and pop search engines…? No it’s primarily going to be Microsoft with Bing and Edge, and I’m absolutely certain that whatever people don’t like about Google having its monopolies is going to be orders of magnitude worse if Microsoft gains ground there.

The “reform is impossible” is a self-fulfilling prophesy because it leads leftists to never try to get involved in the party, which means they’ll never get a seat at the table, which means they’ll never be able to steer the party.

I certainly can’t prove that the influence of big money can ever be overcome within the party by grassroots organization, but you also can’t prove that it’s impossible (you can only prove that it’s difficult, which is something I certainly won’t dispute).

You certainly can’t prove that a true socialist movement will ever gain traction in America. It seems like the general public is so brainwashed they would rather be indentured servants of large corporations than lift a single finger to seize the means of production.

So we’re left with two unprovable paths to consider, and here’s the thing: the two paths are not mutually exclusive. Leftists can try both at the same time with neither being disruptive to the other. So this is the pragmatism: consider all possibilities and put the eggs into more than one basket.

Or he’s a pragmatist who is concerned with both harm reduction and the likely reality that the only takeaway that Democrats will ever have from losing an election to someone right wing is that Democrats need to go even further to the right to win.

If leftists give the impression that nothing will ever be good enough for them then

1. Democrats have no incentive to court the left
2. Democrats have no estimate for how many votes they would even be able to pick up from the left relative to how far left they might try to reach

I personally believe that if the Democrats had taken on a progressive populist anti-genocide platform they would have won the election handsomely, but I am left with no way to empirically prove that to anyone because so many leftists opt out of voting entirely.

I’m not convinced he really believes that OpenAI is going to roll out AGI in the next ten years, but I’m completely sure he’s determined that it’s a good marketing strategy to make people believe that he believes it.

Google is an enormous company which operates flatter than you’d expect for an organization of its size. It’s entirely possible that someone from Google was involved in organizing this (i.e. booking the venue) without having buy-in from leadership. Once leadership became aware after being asked about it, they may have shut the whole thing down because they knew the optics would be bad.

How exactly is an individual supposed to determine which cops will be good and which will abuse their power?

Just as we can’t make a general statement that all cops are definitely bad, you can’t make a general statement that all cops in any particular country or town will be good.

From a basic risk management viewpoint, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to accept the risk that any given cop won’t abuse their position, even if we were willing to accept that very few would actually do so.

Cops have an extremely privileged status in society and the amount of damage that a bad one can do to an individual - on purpose or even by accident - is incalculable, including setting up an innocent person for capital punishment as we’re seeing unfold in Missouri right now.

There have been articles out there for multiple days now which spell out your same conclusion, but these CNN clowns keep pushing the same false narrative. It’s blatantly intentional misdirection at this point.

The official act could be to use the national guard to rescue a US citizen from wrongful imprisonment, but that’s the kind of thing that racist Republicans would start a civil war over in the name of “states’ rights”.

Originally, a qipao was supposed to be a loose-fitting gown

Source for this? From living in Asia (not in China, but in a predominantly Chinese community), I’ve only seen qipao be form fitting, never loose. Even seeing older pictures of women in qipao, they’re always form fitting. And more often than not, women seem to use them to intentionally highlight their figure.

Chinese communities tend to have a strong conservative bend, but that doesn’t mean they’re puritanical when it comes to sexuality, especially the sexually suggestive.

If we are now considering philosophical intellectual exercises to be memes then this description is accurate.

You can’t prove that Godzilla’s bones aren’t hollow ballast tanks that can be emptied and filled as needed.

Ordinary biomatter is very close to the density of water to begin with. That’s why having a little air in your lungs is enough to be the difference between sinking and floating.

If Godzilla’s biomatter under 1atm of pressure has a density close to water then being able to compress or expand an empty chamber inside his body by even just a tiny percentage of his ordinary overall volume could be the difference between floating at sea level or sinking to extreme depths.

Or if you prefer we can imagine that Godzilla gives himself a big ole booty when he needs to come up to the surface and make a mess of things.

“Lungs aren’t really inside” is not an argument that I thought I’d be confronted with.

If you find that your lungs are not inside your body then I urge you to seek immediate medical attention.

You’d be right if the cavity is only compressing other organs inside the body without changing the overall volume, but I don’t know why you seem to insist on making that assumption.

I thought it would be clear from my original description, via the analogy with lungs, that the cavity would not squish the internal organs but rather expand the overall volume of the body.

My head canon for sea-based Kaiju is they have a sack of muscles somewhere inside their body that can expand a cavity, kind of like the diaphragm expands the lungs, except instead of taking in air or water it just creates a volume of vacuum inside of them. This makes them extremely bouyant relative to the surrounding sea pressure, so they rapidly ascend and can casually float like a boat near the surface.

But if they ever want to dive again, they just let that cavity collapse and all their bouyancy goes away.

I think a long time ago a vicious cycle began in the advertising space where predatory ads had more incentive to pay for ad space, so sensible people start to perceive ads in general as predatory. Now no sensible advertiser that’s trying to promote a legitimate product for legitimate reasons will do so by buying ad space, thus reinforcing the increasingly accurate perception that all ads are predatory.

And you think lending validity to Israel’s claims that its actions are purely to defend itself from a bigoted terrorist threat is going to help anything?

There’s an enormous gulf between asking nicely and spreading imagery that implies you want to literally murderer all Israelis. Have you considered that the most effective action may exist somewhere between those two positions? Also I’m very mad at you right now for making me sound like a centrist. Blech.