askchapo

Pic unrelated bc I didn't know what to add for this

I'm going to be honest, I'm not confident in the future of AI and think it would've been ultimately better if it weren't invented to begin with.

I know that it can have genuinely incredible applications that would benefit humanity as a whole, namely healthcare, accident prevention (like with airplanes, ships, shuttles, workplace related, etc.), and weather/natural disaster predictions. I'd love if that were all that it could do.

But I've also seen AI in warfare, surveillance, and policing used to seriously harm innocent people. Employers are already using AI to unfairly filter people out of jobs, and I believe black rock also uses AI to buy up properties. Not to mention that jobs like illustrators, writers, musicians, etc will all inevitably be replaced by their employers looking to consolidate workplace power from unions and increase profit margins.

Boycotting AI art is one way to slow down its growth that I can think of, but what else can be done?

It needs to be regulated and curbed before it's too late.

I’ve had people laugh. Others just stare. One or two people murmured some kind of critical response that I couldn’t hear. I find it strange and just wanted to know if this is an ordinary experience. It’s rare for someone to agree. I live in a rich white area.

Firstly:

Okay now for the post.

When Palestine is liberated, I think the vast majority of settlers will either be [redacted] or forced out of the region. There is no way that any Arab in the region will accept having a settler in their land, and the settlers know this. The plan will have to be a mass exodus for the west, both for their safety and livelihood (I can see many going into ghoul industries like defense, tech, and police training).

That being said, how would you react if your country decides to accept settlers? Would you support the move? If they were going to live in your community/ neighborhoods how would you feel?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2723840

Hi, I need to read handwriting off scanned documents and then file them digitally. What's the best way to approach this? I've done some searching myself but I'm curious what you nerds think. Ty.

Tories are obviously fucked but labour are the new tories. I don't believe in bourgeois electoralism so I'm inclined not to vote at all but would also like to spoil the tories and labour from winning in my constituency. To that end, I'm torn between Green (libs with good climate policies, left of labour but pro-Israel-existence) and Workers Party GB (economically socialist with weird-to-concerning opinions on LGBT+)**. Discuss.

** Workers Party leader Galloway in an interview with Novara media has said he believes all LGBT+ people should be treated with dignity and respect and that he has had many gay and one trans colleague (and used their preferred pronouns) but he has boomerish ideas about what should and should not be taught to children in schools and which changing rooms people should use. It's not great but could be worse I guess.

They're feeling like a failure because of job shit and if they get fired they're probably gonna get deported back after their family spent essentially their entire life savings (and more?) to support them studying abroad

So far I got:

Industrial Reserve Army (Reserve Army of Labor)

Tendency for Rate of Profit to fall (to understand increasing exploitation of workers)

I want to try and keep things light

I grabbed the photo from this article - Have You Seen A Cybertruck Yet? | Defector.

https://subium.com/profile/prisonculture.bsky.social/post/3ku7cmvenz222

Prisonculture is Mariame Kaba.

Mariame Kaba

Mariame Kaba is an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, including all police.

or any thoughts on the matter.

i've been thinking about this for a while but I do not have the words to explore it well or in details.

like the white idealist part of ecology, the concept of "nature" as some kind of perception-black-hole that blinds from the class struggle aspect, or more complicated, the realization for white from the west that they can neither pursue the neverending capitalist global death machine, nor go back to some fantasized "local", "traditional", "simple", "close to nature" lifestyle that never even existed, and if the sources of that fantasy even existed, they were obliterated during the building phase of the nation state that needed to colonize itself before going outward. colonial mindset x "state of nature" etc

shit like that

be it "classic" works/thoughts on the subjects or very recent things, because things are shifting quite quickly

other random threads : the right to land, soft colonialism wanderlust, white indigenous, Bruno Latour

I'm almost convinced that people don't become ultraleft; they end up ultraleft. What type of confusion, abuse, bigotry, whatever- it doesn't matter- turns someone into an ultraleft?

I'm at my wits end, are they just neoliberals that haven't accepted that fact?

I am 100% confident it's them because so many details lined up (team, size of family, compensation, role, location, job level) including them using a specific phrase of words after a few days I sent it in our work chat

Obviously, I can't prove it's them so HR would never take action. Not only that but this guy is one of those started coding when they were 10 years old so not only are they a higher level than me, they also perform way better than me so complaining to my manager or teammates would 100% also backfire as they would 100% prefer a very high performing misogynist and transphobe than a poor performing woke sjw (me)

What's stopping us? Not all of us have to, obviously, but at least some of us can live that way.

If our antiquated predecessors could sometimes manage it, I'm sure we can too. Maybe even better.

Going to DC with a friend for a couple days and am wondering if Hexbear has some ideas on what to do. We already have a list of the 4 (maybe 5) museums we're going to, so probably don't need any suggestions there. (Though feel free if somewhere was super cool to you.) Preferably things close to metro and/or downtown.

If I can't be an octahedron then I'll take floating orb of light instead

His volume is insane.

If there is language in an article that is along the lines of "until the expiration of the agreement", does that mean that whatever is contained in that article is no longer legally binding once a contract expires? I feel like that should be obvious, but my union rep seems to think that's not the case. I do know that terms and conditions of a CBA are to continue under an expired contract (besides strikes/lockouts) but if that language lives in the document, then is that how an employer can get around maintaining whatever benefit it's tied to?

I feel like I read a labornotes article that spoke to this but I CANNOT find it. If anyone can help I would be grateful!

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2688493

i live in a predominantly white area so i get some racially-motivated and provocative comments from time to time

i just ignore them with a clear look of disapproval (+ sometimes a side-eye) because i don't have the time to educate every single random stranger and it's just not something i want to bother myself with (though i know i should to an extent).

i feel like replying with an insult that they won't understand would make it very clear that i take offence with that they said/did without them reacting to what i actually said and would make me feel better that i retaliated rather than keeping quiet.

(plus responding to an ignorant comment with something they'll be ignorant of feels pretty retaliatory to me)

so what are some non-English (or obscure English) retaliatory insults? ideally they should be a common insult (though it's optional ig), short and should sound like an insult to an English speaker

EDIT: to clarify, i'm not concerned about further escalations as virtually all of these exchanges happen in passing where no one is able to continue the conversation (which is why i'm okay with responding in a potentially rude way).

but maybe ignore the last point about the insult sounding like an insult. saying an unknown phrase in a different language should be enough to suggest my disapproval

Lately, we've seen DnD and Pathfinder move away from some of the more blatant signifiers, like renaming "race" into "species" and "ancestry," and in the case of Pathfinder, having systems in place to mix ancestries in a character build. DnD has decoupled good and evil from species, and pathfinder has done away with good and evil entirely ( keeping a vestige of it present for things like demons and angels).

Race is almost alwys tied to a language and a culture, with, say, kobolds having the same certain cultural signifiers all over the world. To an extent, this makes semse because different peoples in these games can have different physical abilities, or have different origins entirely, which would naturally lead to them developing along different lines -- If one people can breathe underwater and another was born from a volcano by a specific god's decree, that would inform how these cultures behave.

Is it possible to have a fantasy along these lines with a materialist underpinning, or is this very idea of inborn powers anathema to that sort of approach?

It does often seem to be correlated to reactionary conspiracy sentiments. There is the "non-white people could not have possibly stacked rocks this big!" thing

I guess also flat earth?

With the Norwegian government recently deciding to massively increase the US military presence in this country, I just really want to have some derogatory way of referring to Usonians in the Norwegian language. The problem is that I cannot find any good word for this: existing words fall short; foreign words I'm familiar with either don't translate well, or don't sound good when loaned, or aren't easily understood; and I'm having a hard time coming up with a brand new word to fill this gap myself.

I'm hoping that by asking here that I might be able to find some inspiration, or perhaps even be enlightened about a Norwegian-language term that I didn't know before.

(I posted this on lemmygrad but I want to get some discussion from here too.)

I’ve been meaning to ask about some stuff regarding parenti that I see come up on different places.

One of them being about parenti’s book blackshirts and reds. So I’ve run into specific people who have claimed and bought up that parenti is lying about : how social democrats in germany gave fascists a path and its actually fault of soviets.

To paraphrase them

Soviets gave kpd direction to be hostile and also it wasn’t just “socdems will ally with nazis”. It was cause soviets gave advice to be hostile to the spd.

To boil it down, they say that parenti is wrong about rise of fascism and he whitewashed soviet mistakes.

The other thing that's bought up is the bombing of germany and american industrial ties. I see it brought up that parenti is just lying about bombing in cologne of ford factory. And its actually all lies and say the charlie higham “trading with the enemy” reference is bullshit. They go on to say that american industrialist involvement with german industry is not that deep. And that parenti (and other communists) lie about this to make a grand narrative of american involvement. They bring up nazi economy book by tooze and this site as a debunking lies material.

Now my post isn’t so much about parenti, I wanna broadly discuss about the whole notion that soviets or german communists were the reason nazis came to power and that socdems were really not at fault.

And also to discuss that american industrialists involved with germany is some bullshit conspiracy. Which it isn’t, given the lengths across the board they spread collaborating after and before the war. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on dulles, hw, and nazis spread across into different places for american interests. So I don’t think american involvement is some fake conspiracy.

What are your thoughts? (Sorry if this post is too long)

I read the tiny Wikipedia article on it but I couldn't draw any conclusions from it and not sure how accurate it is

Scholars have discussed this issue for eons, if I bolt a DshKA to a cargo bike, is it a technical? We need to find an answer