MindTraveller

It's a tool, just like cars, in that both are terrible for the environment and risk the survival of the human species as well as countless ecosystems.

The thing it has to do with his asexuality is that he lacks the natural positive context for sex that comes with being allosexual. Most rape babies grow up, start having sexual thoughts, and are forced to come to an acceptance of sex. Narcissus has zero positive experience with sex. There's nothing to counter his association between sex and his mother's rape. That's explains why he's rude to people who sexually harass him. I thought that context might be helpful, since the other person in this thread is saying that he's evil for not loving anyone.

Hey look it's a comment from the parallel universe where trains, trams, buses, bicycles, and legs were never invented. What's it like living in a universe where nobody has legs?

Another detail about the myth you have to understand, in addition to all the sexual harassment of a child, is that Narcissus is a rape baby. He was born because Cephissus raped Liriope. That's his background for understanding the world of love. He exists because of an act of cruelty, which he is not old enough to distinguish from the sexual harassment he constantly suffers as a child because he was born pretty. Of course someone from that background, who has no feelings of love of his own, would end up resenting the very concept. I believe Narcissus was justified in telling Ameinias to kill himself, Ameinias was a pedophile and he was sexually abusing Narcissus with his harassment.

People tend to get the wrong idea from the story of David and Goliath. That story isn't about a small guy defeating a big guy. That's a story about somebody bringing a gun to a knife fight. Slings absolutely kicked ass in the ancient world. Goliath never stood a chance. Besides, David has been fighting goddamned lions before that point. Meanwhile modern experts have determined that Goliath likely suffered from a host of mental and physical disabilities due to his gigantism. Like, the bible describes him as needing to be guided by attendants to the battlefield because he couldn't see right. David had that fight in the bag from the first moment, and anyone who paid attention knew it. Modern audiences misunderstand the story because they don't know what a powerful weapon a sling is.

The Greeks didn't understand asexuality and thought it was hubris, since the only examples of ace people they did accept were literal gods. Narcissus was 16 when he died. A 16 year old who constantly gets sexually harassed has the right to be a little rude in rejecting people. Ameinias, for example, asked for the 16 year old's hand in marriage multiple times. If you want to say hounding a mid-pubescent child for sex is acceptable in any cultural context, then I'm going to view you the same way I view the ancient Greeks: as a pedophile.

Me: Just commenting on how much trouble the customers are having, boss. I should probably ask if they want a hint.

You can self-host an artificial neural network, just like you can self-publish a book, but that's not where the money is. The AIs that most people are using are owned by corporations, just like the distribution channels for selling books are owned by corporations. That means the efficiency gains won't be passed on to the consumer. They'll let you play with it as first, while they gain market share, but pretty soon it'll back to the capitalist norm. When you publish an epic poem using ChatGPT 7 and make a million dollars, OpenAI will just sue you, and say their AI made the work so they deserve the money. Something like that will happen, and it'll go back to normal, just with the corporations that own the capital making even more money.

Why do you think we're still working 40 hours a week, despite all the gains in efficiency from technology over the past century? Wait, scratch that. Women entered the workforce, so now the average household works 80 hours a week when they used to work 40. We're working twice as much, even though technology made us 10 times as productive. Why aren't we all doing 2 hour workweeks like in The Jetsons? Well, Karl Marx predicted that this would happen, because the owning class has the capital, and we live in a capitalist system. The gains in efficiency only benefit the capital holders. You work twice as much to produce 20 times the wealth, and all that wealth just goes to some rich guy sipping martinis on a megayacht. Even if you work for a small business, the big ones just use their market dominance to squeeze your boss and get the wealth you produced anyway. Technology won't save us. We need to fundamentally restructure our economic system, so ownership is no longer equivalent to control.

Well being an author, you're entitled to royalties. It's different for wage and commission workers. You keep getting paid as long as the books keep selling, but they only get paid once. It's called capitalism, it's an economic system in which control of the economy lies with the owners of capital. Capital is the means of production, the stuff people need in order to produce works of value. At a farm, capital is the soil and tools. At a mine, it's the earth and machinery. At a factory, it's the shipping contracts and the lathes.

At a book publisher, capital is the printers and presses, yes, but that's not all. It's also the abstract idea of intellectual property, which doesn't actually exist on the physical plane. Intellectual property only exists in the law, it's not a real material thing. Humans invented it. There's no way a farm can produce more crops than the soil will grow. And no way a mine can produce more ore than what's in the veins. But a computer can produce a million copies of a book for pennies in electricity costs. And I'll prove that to you by pointing at social media, where a 10 megabyte video that lasts for twenty seconds is shared without a single thought, and the company makes up the cost of distribution on ads, which only cost pennies per view. A TXT of the entire works of Homer is less than 10 megabytes. And we use PDFs instead of TXTs, despite the massively increased size, because size just isn't a relevant issue. It's too cheap to bother worrying about, it doesn't matter.

We didn't have copyright before the invention of the printing press, because there was no point. Back then, if you wanted a thousand copies of a book, you sent a manuscript to a monastery and got the monks to copy it. And a thousand books would have cost a king's ransom to produce. But when it became possible to copy intellectual works at low cost, publishing houses pressured the government to invent artificial scarcity in order to maintain profits. So that it would still be expensive for consumers to buy books, and publishers could pocket the gains from the printing press. And with the digital age, that fact is dialed up to 11. They're laughing their way to the bank. The publishing industry isn't in danger, they're more profitable than ever. Technology made copying works easier, but e-books still cost the same amount as paperbacks. The profitability of publishing is at a record high. I want more people to use Libgen, so that their profitability goes back to what it was before the internet, and so that they have to get competitive again. When profitability is guaranteed by law, as in this case, companies start to ignore what's good for customers and for workers like you. They don't need to listen to anyone. You and I both want them in a weaker position, so that you can push them harder in negotiations and so that prices are better for us. Students are paying hundreds of dollars per semester for online copies of textbooks, it's ridiculous. Tools like Libgen give ordinary people the power to break the laws that enable this power imbalance. That's justice.