FishFace

That fails to acknowledge the force of the argument which is that tariffs affect innocent people.

Point is, it's too important. If you fight back when you're invaded, innocent people (like your own soldiers) will be killed. Consequences will be worse if you just roll over though.

Maximum pressure needs to be exerted on the US, through retaliatory tariffs, ceasing to recognise American intellectual property, and sanctions.

Competition and markets authorities are empowered to block acquisitions and it's often high profile when it's done due to an unfriendly power like china trying to do it. The USA is now a more aggressive power than china so acquisitions by US companies ought to be blocked by default.

This may mean less money flows from the US into the European acquired companies, but tough shit, this is too important.

We need to realise that the status quo is not what we had two years ago, because Trump changed it. He's making the whole world poorer, and we can choose whether that poverty affects us monetarily (because we need to put money into replacing US tech) or more fundamentally - e.g. if he uses dependence on US tech to exert political control over European nations.

Bad AI

Except the corn posts were hilarious and varied

I used it that way for years. It's better for memes than fediverse or Reddit, except for two things: 1 occasionally the user base freaks the fuck out and starts spamming the same thing, like this. I don't like Nazis, but that also means I don't want literally everything on my funny picture site to be about keeping them out. 2 increasingly all the popular stuff isn't memes at all, but shitting on trump and musk. See point 1.

Then they blocked the UK because they didn't want to put an age field on their registration form (note this is not to do with age verification)

Is that on the 17% joke rate?

Right that's why no other country had dreams of home ownership.

American exceptionalism really did a number on you guys!

You just haven't tried it with the latest release of this fork of Plasma.

That would be great in an ideal world, but there's just no reason to think that they should be able to because the two concepts are simply orthogonal. What you can make a living off is determined by what other people need and want (with the exception of farming), which is completely different from what you want to do. Fundamentally, no individual is going to pay you (or give you food, or whatever) in return for doing something that they don't value.

The only way to get away from that paradigm is UBI or something like it.

Would I prefer to live in a world where my shitty abilities in music, art and writing were enough to keep myself fed and clothed? Yes! But we don't and AI isn't changing that. If we want to move towards that it's economic changes we need to make.

Note that this is still true even if you a well-funded arts council that funds artists as a public good, because while you might not be a slave to what individuals or "the masses" want, you're still a slave to what the arts council is willing to fund - what it sees as a public good. And if people as a whole simply don't value some forms of art that much, there's a very limited extent to which public funding will make up for that. If that's too abstract, if my art passion is recording classical music arranged for the human butt, I'm going to struggle to sell that to ordinary people, as well as struggle to get a grant to fund my passion.

Fundamentally I think this question arises because there is a general sense that people ought to be able to make a living from art. But this has - except for very few people - never been the case, because lots of people enjoy making art, but society as a whole does not value it highly enough to support all those people in doing it.

Artisanal things are great, but because they take so much more time for a person to make, fewer people can have them - realised in our society as them being more expensive, but to be clear this is due to the fundamental issue of it not being possible to make as many for the same input of human time.

So, is it worth it to have a table made by a master craftsman versus a table produced in an IKEA factory, when the societal result is that some people just can't afford a table - or they can, but the tradeoff is they can't have something else? We are not a post-scarcity society, these are real questions.

Is it worth rewinding the green revolution and starving half the world population who depends on the higher crop yields due to modern agriculture?

The whole point is that you can still make things. What you cannot do is something 99% of people have never been able to do, that is: feed yourself by doing something that you would still do if feeding yourself didn't depend on it.

Well, kinda. Their cost of production is lower partly because they don't have to pay an artist enough to feed themselves. Your costs are always lower when you don't pay for stuff that those playing by the rules do.

Ok but this is a joke, not an instruction on how to behave in real life.