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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.
They can pay the workers using the gigantic piles of money they have lying around from decades of exploiting customers and workers. And in fact, they already did, because the books Libgen is pirating already exist. You think Pearson is leaving wages unpaid until they hit a sales quota? No way, those books already got made and the workers already got paid. Some of those books are decades old, and Libgen is the only place you can get them aside from rare booksellers and libraries, and the court still awarded damages to a company that no longer even sells the product. It's crooked.
They're not fictional, they're mythical. Here's the difference between reality, fiction, and myth: Fiction is made out of the rearranged parts of reality. Myth is made out of fiction that people thought was important. And reality is made out of myth that people took too literally.
Ooh, now Deadlock shares two character names with Titanfall: Battle Royale
That's ass. People just wanna read. Words are free to copy.
My overall point is that Putin's actions are having the consequence of expanding NATO and the American Empire. Putin isn't opposing western imperialism, he's making it stronger. Russia is the number 1 recruiter for NATO
Actually, Earth is around about the largest that rocky planets tend to get. Look at the gap between Earth and Uranus, it's huge. Planets in the middle size are rare. This planet is a super-earth type planet.
You left your SI in the link
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/c/soulism is removed from lemmy.blahaj.zone
(lemmy.ca)
The community /c/soulism@lemmy.blahaj.zone was removed by the instance admins two weeks ago. The community contained only memes and discussion of the ideas of soulism. There were no attacks against anyone. Here is the admin's explanation of the situation:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/9875313
Transcript:
ADA:
The post you linked to by MindTraveller is an active misrepresentation of events by them
Traveller and I are not “in agreement” about much of anything. Their politics are very far removed from mine
This is the text of the message I sent advising that I was shutting the group down.
After consideration, I’ve decided that non voters does not really fit the stated goals of blahaj zone. Your motives for creating it seem based on a personal vendetta, and whilst your views are genuine, nothing constructive comes from the community. All it does is create division, because its sole purpose is to target others, without really focusing on any progressive ideas or discussion of its own.
At the moment, it’s causing more harm than good to the overall community.
I’ll leave the community open, so that if you choose to set the community up on another instance, you will have the opportunity to direct them to the new location.
Given the post which you linked, (which I had not seen until now) I will be removing Traveller and the new community, because once more, the goal appears to be to create division
The goal of blahaj zone is not political. The goal is to allow trans people to have a space where they can exist on their own terms, without having to pretend to be someone they’re not. My own political views are closer to Links/LibertyHub than nonvoters or its ilk. Yet as long as there is no bigotry or gatekeeping, then trans people with politics at odds with my own are welcome. It’s why we have an “armed queers” community, despite my own strong distaste for gun culture.
It is communities/posters that exist primary to create division, without adding anything positive back, that have no place here.
This comment contains only one side of the discussion I had with Ada about Non-Voters and Soulism, here is the full context (top is newest, bottom is oldest):
Transcript:
ADA:
Hey there. After consideration, I’ve decided that non voters does not really fit the stated goals of blahaj zone. Your motives for creating it seem based on a personal vendetta, and whilst your views are genuine, nothing constructive comes from the community. All it does is create division, because its sole purpose is to target others, without really focusing on any progressive ideas or discussion of its own.
At the moment, it’s causing more harm than good to the overall community.
I’ll leave the community open, so that if you choose to set the community up on another instance, you will have the opportunity to direct them to the new location.
MINDTRAVELLER:
Thanks for letting me know. I don’t mind if nonvoters is gone. It served its purpose. The guy who was banning trans people and calling us liberals for not wanting to die is no longer in power. The Blahaj community is no longer divided. We achieved unity. And sure, some people are whining that they have to get along with others now, but the tide is against them. I’ll see if there’s a way to lock the community and prevent new posts. I want to keep the most recent post visible so in two months when the transphobes start whining about Kamala I can link that post and tell them “called it.”
MINDTRAVELLER:
There we go, all locked up. No new posts or comments.
MINDTRAVELLER:
Also, your mention of constructive politics gave me an idea. I want to create a soulist community on Blahaj. Something like https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulism101/. That place has been a ghost town since the APIcalypse, but the soulist movement has been going strong on Discord. It should have a place on Lemmy too. Plus, it would dramatically reduce the number of people mischaracterising soulism on the fediverse. The only attacks shall be against capitalism, the cisheteropatriarchy, the state, and reality.
ADA:
That sounds like a much better fit!
Non-Voters was completely locked up, and I made a post explaining the decision to close it, which both Ada and I agreed on, as you can see in this message log. In Ada's later public comment, she says the post was a misrepresentation of events. She said that she and I did not agree. However we can clearly see in this chatlog that when Ada told me the community was closing, I agreed to close it. And when I asked to open a new community not focused on any form of criticism of others users, she agreed too. If I had not agreed to do as Ada said and close the community, there would not be a post from me announcing the community's closure. So the idea that Ada and I did not agree to close the community is nonsense.
At the time that /c/soulism was removed from lemmy.blahaj.zone, I had in fact already been unbanned from /c/libertyhub by the community's mods. Ada cites division as the reason for the removal, but there was no division at this time, except between some Liberty Hub users and their own mods. Here is the log:
Transcript:
MINDTRAVELLER:
Hi, I’d like to appeal my ban on Liberty Hub. I never broke the rules, I only complained about LOC’s overly strict moderation style. I was banned with the reason “off topic”, which isn’t a rule.
KITTENZRULZ123:
I unbanned you however know that you have broken the rules, if you make me regret this act of leniency I will reban you.
At this time, the division between Non-Voters, myself, Liberty Hub, kittenzrulz, and linkopenschest had been resolved. Non-Voters had never been a community specifically designed to target Liberty Hub, and in fact linkopenschest and kittenzrulz both had posts on the community that engaged with the concept in good faith, and which I did not remove. They were never banned from the community, and they decided to reverse my ban from the community. So the three of us had been engaged in a good-faith disagreement from the start, minus one impulsive ban that was reversed, and we had already set our differences aside. I became an outright ally of Liberty Hub when they decided to relax their excessive bans, and they were exploring the possibility of treating me the same way.
Here is where I diverge from pure fact to analysis and speculation: Since division still existed between the users of Liberty Hub and the mod team, and the users perceived Ada as an ally of the mod team and of myself (because I was cooperating with everything Ada told me and getting along well with the LH mods), Ada panicked. The fact that I was getting along with everyone and making compromises was causing the conspiracy theorists to target Ada. So Ada manufactured a drama between her and myself to make it clear that she did not approve of me, even if I was agreeing to do everything she told me. The unity, compromise, and reconciliation was a bad look for Ada in the eyes of the tinfoil hat people. Ada chose to regain the tinfoil hats' favour by inventing a fake disagreement between herself and me. That's the reason /c/soulism was removed, despite hosting zero offensive content and never even having one of its posts or comments reported by anyone. Ada needed to conjure up a fight from nowhere to look good to the conspiracy people.
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.