I feel like maybe there’s some unexamined assumptions here. I want to agree with part of this but it’s so one-sided and narrow and playacting at being shallow and sophomoric.

Anyway in the article’s favour I do love a good irredeemable Shakespearean villain. Give me a vampire-capitalist and stick a stake through their heart. I love it. That said, I think the writer is just pretending to not understand how sympathetic or anti-villains might be constructed with a particular work’s themes or thesis.

Not enough to achieve something, but enough to pretend that it might do something.

There are plenty of small independent publications and online journalism outlets that survive off donation drives, subscription patrons, and volunteer citizen journalists. There are even totally independent citizen journalists that report on community sources. Unfortunately, honest journalism is something that society currently has a limited carrying capacity for, but that capacity is not zero.

I think the problem is centralised “big house” journalism. I’ve only ever really been happy with special interest, independent, moderately-sized publications. I can drop them and move on when they start to show institutionalised bias that I find distasteful (like the AIM hosting Labor lapdogs, which would be fine, if the party wasn’t ambivalently ableist and infested with documented Christofascists). There’s a certain size of online journal that is actually sustainable given its audience.

I believe NASA ultimately had to scrap the idea, but the cloud 9 buoyant cities idea is an old one, tracing back to Bucky Fuller and Earth, and it’s vastly more plausible than trying to make Mars habitable. Or even the Moon! Venus has Earthlike conditions if you exploit buoyancy to settle in the goldilocks area of the atmosphere.

Inside you are two humans. One wants to befriend every animal. One wants to eat every animal. You are named Terry.

I can’t really bee nice here, so pardon the language, but as a second generation Fijian Australian…

Fucking LMAO. Australia is an outsized emitter of greenhouse gasses, let alone the hidden emissions caused by how much oil and gas we export. Scott Morrison, the former PM, even went to the Pacific forum during his incumbency and essentially mocked them regarding this. This turn from the Labor government is probably one of the starkest demonstrations of liberal diversionary political theatre and colonial violence.

Absolutely revolting.

Where I am, the municipal government are also MPs in the lower house. LA seats also tend not to move much, it’s been mostly the same people in the same seats the whole time I’ve been here. The big municipalist candidate actually gave up after he lost two elections and went back to local municipal and dual power operations and organisations… so I’m much more interested in volunteering for local coops or seeing what his latest work efforts are.

Overall though I’m way more interested in municipal politics. One for philosophical reasons, since I find Bookchin’s ideas about municipalism both empirically and ideologically compelling; and two because it’s way less depressing to actually see real change happen through municipal dual power operations and establishment politics. Federal and state politics are intractably bougie and have a lot of inertia driven by money and “old boys” networks.

All the socialist success stories have been built bottom up, all the failures and nonstarters have tried to cut in where they’re inevitably forced out; or become tyrannical and drift from their original goals. Resilient systems are built from people, it’s the only way humans can function collectively in my opinion.

I’m not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn’t mean it’s good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

I’ve deleted and redrafted this several times now… but am I unreasonable for being weirded out and a bit offended by how out of touch rich-and-powerful-people journalism is? Canada, like Australia, is soaked in blood. This is just public image laundry for a country with the same genocide cops and resource extraction monstrosities as all the other colonies, and I’m guessing most of the people reading a niche link aggregator aren’t really the target audience.

If things like this are going to try and memory hole the crimes of a state, we should conscientiously memory hole crappy fluff pieces like this. Who’s moving to Canada? Who has the ability to initiate infrastructure projects or run funding requests up the political ladder?

If nothing else, just as a personal request. I just spent a long time trying to stay calm and articulate (or relative to my original state upon reading this) because this really made my blood boil.

Also of note is that the UN OHCHR is also bluntly critical of austerity as a human rights abuse, due to the way it targets minority groups: https://www.ohchr.org/en/social-security/austerity-measures-and-right-social-security

Not mentioned is the way it helps established disabled people as a permanent underclass. We are simply less than human. In Australia, the more disabled you are, the more you’re exposed to being killed or maimed in an institution, or slightly “better” winding up homeless and exposed to violence and other crimes (if your state likes packing people into shelters like sardines) or the elements (if they don’t).

I write a lot of spreadsheets for games I play, so adapting them into more sophisticated software is always something I chip away at. Good opportunity to learn how to implement concepts in new languages too. Right now I’m writing a Warframe simulator in Racket.

I’m getting nerd sniped by this though!

Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.

Sorry if my tone isn’t exactly right. You have my unconditional respect. I’m learning that I’m just not always a clear communicator, sometimes I get fired up and sound harsher than what I mean, etc.

I think this is actually a major mental blinder put in by the supposed “evidentiary basis” of modern neoliberalism. If you’re receptive to philosophy, I think you might like Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. And then following from that, statistics mean nothing to the worst off in society. I’m currently fighting Australia’s health system for my human rights, why does it matter to me or people like me that statistics say Australia is doing okay? If I die, then what? What value are statistics to my corpse, and all the others who have been killed before me?

I think it’s also important to distinguish “social liberalism” from “socialism”. This is another instance of tricky words that have distorted people’s understanding of history and the trajectory of societies in crisis. Fifty years ago, what you are calling “socialist policies” were just liberalism, social liberalism in particular. This authoritarian meatgrinder we live in is also liberalism, albeit the neoliberal strain.

Socialism isn’t when you have your rights accepted and provided for, it’s the destratification of society along lines of resource ownership. Also, as an anarchist-adjacent I would say a further goal is the collective custodianship of the natural world and the proliferation of a culture of symbiosis and egalitarianism :) (but that’s me).

I don’t mean this as a slight, but I’m very sick and don’t have much energy, so I’ll just make some other offtopic remarks related to what you said, if you’re interested in personal research:

“Confederalist” is different from “federalist”. For instance, Catalunyan syndicalists were federated, in a confederalist system. The Kingdom of Spain is a Federalist system of government–and one that has very recently blocked Catalunyan autonomy. Also, the Fediverse is “federated” but confederalist in character. But you’re right, it is ambiguous.

I say “Bookchinite” because I’m somewhere hanging around the anarchists, but I’m not totally married to anarchism, and there are anarchist tendencies that I have mutual antagonism with; much like Marxists I’ll never be friends with. I’ll take whatever I can get so there is less horrific evil in the world. Social liberals, social democrats, Marxists, anarchists, whatever. Bookchin’s post-anarchist writings are the most aligned with my beliefs, values, and personal context.

I just have a dim view of liberalism as a durable and stable system with the way the world has turned out. Same way I think vanguardists are misguided.

Unfortunately I live in a country where “social wages” and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There’s a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising “lost cause” disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population…

Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of “communism”). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I’m concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it’s hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.

Anyway I’m a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that’s my context.

Reading the responses here, why are people so mad about types? Maybe I’m biased coming from a background of statically typed languages and mathematics. I’d rather have a good typing system that makes me think about data than just hoping I’ve thought about a problem right.

it’s per capita cheese consumption though, so shouldn’t it be independent to population increase?

Australian disability pension.

Really have to wonder how these people keep getting licensed to practice! I know Foucault had some ideas on that 🤔

Yeah, it’s just hard having to continually “shop around” for someone that will help, and do so long term. Think I’m around 50/50 for psychiatrists that are like that.