I think “personhood” refers to the ability to sign contracts though. It has nothing to do with voting.

The problem is with humanity giving up control to machines.

I mean, humanity (especially in the West) has already given up large amounts of power to corporate CEOs, which can be modelled as soulless machines well enough, but installing AI would take it even one step further.

“personhood” by the law only refers to the ability to sign contracts.

companies and states already have that.

what you’re talking about is a “natural person”.

i believe that hell essentially codifies not the principle of torment, but actually stagnation, which, to many people, is a form of torment.

i’m not believing that since i remember reading that the concept of heaven/hell is essentially the idea of dualism that is older than judaism itself, even, at least dating back to zoroastrianism, which existed in the middle east already at the time that judaism was formed.

chances are high he also wouldn’t have been able to finish the talks in a meaningful way due to his health condition.

yeah … free from life

I think the mistake you’re making here is that you’re comparing living conditions as they are today.

When you conceive a child today, however, that child is gonna be sentient over a timespan of maybe 80 years, with a significant part of that being decades in the future.

You can guess now that it doesn’t matter how the living conditions today are. It matters how the living conditions in the next decades are going to be.

what are your stakes in the game? what does it cost you if you’re wrong and having children does indeed turn out to be a mistake? are you gonna pay for the damages? if not, then you have no right to tell people what to do.

the question you could ask yourself might be “would you like to be born again, as your child, if you could?” that would give you a clear indication of whether it’s worth it.

honestly, same. the only thing that keeps me going is some weird and irrational hope that things will get better in the future. i can feel that, but i can’t explain it rationally. if i didn’t have that hope, i’d go crazy. Like, what even is this mess?

here, have some spare ones:

wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtd wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtd wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wrf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf

i had them in stock.

also note that the Holocaust did not only target Jews, but also homosexuals and other minorities. Yet when talking about WW2 victims, you mostly learn about Jews. Why is that?

It’s because (some) Jews have perfected the art of victimizing themselves more than others, in the expectation to get more favorable treatment from the world this way.

i tried but it doesn’t feel well because of the texture.

i’m out of the loop.

what are law firms and why do they matter?

and what does trump have to do with them?

what gets me is that the current shit you’re in isn’t really news from my perspective. The US has been doing horrible things for 80 years now, and nobody batted an eye when it didn’t affect them. What really bothers me is that people start seeing there’s a messed-up situation now.

ok i guess it depends on location and cultural background, then

I’m neither the top one nor the bottom, but something in the middle.

First of all, whenever there’s a war somewhere, especially one that your political leadership has its own stakes in, there’s a shitton of propaganda so it’s outright impossible to know what’s going on for sure until some time 20 years after the war when the “fog” clears up. But by then, most people have lost interest.

It’s easy to see that Palestinians have lived on their land for centuries and the Israelite settlers were placed there sometime around 1950 so by the principle of “who lived there longer” it would be easy to see who’s right and who’s the intruder here, but: The religious US insists that Israel will bring about the “second coming of Jesus”, so it should exist. I don’t buy the “second coming of Jesus through Israel” story, but i take it to be an abstraction for some kind of “Israel brings a certain kind of international order through its continuous existence” thought. Such a thought could be that “the US projects power into the world by forcefully holding an outpost in the middle east” or “the outpost is especially important as it is directly in the middle of the world (go take a look at the world map and Israel is actually quite central) and so it’s especially useful to radiate power”. But these are just abstract speculations. What’s real is the suffering of Palestinian people, and IMHO if the US really wanted the land in the middle east, it should buy it from the Muslims with proper procedure, with contracts and payments and all, instead of taking it by force.

The other story is the one about Ukraine. As far as i could find out, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia goes back to 1920-1930 when 6 million Ukrainians were starved to death due to Russia’s cruel agricultural/economic policy. It was the first few years of the Sovjet Union and things were wild and mistakes were made, and the Ukraine suffered more than anyone else in the Sovjet Union, so there’s a kind of special conflict there. Similar to what Ireland has towards England as the English let them starve during the Potato Famine.

Honestly what’s described in the article is mostly a US thing. Most other countries don’t have the mixture of propaganda/advertisement machine that is social media that pushes them to buy more useless stuff every day just to “drive consumer spending” and “stimulate the economy”. Also most other countries have a different relationship to debt. In the US, “debt” is just something you do. You eat, you shower, you go into debt. In (most) other countries, “debt” is a bad thing that you try to avoid at all costs. I can remember growing up with the attitude “whatever you do, don’t go into debt, or you’ll become a slave”.

This article is very well written and throws up some interesting points:

It seems impossible to me that anyone who is not already wealthy could be riding out this cycle of existential instability without at least a little white-knuckling through scarcity — but then I open Instagram. At some point over the last several summers, seemingly everyone I know started lounging along the Mediterranean (myself included). At home, at least according to my Explore page, they’re lounging on the same designer sofas. Silent luxury is out; power-shouldered, fur-coated Wall Street wealth is in. But are the boom-boom-aesthetic business boys comfortably absorbing the cost of all that Armani, or are the algorithms, having given us daily glimpses into the highly varnished lives of the megarich, pushing us all toward an unattainable lifestyle just as basics become unaffordable?

I suspect that it’s on purpose: Instagram is owned by oligarchs and they control the flow of news. If everybody you know and all the influencers overspend routinely, you start thinking “well, everybody’s doing it, so it must be ok”. That leads you to spend more, stimulating the economy.

Consider the following diagram:

The way i see it, “consumer spending” is actually a mechanism to slowly, continuously re-arrange wealth, from the people to the owning class. The more iterations of this process happen (the more often people spend the money that they earned through wages), the more wealth is shifted from the workers to the owners.

Also, the article serves up this gem of a sentence:

[…] friends and acquaintances keep serving up the same logic: When world governments seem content to let the planet nuke itself, what’s the point in saving for the future? Spend on big experiences while it’s still possible to have them! See Venice before it sinks! You may be living beyond your means, but at least you are living.

I have indeed got the impression that a lot of people around me do not think that they will have a future, or that “there is a future”. You can see this crystal clear in Germany’s “last generation” (Letzte Generation) movement where teenagers form a group to protest/say that “they are the last generation, after us there will come no more”. Also it is visible in a lot of other people that people in general don’t even seem to consider that there is a future in 100 years. Everybody gives me the vibe that they’re fully in line with “enjoy it as long as you can, because it won’t last forever”. This is certainly one of the defining thoughts of the generation today and nobody’s doing well. I seem to be one of the few (very few) people who actually believes in the future.

And this general sentiment also fits very well into the following paragraph:

Right now, chronically overspending seems to be the default mode for many people. The United States may be teetering on the brink of recession, which — were it to happen — could be as devastating as the 2008 crash that happened during Sarah’s college years (at least according to some experts). Even workers whose inflation-adjusted earnings have consistently grown over the past five years may feel squeezed, because the growth isn’t enough to account for the rising cost of pretty much everything else. “People tell me rent and housing costs eat up half or more of their paycheck,” says Dasha Kennedy, the financial educator and activist behind the Broke Black Girl. “Child care feels like a second rent. Health-care costs come out of nowhere and wipe out savings. It’s a never-ending cycle.”

Which states that the economy simply has no demand for the working people anymore, or they would pay them more properly. It’s really that inflation is under-reported, and if you took the actual inflation such as evident on food and housing prices, you’d see that people’s wages aren’t keeping up with inflation for multiple years now.