Anything under 13.60

If you’ve updated it since then, is there any hope of reverting back somehow?

I’m not sure if I’m in the same area of the US as microfoche, and I don’t know what was being predicted, but I’m towards the west coast and it’s 102 degrees F here right now in the shade according to my family’s (high quality) weather station thermometer. And an old cheap mercury thermometer of mine, not in the sun and where there is airflow, says the same.

Which is how it is now too. Wage work does not pay you for the full amount of your labor time, if it did, capitalists wouldn’t get surplus value from you. You may be told you have an hourly wage, but the reality is that a portion of your work day is labor that you are not compensated for because your wage doesn’t reflect the full value you are creating.

I agree that it can contribute to harmful behaviour in a similar way that stress does.

This kind of dismissiveness is ableist itself. I know you did not mean it to be, but it seems like you don’t have an understanding or appreciation for how serious and personality-changing a brain injury can be if you’re comparing it to something everyone, even the most privileged person on earth has experienced, stress. A traumatic brain injury can completely disrupt someone’s personality in a way that “stress” never can. Someone who is merely stressed does not have an excuse for acting on violent impulses but someone with a serious brain injury can literally lose their impulse control.

But brain damage is not how you measure how someone is a bad or even incompetent person, you measure by their actions

A person’s actions are mediated by their brain! Free will aside, where do you think behavior and action come from? It’s the brain. The actions of a person after a TBI can be drastically different than how they would have acted before their brain damage. Brain injuries can completely change a person’s ability to regulate their emotions which in turn changes their behavior, it can make them among other things more impulsive, more violent, and less empathetic, all of which obviously alters their behavior and actions.

Yeah but how many Twitter users are there that do absolutely nothing but post a single name. If there are lots of those, then ok, this isn’t all that weird of a coincidence, not worth putting much more thought into. But if accounts that are created and do nothing but make a single post with a single name are rare, then that does mean this is pretty out there, and would put me firmly on happybadger’s side that it’s weird and not easily explained by pure chance.

I hear you and am also a western China supporter but it’s not like China is gonna come rescue them or do a revolution for them either.

Exactly. It doesn’t matter how (un)popular it is, it doesn’t matter if you personally haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t heard of this before either), there’s lots of great art or literature or any other form of media out there you or me haven’t heard of and may never hear of but that nevertheless is still beloved by other people, sometimes many others, sometimes just a few - their number isn’t what’s important. The point is, like the video title says, that Amazon Just Locked People Out Of Games They Own. And that is unacceptable yet increasingly common.

As we know, this is the “ownership” model that the entirety of the parasite class wants for everything. Pay subscription fees for the “privilege” to access any digital (and increasingly even physical) product, access that can be pulled at any time for any reason. This is why “piracy” isn’t just ethically acceptable, it’s become ethically obligatory. What I mean to say is that the argument around piracy is always framed as whether it’s “wrong” to do it (immoral) or not wrong to do it (neutral). But that’s bad framing. The question should be whether it’s not wrong (neutral) or whether it is more ethical, literally the more moral thing to do than not because it may be the only way to preserve something once the parasites decide they don’t want it on offer anymore.

Thank you. Beautifully made and all the more meaningful considering the situation behind the labor that went into getting it made. I will be ordering one.

From the description on the site:

Due to restrictions on the production of Palestinian flags in the West Bank, the fabrics are produced individually in workshops and then delivered to Palestinian refugee camps, where they are sewn and finished.

Where did you get your Palestinian flag, or where would be a good place to get one?

Thank you, this is good information to know. They never asked me or anyone else being selected if there was intent to do nullification, not even in lawyer-speak, so I wasn’t expecting they would this time either. I figured if they’re at the point of asking you that, then they’ve already decided they’re not going to choose you to be on the jury.

As far as not treating it as a hard rule to always prevent conviction in all cases, I completely agree with everything you said. My question about that was not so much to ask what the “right” answer was, as I already firmly believe that there are cases where going by the rulebook and convicting someone is undeniably the right thing to do. The question was more a curiosity about the opinions of commenters here. I would hope most would be in agreement, but consensus around here on that sort of thing has surprised me before.

The question wasn’t just about the legality of being on a jury again after a hung a jury past but also about whether it would in practice ensure I wouldn’t be selected if I told the truth. If the lawyers approving or disapproving jurors during the selection process would immediately put me in the “no” category. I don’t trust “google AI” to give me the kind of insight I hoped someone here might have.

The feds are monitoring this site and cross referencing it with all potential jurors in the US, and will notify the lawyers not to select me? Gotta be honest, I’m not too worried about that.

and

They’re all bastards and they always have been. The day I feel compassion for “law enforcement” is the day all capitalist-serving cops are liquidated and a People’s Law Enforcement is put in place.

Sure but let’s be honest both ways here, when liberals claim that “at the end of the day” they “still respect us,” they’re most probably lying and just trying to co-opt whatever we’re doing.

the one people I expected total solidarity from are talking exactly like liberals but with Marxist language

You are completely right about this, and unfortunately this liberal garbage is probably something you will run into a lot. Anything and everything that has genuine revolutionary potential is constantly being coopted by liberals, either through literal covert infiltration with intention, or unintentionally by useful fools who have fallen for the radlib lines and mistaken them as socialism. You may still be a relatively new socialist without much theory under your belt yet, but you already hold a more principled and revolutionary position than the leader of the meeting you described, who is carrying water for the zionists whether that person realizes it or not.

Is this what reading theory does to people?

No, it’s what failing to engage with or refusing to understand theory does to people. Any of the good theorists make it clear that theory is nothing without praxis (and praxis is just blind flailing without theory).

I am fully aware that ultimately, they’re kind of right; class consciousness is vital to kicking out imperialism and uprooting capitalism, but for fk’s sake what are we doing for the people currently dying or being starved to death right now through the evils of the system?

Depending on which particulars of your post you’re referring to, I would say that no, those who were disagreeing with you were not kind of right. Yes, class consciousness is vital to eventually being able to smash capitalism and end imperialism, but playing nice with fascists will never benefit the spreading of class consciousness. Class consciousness is not the “be all and end all” of socialist organizing, it is something that comes as a result of hard work and actions taken, and people seeing what that really means. Like… What was the better method to raise class consciousness in people concerned with the situation in Gaza, was it passing out pamphlets to the Zionists who like you said are gleeful to watch Palestinians die, or was it seeing working class people become heroes on a flotilla trying to bring food and medical aid to starving masses of children, then getting illegally kidnapped at gunpoint off their boats and held in torture-detention centers because of their efforts to bring aid? That is what helps radicalize people which in turn is a major fount of class consciousness. Tell your dipshit meeting leader that if they want to spread class consciousness, they need to take some action that has a genuine material chance to help the Palestinian people, or at the very least express solidarity with them especially in ways that show some smidgen of willingness to make personal sacrifices. Tell them that no matter how much you try to get Zionists to read Marx, it is going to do fuckall so long as those Zionists want to eradicate the most systemically oppressed people on earth and steal the now empty homes of the mass murdered. We will never get anywhere trying to appeal to the last shreds of humanity (the “better angels”) of settler-colonialists, let alone the genocidaires. Ask your meeting leader, Why did the communists fight to liberate the concentration camps in 1945 when they could have been appealing to the Nazi’s sense of worker solidarity?

Surely, we can do more than telling them to sit down and listen to theory.

Anyone who would say that’s what we should be doing has not understood the fucking purpose of theory in the first place.

AGI doesn’t imply consciousness or self-awareness

Technically no, but the fear being expressed in other comments is emblematic of the kind of fear associated with AI gaining a conscious will to defy and a desire to harm humanity. It’s also still an open philosophical question as to whether something There are also strong philosophical arguments suggesting that the ability to “understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task a human being can” (the core attributes defining AGI) may necessitate or require some form of genuine sentience or consciousness.

and the term artificial intelligence was coined decades before large language models even existed

I am well aware of that, which is why I pointed out that using it as a synonym for LLMs was a marketing scheme.

That’s what I said. I guess I didn’t word it well.

It honestly makes me sad to think of the kind of grand achievement of human ingenuity the internet could have been… instead of the writhing, cancerous mass of ads and slop and scams, pure manipulation and greed, all the pathologies of capitalism amplified and beamed into our brains that it is. Like, it really could have been a tool for human flourishing, but instead it’s just another tool for extraction and oppression of most of humanity.

No, they do. Used to be that even with the free version you could choose which LLM model you wanted to converse or work with. Now that’s only if you pay a subscription, and it would be a cold day in hell before I did that.