FYI only 65 million people (<5%) pay income taxes in China.

I believe you, but just googling this it seems like the standard deduction is 60k yuan, and then income taxes are applied progressively after that? I’m sure I’m misunderstanding, but could you say a bit more about this? I’m really fascinated

Mom: “we have de-Ba’athification at home”
“De-Ba’athification”

Here’s one of the big books on this sort of topic. I haven’t read it, but I’ve not seen a bad review of it.

Oh god it’s just like when we sent all those 20-23 year olds to head up the hollowed out Iraqi ministries. Posting on message boards asking how to do their job

Their prime minister back in the 30s loved Hitler:

he is really one who truly loves his fellow-men, and his country, and would make any sacrifice for their good

and

[Hitler] will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people

I think we agree that LLMs like ChatGPT and CoPilot largely will be (and are being) used to discipline labor and that is reactionary. But this feels more like a list of gripes with LLMs and not actually responding to my comment. DKL, GNNs and other machine learning architectures ARE being used in drug and material discovery research, I just didn’t feel like explaining the difference between that and the popular conception of “AI” to peppersky, given how flippant and troll-y their comments were. We should push back against anti-intellectualism in our spaces, and that’s all I was trying to do.

I should have been more precise, but this is all in the context of news about a cutting-edge LLM using a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT, and comments calling it all “reactionary autocorrect” and “literally reactionary by design”. My issue is really with the overuse of the term “AI”, but I didn’t feel like explaining the difference between a GPT and deep kernel learning or graph neural networks, which have been used for drug and material discovery. Peppersky’s comment came off as very anti-intellectual to me, which I hate to see amongst “leftists”.

This is a stupid take. I like the autocorrect analogy generally, but this veers into Luddite-ism.
Let me add, the way we’re pushed to use LLMs is pretty dumb and a waste of time and resources, but the technology has pretty fascinating use-cases in material and drug discovery.

A lot of southern states rejected the funding. Also serves to de-legitimize all government-run/funded healthcare, as well as punish the poor with no (or no good) employer healthcare plans.

too many hexbears googling the name of our great newsposter

Gonna echo 51dz31 and say Losurdo is the move. Everyone who calls themself a “leftist” needs to read his works.

this shit goes so goddamn hard

I put on Rumours just last night. It always blows me away how every track is incredible

I’d like to add that I do union work as well, and that’s about the biggest source of sustenance in my day to day life. At work I can barely have a conversation more than a few minutes without turning it to wages, our benefits, and general working conditions. A lot of people are pretty receptive, although often hesitant (tying into the comfortability I mentioned above). Homelessness is bad in my city and it’s definitely functioning as a threat to a lot of people (as I think it’s pretty much intended).

It’s a weird mix of resignation, anger, sadness, and depression most days, but sometimes you’ll have an off-the-cuff conversation with someone and they’re a lot more clued in than you’d expect. Stuff like that keeps you going.
At my old apartment I used to run into my 70-ish year old neighbor every few weeks or so. His main source of income was from selling scrap metal he’d scrounge from dumpsters around town. He still believed in the Democratic Party, but had sharper analysis than I think a lot of people would give him credit for, just from looking at him. He definitely had some real class consciousness.

There’s opportunity for agitation out there, but I think ultimately a lot of us are relatively comfortable and have a lot to lose, which stifles a lot of potential activity here in the belly of the beast.

Probably a bit of a stretch based on the bands you listed, but if you want something more hardcore, check out Mindforce. I like to say they’re a hardcore band that got a metal guitarist. Excalibur is one of their best

Watching the shotgun house get gentrified right in front of me, in my own city, has been crazy to watch. Ridiculous what people will pay for

Yeah, it’s definitely strange to me how everyone is just buying that this guy is legit and not some patsy

If you (anyone) have the chance to see them live, do it. Crazy show and stage presence, and loudly support Palestine

Here I am riding my 2006 SUV until it blows up with me inside, when all I want is one of those new BYD hybrids that go like over 2000km on a single tank+battery charge and only cost like $15k new. I hate it here