Wow I’m starting to feel bad about that time I asked AI to make a joke about scatology & eschatology sounding similar.

From good ol’ Liberal Fig Leaves, LLC

Displaying tit can lose 70% again.

I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but

What a condescending opener. Whatever you think of George Lucas, he’s made some cool stuff, he did it the old fashioned way, and he’s not constrained by resources. But rather than listen to what this guy has to say on the topic, he begins with the presumption that no, he must be deluded from swallowing propaganda.

I’m hardly George Lucas’s biggest fan but this writer can blow me.

It’s a complete illusion that the US can control this strait. It could destabilize it further if it wishes, but there is no getting a ship through without Iran’s cooperation.

Because Iran has a ton of land along the straight from which they can launch missles, drones, rockets, or even artillery at passing ships. There’s a huge region where they can attack the strait, and the US can’t put hundreds of thousands of troops on that land to hold it all. Therefore Trump cannot declare the strait open, though he can declare the strait closed (this just hurts him most of all).

All his bullshit about floating ships at one end to “gate” the passage, and escorting ships, and shooting down rockets…. It’s complete bluster. Even with the entire US military he cannot guarantee safe passage. And that’s just one of the things he has to do if this war continues. He also has to try to defend our allies in the Gulf and elsewhere.

Setting aside the many other things wrong with this, 20% the value of the cargo is just stupid. Most of it doesn’t have that much profit margin in the first place. I know it’s a number straight out of his ass, but damn, the stupid…

I agree with everything that you’re saying and yes they have a lot of money. Do you see what I’m saying about how this could require millions and millions of moderators at the kind of scale they operate? A significant portion of humanity is on social media.

Meta earns about $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit. How many mods would $60bil actually buy?

Let’s work with a total cost of $50k per moderator. This is very conservative since only a fraction of that would be salary (the rest insurance, HR, management, taxes, equipment, etc).

If they spent their entire profit on mods, they could hire 1.2 million. Is that enough to moderate several billion? Maybe.

Now should we consider costs they could actually sustain? Taking their entire profit to zero is, understandably, not possible for any company. I think this is where most people just wave their hand and say “who cares” or “fuck em” or just assumes they have infinite money.

But to seriously consider this… it’s just a very big challenge for anyone to pull off.

Yes it’s a thing with more than one challenge.

What would 200 million moderators cost? At a modest salary of $50k annually it’s in the trillions. They literally couldn’t pay that.

Fair enough. But I think we’d be just as upset to see pedos organizing in unpaid content.

I want to be clear I’m not promoting Meta’s decision here by any stretch.

There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it? You might say oh sure, because the average person might only post occasionally and human moderators could be dedicated full time so they’d outweigh users by factors. But that kind of ignores influencers who also generate content full time.

I really don’t see how there will ever be enough humans to do this right. Or if there are, they will have to number in the hundreds of millions to keep up. The bit about all humans posting is not really hyperbolic at all. Zuckerberg already has 1 billion of us.

If driving is the reason to make it opt out, I don’t see why that couldn’t be changed for state ID.

Though really I don’t see a problem with it being opt out for all. Many places do it that way.

Opt out is fair at a minimum. Driving is the most dangerous thing we do, and if you’re going to do it, there’s an argument to be made that throwing your organ donor chip into the pot is the least you could do, because you could very well cause an accident someday that costs someone their life.

If you sit down and give the topic all due fair consideration, yes, there’s only one rational conclusion. However a lot of people just don’t want to think about dying, period, and will switch off on anything that makes them do so. I’m sure there are also misinformed people who think their organs can be freely stolen even if they’re not dead yet if they check that box.

I’m not justifying these people, mind you. I’m just describing how it happens. There is no good reason, but there are reasons.

Both of your scenarios seem to start with an empty landscape. When I heard “move the ground level up” I took that to mean that we are starting with an existing cityscape that has a ground level, and everything must be elevated.

If we’re just talking pure theoreticals built on a tabula rasa, okay then. Like you said, everything can be hand waved away.

I’ve actually been there. Like I said, it’s a gallery with little depth and does not answer how this would be applied to modern architecture n any kind of scale.

effectively raising ground level

I can’t say I follow what this means. Moving everything we have at ground level up? I understand that this kind of thing has happened historically but only in periods where we barely built a couple of stories high.

I’m looking out over the Tokyo skyline right now and there’s every level of building. How do you get everyone to agree on the one right height?

Do you want to suggest a measurement scheme in which underground building is cheaper? As is I don’t understand your point.

I disagree - there’s a massive corpus of science fiction behind it. Protomolecule!!

Indeed. Your point?