You know, if it was anything but Twitter, I could at least have an ounce of sympathy. I remember Tumblr getting a bunch of cheap heat over its active community of furry enthusiasts. Valve cracked down on a bunch of lewd games in their Steam Store, largely out of prudishness. Reddit’s been a notorious hub for revenge porn since forever, and its still been considered draconian to blank-ban the whole site.

But pretty much everyone drew the line at CSAM. Hell, 4chan generally drew the line at CSAM. Sites that had virtually no moderation still managed to swing their tiny hammers at CSAM wherever it cropped up.

Twitter seems to have fully embraced this shit with an enthusiasm that can only be described as satanic. Just really, nakedly, unapologetically evil. Maybe Sweeny just doesn’t get that, and he’s reflexively defending another billionaire from the oppressive hand of Big Government Regulation. Maybe the dude’s just a nounce and thinks CSAM is no big deal. Either way, someone needs to rub his nose in it until he gets the picture.

We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.

I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.

I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.

Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)

I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.

Schools generally buy anything microsoft offers with the little budget they have.

Far more Pearson than Microsoft. The “teach to the test” regime is all about selling schools test prep material that effectively tells you the answers to the next round of Pearson-written standardized exams. I’m sure Pearson is eagerly integrating with Microsoft AI tools, so they can cut their own internal staffing and roll out more profitable digital variations of their material.

But schools pay top dollar for these resources because state administrators use exam scores as a benchmark for school funding. So the $10M you pay for test prep material may determine the next $50M in funding your school receives, relative to the poorer districts that couldn’t afford to buy answers in advance.

Why did any school higher ups pay to implement these?

Tons of kickbacks to high ranking administrators, double-dealing with teachers being contracted or poached by Pearson for test-writing gigs, state administrators moving between jobs in the school board/legislature and positions within Pearson, people with stock and other debt instruments that profit when Pearson does well…

FFS, the Houston ISD takeover by the State of Texas ended with a Colorado private school management guy sending tens of millions of dollars from the Houston public schools to pay consulting fees to Colorado private school agencies. That’s as corrupt as it comes.

I mean, the bitter truth of all this is the downsizing and resource ratcheting of public schools creating an enormous labor crisis prior to the introduction of AI. Teachers were swamped with prep work for classes, they were expected to juggle multiple subjects of expertise at once, they were simultaneously educator and disciplinarian for class sizes that kept mushrooming with budget cuts. Students are subject to increasingly draconian punishments that keep them out of class longer, resulting in poorer outcomes in schools with harsher discipline. And schools use influxes of young new teachers to keep wages low, at the expense of experience.

These tools take the pressure off people who have been in a cooker since the Bush 43 administration and the original NCLB school privatization campaign. AI in schools as a tool to bulk process busy work is a symptom of a deeper problem. Kids and teachers coordinating cheating campaigns to meet arbitrary creeping metrics set by conservative bureaucrats are symptoms of a deeper problem. The education system as we know it is shifting towards a much more rigid and ideologically doctrinaire institution, and the endless testing + AI schooling are tools utilized by the state to accomplish the transformation.

Simply saying “No AI in Schools” does nothing to address the massive workload foisted on faculty. It does nothing to address how Teach-The-Test has taken over the educational philosophy of public schooling. And it does nothing to shrink class sizes, to maintain professional teachers for the length of their careers (rather than firing older teachers to keep salaries low), or to maximize student attendance rates - the three most empirically proven techniques to maximizing educational quality.

AI is a crutch for a broken system. Kicking the crutch out doesn’t fix the system.

“It’s only sunny during the day” is a line uttered ad nauseum by people who didn’t see lithium batteries falling through the same price drop.

This is a 27 year old joke

The history of the protest-turned-riot-turned-massacre is genuinely incredible. I wish more Americans learned enough about Chinese history to understand the significance of the event. It wasn’t just one guy in front of a line of tanks. And the movement didn’t end in Tienamen, either.

Dengism into the 21st century was defined by that movement and the backlash and it’s reverberations. Modern Chinese domestic policy exists as a combination carrot and stick to discourage this kind of insurrection from happening again.

Would that the US people had the kind of courage and social cohesion necessary for a Tienamen in the modern day.

you techno utopians are funny.

I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.

It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.

Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”

But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?

Eventually. But, much like traditional fission power, you’ll need a very large and complex piece of infrastructure to deliver it.

You won’t be able to put a fusion plant in your basement like you can put solar on your roof.

Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.

US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.

I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.

There’s good, actually.

Smaller communities don’t fill up with annoying bots and toxic personalities

Communities driven by bots should die

I guess I’m curious what “enlightenment” you felt you got out of it.

I met people from a variety of backgrounds, including people who’d grown up overseas. I had roommates for the first time, which gave me a taste of living with others who didn’t share my same habits or hygiene. I started dating seriously for the first time. Experimented with alcohol and a few other substances. A bunch of friends came out of the closet. I spent every summer doing a different low wage job - grocery store, teacher, assembly line worker, entry level paid worker on a political campaign. Put more miles behind the wheel in my freshman year than my entire life previously. Got to watch a particle accelerator fire and buy a homeless guy a drink at a local bar.

Idk how to really nail it down in simple terms, but I had such a broader exposure to the rest of the world in those university years.

Agreed but I get annoyed at people who have this idea of if we just educate everyone -> utopia and that conservatism is a function of undereducation

Oh, I agree. Some of the worst reactionaries are college educated. I don’t think college makes you liberal.

What’s the old saying? “A Conservative is just a Liberal that’s been mugged by reality”?

I had more than a few diehard Republicans in my friend group in college. Like, I got to meet the kind of people you just see shit talking on CrossFire IRL. People who unironically thought we should do genocide in Iraq because these were subhumans who had forfeited their right to life. People who were in Engineering because they wanted to build the bombs we were dropping in Afghanistan. People who used the hard-r at the end of the n-word just to prove they could.

Also incredibly enlightening.

american claim their country is worse than iran

The worst country in the world is the one that is oppressing me, personally.

nobody cared

Trump Threatens Iran Intervention. History Shows When Foreign Support Works

Somebody clearly cares

People who talk about how college makes you “Enlightened”, “Well Rounded”, etc. always baffle me.

Being a young twenty year old living apart from your parents among your peers with lots of free time to study and develop your talents enlightens you and rounds you out.

Universities are great because they facilitate that kind of social and intellectual development.

These elite prestigious institutions graduate some of the most evil and diabolical human beings driven purely by greed and prestige.

Evil people congregate in everywhere. I wouldn’t put this on universities specifically

Eye witness account plus video

Pretty famously, he climbed directly up on the tank and chewed out the driver, then got back down and continued to block the tank. Others in the crowd pulled him away back down the street. The tank didn’t try to run him over, he was never reported captured, and as far as we’re aware he’s alive to this day.

Imagine an American climbing onto the hood of an ICE van or stubbornly maneuvering in front of a vehicle.

Historically speaking, a safe bet

The global power that hasn’t participated in numerous atrocities does not exist.

Almost as though power is accrued at the expense of the vulnerable.

The difference here is the loss of domestic law and order and its cascading downstream effects for global cooperation and trade

The only countries that the US has alienated are ones it is explicitly sanctioning. Nobody else is actually cutting ties.

China is the obvious beneficiary.

China’s the trade-alternative for countries under US sanctions, precisely because Trump’s done a ham-fisted job of diplomacizing with his counterparts overseas. But a future Pete Buttigieg administration can patch that up if he chooses. There is more to be gained by doing business with the US than with Venezuela or Iran or Cuba. Chinese leaders know that and act accordingly.

But could get a whole lot worse a whole lot faster

Sure. Or it could come to a grinding halt if Trump loses control of Congress and falls into lame duck status three years early. Already, we’re seeing sharp divides even inside the GOP, which already operates on thin margins in the face of a Dem election wave.

Plenty of precedent for an unpopular President to get sidelined by skilled and ambitious legislators. And the US has demonstrated time and time again that it has the manpower and the infrastructure to rebound quickly under strong, competent leadership.

We’re almost certainly going to face a nasty recession going into the next few years. But we’re still a massive, hugely populated, highly technical, heavily industrialized economy. Losing unipolar status isn’t the end of the empire. A bad few years of economic contraction isn’t the end of the world.

Now… the long tail of climate change… that’s another story. If the Colorado River dries up before it reaches Arizona, we’re going to see some shit flying.

The American brand is permanently tarnished

I wish this were true. But after Iraq? After Vietnam? A Cold War that nearly wiped out the entire human race? After CIA sponsored coups from Brazil to Guatamala? Henry Ford was passing out copies of “The International Jew” all over Germany during the 1920s. Roosevelt forced the Platt Amendment down Cuba’s throat. McKinley oversaw a genocide in the Philippines. Polk gave us the Annexation of Texas and the revitalization of the North American slave trade. Anyone ask Andrew Jackson what happened to all the Cherokee down in Florida?

America is a country with unlimited do-overs. Our brand is never tarnished. We are always and forever a Shining City On A Hill even as Ronnie fucking Raygun is sponsoring nun rape down in Nicaragua.