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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it’s in their owner’s interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.

    Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become “min maxed” by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.

    For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent “forth estate” or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public’s interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.

    If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.

    TLDR: We don’t *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.


  • Ok, it’s obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

    But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don’t get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn’t serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

    And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can’t have democracy without free press, and currently we don’t have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

    Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.



  • 1 Self checkout rarely allow you to pay with cash. 2) Self checkout can be made easier faster by scanning with a phone app

    That leads to different complications and outcomes. See OP complaining about slow self checkout. The more self checkout, the less cash transactions and the less privacy.

    A fully cashless society would make people more vulnerable. Not just privacy, but maybe some bureaucratic snafu that doesn’t allow you a residence, maybe your ID card expired, and no banking account. If you’re not in the system, you can’t even buy food. Or if your account is in the red and blocked.

    Ideally we should have have fully anonymous cash cards. But regulation is being pushed in some countries to limit them, or make you give ID. Or they take 5% “tax” on the revenue. And a phone app is easier to use.


  • In what reality do you live in lol? This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is literally the business model of “data collection companies”. European privacy laws and the cookie disclaimer BS just showed us what is already happening.

    If you don’t think all this data isn’t being collated and used then you don’t understand the nature of neoliberal capitalism and politics. Mock me all you want, but it seems they’ve already won when basic privacy is now a fringe idea.





  • What the fuck? Do people not understand the concept of privacy? Have you ever read one of those cookie agreements? This is exactly the same!

    If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity. We KNOW they use or sell that information from countless examples. That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.


  • They really went all out haha. They also have a linked website with a video and a tutorial. The tutorial has an easier to understand explanation of what they are doing.

    It seems they use simple motion flow of the video to train the neural net, but they also use some kind of volume rendering to train the AI to predict and reconstruct the 3D scene with your robot. And they use cheap depth cameras but apparently it also works without depth. And this works for basically any robot you can imagine which is really brilliant.

    Looking at all those pneumatic soft robots, now I wonder if you could invert this to use for an 3D input device. Like a kind of 3D printed pneumatic joystick that simply measures the resulting air pressure at the end of internal channels when you tilt or twist or move the joystick. No wiring or assembly, just 3D print a joystick and glue it to a board.








  • Is there a reason to call it “male loneliness epidemic” instead of just “loneliness epidemic”?

    Isn’t the male part actually a reaction to the “fascist youth indoctrination” mentioned above? The modern fascism pushed by the anti-woke “intellectual dark web” is fundamentally a belief in inequality based on identity like sex, gender or race. Which is incompatible with dating emancipated women if based on sex, and causes problem when dating materialistic women who seek beauty or wealth.

    So part of the problem is fascism. And the other part is neoliberalism, making raising children so expensive that it forces people to strongly consider wealth of partners before other attributes. That and the other things you mentioned of course, or an identity fueled by social media self marketing.




  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.mltoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldsigh
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    6 days ago

    consumerism is fundamental to human nature

    I don’t disagree. Like Nietche said: “I shop, therefor I am” haha. Also:

    Any argument you make that increases the risk of genocide is wrong.

    I agree that hedonism is a fundamental part of human nature, but not exclusively or in this extreme. Lets agree “Extreme Consumerism” on the current level is destructive, genocidal and not healthy for us. People also need a planet to live on, and want a world where their children can grow up without being consumed by advertising, self-marketing or endlessly distracted by tasty nonsense.

    Advertising is the primary “infection vector” that makes people think that what they shop is their identity. It also doesn’t require full on socialism to prevent the genocidal effects of unbridled consumerism.

    I do believe we can achieve a modest level of hedonism where this “DLS” becomes something more luxurious than our current living standards. Working only 20 hours a week, having a luxury apartment with an awesome look on nature or on a green city. With the current technology, the “one mobile phone and one laptop per person on earth” isn’t more sustainable than a gaming PC.

    There are many destructive or abhorrent things that are part of human nature that we as rational individuals want to control in a society. I believe video games or virtual worlds with full “deep dive VR” is where we could explore and satisfy our less savory natures. But we can’t let it influence us like the toxic male teenage gamer culture has by now. The “sheepism” is real, unless you think MAGA is fine. But it’s mostly driven by dire outlook on material conditions.

    Fundamentally, we can’t keep going as we have. It doesn’t matter if nobody “wants” the party to stop. It has to. And the study in OP gives us strong evidence that it is possible to achieve at least a decent living standard without exterminating ourselves.

    Humans only really need 7 or so fundamental: Food / water, shelter / housing, safety, community, healthcare, communication, education / news. If we can get those with working only very little, living mostly a life of leisure, that’s already luxury. Everything on top of that advanced technology can give us is gravy.

    Like building tons of greenhouses to grow food beyond “subsistence farming” locally and using simple farming robots that are not harder to assemble than 3D printers, or genetically engineering food.

    What technology can’t give us is a culture where greed and politics doesn’t lead to irrational, undesirable and unequal outcomes. Or maybe our new savior ChatGPT can haha.