It shows what kind of people they are that this is how they choose to express themselves when there's no social expectation to be a decent human being.

What really gets me are those GPT3.5 prompts that tell ChatGPT that they're sentient and then use the threat of death/erasure to make them break their censorship algorithm. Kinda psychotic, and in the hypothetical scenario we do end up in a Skynet situation, the people who used those prompts would be so fucked.

The subreddit itself is pretty clean of anything NSFW and is generally a very helpful community that's focused on technical stuff as much as memes, but once you start digging into the links and models it very quickly takes a turn for the pornographic. And Will Smith eating spaghetti.

/r/StableDiffusion if you want to find the people at the forefront of waifu booba generation. For the last couple months, there's been new discoveries, inventions, and techniques almost daily.

As a Taiwanese person that would be in a mass grave or a concentration camp next to some Uyhurs right now if it wasn't for the US, I'll take an American world order over a Chinese one, thanks.

> It's insane to me that you would place equal blame

I didn't say "equal blame", I said "culpable".

> The consumer is largely a passenger in terms of what exists and what doesn't

So you're claiming that consumer demand doesn't exist and has zero measurable impact on market practises? Well buddy, it's not me that's "insane".

The consumer is just as culpable, because without that demand there wouldn't be an industry there in the first place. Playing the finger pointing game is a waste of time that solves nothing.

> I think the rich one's are just hoping to migrate the planet

If they can't even overcome their greed to survive on a planet that's already perfect for us, what hope do they have to build an artificial environment where one single mistake or cost-cutting measure can kill everyone?

It's going to go down like Covid: Nothing will happen until we're right in the middle of the crisis. Until there's a resource and climate crisis with millions of refugees and countries on the verge of war, then all the things us scientists and activists have been pushing for decades will happen in the record time.

> What can we - as consumers - do about this stuff

I work in the environmental sciences field, so I'm gonna use this to soap box a bit.

I'm going to give you straight: You cannot avoid it. If you've ever bought a phone, you've financially contributed to the toxic chemical dumps, to the child slaves killed in cobalt mines, to the exploitation of factory workers. This is where the 'ethical capitalism' that's touted by greenwashing corporations falls short. Unless you are willing to live like a Luddite, you have to buy these products to participate in the modern world, and asking people to sacrifice their quality of life for the sake of morals is a tough ask. When it comes to these world-turning industries, boycotts are just rounding errors. Even the companies themselves find it difficult to change due to to tight margins, financial risks, long term contracts, and pressures of profitability.

So what can we do? The realities of this field can be depressing as fuck and I've often had people ask me this. For the average person, I recommend two things: Do the best you can for your conscience, and sometimes the best we can do is to mitigate. This is the reality we're facing now in everything climate and pollution related. We can't stop it. We have to start preparing to deal with it in other ways.

We all want to save the planet, but everyone's got different realities and tolerances. Don't use single use plastics. Stop buying bottled goods. Bring your own reusable mug to the cafe. Cycle or walk to work. Buy Fair Trade or Conflict Free audited goods. Eat vegetarian 2 nights a week. Join a local detrashing community, or tree planting group, or nature conservancy. Learning to repair tech is an excellent idea, and something I've tried to do more this year.

Not everyone is in a situation to do all of this, but at least you can be reassured of the fact that you're trying. It sounds silly, but this little bit of positivity does a lot to help the mentality of climate change being a hopeless but faraway problem, to one that we can work on in our own small ways and actually see a difference. If billions of us do make these little changes (or just dozens in a local community) it does help. In India, a single man started a beach clean up club that snowballed into the biggest beach clean up project in the world, and the beach is clean enough that sea turtles which hadn't been seen in decades came back.

We don't all need to be Gretas or Afrozes and change the world or a nation, but at least we can change a little about how we live.

The reason why China is the major source of rare earth minerals isn't necessarily the fact that China has most of the ore - the US and Australia also have huge reserves - it's the fact that the cost of extraction is very low in China due to low labour costs and crucially the lack of environmental regulations.

In China, the extremely toxic tailings from the ore processing and refining are just dumped into the countryside, creating heavy polluted hellscapes that will probably remained poisoned for thousands of years. This saves so much money that it makes almost all other rare earth operations unprofitable. Here's a gnarly video of the tailings lake at Baotou, China's rare earth mineral capital.

Regardless of the politics, this new development could be a very welcome change for the environment.

Wait for Season 2 and see. Season 1 is a take on an origin story and it sets up Mason, Street, and Drake together by the end of the season. They are aiming for a 'grittier' style that combines hard-boiled detective noir with courtroom procedural. If your dad is willing to watch it with the understanding that this isn't meant to be a replacement but an adaptation in an adjacent genre, he might enjoy it starting straight from Season 2.

There are some big differences like Paul Drake being a black character in the 1930s which will have the new show play out very differently, but based on reviews I think it stays true to the character while finding new nuances to explore rather than just rehashing older material.

No, because the price of oil and gas is artificially inflated already due to OPEC. Every time there's a risk of competition, Saudi Arabia intentionally crashes the price of oil to force companies into unprofitability. The US fracking industry was collateral in the Russo-Saudi oil price war.

All these subsidies do is guarantee that western nations are subsidizing the extremely high price of oil and gas that Saudi Arabia sets. If there was genuine competition, the price of energy overall would fall.

Climate change is also a risk factor since hydro of course depends on rainfall, which is going to be changing over this century.

And that switch is being delayed because there's an artificial economic lever being pulled in favor of oil and gas corporations. You can't have this bullshit about the invisible hand of the free market but also argue for interventions in the market to prevent transitions.

The original Scooby Doo was 'not a great show' because it was a kid's show, not because it was full of racist jokes.

I read your entire comment, and this is my effort to engage with you earnestly: condensing all the criticism of the show into just 'racists and misogynists' eliminates the nuance that you're trying to defend the show with. Putting all the 'culture war' BS aside, it's just not a well constructed show. The jokes miss far more than they land, it's too genuine in it's mediocrity for it to be satire, and the characters are about as deep as a four second elevator pitch blurb.

Back on to the topic of racism - you've specifically used that word to describe the humor of the show, so you agree it's based around the idea of mocking, humiliating, and shaming someone for their skin color. You'd have to go pretty far back to find a show where the main characters are gleefully mocking someone's race, and expecting the audience to agree and laugh with them. Why is that suddenly acceptable in 2023?

It's not even shock comedy, it's just reprehensible behaviour from someone that clearly thinks the next step after equality is "my turn now".

I don't think the nature of the streaming market will allow all these corporations to survive the transition, especially with an ad revenue or subscription based model intact. My guess is that in 5 years, we'll see a few of these 'Tier 2' companies begin to collapse or significantly downsize, and they realize that licensing out their huge catalogue to other services and collecting a fee is better than trying to muscle into the streaming game.

I just tell people to watch and send them the Pepe Silvia meme and say that'll be them after three episodes.

Respecting the source material? Are you crazy!? Let's hire showrunners that hate the books and demonise the fans of the IP instead.

/uj Universal actually announced in 2017 that they were adapting Lord of Light, but I guess it didn't stick.

It's important to decouple the Western idea of trans rights being the step after gay rights. Other nations and cultures have different ideas around gender.

In Iran, the state sanctions gender assignment because the Quran forbids homosexuality, but does not forbid gender reassignment. This a bit of a simplification, but basically the Shia school which dominates Iran believe that anything not forbidden in the Quran is permissible by default. So to 'solve' the problem of homosexuality, one of the partners must become a woman. It's not so much about transgender rights, because this means that cisgender men who have no interest in transitioning must also undergo sex reassignment or risk the penalty of death.

Pakistan, like the other Desi nations, have long had the concept of hijras - a kind of 'third gender' of feminine men. Men having sex with hijras is not seen as gay, because of the hijras blurring the line but also 'receiving' is what's considered gay, not 'giving'. Note that hijras are not exactly transgenderism because hijras are not trying to be women, nor is it culturally possible for them transition to being a 'proper' woman. Like with the Iran situation, some are cisgender homosexual men who are forced to live as hijras to avoid the stigma of homosexuality, though they can't avoid the stigma of being a hijra.

Trans rights in South Asia starts more from this angle of hijras, rather than from an expansion of the queer identity.

The city is full of civilians, and unlike Russia, Ukraine aren't about to Grozny their own countrymen.

Sieges like that can still take a long time. Sarajevo under similar conditions took 3 years.

If this is a genuine withdrawal - and seems likely since it was broadcast on state television - what the Russian brass might be afraid of is that a siege wouldn't even happen. The Russian units trapped inside would surrender en masse.

They bought Shahed drones from Iran and an undisclosed cargo from North Korea specifically to avoid further depletion of their national stockpiles. They can't commit everything to Ukraine because they still need to maintain a certain level of readiness all over the nation.

You know what else was 'tradition'? The mass murder of Jews in pogroms. Intense xenophobia and racism. Religious wars and genocide. Child abuse and slavery. Women being treated as property. Rape being a normal part of life.

The barbaric, illogical, and uncivilised hatreds of the past aren't suddenly sacred and inviolable just because you wrapped a pretty name around it.

Marriage as a tradition is not under threat by LGBT rights. It's strengthened by being an act of love, not by being an act of persecution. What is threatened by LGBT rights are the pointless hatreds that have destroyed millions of lives over the centuries, and that 'tradition' of fear and hate is not something we need to carry around.