CoderKat

We absolutely could do things if society as a whole agreed to. Billionaires only exist because we let them exist. The only thing stopping us from taxing all money over a certain amount is us.

Unfortunately, I have little faith in our ability to convince people that we should massively step up our taxation. We can't even get billionaires to pay the percentage of income tax that they're theoretically supposed to pay. How are we supposed to convince enough people to go above and beyond?

A huge number of people somehow have the idea that billionaires deserve this money. Or that just because their wealth isn't cash means we can't take it away.

If they try to leave to another country, arrest them for tax evasion and seize every asset they have. Don't let them do any business in the country without paying their share. Get other countries to band together on this until there's nowhere for them to run except shitholes. Even if we can't stop them from being rich in Ireland (and on that note, we should punish tax havens with sanctions), we can stop them from using their wealth to affect other countries.

In Canada, pretty much every fast food restaurant has poutine these days. McDonalds is the worst one IMO. They have the best fries for plain fries, but for poutine, Burger King is much better (and offers poutine with bacon, which is the best combination).

Poutine is also super common in sit down restaurants, which often offer fancier versions. Buffalo chicken poutine is a really fun combination. Some places will have like half a dozen different poutine options, with stuff like hamburger poutine, loaded with multiple kinds of cheese, mushroom gravy, butter chicken, pulled pork, etc.

How does this happen? Really soggy, thawed pizza?

Bear in mind that some instances blocked Hexbear and similar. This means that what people perceive as the fediverse can be very different. Some instances are super curated while others see warts and all.

Plus some users have blocked the instance on their side. Easy to forget how bad things are when you utilize blocking.

But we (as a collective) do need to remember that what we experience isn't the same as what a potential new member experiences. Which is why I now advocate defederating instances like Hexbear. I really didn't want to for a while, but eventually it became clear that they're too aggressive and bad for the fediverse as a whole.

Yeah, it's so weird that they're sooooo in love with Russia and China. They claim to be communist and/or socialist, but those countries aren't what I'd consider to be either of those things. They're just... regular ol' dictatorships full of human rights abuses. Why the hell would they want to support them?

Hot pursuit was the one that let you play as or against cops, right? I freaking loved that as a kid. I'm not much for racing games, but that's the exception.

Which half the provinces don't even recognize (as in, not a stat holiday). Not that it really matters that much. No problem has ever been solved by merely declaring a holiday and there's no shortage of shitty actions speaking louder than any holiday could.

Yeah, the average consumer doesn't buy Windows. They buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows most of the time. Those consumers aren't going to want to pay for a subscription. Especially when you look at the prices of the kinds of computers that most people are buying. They're budget machines. No way a subscription would go over well. And why would OEMs want to deal with the fallout of people not buying their computers because of subscriptions?

The "fun" intersection of incel with sovereign citizen bullshit.

Agree and I sympathize with all the points.

On the financial point, we, as a society, badly need to stop depending on jobs for survival before it's too late. But I know that we're unlikely to change until a lot of people get hurt.

And on the self-worth point, it feels awful to be replaced, even if the money isn't an issue. People take pride in their work and want their work to be celebrated. Yet, we're quickly approaching a point where it's going to be very difficult for people to create art by hand that can hold a candle to AI art. Sure, there's still many master artists, but they got where they are through hard work. How many new potential artists will be willing to put in that hard work when any random Joe Blow can generate something better in seconds? Human made art (from scratch) won't go away, but it is harder to feel good about what you create when it feels like your art has no place anymore.

I don't think that's necessarily a dead giveaway. Because there's been controversy about AI art that added watermarks. The controversy being because it implied the AI was scraping images that it definitely wasn't allowed to use.

Hands are only a give away for bad AI art. There's no shortage of examples with great hands (especially when using features like Stable Diffusion's ControlNet, which allows you to give hints to the AI for the shape that something should match). Just so many people posting AI art generate once or twice and post that. If you're more selective and selectively regenerate, you'll be able to get much more believable results.

This is also a rapidly changing area, with the most cutting edge AI being way better than something from even a year ago. Used to be that no AI could do even remotely believable text, but in recent weeks, I've been seeing many examples of AI art that got small amounts of text perfect.