I mean, if they're shit enough, there will be a few that just end up parked in a garage for decades after a wealthy owner finds them unusable, that are then even rarer when the rest don't survive

I think I've encountered one person that could reasonably be said to be using AI generators to make art, in that a discord server I'm in used to have a guy that made something of a hobby out of trying to get chatbots and coding AIs to make "shaders" (I don't know exactly what this implies, since what he posted weren't recognizable as shaded images but some kind of abstract patterns or shapes). He was always talking about tweaking some technical aspects of various models, that I didn't really get the terminology of to understand, and seemed to spend a lot of time messing around with them to only occasionally get something he found interesting enough to share. It wasn't how people typically use "AI art" generators though, for sure.

Quite the exaggerated headline from the look of it.

I mean, might it not be so much the actual conditions themselves so much as the perception of the future state of those conditions? I imagine bad conditions that one is already used to, that one perceives as potentially getting somewhat better or at least not that much different, feel different than relatively good but tenuous conditions that one expects to lose with time. Losing things often feels worse than simply not having them in the first place after all.

My fursona is somewhat OP (compared to like a regular guy anyway he's not like a god or anything), so probably have a momentary sense of elation and then a panic of realizing that a bunch of people might get hurt if the wrong choices are made, myself included.

It'll take the magical powers of an archmage to solve this dispute.

That's not how field sobriety tests work, because they don't actually work at all, they're just a way to give cops a justification for their suspicions without conducting an actually functional test.

I mean, good? I guess they'd bring some user growth, but they'd just post their brand stuff that I don't imagine most people really want in their feeds, and there's the risk that they end up getting favored treatment on larger instances by donating more than a typical user can or paying the moderators there.

I've heard of some bakery somewhere doing "recycled bread", where they supposedly take the leftover bread that didn't sell that day, dry it out, grind it up, and mix it with fresh flour to make new bread, but I don't know for sure if the story is real.

I think drone warfare so far has shown that one of the advantages of drones, for a weapon, is their ability to be produced cheapy, en masse, and with a relatively limited manufacturing infrastructure. Assuming you have the computer parts anyway, which are abundant in today's society. One of the implications of that, I think, is that in future asymmetric or civil wars and the like, they're not going to be like fighter jets or tanks, where one side will have them and the other must improvise countermeasures. They're going to be like guns and explosives, where both sides are going to have access to at least some degree.

I work in a factory in the US, and the vast majority of my coworkers at least don't appear overweight. Granted, a pretty big percentage of them are immigrants, so maybe that skews the numbers compared to the general population.

I mean, a few million nationwide is high numbers to get for a protest, but not for a presidential election, with the size of the US anyway. I'd bet most of them probably voted. It's the more politically engaged segment of a population that one would expect to show up to a protest, after all.

I dont think that you can design a constitution capable of this, because at the end of the day, a constitution is just words on paper, so if you can get enough people capable of violence to follow you, you can simply directly violate the thing and declare yourself dictator, and an elected executive must by being elected have a significant group that at least somewhat approves of them, and by being an executive have some ability to ensure the law is carried out implying the capacity for violence. You can try to weaken the executive to make this more difficult I suppose, but you probably cant make it impossible without breaking the functioning of the executive completely, and you also need to avoid a case where one of the other two branches seizes control from the rest as well.

Ultimately what you need for a healthy democracy is two things: an election system that actually represents the wishes and interests of the people, which is anywhere from very difficult to not technically truly possible, and a populace that cares enough about their system to not use their electoral power to elect someone (or pass laws in the case of a direct democracy) that demolish or usurp that system. The US fails at both of those at the moment, the latter possibly in part due to a long time deficiency in the former.

The first one would be meaningless without an actual change to the election system. There are more than five parties in the US after all, technically speaking, the ones outside the other two simply arent viable because first past the post voting trends towards two dominant parties.

Wealth is not money, as the concept of inflation demonstrates. It is the stuff money represents. If you create more of that, you're creating more wealth.

I mean, has the system ever not eventually stabilized in another state? The fact that we have had extinctions, quite a lot of them even involving most species that have ever existed, and yet complex life and ecosystems still exist, would suggest that life will find a way to adapt around such a loss given time.

If I bring in more resources and lower the price, then suddenly people can have more stuff with the same amount of money. How is that not creating wealth? Do you think there exists the same amount of wealth in the world now as there was when currency was invented? That seems obviously untrue, since even if you had literally all the money in the world back then, you wouldn't have been able to buy as much with it as you could if you had all the money in the world now.

For that matter, if it were literally impossible to create wealth, people should have had a lot more in the past, due to that wealth being distributed among fewer people. If you go further, you would have to question how wealth exists at all: the concept didn't exist before people, so if people cannot create wealth, where did it all come from?

I've answered responses along those lines a couple times at this point. My position is that pain is a bit like mind control; you probably could get me to change my mind that way, but the reason for doing so wouldn't be anything to do with the reasons why I think this stuff unethical and everything to do with the way sufficient pain overrides one's normal thinking and forces you to pay attention to it.

"Someone/something could torture you into changing your mind" doesn't say anything about how right or wrong the original position is, you could probably torture someone into believing the earth is flat if you kept at it long enough and the victim wasn't unusually strong willed, but that doesn't make it so.

How many species of birds and bats eat just mosquitoes though, or a high enough percentage that they would go extinct rather than shift to rely more on their other prey species, even if at a smaller population? And are those particular species of birds and bats worth the consequences of having mosquitoes?

Well no, it is possible to create wealth, because money is a proxy for resources, and it is possible to bring more resources into the system or to convert less valuable things into more valuable ones. There is still a finite amount of wealth, because there is only a finite amount of stuff in the system at any one time, but it isn't a zero sum either, because the actions of those in the system can change the total amount of stuff to go around within it.