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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Voting is about choosing good candidates well before it gets pared down to 2 options. It’s about choosing a good local government, choosing good representatives, choosing good senators. If the only thing you care about is the President, then you’ll never have a good pool of options from which the parties will pick a presidential candidate. They’re not on our side - it’s our job to force their hand with a deck stacked with good candidates. But only the people who pay attention to politics well before election year get to have a say in stuff like that.


  • Okay, and how do you plan to get them into the hearts and minds of around 50% of the population in the next 2 months, when the vast majority haven’t even heard of her? It’s not enough to have someone who could be a good president, you also need to get people to vote for them. If you want most of the population to vote for someone, they need to be aware of them as a viable option years beforehand.

    I agree that the 2 choices are pawns of the rich, but even if every person who knew about Claudia voted for her, she wouldn’t even get enough votes for her to make the news, much less win. We’re talking about tens of millions of people voting in unison for an election win to happen in this country. At this stage in the game, there are only 2 candidates with that kind of draw power. If you want to focus on the 2028 election (assuming there is one, since there clearly won’t be if Trump wins) to get a 3rd viable candidate on that ballot, that’s a noble plan, but by now this election’s potential winners are already down to 2.

    Voting isn’t about closing your eyes and saying “I want someone good to win!” It’s about assessing which people might actually win, and voting for the one that best aligns with your views, however loosely. It’s about strategy. If you want to change that, you need to build national presence in the name of your preferred candidate, and you need to start years ahead of the elections. Big changes don’t happen at the ballot, they happen during the campaigning stage and beforehand. If your candidate isn’t on the news every day leading up to the election, most voters won’t even know they’re an option.



  • People are scared that if you acknowledge the fact that Biden is concerning as a presidential candidate in any way, people will be less likely to vote for him; the sad state of the matter is that Biden is the only candidate who has a chance to beat Trump at this late of a stage in the game. The reasoning that we need to avoid criticizing him as a result of that is bullshit though, since if you’re closing your eyes and voting for your default color, then such discussion won’t affect to your vote, and if you’re actually paying attention to the state of our upcoming election, then you’ll already be well aware that being against Trump forces you to vote Biden, so your vote is locked in, regardless of how depressing it is. Nobody’s still hemming and hawing at this point, and even if some are, some random meme on Lemmy isn’t going to be the thing that finally gets them to make up their mind.

    There’s no reason we can’t acknowledge the fact that, while being better than Donald Trump should win Biden the presidential election, it’s not an accomplishment, and in a vacuum he’s a terrible candidate. In fact, we specifically need to point out that we knew this scenario was coming for the past 4 years, and have organized no major uprisings, or even major educational movements to try to get people to force out a different Democratic candidate in the primaries; we’ve sat on our asses ever since the last election, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do the same going into the next election unless we start forcing a change in the DNC right now.

    These “both sides” discussions aren’t about whether or not to choose to vote for Biden, they’re about getting people to notice the fact that we vote for the “lesser evil” every 4 years, saying that the time to make a change is after we’re solidified our candidate’s victory, but then once we’ve done that we do nothing until we’re in the same “lesser evil” situation again 4 years later. If we want to ever have a situation where we’re voting for a president we’d actually like, we need to start planning out how to force that to happen now, because even 4 whole years isn’t a very long time frame to for us to push such a large change.

    I can understand some people are scared that Trump is going to win because too many people chose to vote 3rd party, or choose not to vote, but everyone who’s paying attention enough to be swayed by political discussion is already aware that we specifically need to vote for Biden in order for Trump to lose, so at this point the fanatical drive to quash any criticism of him as a presidential candidate seems nearly tailor-made to sow even more apathy among the voting population, making them feel not only forced into voting for Biden, but forced into liking it as well. In the end I think the efforts to prevent discussion about how neither candidate is an objectively good candidate is going to ultimately cause fewer people to vote at all, since they’ll feel as though they can’t even air out their grievances with the candidate they’d already begrudgingly chosen to vote for.



  • Ah, I see. It’s true that these issues cast a negative light on AI, but I doubt most people will even hear about most of them, or even really understand them if they do. Even when talking about brand security, there’s little incentive for these companies to actually address the issues - the AI train is already full-steam ahead.

    I work with construction plans in my job, and just a few weeks ago I had to talk the CEO of the company I work for out of spending thousands on a program that “adds AI to blueprints.” It literally just added a chatgpt interface to a pdf viewer. The chat wasn’t even able to actually interact with the PDF in any way. He was enthralled by the “demo” that a rep had shown him at an expo, that I’m sure was set up to make it look way more useful than it really was. After that whole fiasco, I lost faith that the people in charge of whether or not AI programs are adopted will actually do their due diligence to ensure they’re actually helpful.

    Having a good brand image only matters if people are willing to look.


  • I highly doubt that OpenAI or any other AI developer would see any real repercussions, even if they had a security hole that someone managed to exploit to cause harm. Companies exist to make money, and OpenAI is no exception; if it’s more profitable to release a dangerous product than a safe one, and they won’t get in trouble for it, they’ll likely have no issues with releasing their product with security holes.

    Unfortunately, the question can’t be “should we be charging them for this?” Nobody is going to force them to pay, and they have no reason to do it on their own. Barring an entire cultural revolution, the question instead must be “should we do it anyway to prevent this from being used in harmful ways?” And the answer is yes. Our society is designed to maximize profits, usually for people who already have money, so if you’re working within the confines of that society, you need to factor that into your reasoning.

    Companies have long since decided that ethics is nothing more than a burden getting in the way of their profits, and you’ll have a hard time going against the will of the companies in a capitalist country.


  • Signtist@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlThe "Left"
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    10 months ago

    To be fair, as a democrat, I generally view conservative voters as easily-misled people - essentially “dumb,” I view conservative leaders as thugs trying to overthrow America, and I view conservative corporate heads as ruling class elites. When you’re using such an overarching term as “Conservative” or “Left” it comes with the unsaid caveat that there are many subgroups that can differ greatly from one another.