People at my job are SHOCKED that I take the bus to work even after we had a ten minute discussion one night about increasing road rage incidents. I just wanna get on the commute box and zone out until I get there, LOL.
Honestly just paying people $25/h to literally just do this would actually do some great things for the mental health crisis. The most you would need to do is maybe throw in an 8hr "mental health first aid" class and give them a line to refer out to if the person expresses anything more severe than a passive death wish. I would totally support my tax dollars paying for this on a WIDE scale.
Edit/btw: the official term is a "warm line" as opposed to a "suicide hotline" for people who aren't in crisis but just need to talk to another human for a bit, possibly to even help avoid a crisis developing in the first place.
I have never heard the term "don't name your gods" but it's my new favorite phrase of possibly the whole fucking year. Thank you.
I'm one of those that sees a purpose for AI in doing some of the grunt work of information processing and some creative tasks (like an old school painters apprentice, put some grass over in that corner while I work on this face, upscaling images without blurring, or making sure all the formatting and pronouns / perspectives match in a written work), or in increasing accessibility by describing images for the blind or audio for the deaf, but what in tf does it need to be in a browser for? It definitely has some uses but they'll really slap that label on anything these days!
Yeah like. They're already covering up enough stuff that is both stupid AND awful all at once you don't need to make up extra shit.
I remember reading somewhere that while a western audience would perceive this as utterly farcical, a Chinese citizen is at least more likely to perceive it as the government taking their safety and security seriously enough to be thorough about it. While I'm sure there was some person somewhere in the chain of command who thought this was a good and important idea and that they needed to check the pigeon butts for explosives, there's no way all of the people involved in doing those searches thought it was likely to uncover an actual weapon, but the cultural context makes it important to err in that direction. Meanwhile in the US, the government is more successful in hiding abuses by "protecting freedoms." Powerful people all around the world have basically the same playbook, but a big part of that strategy is knowing their audience.
You can also utilize the somewhat covert bribery and diversion systems to this end. As long as everybody thinks everybody ELSE is following the guidelines, and that they're the only ones really getting away with things / reporting that they're following guidelines when they're not, you can get the same result and all you have to do is not look too closely, which is probably what you're doing with most other things already. In the US you don't even need to bother doing that because aside from not culturally having enough shame to do so, actively hiding our idiocy in any way would be considered a restriction on freedoms. Around these parts its your god given right to be a dumbass and the gubmit can pry that from your cold dead hands.
We're stupid, but at least we're honest about it. They're stupid, but at least they have the decency to not act like it out in broad daylight. Neither is better and both can easily be a tool of the bourgeoisie.
Well you can't not do that, especially not if you're already known for doing that kind of thing anyway for other things.
I once heard of a pediatrician who successfully convinced a concerned mother that anti-vax ideology was likely a psyop by the Russians to weaken the health of the American populace starting with our children. Doesn't hurt that it's probably true.
EDIT: My personal conspiracy theory is that the Chinese government did engineer (or at least selectively cultivate) COVID, but not to kill Americans. In the early days of the pandemic there was some speculation that it affected some blood types more than others, particularly type A. While no link to blood type specifically was found, type A is a more common genetic trait as you move out of Asia and towards the middle east. China has been heavily persecuting the Uyghurs (Chinese Muslims), and those who have managed to get out of the camps have reported medical experimentation and being injected with unknown substances. In addition, the virus would also kill a significant number of the older population, which is important because of the population crunch they're about to experience due to one-child policies resulting in a high amount of female-specific infanticide. They're about to have a bunch of old people and a massive shortage of able bodied young people to care for them. Even if they didn't directly "engineer" the virus in a gene-sequencing manner, they have a lot off motive to just generally cultivate and spread (you can't really "breed" a virus) an infectious disease targeting people of middle eastern descent and elders.
Thank you for coming to my tinfoil-hat Ted Talk.
@Apytele
@sh.itjust.works