I don’t think that’s the case at all. Not everything has been successful, and in many cases efforts got watered down so they could pass congress. However, Obama and Biden have pushed for some pretty serious left wing talking points. Some examples off the top of my head:

-Medical reform

-Student loan forgiveness

-Renewable energy initiatives

-Marijuana rescheduling

-Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military

-Immigration clemency with DACA

Compare that with Bill Clinton, whose strategy explicitly was to place himself midway between liberals and conservatives

I’d generally agree, but the problem is that this particular instance is much higher stakes than most elections.

Generally speaking, the worst case scenario would be someone like John McCain taking the reins instead of Obama. I didn’t agree with McCain about a lot of things but he was a generally honorable guy who wanted to do the best for American democracy.

Now we have a group who is polling to win and outright saying “America needs a dictatorship”. If they get their way, it could be the last election we ever have.

That’s when we find out the player’s wizard character, Ehariel, has a long lost brother named Aharial with a suspiciously identical set of stats and backstory

He also has been looking for his brother for years only to conveniently find the party minutes after his brother dies

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

I mean, from an engineering and mathematical perspective the gun aiming problem and bipedal droid mechanics are very similar in a lot of ways, except the bipedal droid is much more difficult.

Ultimately, though, who cares? Nothing about Star Wars makes scientific sense and Luke shooting guns from a manual turret is more fun than a computer casually blowing up the tie fighters.

Sure it is, in the real world there are entire disciplines of mathematical theory dealing with those topics.

A geas is a magically enforced taboo against something. Following the requirements brings power but violation comes with grave punishment, often resulting in a character’s death or undoing.

If you think we are materially worse off now than we were before the introduction of automation you are either pushing hardcore propaganda or absolutely delusional.

Real median middle class income has stayed effectively constant since the 1980s. However, with automation the variety of goods available at that income level have dramatically improved. This is the benefit that the consumer sees and pretending it’s not a real benefit is disingenuous at best.

Maybe if you shill for billionaires a bit harder they’ll give you one of their yachts.

You really think so? That would be amazing

You said “now we have billionaires” like it’s a new phenomena. The graph I posted tracks the total wealth share of the top 1% wealthiest people, which is a much better picture of income inequality than the “average CEO”. Notice that the total wealth share went from 30% to 35% since its low in 1970, which is a much smaller change than the 200+x difference that people like to quote.

While inequality is growing, it’s not nearly as dramatic as people make it out to be and in 2023 we are far closer to that 1970s low than we were a century ago

In a world where we’ve so much automation and wealth in the world that we could care for everyone why do people still have to work 40+ hours a week just to get by?

I don’t disagree with you. Most people in white collar jobs realistically don’t get more than 5 hours a day of real productive work done to begin with. Why do we need to be at the office for 8 hours?

I just think it’s important to look at the data in an objective way. Instead of posting inflammatory comments on Lemmy that exaggerate the situation, you could try lobbying your representatives for better worker protections.

Funny you should say “we” and “American History” though :) Maybe the American model is the problem here.

Well, I’m American lol. But the trends are similar in almost every developed country so I don’t think this is an American problem.

In many ways, we have been. The average person has casual access to goods and services that would have been immensely inaccessible without industrialization. Consider the average car for example. The engine alone has hundreds of tightly toleranced parts working in a mechanical dance to harness thousands of controlled explosions per second. That doesn’t even touch on the complex support systems required for engine management or chassis/suspension. I can buy a well running used car for less than the cost of a month’s rent.

Compare that to the pre-industrial era, when a simple shirt would have taken a single person 500-600 hours in manual labor to make starting from raw wool. That’s more than three months’ work with a 40 hour work week.

It’s truly amazing that any minimum wage worker in the USA can buy multiple used cars, a monumentally complex piece of machinery by any historical standard, for less labor than it would take to get a new shirt a few hundred years ago.

That said, I do believe we have the capacity to get these benefits PLUS reduced work hours. We will see that when we demand better worker protections from lawmakers and stop equating a human’s value to society with the number of hours they work each week.

We have had ultra-rich people and major wealth inequality for most of American history. Rockefeller (1838-1937) amassed a fortune in the 1800s in excess of $400B inflation adjusted dollars. By most measures, he was the richest American of all time.

The second richest American of all time is up for debate but contenders include Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), Henry Ford (1863-1947), or Bill Gates (1955-present).

Wealth inequality has obviously grown over the past 50 years but it’s worth noting that wealth inequality in general is not a uniquely modern problem. It is also exaggerated by comparing to the 1970s, where wealth inequality was at a historical low point (see graph below)

You don’t think they carried insurance that covered Acts of Jedi?

Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.

It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.

The onion did a bit about ten years ago on the Palestine-Israel conflict, reporting:

“Israeli and Palestine leaders have shown they see eye to eye in nearly every facet of the proposed solution, including such provisions as: seizing all territory, watching the opposition burn in righteous fire, and building a unified nation on the corpses of their enemy. Yet, they still haven’t come any closer to putting a stop to the conflict”

Kind of sums it up.

If you are considering two modes of transportation for a airplane-suitable trip, the per-trip stat is effectively irrelevant. If we consider a 1,000 mile trip and want to choose the safest manner of travel to the destination aircraft will statistically be the safest transportation method.

You don’t think that was implied when I said they vastly outperform human pilots?

There are numerous advantages to letting a flight computer do the piloting. Higher allowable G limits is one of them, albeit far from the most important.

You’re right on all counts here.

Computer algorithms (such as AI) can’t replace organic judgement-based decision making, but they vastly outperform humans when there is a well defined cost function to optimize against, such as, “hit this target in the minimum possible time”.

I think you can compare it to autonomous cars. They can drive from point to point while avoiding hazards along the way, but they still need the passenger to tell them where their destination is.

Technically correct but there is a reason why people talk about a body’s sphere of influence.

Because the biggest practical downside of Linux is a lack of natively developed big name software. It’s annoying to find some great software that perfectly meets your needs and then discover than it can’t run with decent performance on Linux.

Market share growing means that Linux becomes a better and more accessible option.

R