Workers should exercise their power more, imo. We need more folks willing to put tools down, collectively, over stuff like:
* RTO mandates that reduce productivity AND job satisfaction
* High CEO pay outstripping worker pay
* Loss of work autonomy and space (working without an assigned desk)
* Layoffs out of the blue for successful teams
* Weakening benefits
* AI being wedged into whatever task you are working on
I don't care if it's a union, I don't care if it's a guild, I don't care if it's just a group of folks deciding to take action together, whatever. It's time we (especially us in tech) to stop acting like "got mine" and start acting like "get ours".
This is a symptom of alienation, imo, not a unique problem from AI.
There's a theory that we're becoming increasingly removed from our work -- we have less control over what we get to build, we have less control over how the products we build function.
Because we don't influence what we create as much, work becomes much more about getting a pay check. We no longer work to craft, we work simply to build the things the bosses want.
Now that work is just a paycheck, we're increasingly unsettled, and increasingly in competition with one another. Material conditions are such that the bosses get most of the profits, and we get squeezed more and more. Competition gets more desperate, and we begin to see others as threatening our remaining resources, more than a community.
Now that we're increasingly isolated from one another, we end up isolating ourselves. We find ourselves less creative, less fulfilled, more alone, and looking for any semblance of community.
It's not surprising someone in this state turns to anything, even an AI, that wants to engage with the person.
Japan, however, has other cultural hangups about things like mental health and vulnerability and difference.
I think it's probably a multiple things we need situation -- a robust welfare system and social safety net AND a cultural acceptance of failing and needing that help.
> I also still get to feel smug because the environmental cost of producing a new electric car is WAY greater than the petrol I’m burning.
Citation very much needed.
Electric cars are still cars, and therefore terrible for the environment, but they do emit significantly less pollution over their lives and require a lot less oil to operate.
> a pattern of behavior characterized by a disregard for others' rights and feelings, a lack of remorse, and manipulative or deceitful tendencies.
You are talking about killing a tree in a deceitful manner designed to subvert local norms, regulations, and the concerns of your neighbors. You aren't the only person your actions affect (and you know this, because you opened your post by saying you should lie about killing the tree.)
> First, it just reads that way. It's the default style if you ask ChatGPT to write a couple of paragraphs that explain why lightfastness is important.
It doesn't read that way to me, and I've read lots of ChatGPT text. We've come to opposite conclusions, I'm curious what qualities you are identifying/keying off of?
As someone who is heavily tattooed, I'd LOVE to see this analysis for tattoo inks.
Fun fact: UV light makes tattoo particles smaller, which makes them easier for your lymphatic system to carry them to your lymph nodes. The particles are easy to transport into the lymph nodes, but difficult for your body to remove from your lymph nodes, meaning that for heavily tattooed people like myself, surgeries can be a potentially very colorful endeavor! (Or, if you have primarily black tattoos, it can be a spooky endeavor, I suppose.)
3 images explaining the importance of lightfastness
1 image explaining the measurement process
1 image linking to another article diving much deeper into the methodology
1 image linking to another article on a different color pencil concern (layering)
1 image representing each brand-line's lightfastness
Every single one of those images seemed relevant to the concept presented and clarified something that would have been difficult to articulate succinctly in writing. For example, the "how was this measured" is a lot easier to understand once you've seen the grid of squares before and after than it would be to try and articulate the fading of colors in small squares in text.
There's LOTS of individual images on specific brands, but given their wild degree of variance, I think it's really useful to perceptually see what's going on with each one.
I'm curious, where do you feel the images were "spammy"? It's a conclusion I heartily disagree with, but would love to understand.
FWIW, I do object to the industrial raising of animals for food as well.
Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.
Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.
I disagree. We can also continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally. We can decide that collective and community health and wellbeing are more important than individual success. It's a more difficult road, but the capitalist mode of "just tweak the financial curves" is not the only way we can approach this problem. Just the most well supported today.
FWIW, I am not opposed to GMOs broadly. But I am opposed to GMOs for the purpose of enabling more industrialization in agriculture. I don't see, e.g., red grapefruits as bad, even though they used an early form of genetic engineering (seeds were exposed to radiation in hopes of creating random mutations.)
This is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's practiced in the US, is basically mining.
It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.
If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.
Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.