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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • “just change the system” is easier said than done, which I suspect you realize of course, since if it were so easy, you’d have changed it yourself already. The difficulty in such change is that it requires a very large number of people to act in unison, which is quite rare, especially when most people aren’t literally starving, and have different ideas over what they want the system to be, some of which might be better, but some of which might be as bad or worse. It’s a bit like how libertarian types sometimes remark that, if everyone stopped paying taxes, the government would run out of money and be unable to enforce them anymore: technically true, but requires humans to act with uncharacteristic unity towards a singular goal, against pushback from established power. Not to say that it never happens, but it does not seem to happen reliably or in a way that can be readily forced to occur.



  • tbf, arent those border policies somewhat popular among some latino voters? Im not defending those policies as they dont align with my own views on the topic, but theres plenty of room for people that managed to get through the immigration system legally to look down of people who havent, or for people born in the country to dislike migration even if their ancestors did it, or for people that want to “pull up the ladder behind them” so to speak. Biden couldnt exactly expect Trump’s border policies to automatically win him that demographic either way.







  • Trying to educate people to avoid all porn sounds even less likely to be successful than trying to ban things on the internet, because you cant simply teach people to not get horny in response to certain visual stimuli, and trying to make people averse to depictions of anything sexual will just lead to a repressed society that still consumes porn but is even more embarrassed to talk about it, which causes more harm than good and still doesnt solve the problem at hand. Its also a misunderstanding of the issue anyway, because the problem isnt porn as a general concept, or even the use of AI to create it, but the creation of some that depicts real people against the wishes of those people, and secondarily the possibility that it could be used to make other people believe the event actually happened due to the ability to create photorealistic images and video.

    Would banning it make it go away? No, of course not, but it would make it a bit riskier to make and spread, and that would reduce the number that do it. We already have certain kinds of porn banned due to requiring abuse to create, like CSAM, and while that certainly hasnt made it disappear, its not something one encounters regularly either. An argument of “we shouldnt ban this because bans dont work on the internet” would apply equally to our ban on that material too after all.



  • The thing with China imo is that part of the reason they’ve been so attractive for manufacturing has been that it’s cheaper there, and the reason that it’s cheaper there has been lower wages and lower safety standards. That’s bad for pretty much everyone except for companies making stuff in China, and consumers getting stuff cheaper than is probably viable with more ethical labor practices (and even then it’s not really much of a benefit to them, because those people need jobs too and so the negative impact there offsets that). It is sadly ironic that a country who’s stated ideology originally claimed to be in the interests of labor (not that it actually was, but they talked that way), has made it’s competitive advantage in the global economy pretty much be being a way around labor protections and unions.

    Something I could see being potentially useful, then, would be a tariff policy that was roughly “if you make stuff using labor that’s significantly lower paid than our wages, or with worse safety standards, we raise the price to be around what it would be if it had been made to our labor standards, so that there is no advantage in not keeping things fair for our workforce and yours”. I’ve never really been a fan of things like tariffs, because I know that they mainly just make things more expensive and can reduce pressure to compete by domestic companies, but at the same time, the current system both makes the US dependent on goods made by exploited foreign workers as most people don’t have good enough jobs to afford much better than that which is made cheap by that exploitation, and incentives those foreign countries to keep their people trapped in those conditions and not raise standards, to avoid losing that competitive advantage to another country that does not.