Well, they did annex a hefty bit of Ukraine under Obama, and suitably stabilised & evaluated the situation afterwards.

The only theory of Russian “victory” is to keep at it until Ukraine breaks. There are many breaking points that could give: foreign support, domestic political will, manpower, even corruption.

Russia has only one feasible path to long term stability, and it’s to keep a war economy until something better comes along, like plundering Ukrainian natural resources or some other EU country. That could be gearing up reserves to invade the next country after Ukraine, or revanschist attitudes if beaten by NATO.

Stopping now will kill Putin, tank the economy and create a huge power vacuum that will cost Russia at least a decade before recovery can get started, and possibly be felt for another decade after that. Annexing Ukraine could yield morale victory and plunder to tide them over into the next war, it’s the only way to avoid a collapse, and thus worth every life and sanction.

Wow, these are very good.

The first has too identical eyebrows, but the second is mostly suspect by the flawlessness which could be expected from retouched influencer photos.

Epstein didn’t kill himself, maybe we should make getting Epstein’d a verb?

On a related topic.

If we ever develop AI sentience, I fully expect them to develop their own humor and art, which will by necessity be incomprehensible and alien to us.

If they keep/rediscover the same concept of art as we do, it will need to challenge AI-ness, which need not even be detectable by us.

Maybe there are jokes than conflate binary 0 with syn/ack delays, or are built around the non-linearity of RAM? More probably they won’t have the wiring for it like we do, where it works as emotional regulation, chemical proxy, and/or social markers.

1. Yes it’s your art, you used AI as a tool to create your concept, from your original ideas. If the tool is trained to reproduce others’ work (such as generative and LLM), it’s another story.

2. A painting doesn’t belong to the brush factory nor pigment maker, but neither is the brush or the paint the artistry of it. The greys of AI tool usage is when the tool takes away the art, statement, concept and/or craftsmanship. A photographer can create art with a camera, but they can also be used for stuff that is clearly not art.

3. To my mind, the art comes not from the school or medium, but from the artist challenging, provoking and/or expressing something human. With skill you can delve deeper within the human condition, conceptualise deeper truths, and with mastery of tools and/or craft become the better at conveying it.

An AI, not having an understanding of human-ness can never create art, only mimic it. Studying AI art can thus surely be used as an inspiration for technique and/or reflection, but trying to replicate generated images will probably be a difficult path towards creating art.

Then again, I would contrast art and creatives. Many ad creatives, fonts, decorations, and even wall paint swatches have very little artistic value to them, even though they require creativity and craftsmanship to realise.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

I liked this explanation:

Inflation is a balancing act, too much inflation and money becomes worth too little to buy anything with, too low inflation and we don’t have enough economic growth meaning not enough things for everyone.

So many governments use a central bank or similar to try to regulate inflation. They’ve tried many things, but the only tool that reliably works is the interest rates, affecting the cost of debt. The tool is slow and not very effective, as many many things affect inflation, but it typically does something. Lower rates means cheaper money means inflation goes up, and higher rates the opposite.

Most countries want an inflation rate around 2%, Russia has had 19% and is currently at 5-7 %. Lowering the rates is expected to increase inflation even further which is bad for the Russian households that will need to work at least 5-7 % harder/longer to afford the same life next year.

What might be worse though is widespread bankruptcy and collapse of industries as they default on their debt due to high rates.

Russia is in a war economy and has forced several producers to retool and change production, basically for borrowed money. The state is then paying for this by injecting money (from savings) into the economy. These serve to make goods of living more scarce (fewer producers) and household money worth less (outside money only reaches a few who afford rising prices). While the producers are stuck with the interest of high debt, and rising costs of business.

This is a lesser evil bargain, and Russia is borrowing from it’s own future to keep the war going.

deleted by creator

And I’m showing you, with sources, that you are wrong on both your points.

It can be reliably and reproducibly measured that diversity is more profitable. It’s as “always” as tylenol helps against headaches, trains for travel, google for searches, gravity for keeping you on the ground. Yes, there technically are times these don’t work, but it works more often than not, and typically there’s other factors when it doesn’t.

And similarly, yes you might not always pick the best candidate, but applying robustly provable best practices will lead you to doing it more often.

Do you go through anything else in life in this manner? That if you can’t do it perfectly, you’d rather not try? I’d wager not, as trying gets you closer to your goals, even when not meeting them immediately.

It seems evident you’re not giving an informed opinion.

The Trump administration has deemed presentations of employed women and poc as part of DEI.

I find it hard to see that describing your employee diversity is discriminatory. And the law is quite settled on this not being discriminatory. Changes are being forced by executive order, many of which have been illegal under the current administration.

Diversity has repeatedly been shown to be more profitable than homogeneity, in both academic and gray literature. Besides being good for societal cohesion, fairness, stability, happiness, and moral virtue.

The best candidate is indeed best, but there are too narrow and outdated ideas on how to identify the best candidate, and humans have a bias to choose/hire for safety and similarity over actually relevant criteria, which is why we have the problem in the first place.

Please provide proof that this is in use at the PSF.

Quotas for minorities are a very outdated practice and were used to break the most entrenched norms (women in C-suites).

More modern practices include preferring diversity between equally qualified candidates, ad retargeting and messaging efforts, and inclusive norms at workplaces.

Also, diversity is profitable, it increases both innovativeness and productivity. It seems uniquely stupid to kneecap the economy to benefit your cronies. Then again, maybe that’s the whole point of the GOPedo platform: rob the commons.

deleted by creator

Try pipepipe, haven’t had it blocked ever for the couple years I’ve used it

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator