Increasing domestic consumption is only possible if people have more money to spend on consuming stuff. For a long time China relied on having low wages and manufacturing stuff for more prosperous countries. It's now changing, China developing a lot of home grown business where they're catching up and in many cases overtaking the West, but perhaps Chinese leadership thinks they're still not there yet. Also, in order to achieve higher prosperity needed to increase domestic consumption you pretty much have to live in the city, and some Chinese cities are already horribly overcrowded without even more people moving there from rural areas. There's also the demographic situation. Chinese birth rate is apparently around 1.0 now, lower than even Japan. It's hard to rely on increasing consumption from domestic population when that population may well start shrinking soon. Those are just my guesses, actual reasoning from the leadership may rely on completely different considerations.

Given that in some rural parts of the country people believe stuff like this, it's not surprising awareness of importance of sanitation is so low.

The knife at least might be a different model rather than just a texture, of course still possible to mod that in. I still struggle to wrap my head around what kind of absolute moron would pay the price of a pretty decent new car for a virtual knife in a free-to-play videgame.

If, starting from tomorrow, every single oil-producing country completely stopped selling any oil, civilization would collapse within, maybe, a few years. As it stands, trucks, shipping vessels, airplanes, concrete producing factories and many other essential things all run on hydrocarbons. For many developing nations almost all their power stations need oil or gas or coal. In order to combat climate change we need to come up with ways all these things can still function without needing oil anymore. Like, for example, moving most of your cars to EVs.

Climate change doesn't threaten 'the environment' or 'mother Earth' or whatever. CO2 level have been far higher in Earth's history. Biomes change drastically, a whole bunch of species goes extinct, other species evolve to take their place but life always adapts in the end. What we really want to avoid is homo sapiens being one of the species that goes extinct, and keeping our advanced civilization would also be nice. To that end we need to adapt our technology to need drastically less hydrocarbons and legislate some measures, perhaps even social restrictions, if it comes to that, to help achieve that goal. Not just 'hydrocarbons = evil, stop using them right nao!'. We need to be smart about this. So I would possibly question Norwegian government's decision to drop subsidies for EVs, it might be a bit premature, but nothing else.

If you're looking for someone to be angry about, you could start with any governments that impose significant tariffs on cheap Chinese EVs. Allowing more of those to be imported could go a very long way towards reducing petroleum usage. But those governments worry, certainly rightly, that this will lead to their domestic auto industries becoming completely uncompetitive, so I understand this position to some extent. Real world is complex.

Norway isn't one of the top oil producing countries in the world and they're way behind the top producers in volume. They're known as an oil nation because of a small population relative to the amount of hydrocarbons they produce. More to the point, they never put a gun to anyone's head to force them to buy their oil (or perhaps, never sent a team of Viking berserkers to intimidate people into buying their oil). If people weren't buying their oil, they'd be buying from Saudis instead.

Oil is used for a lot more than just gasoline, it's also used in producing various plastics for example. The goal in reducing the impact of climate change isn't to eliminate the use of oil, that isn't possible for the foreseeable future, it is to stop burning so much of it that it's raising temperatures at an unprecedented rate. In a fully carbon-neutral world (which is looking very hypothetical now) oil will still be used, just a lot less of it than now.

China isn't automating everything - we don't have the technology for that. AI was sold as such but we know how that is turning out. They're automating manufacturing which has already been highly automated in technologically advanced countries which China certainly is now. Unemployment in China is apparently just over 5%, which is slightly on the high side but nothing drastic. Youth unemployment is quite high but that's happening in a lot of places now.

Besides, China is very big on impressing foreigners and showing Chinese stuff in best possible light. These CEOs have probably been taken to the most cutting edge, state of the art factories - most of their auto industry is probably not quite as automated. It does look however that Chinese auto industry is pulling ahead, certainly in EVs.

Just another act of an ongoing shitshow. This is a government that is obsessed with 'optics', i.e. their popularity. They're now massively unpopular in UK, mostly, I believe, because people expected them to implement substantial policies, especially after a massive victory in the elections. They've been too afraid to do anything, however, for fear of upsetting anyone, and ironically this pissed off more or less everybody. This is just another desperate attempt to score some cheap political points - maybe with parents, or whoever is the usual target audience of the 'won't somebody think of the children' legislation. Or maybe with older voters - see, Britain is still great, we can issue fines to foreign companies! Never mind the fact that I'm pretty certain not a single one has paid anything - they've either just quit providing service in UK or just shrugged their metaphoric shoulders and carried on as before.

The sad thing (one of them anyhow) is that people are now looking to anyone who promises solutions. Like Reform, which promises to solve all the problems by kicking out some immigrants. As it stands they're projected to win the next election - those would be 'interesting' times, like in the Chinese curse.

That's not a good analogy. No-one ever pretended that computers were some kind of artificial life form. It was known from the start that all they could do was logic operations and moving bits around from one part of its memory to another. But in that, computers were absolutely reliable.

First computers didn't have keyboard or screen, the only way to interface with them was using punch cards (and punch tape later). And of course there was nothing like BASIC back then, only machine language. Your Commodore 64 was insanely user-friendly compared to that. But even the punch card computers were incredibly useful (an absolute game changer in some fields) because they could do complex calculations reliably.

'AI' on the other hand is perfectly user-friendly, but it outputs BS. Things it comes up with may or may not be true, and even if most of it is true, you have no idea which parts aren't. That just isn't very useful. And the claim that it'll get better and more accurate later - I don't see how, since AI has no idea whether what it's saying is true or not, because it has no understanding of what it's saying whatsoever, being just an algorithm that pattern matches arbitrary tokens, basically. It can quite useful in some very specific fields, but as an AGI it's a dead end, and the sooner we stop pretending it isn't the better.

That's a legitimate concern. That's the problem with arguments about AI copyright issues, they involve one social ill - AI - against another - copyright, or at least its abuse by giant litigous corporations. To start with, you'd definitely want different laws for AI and humans. Humans are capable of creativity, so you give them a benefit of a doubt, but AI, being just a piece of software, cannot be creative by definition, so for any AI-generated output involving copyrighted material, the developers of that AI always owe royalties to rights holder.

Then, as you say, you have a scenario with Sony or Disney claiming that a human's work has been created by AI and wanting copyright damages. You can bypass some of the problems if you legislate that it's not the human who is wrongly claimed to have used AI that's liable for damages but the developer of the AI. This won't stop the copyright holders suing but that way it's just money passing hands between big corporations, Sony and Disney vs OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or whoever else. Not sure if the human would be guaranteed a legal immunity in such a case and anyway there may be reputational damage from someone claiming that you used AI in your work. That's getting into some pretty complicated legal issues, my knowledge of copyright law is far too limited to speculate on how those could be resolved.

Copyright law always had to draw a distinction between 'was inspired by' and 'copied'. Inspiration means the source material gives you ideas and thoughts which will then influence the work you produce yourself. Copying means, you do no work of your own, you just take existing stuff and at most tweak it a bit. There isn't always a clear dividing line between the two and there are always grey areas but a lot of the time the distinction will be quite obvious. For example fantasy authors creating worlds with a roughly medieval technology level that have magic and elves and dwarves are inpired by Tolkien (and often not directly by him but others who have been inspired by his work). A fantasy book where a small hairy humanoid called Dilbo Daggins together with a wizard called Sandalf and other companions go on a quest to take a magic ring to Mount Boom, is copying.

Now AI has no ideas and thoughts which can be inspired by existing work. It takes a lot of existing material from various sources and just shuffles it about to create a sort of randomized mash up of all these sources. Often there doesn't even seem to be that much shuffling and randomizing - many times I've looked at the 'AI answer' on Google and the top search result and those looked awfully similar. That is pretty much copying in my book.

It's like cancer, or common cold, in a sense that we talk about possibly hundreds or thousands of different conditions as if it was one.

So, according to Microsoft AI can make it easier to buy toxins from commercial DNA vendors. Who is that supposed to appeal to? 'If you're a doomsday cult or a terrorist organisation wanting to develop bioweapons, buy our AI! It's the best at getting past security screening procedures!' *two thumbs up and a cheesy grin*.

Really though if someone would want to design entirely new proteins on basis of existing toxins, test those proteins and possibly be able to mass-produce them that implies an amount of technnological sophistication that really only a nation state would have. Would this hypothetical nefarious nation state really be ordering DNA from commercial vendors, or would they instead have their own facilities?

So Microsoft marketing seems to be resorting to cheap scare tactics in another desperate attempt to plug its AI. Apparently they'd rather people believed that AI is scary as opposed to just useless and overhyped.

Not sure about most of that.

There is a definite possibility that the occupation will be very long term (as in, for the foreseeable future). You can't wait for years or decades to hold an election.

Before the war, people in those territories were likely to vote for pro-Russian parties. Not sure how they would vote now, but like I said, not relevant.

People will gather in crowds as an inevitable part of everyday life, at train stations, for concerts and sports events, and so on - all of those can be targeted.

Postal voting? No doubt it presents serious logistical difficulties, but not insurmountable.

In recent years in more or less every elections held in Europe (and not just Europe) you had claims of foreign intereference, wasn't there a candidate banned in Romania recently (I think it was Romania) because of alleged Russian interference? So, same way as everyone else I guess.

The problem with holding off elections because on ongoing war is that it creates a perverse incentive for the incumbent government to continue the war because as long as it continues, it stays in power. There are many people who believe that Netanyahu and the current Israeli government's decision to continue the Gaza war after the ceasefire was agreed, was influenced by those considerations.

If that's the case that's probably the decisive argument agaist elections, but it would be better if all the running parties, or at least most of them, agreed to not hold elections.

Most likely scenario, there aren't going to be any actual friends involved.

Step 1. Create an account. Upload some pictures of someone you have the hots for or videos or whatever you need for this, which you've probably downloaded off their social media.

Step 2. Create a second account. Mark the second account as a 'friend' of the first one.

Step 3. From the first account, give the second account permission to generate deepfakes.

Step 4. Generate away. This company claims they don't allow explicit content, which is the obvious endgame here, but I bet it's very easy to circumvent, probably just a question of wording the prompts correctly.

This seems to be a classic example of the kind of thing that happens all the time nowadays. As far as I can tell, originally "trigger warning" was meant to be for things that could trigger a panic attack or PTSD flashback in people who have PTSD or other severe mental or emotional problems as a result of some past trauma. Like content depicting child abuse for those who were victims of it, rape, that kind of stuff. Maybe also those with extreme phobias, where some content could also trigger that kind of meltdown.

Then people started talking about 'getting triggered' simply by things that upset them a bit, maybe even things they pretend to be upset by. Other people who were totally desperate to show to everyone how sensitive and enlightened they were started including 'trigger warnings' for things like general violence. I've seen 'trigger warnings' for drug and even alcohol abuse. I wouldn't be surprised if there are now 'trigger warnings' for people being generally a bit mean or for bad weather. Honestly it now feels like trigger warnings are there mainly for the benefit of people issuing them. It's virtue signalling, I try to avoid that phrase because it's become so politicised, but there's no other way to describe it really. Anyway, now 'trigger warning' basically seems to have become a synonym for 'content warning' which is, 'there may be content here some people may find unpleasant'.