A two percent wealth tax is actually a better idea than a lot of people here seem to think.
If you have $100B, you'd have to pay $2B every year that you hold that much wealth, and you'll have to pay it in cash.
This would produce a lot of annual recurring tax revenue, and it would incentivize billionaires to hoard less paper capital if they don't want to constantly be forking over billions in taxes.
The tax is beneficial, and so is the way around the tax.
Popular rapper Toomaj Salehi wrote songs in support of the protest movement in Iran following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022. He has been in jail for over a year....
That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about people who single rap out or make it the butt of a tasteless joke.
If someone feels the need to joke that everyone who likes or makes rap should be executed, you really just need to take a look at the demographics that listen to or create rap music, and you get a distinct picture of what they don't like about the rap community (spoiler: it isn't the music).
And if you ask someone what they like to listen to, and they don't give a real answer and single out rap as the only genre they dislike, they're not actually telling you what they like or don't like, they're just taking a jab at part of Black culture for the sake of signalling their disapproval.
If you don't like rap music aesthetically, it's pretty easy to convey that without sounding like a racist by dismissing the entire genre as if the world would be a better place without it, because people notice when someone focuses their vitriol specifically at PoC cultural strongholds.
I personally don't listen to much rap, and don't consider it my style, but I'm sure has hell not going to insult it or the people who enjoy it, because I respect people's aesthetic and cultural differences and don't reflexive hate Blackness.
If you are for the death penalty when your emotions are high, you are for the death penalty period. People who are against the death penalty don't go on the record in support of the death penalty, because it's a principle, not something that you only stand for when it is convenient for you.
If the death of an animal is enough to make you flip, you're probably going to side with most death sentences since they relate to the murder of human beings.
Someone could murder members of my family, and I would still be against the death penalty, because that's who I am. You're not going to hear me calling for anyone's death, regardless of my emotional state, because I know that doesn't solve anything, and it is bad for our society as a whole.
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I'm going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
The emergency library followed the same legal framework that ebook lending follows at local libraries.
A library owns x many copies of a book, and they remove some percentage of them from circulation so that they can leverage them to lend digital copies (usually via Libby).
All IA did was coordinate with libraries that were closed due to COVID to allocate a portion of their uncirculated books for IA's lending system. It was never uncapped, and even used DRM to protect against piracy like Libby does.
Every book that was lended had a physical copy deliberately uncirculated for the purpose of allowing redistribution. It was entirely legitimate, and I commend them for doing it.
Publishers are already trying to fight against libraries that they feel threaten their profitability. This attack against IA is just a test case for going after local libraries, and Libby next. I want IA to fight this and win, because we're fucked on multiple levels of they lose.
Don't blame IA for fulfilling their mission to make knowledge free. Blame capitalists for attacking libraries in an attempt to make knowledge less free.
I think you might be confused, albeit by a poorly written Wikipedia article.
First of all, it isn't clear what it is meant by "removing the waitlists and expanding access to all readers". It doesn't seem to mean uncapping loans without backing them with physical books. In fact, the part of the wiki you quoted is the first of two mentions of the word "waitlist", a word that doesn't appear in either of the sources cited for those sections.
IA’s attorney argued that the publishers had not offered empirical evidence of market harm in this case, focusing on the fact that when a library lends out a CDL scan, it does so in lieu of a physical book, “simulating the limitations of physical books.” This is due to CDL’s “owned to loaned” ratio requirement: a library can only loan out the number of CDL scans as it has physical books in its collection, and can only loan these scans out to one patron at a time.
And this:
Plaintiffs discussed what they see as massive financial harm stemming from IA’s CDL program, which they estimated to amount to “millions of dollars in licensing revenues.” Plaintiffs also emphasized that, were CDL “given the green light,” or upheld as a fair use, the plaintiffs would suffer even greater losses.
And this:
CDL is a longstanding and established practice, which has seen adoption and growth in libraries across the country while the ebook licensing market has continued to thrive.
So it seems easy for me to conclude, having checked Wikipedia's sources, that the plaintiffs are challenging the Open Library CDL system itself, as a threat to their profits, even though IA was playing by the same rules as every other library system, and that IA losing this fight will be a major blow to libraries across the country:
The judge also questioned whether CDL actually could represent such a loss: the publishers’ argument rests on the premise that libraries loan out CDL scans in lieu of paying to license ebooks, and were CDL not permitted under the law, IA and other libraries would instead choose to pay licensing fees to lend out ebooks. The judge pointed out that the result might in fact be that libraries would choose not to lend digital copies of works out at all, or would instead lend out physical books, undercutting the lost licensing revenue argument.
Tl;Dr: Everything I said was correct, and the publishers want to establish precedent that definites physical books and ebooks and separately licensed so that libraries lend out fewer books, and/or have to pay more to loan out the same number of books that they currently do. They just chose IA as the first target hoping that smaller libraries will be forced into compliance should they win.
Also, someone who knows how to effectively edit Wikipedia articles needs to overhaul that page, because it seems intentionally written to make IA look like they did something much worse than they actually did.
Yeah, I'm done with this article. If you want to make me feel less doomed, start blaming the corporations responsible and demanding actual action from the top down.
If you're opening with some "individual responsibility" bullshit, you're contributing to the apathy problem, because fuck you I can't fix this.
We could just make speech that directly glorifies or encourages violence illegal. Basically just an extension of laws against violent threats or speech that does direct harm.
It would be much harder to abuse such a restriction on speech, and it would cover all violent or genocidal movements without singling out a specific ideology.
One of the best ways around the first amendment is to throw away any notion of offensiveness or obscenity, and focus on victims. You can't fraudulently shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre because the people who get injured in the panic will be victims. You can't possess child porn because minors have no right to grant sexual consent and the existence of such media further victimizes them. You can't distribute private porn made with your partner without their permission for similar reasons: because your partner didn't consent to it, and would be victimized by its distribution. You cannot threaten to assault or kill someone, or call for others to assault or kill someone, because it amounts to conspiracy to commit a violent crime.
None of these restrictions on speech focus on the speech being offensive, they focus on the speech having direct harmful consequences to others. It draws the line of where your rights end at where others' rights begin.
I don't see why we can't extend this to cover inherently violent ideologies like Nazism, where glorification of it, by definition, is a call for violence against specific members of our society. If you celebrate the Holocaust and demand similar action today, the victims are the people who you are asking the state to murder. There's no reason to tolerate that as free speech, because the people being targeted have the right not to be murdered. If it's illegal to call for the murder of 1 person, why not make it illegal to call for the murder of millions of people?
Internet Watch Foundation has found a manual on dark web encouraging criminals to use software tools that remove clothing. The manipulated image could then be used against the child to blackmail them into sending more graphic content, the IWF said.
I mean, it would be nice if demand for sex was just pushing us towards AI VR waifus or something. Let the neckbeards put on a haptic suit and bang all the Evangelian characters or something. Kinda fucked that we're going straight to fully-automated sexual exploitation of kids...
I wish we lived in a cool cyberpunk dystopia instead of the horror show that is present day reality.
I want to be happy that the IWF exists and is collecting data about this kind of thing. This is extremely difficult and important work.
But they are also lobbying to ban encryption, arguing that privacy only helps criminals.
Sorry, but if Facebook is too dangerous for kids, instead of banning encryption so the authorities can more easily catch child abusers, let's just ban children from using Facebook before they fall victim to abuse.
A new bill, the first of its kind in the U.S., would ban security screening company Clear from operating at California airports as lawmakers take aim at companies that let consumers pay to pass through security ahead of other travelers. ...
"Sky Priority" is just a Delta thing, on par with any Airline loyalty program perk. You're not getting airlines to give up their perks so easily, and I don't think there's a compelling reason to target those programs.
Pre-Check requires a background check and fingerprinting, and actually serves to make TSA's job easier by routing some percentage of eligible travelers through a checkpoint with more relaxed security processes.
Clear is a bit different in that it is a private for-profit program that primarily grants users a fast-track through a mandatory government process. That's a bit unethical. Though I do enjoy it for skipping the line at sporting events...
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...
This is such a dumb argument. Nobody is claiming that the AI can show you what's actually beneath a person's clothes. The nudes being fake doesn't resolve the ethical issue of creating porn of people who never agreed to it.
The people doing mental gymnastics about this stuff are just telling on themselves. Don't make fake porn of real people, and if you do, be prepared to be rightfully treated as a sexual predator if anyone finds out.
You seem to have reading comprehension issues. They said that this could be done to their body, which is 100% true.
Any picture of anyone can be processed with an AI, and "nudified". Yes, the AI generated portions of the image are fake, and likely won't resemble the person's actual body under their clothing. Results are probably more accurate for photos of people in swimsuits vs more conservative outfits but...
...that doesn't matter. If you're modifying a picture of a real person to make them nude, even without AI, it amounts to sexually violating the person in the original image. Even if you're just photoshopping their face into porn, that's fucking vile and I see no reason there shouldn't be real consequences for it - especially if these images are shared with others.
Nobody defends this shit like you are unless they are doing it themselves. With that said, reevaluate yourself and stop sexually violating women.
It sounded like they thought the AI would literally reveal their body tho, which simply isn’t true.
They didn't say anything like that. You can go back and re-read the thread yourself. If you were wrong, own up to it, but absolutely fuck off with this "well, ackshually" troll response.
If you view sexual assault as a form of free speech, expect to be treated for the kind of person you're telling everyone that you are.
You didn't have to come out and tell everyone that you're one of those guys who doesn't understand the concept of sexual exploitation and consent.
It literally doesn't matter what you call this. Colloquially the technology is known as "Generative AI", and it is fully automating the task of making fake nudes to the point that shady websites only require a single input image, and with a few layers of machine learning, are able to spit out a convincing nude.
It was just as fucked up when perverts sexually exploited people with Photoshop, so I don't understand what your point here is. "AI" has made sexual exploitation fully automated, and there's absolutely no excuse for defending this.
This was from a test I did with a throwaway account on IG where I followed a handful of weirdo parents who run "model" accounts for their kids to see if Instagram would start pushing problematic content as a result (spoiler: yes they will).
It took about 5 minutes from creating the account to end up with nothing but dressed down kids on my recommendations page paired with inappropriate ads. I guess the people who follow kids on IG also like these recommended photos, and the algorithm also figures they must be perverts, but doesn't care about the sickening juxtaposition of children in swimsuits next to AI nudifying apps.
Don't use Meta products. They don't care about ethics, just profits.
This 100%. I can't even bring myself to buy new content for my Quest now that I'm aware of the issues (no matter how much I want the latest Beat Saber and Synth Riders DLC), especially since Meta's Horizon, in my experience, puts adults into direct contact with children. At first I just dismissed metaverse games like VRChat or Horizon as being too popular with kids for me to enjoy it, but now I realize that it put me, an adult, straight into voice chats with tweens, which people should fucking know better than to do. My first thought was to log off because I wasn't having fun in a kid-dominated space, but I have no doubt that these apps are crawling with creeps who see that as a feature rather than a problem.
We need education for parents that sharing pictures of their kids online comes with real risks, as does giving kids free reign to use the Internet. The laissez faire attitude many people have towards social media needs to be corrected, because real harm is already being done.
Most of the parents that post untoward pics of their kids online are chasing down opportunities for their kids to model, and they're ignoring the fact that a significant volume of engagement these photos receive comes from people objectifying children. There seems to be a pattern that the most revealing outfits get the most engagement, and so future pictures are equally if not more revealing to chase more engagement...
Parents might not understand how disturbing these patterns are until they've already dumped thousands of pictures online, and at that point they're likely to be in denial about what they're exposing their kids to, and/or too invested to want to reverse course.
We also need to have a larger conversation, as a society, about using kids as models at all. Pretty much every major manufacturer of children's clothing is hiring real kids to model the clothes. I don't think it's necessary to be publishing that many pictures of kids online, nor is it acceptable to be doing so for profit. There's no reason not to limit modeling to adults who can consent to putting their bodies on public display, and using mannequins for kids' clothing. The sheer volume of kids' swimsuit and underwear pictures hosted on e-commerce sites is likely a contributor to the capability Generative AI models have to create inappropriate images of children, not to mention the actual CSAM found in the LAION dataset most of these models are trained on.
Sorry for the long rant, this shit pisses me off. I need to consider sending 404 Media everything I know since they're doing investigations into this kind of thing. My small scale investigation has revealed a lot to me, but more people need to be getting as upset as I am about it if we want to make the Internet less of a hellscape.
I logged into my throwaway account today just to check in on it since people are talking about this shit more. I was immediately greeted with an ad featuring hardcore pornography, among the pics of kids that still populate my feed.
Generative AI is being used quite prominently for the purposes of making nonconsensual pornography. Just look at the state of CivitAI, the largest marketplace of Stable Diffusion models online. It pretends to be a community for Machine Learning professionals, but behind the scenes it's laying the groundwork for all of the problems we're seeing right now. There's not an actress or female celebrity that doesn't have a TI or LoRA trained on their likeness - and the galleries don't hold back on showing you what these models can do.
At least Photoshop never gained the specific reputation of being a tool for making fake porn, but the GenAI community is leaving no doubt that this is a major use case for image models.
Even HuggingFace turns a blind eye to pornifying models and lolicon datasets, and they're basically the GitHub of AI models...
Who the hell is upvoting this awful take? Please understand that it would never be equitable. If this became reality, it would be women and girls that were exploited the most viciously.
I guess if you don't give a shit about people, especially women and girls, feeling safe in public at all, you would say something like this...
How do you prove some anon on 4chan that posts nudes of someone else actually deepfaked it?
It's either deepfaked, or revenge porn. Whichever charge sticks. If 4chan refuses to unmask anons posting illegal content, throw the book at 4chan. Way overdue anyway.
That's kinda why I brought up specific key players and how I consider them complicit. If you don't want AI to be blamed as a whole, you should want those key players to behave ethically, or they'll poison public perception of AI as a whole.
The pedos out there are using AI to nudity pictures of real kids. That's just going to drive up the demand for creep shots and child model photosets to exploit.
There may be a small percentage of offending pedophiles that switch to pure GenAI over pictures of real kids, but I don't see GenAI ever playing a role in harm reduction given the harm it ultimately enables.
One of the current sickening trends is for a predator to convince a kid to send underwear or swimsuit pics, and then blackmail them into more hardcore photos with nudified versions of the original pics. They're already seeing an influx of that kind of CSAM online, that involves abusing real kids on social media.
I just wish America was less puritanical and taught kids about sex and boundaries to protect them, and that we had a functioning mental healthcare system that directly helps people who experience inappropriate sexuality attractions like pedophilia before they go down these dark paths.
"We are going to put Satanic chaplains in Florida schools, nothing in the bill places limits on who can become a chaplain, and Ron DeSantis can not simply amend the Constitution limiting the religious liberty of some by proclamation from the podium. "
Yes, I am a member of the TST, and we are going to corrupt children in public schools with the help of Christians who have opened the door to us. They also want to corrupt the children, but we're better at it, so we will win. Hail Satan!
Unless they want to close that door again and respect separation of church and state. If they did that our whole plan would be ruined. Under no circumstances should they do that...
I'm currently running both a home server and a VPS. The former is not reachable through the internet, only through vpn. The latter hosts public services....
No shit the VPN requires an open port, I never said otherwise, but if your router is the one running the server, you aren't forwarding the port. The router itself is listening on its WAN interface.
The VPN prevents you from having to forward any ports, because the router allows you to tunnel in. The only open port will be whatever port the VPN server listens on, and it isn't a forwarded port.
New York appeals court overturns Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction from landmark #MeToo trial ( apnews.com )
New York appeals court overturns Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction from landmark #MeToo trial ( apnews.com )
World’s billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers ( www.theguardian.com )
Brazil, Germany, Spain and South Africa sign motion for fairer tax system to deliver £250bn a year extra to fight poverty and climate crisis...
Goatse, like Michelangelo's David, should be an exception to normal rules of censorship, due to its status as part of our shared cultural heritage.
It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office.
Aluminium drawback? Why US still uses so many plastic bottles?
Thoughts? I am currently trying to avoid using plastic packed drinks as much as possible due to it's limited and finite recycle count
You think Linux is living a Renaissance with Gaming and New Non-Technical Users? ( lemmy.ml )
Iran: Rapper Toomaj Salehi sentenced to death, says lawyer ( www.dw.com )
Popular rapper Toomaj Salehi wrote songs in support of the protest movement in Iran following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022. He has been in jail for over a year....
Dolphin found dead on beach riddled with bullets, NOAA offers $20k reward to find killer ( www.usatoday.com )
Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it ( www.theverge.com )
Fisker now expects to go bankrupt within 30 days ( www.arenaev.com )
Life gave me some lemons. What should I do?
Culinary and/or philosophical advice welcome
Trump attacks judge on Truth Social moments after gag order hearing ( www.independent.co.uk )
There’s More to Copyright Than Financial Incentives, Internet Archive Argues in Court ( torrentfreak.com )
Image...
How to talk to a climate doomer (even if that doomer is you) | It’s not too late to tackle climate change, but sometimes it sure feels that way. ( yaleclimateconnections.org )
4 Germans caught marking Hitler's birthday outside the Nazi dictator's birthplace ( www.nbcnews.com )
PSA: Twitch Shadowbans Users on VPN + Linux
If you notice your chat messages show up in the chat feed but don't appear on the streamers in-screen chat, you have been shadowbanned....
Paedophiles create nude AI images of children to extort from them, says charity | Internet safety | The Guardian ( www.theguardian.com )
Internet Watch Foundation has found a manual on dark web encouraging criminals to use software tools that remove clothing. The manipulated image could then be used against the child to blackmail them into sending more graphic content, the IWF said.
California could ban Clear, which lets travelers pay to skip TSA lines ( www.cbsnews.com )
A new bill, the first of its kind in the U.S., would ban security screening company Clear from operating at California airports as lawmakers take aim at companies that let consumers pay to pass through security ahead of other travelers. ...
Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps ( www.404media.co )
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...
Biden condemns ‘antisemitic protests’ — and absence of Palestinian empathy, too ( www.politico.com )
Self hosted remote storage for VPS?
I'm currently running both a home server and a VPS. The former is not reachable through the internet, only through vpn. The latter hosts public services....