PonyOfWar

No way you haven’t read the other replies to my comment.

The US is a hellhole with a billionaire class living above the law, sure, not arguing with that. But OP made a blanket statement about all laws, and didn’t specify a country either. If your username is any indication you’re a Marxist. How do you think a Marxist state would work without laws?

That has certainly been the case in some places, though by no means all of them. Enforcement is also a separate issue to the law itself. But to provide some maybe better examples, do laws that enshrine workers’ rights to form a union only serve to benefit the rich? Laws that limit donations to political parties? I really don’t think you can make that argument for all laws.

I guess I haven’t yet. Maybe you can help me: How do laws against, for example, rape, only benefit the rich while oppressing the rest of us?

Yes. Never liked the feeling of sitting or sleeping in a room with the doors open.

That is, indeed, what every paranoid individual thinks.

There is no such device. What you need is, in all likelihood, a therapist, or a doctor in any case.

For German, I guess Pennsylvania Dutch would come closest? At least in the sense that it’s a variety of German spoken in North America. It’s barely understandable for modern-day Germans.

Yesterday, on my bike, feeling the warm sun on my skin again after a long winter.

A hereditary monarchy is still not an oligarchy 🤷 Sure, not saying it is. I was arguing against the claims of North Korea being a democratic system controlled by the working class. North Korea is not a classic oligarchic system, so I’d agree with your reply to OP. But anyway, you’re only talking about the head of state. They have an entire system running there I don’t think that any kind of democratic system is possible under a head of state with that amount of worship and cult of personality around a single person. The structures for a democratic system underneath may exist, but when it’s not possible to act out of line or speak out against the great leader, they might as well not. All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that it’s not. Both from North Korean media itself, which I’ve watched quite a bit of, and from the mouth of North Koreans who managed to get out.

You’re no doubt well-informed on the theoretical systems of those countries but you can’t just look at the theory and say “that’s exactly how it works in real life”. It’s a fact that leadership in the DPRK has passed on from father to son for 3 generations now - any country that does that is a hereditary monarchy, not a people’s republic. Kim Jong Un was never part of the working class. He was raised in palaces and sent to an elite college in Switzerland. You don’t even need to trust any Western media on this - just watch a few minutes of North Korean TV and you’ll hear how the leaders are basically treated as gods. Many people who threatened or spoke out against their rule, including those in the “royal” family like Kim Jong Nam, have been murdered or disappeared.

There were and are so many dumb and incorrect conspiracy theories that I think it’s understandable that people would outright dismiss them, even if there was a real conspiracy. Take the deep state. Sure, you can say that there absolutely is a deep state of oligarchs influencing/controlling governments. But if you read about that topic on conspiracy forums, you’ll quickly find it getting entangled in bullshit like Pizzagate or QAnon. They said Donald Trump would be the one to finally “expose the deep state”, which is just laughable. On the same forums you’ll find stuff like “flat earth”. So why would anyone use those places as sources of trustworthy information?

Voyager doesn't even show them

I don’t know about him specifically, but I’d say it’s a shift in opinion that many of us went through. 2008 was a very different world. Amazon wasn’t quite the evil empire it is today. It was one of the only usable online shops, leagues ahead of almost everything else available.

My company has 2 CEOs. One of them doesn’t ever really talk about AI. The other one is personally obsessed with the topic. His picture on Teams is AI generated and every other day, he posts some random AI tutorial or news into work channels. His client presentations are mostly written by ChatGPT. But luckily, nothing is being forced on us developers. The company is very hands-off in general (some may say disorganized) and we can pretty much use any tools and methods we choose, as long as we deliver good results. I personally use AI only occassionally, mostly for quick prototyping in languages and frameworks I’m unfamiliar with.

Browsing various art platforms, when I see a user where I’m not entirely sure if their art is AI (usually I think I can tell immediately though), I check how old their profile is. If it’s older than 2024, I check how their art from before that year looks. If there hasn’t been a sudden and radical shift in style and expertise, I consider the art human-made. Otherwise, likely AI. That method might be a tad unfair to artists who are only starting out now, but I don’t know of any better way.