Too many enjoy the (temporary) safety that Trump provides them to stand up for others. Too many still are afraid to stand up for the rights of others for fear that their rights might be taken away in response. Too many others are beaten down and exhausted from the system that keeps them oppressed to be able to stand up for what’s right. Too many have either never read or truly understood Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came”.

For a long time now, humans have been utilising machines and robots to perform tasks that humans would otherwise have had to perform - particularly when it comes to manufacturing. Occasionally, one of those machines will encounter an error or issue, and a human will need to intervene to either fix the machine or guide the process before it can resume its task.

These advancements have allowed a very small number of humans to oversee what would have otherwise required hundreds, potentially thousands of humans to do independently. Even when humans were performing these tasks, they would occasionally need someone with more specialisation or experience to help them with completing such a task.

The point of this tech - the point of all tech that I’ve described above - is to reduce the amount of humans needed to produce a given result. It’s a reduction in the need for labour. It’s a matter of efficiency, not a complete replacement of any need for any human to ever intervene under any circumstances. Under communism, or even well-fleshed out socialism, it would free up humans from having to perform menial labour to instead pursue their passions, work on vital human skills, create and consume art… just live better lives.

Now, would I ride in a self-driving vehicle? Certainly not yet. The tech still needs time to develop before I’m confident in it. As time goes on, the need for human intervention will continue to drop, and hopefully my confidence will grow.

Not sure if this is a major difference between the US and Australia, but the vast majority of jobs I’ve gone for I’ve been interviewed by the people who are the managers of the position they’re hiring for. HR tends to handle booking in interview times and what not and then onboarding once a decision is made, but the only time I’ve been interviewed by someone from HR was in a panel interview where the line manager was also present and interviewing. I’ve never worked for big business, but a lot of government and NGO roles as well as large retail chains, cafes and the like.

My armchair prediction is that even if Democrats manage to gain back control of power in the US, many countries will now be skeptical of entering any arrangements with them for longer than 2-4 years. US voters have now shown a propensity for electing and re-electing a leader that is able to come in and comprehensively dismantle decades of intense diplomacy and geopolitical navigation in a short period of time. As such, wise leaders of other nations won’t be willing to enter long-term arrangements that last beyond a given administration anymore.

When your worldview is predicated on your ‘right’ to lie, cheat and steal from others in order to enrich yourself, socialism and communism are the greatest evils.

It’s Australia. We always consent to a good, hard pegging.

I tend to prefer ‘Naughty Sex: Anal’

I’m a nerd for… not knowing that a book exists? Weird, but okay I guess.

As an Australian who has never studied Agatha Christie in any context, I literally had no clue what the censored word was. I was, and am, appreciative of the context that was provided by other commenters. Be careful when you make blanket statements like “we all knew what the book was”, because you’ll almost always be confidently incorrect.

What the fork did you just fricking say about me, you little bench? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed pewpews. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the flip out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fudging words. You think you can get away with saying that spit to me over the Internet? Think again, fuddler. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, misanthrope. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your “life”. You’re finking done, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can booboo you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable bumbum off the face of the continent, you little shirt. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your franken tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goshdarned silly. I will poop fury all over you and you will swim in it. You’re fully dumped, kiddo.

Very, very few did, as you’ve pointed out, but I was lucky enough that my Dad was one of them. He wasn’t an avid gamer or anything, because he tended to work long hours, but he’d regularly sit down and play multiplayer games with me and my siblings when I was younger and used to live with him. I didn’t really realise how lucky I was at the time.

I’m curious, what’s your definition of communism?

That’s a perfectly reasonable viewpoint to hold, though sadly from a pragmatic perspective all it does is maintains the power imbalance between employers and employees. I’d love to live in a world where I don’t have to commit fraud in order to get a decent job but, for as long as I do, I probably will.

Be careful now, you don’t want to be accused of trying to take the piss out of Big Urethra.

While I totally agree with you, it’s important to note that LLMs are decidedly not part of the evolution of AGI. They’re a separate piece of technology on their own branch. An LLM could never feasibly be developed into AGI. The development of AGI is going on in the background, as you said in a slow grind, but those researchers are not working on LLMs nor are LLM programmers working towards AGI.

most cops don’t live near their precincts anymore - these people aren’t their neighbors. They’re ‘outsiders’ who they don’t need to imagine as human beings.

This can be a little bit of a double-edged sword. Working in social services, I’ve heard numerous cases of children disclosing parental abuse to a cop who says words to the effect of “I know your Dad, he’s a good man and wouldn’t do that. Let me take you home and tell him everything you just disclosed to me” or women who try to report domestic violence only to be faced with a similar outcome.

I don’t think there’s an optimal distance for cops to live from their precincts. The only panacea seems to be defunding them.

Source? Not trying to aggravate or anything, but I just haven’t seen any statistics that bear that out. This report from Pew Research in 2025 suggests that married women are roughly split:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-gender-sexual-orientation-marital-and-parental-status/

Married men and women are more likely to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party than their unmarried counterparts, with 59% of married men and half of married women oriented toward the GOP.

The image above this statement shows 45% of married women are Democrat-aligned whereas 50% of married women are Republican-aligned.

It’s a difficult and tetchy issue at the best of times, but I’ve got to say I’m also in the camp that believes that issues of difference need to be worked on from both sides. My partner has ADHD and often interrupts me, which is a pretty big trigger for my CPTSD, so we work through that together as best we can. I know that she struggles to control interrupting me, just as she knows that I struggle to control getting triggered when she does so. We have a common understanding and both work on being accommodating to each others’ needs. Over time, we’ve struck a great balance that works well by meeting each other in the middle as best we can.

I also have coeliac disease. While I get frustrated that many restaurants, events, friends’ houses etc. don’t have gluten free options, I also understand that it’s my responsibility to manage my disease. Sometimes that means bringing my own food; sometimes that means going hungry. I can’t walk through the world demanding that everyone provide an experience that caters to my disease (like a good number of coeliacs do). I would feel selfish doing so.

Society is a co-op game. We all have our strengths and weaknesses; our abilities and disabilities; our positives and negatives. We all have to make accommodations to one another to achieve the best outcome for everyone. None of us have the right to dictate that others cater to us unless we’re also willing to cater to them.

As a side note; ADHD does not imply that a person is neurologically unable to understand social cues. Other forms of neurodivergence experience this to varying degrees, but that’s not an immutable criteria of ADHD.

The Gnostics really were onto something there. They’re the only Christian sect that makes a lick of sense.