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Cake day: May 4th, 2024

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  • Few days ago a friend linked me a danish research paper and claimed it shown that higher wages for women lead to decrease in children being born, and that higher male wages led to the opposite. I don’t have the skills required to parse this kind of paper quickly nor understanding of a lot of the terminology. I told chatGPT to read it and contrast it with the arguments being made, to which it responded with pointing out that the term “marginal net-of-tax wage” meant something different from “wage”, and that this paper suggested that tax laws incentivizing working more hours led to lowered fertility rather than higher salaries for women. I was asked to point exactly where in the paper it was said like that, and again, I had to lean on LLM to get me page numbers. I eventualy convinced my friend that he got duped by right wing talking points and got him to think a bit.

    So, if I didn’t do that and just read the conclusion from the paper I’d probably have to agree with him instead, as just googling it led to the right wing trolls making those claims. Was this a good use case of LLM to get me some counter arguments, or would it have been better if I stayed true to my ideals and not to use those tools? Was I rude by arguing against the point made about a research that neither of us understood from the get go by using genAI to parse through it? While I do agree that companies developing those tools are evil and need to be stopped, there is an utility to it that I don’t think is available elsewhere. Would me losing that argument and believing that women should have lower salaries to increase fertility (because I believe in science, and this paper seemed to be referenced a lot, also if anything capitalism would be to blame, so probably not as bad) be better than normalizing the use of the devil-tech but having myself and my friend better informed? I am legitimately not sure, but I think I did the right thing? What should’ve I done? I don’t have the skills nor time nor will to read scientific papers that aren’t related to my area of expertise, especially when someone linking them didn’t do any research either. I am also genuinely exhausted from defending my left-wing points of view from the constant barrage of underhanded and often completely baseless arguments some of my coworkers and friends make to convince me I’m wrong and the default consensus is right. Is it bad to use genAI to figure out some counterpoints? Or should I give up and admit I’m not good or commited enough to make them myself? Right wing people often argue in bad faith and don’t take the counterpoints to heart, but sometimes they do, even if the original point they made was just to rile me up. So, am I the asshole? Am I wrong? I seriously don’t know.



  • voldage@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlThe Democrats theatre
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    1 year ago

    Doubting that this is the case, seeing how they are trying to push back against protests against Republicans, is just delusional. I refuse to believe them to be so incompetent, that they constantly act against their own interests and boost MAGA message instead. Bernie gets way more attention from the public than everything they are doing right now combined, and they barely acknowledge he exists.


  • voldage@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlForest of trees
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    2 years ago

    And honestly speaking I’m not sure myself if “tankie” should apply to China, seeing how most of their bad shit happend internally with the notable exceptions of Taiwan and Hong Kong, which are a stretch. There is a distinctive difference between Russia and China, despite both belonging to same political alliance and both have a dictatorial leaderships. Hating west/USA and loving either of them would make one a campist, but I’m not sure about that qualifyng as tankie. Naturally, most campists support both, so by that definition it would make them tankies.

    While your definition does describe tankies as well, I always understood it to be a derogatory term for the general authoritarian communist/pseudo-communist block more so than applying to all national supermacists.


  • voldage@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlForest of trees
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    2 years ago

    I mean that would mean I believe that they’re imperialists supporting the case of white supremacy - I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to claim that most USA supported conflicts have the purpose of benefitting the western world, which is based on white supremacy - and most likely are either politicaly illiterate and are unaware (willingly or by ignorance) of what USA is doing, or are sociopaths. They’re not tankies by virtue of not being pro post soviet dictatorships, but when it comes to the callousness towards loss of innocent human lives, they’re uh… Pretty bad. I’m not making a comparison though, I feel that’s like asking which of two shits stinks worse, and we can clearly see that both defecators had varied and distinctive diets.


  • IQ tests intentionally omit any questions related to empathy, emotional intelligence and creativity, so it can favour people from the top of the pile and act as accurate perdictor of success in ruthless capitalist society. It implicitly promotes lack of those traits in individuals and explicitly promotes the definition of intelligence that’s unrelated to them. While you don’t get lower scores if you’re highly creative or empathetic person, so it’s not directly a detrimental for society and can be a useful metric for some cases like specific jobs, it’s image as sole measure of intelect is manufactured to promote “specific kind of people”, to which group many republican businessmen would belong.

    I’m not disagreeing with what you said, just thought I’d expand on that.


  • I also have felt unburdened by what has been, as if a spell was cast on me. I had no doubt though that replacing Joe Biden with literally anyone, including his son or dog, would increase democrats chance of winning. I think in my case it was more of letting go of pent up anger towards the rotting carcass of the current president and all those who campaigned for his reelection. Including the lovely folk of lemmy, for whom I still might hold some animosity. To those that rode hard for Biden, a sincere fuck you.



  • Right, sorry, it was his wife that outed him for having Hitler speeches book “My New Order” back in 1990, which he apparently kept in a cabinet next to his bed. In the interview he also admitted having a copy of Mein Kampf, though he never openly claimed to read that book often. When he quoted Hitler in 2023 he said it was just a coincidence. Which caused no one to feel uneasy, no one at all. His former chief of staff claimed that Trump praised Hitler for doing some good things, like rebuilding the economy.

    So right, sorry, I mixed the “Mein Kampf” for “My New Order”, and it was his wife that outed that, he only confirmed.


  • I see republican voters shooting republican candidates as pretty much reasonable outcome rather than some newly emergent threat to democracy. Trump made his image himself, it was him who decided to harass miniorities and brag about reading Mein Kampf often. It was him who made republican message extreme, provoked an insurrection, had all those criminal charges and appointed obviously corrupt judges. He groomed americans into feeling insecure and threatened and radicalized a lot of them. I think random depressed kids trying to suicide by shooting him is the least he should expect, especially seeing that USA has a gun cult focused around right to bear arms against threats to democracy. Also a child rapist, which alone is enough for millions of people to pull the trigger. You’re seriously blaming his bad image on anyone else?