“as bad”… not quite, and not in the same way. As other people have said, there’s no conscience to AI and I doubt there will be any financial incentive to develop one capable of “being evil” or doing some doomsday takeover. It’s a tool, it will continue to be abused by malicious actors, idiots will continue to trust it for things it can’t do properly, but this isn’t like the movies where it is malicious or murderous.

It’s perfectly capable of, say, being used to push people into personalized hyperrealities (consider how political advertising was microtargeted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and consider how convincing fake AI imagery can be at a glance). It’s a more boring dystopia, but a powerful bad one nonetheless, capable of deconstructing societies to a large degree.

As far as financial scams go, my parents and uncles handled my grandparents’ finances for their last decade. If they were targeted then there would be an upper limit to how much money they could lose in one scam. They also weren’t paying for things online.

As for younger elderly people, if they’re still smart enough for it then I’d try educating them. Practically, not just talking about it. There are plenty of good public interactive resources for phishing training, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t any for AI. Also simple things like “never pay for anything in gift cards, ever” are some easy wins.

Reminds me of US COVID hospital workers begging not to be labeled as heroes, for a variety of reasons.

If you’re not doing something material to further the movement, you’re complicit in the status quo. I know we all have our own conditions and circumstances, but even small actions are important. Praiseworthy resistance shouldn’t be heroic, it should be normalized.

I’ve looked briefly into the equivalent of antifascist projects, and former neo-Nazis talking about how their minds were changed. From what I’ve seen:

• People can and do leave political cults
• There’s no universal recipe. A common factor among former neo-Nazis seems to be having someone close to them who doesn’t tolerate the bullshit, so to me it seems the best approach is to stand firm, but leave a door open in the rare case that they have a revelation on their own. (Historically, this sometimes happens if/when their own personal reality begins to clearly contradict the propaganda.)
• Many people simply don’t leave, so it’s unfair to demand those around them spend so much time and effort trying to make it happen. It can be a waste of time. It’s a gamble, really, so again that’s why I say leave a door open, as long as it’s safe.

Obviously these are just second-hand observations, I don’t have much personal experience with this, so if any of it sounds wrong then I’d like to know.

yo dawg i herd u liek boats so we put yo boat on a boat so you can ride while you ride

I grew up wanting a fast car and lots of powersports toys, now that I am in a position to afford some (small amount) of that, I find myself thinking more that its not right to spend on those kind of activities now due to the impact on the environment.

Exactly, as I begin to be able to afford some smaller luxuries (say, a higher-end computer part or an extra monitor) I realize that I morally object to many luxuries because of their environmental cost, e-waste, and thinking of better uses for that money.

I do believe there’s some truth to the slogan of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” but luxuries are so often just egregious and repulsive.

Buying an island:

https://www.privateislandsonline.com/ lists many islands. They’re between about $100,000 and $75,000,000 (some lower-end ones are undeveloped and just trees), most seem to sit in the millions range. There are also renting options but prices aren’t public.

This advertisement blog post shows similar prices: https://www.jamesedition.com/stories/real-estate/how-much-does-a-private-island-cost/

Mega-yachts.

Here is a yacht buying/selling website with a filter for mega-yachts: https://www.yachtworld.com/boats-for-sale/type-power/class-power-mega/

The most expensive ones listed there are in the lower hundreds of millions (US$). I didn’t check if these were new or used. The smallest ones I would start to call mega-yachts were mid-to-upper hundred of thousands.

There’s also this calculator site for the purchase annual operating expenses of superyachts: https://www.luxyachts.com/yacht-cost-calculator

Other replies have listed a lot of them, and there are plenty more. Lots of webrings for personal sites are still running. Plenty of BBS-style forums too.

The bottom line is, there are plenty of other people who enjoy those aspects of older websites, whether for nostalgic aesthetic reasons or for the benefits of minimalist design. So there are many new sites being made in the same vein of twenty and thirty year old sites. Just like Lemmy is a breath of fresh air for those who are only used to having ads shoved down their throats, old-style sites can be surprisingly relaxing and refreshing.

Some examples from the past week:

• Being active and involved in my worker union (we’ve had a few recent wins).
• Attending and promoting rallies and counter-rallies for various causes.
• Cantributing to tactical discussions in political party meetings.
• Small financial donations to various causes (both social and political).
• Reducing my food and plastic waste.

From a political science perspective (and for most people outside the USA), most of the US has liberalist ideology, including Republican voters. The electoral system is called a liberal democracy. The country rallying cry is for “freedom”; liberty.

US mass media simply started calling progressive liberalism “liberalism”, conservative liberalism “conservativism”, and classical liberalism “libertarianism”. It’s silly and confusing, but it’s the world we’re in right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

As far as Boeing employee fates go, this is fine.

they steal everything.

Absolutely. Nazis are consistently creatively bankrupt with few exceptions.

• Original party aesthetics: rebranded from DAP to NSDAP (against Hitler’s wishes) and adopted symbols to try and capitalize on the growing socialist movement after the failed German Revolution.
• Original party policies: A shallow syncretic mess. Even Mussolini thought they were morons.
• Neo-Nazi tactics: Also a syncretic mess, with tactics that contradict their own goals and abilities (e.g. copying black bloc, trying to adapt ex-military 1930s tactics to 2000s alienated teenagers).
• Aesthetics (both original and modern): Ignorant copypasting of ancient imagery (not-actually-Roman ‘roman salute’, neo-Roman architecture and statues, fake-Germanic runes)
• Nazi Pepe/Wojak edits: Both memes were already prominent from /r9k/ board.
• Fashwave: Vaporwave aesthetics copied without understanding what they represent and why they were interesting

why do we keep letting them steal?

Stealing is easy to do and takes effort to combat. There are things we’ve stopped them from co-opting, and plenty of contested symbols. But at the end of the day, when the mainstream media picks up a symbol and repeatedly assigns it to a group, it’s not so easy to overcome that in broader society.

By itself? No. The original character was not political, the community that made “feels bad man” famous as a meme wasn’t political, and many, many, many of the variants still around split off before it was seen as political. Even in the political sphere, there are plenty of left-wing variants too which I would not consider hate speech. A frogpost without context will make me examine someone closer for other clues, but it’s not inherently political or hateful.

dreamingspanish

Thanks for the recc. I was half expecting it to force a pay gate to simply watch any of the videos (the internet can make me cynical like that!) and better yet, they have a superbeginner video on an exact topic I was interested in learning about after some South American immigrant friends had brought it up. Immersion almost seems ‘too good to be true’ because one can learn interesting content more enthusiastically than studying it formally, I’ve found the same with history and political theory.

Lots of the usual stuff, but speaking of class, when I get unexpectedly positive reactions for outreach. When handing out fliers at a train station, I’d often see someone instinctually ignore us for handing out stuff, but when I announce the reason (e.g. protesting a local weapons factory supplying the ongoing genocide, or for my union organizing to fight issues affecting our workers) some people double back and grab one, or even thank us for volunteering. It’s heartwarming and validating. Far more people showing interest or support than the one or two grumpy reactionaries.

Most celebrities. I know its usually manufactured hype, but I still don’t understand people falling for it.

Collectible toys. On top of not getting it, I hate it from an environmental perspective and a wasted resources (incl labor) perspective.

lemonade!

I’m not sure what you mean by “believing in” comeuppance. It doesn’t automatically happen when people do bad things, it’s not a real material thing. People can do harmful things that sometimes cause people to react and punish them, and I’d say that fits your definition of comeuppance, but it’s not some guaranteed or spiritual concept. So I can’t say I believe in comeuppance, even when it happens.

If you mean in a sense of justice, I don’t really advocate punitive justice, as gratifying as it is. What comeuppance does someone truly atrocious on a mass scale deserve? There’s a point where you’d need to artificially prolong someone’s life for thousands of years of torture just to scrape the surface of the suffering they’ve caused to humanity (let alone other creatures), some proper “I Have No Mouth” sci-fi stuff would be the necessary fate to qualify as Hitler’s comeuppance. And what does it accomplish? Not much. In the end, just give them a bullet as quickly as possible to prevent them hurting more people, we can leave ironic fates to the novelists.

A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.