Fortunately, they can’t arrest everybody using open-source AI models. There are clear efforts to stop momentum with geo-tracking high-end GPUs and indirect efforts like the EU plan trying to backdoor everything.
Personally, I see it all as ineffective.
We have accessible, open-source AI models - your predictions won’t come to pass.
Why would Islamic countries not condemn China? They certainly seem to condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people. Somebody please enlighten me.
Edit: According to Business Insider, they might fear China’s retaliation (e.g. economic vengeance). How reliant are these Islamic countries on exports from China and how reliant are these countries on China importing their resources (e.g. oil)?
Why would any of that matter when people of their religion are being genocided? Fear of retaliation from a nuclear-powered state and facing consequences in regards to western trade doesn’t seem to deter them from taking a stance on Palestine.
And a great deal of the rights violations persist to this day, regardless of some of the treatments being viable presently to stabilize individuals.
Lifelong prescriptions are misappropriated and are too common (see Soteria Houses - they use psychiatric drugs in first-episode psychosis/schizophrenia with consent for stabilization and only for a few months to achieve remission in some individuals), people are kidnapped (sometimes in the middle of the night) and taken without due process by individuals who aren’t able to assess mental illness, medicalized rape or forced psychiatry is rampant (patient choice is disregarded), there is essentially zero outside oversight, court access is wholly insufficient, you generally can’t get second opinions, forced treatment orders still exist (so even when you’re released you have to get court-ordered intramuscular shots), and so forth.
Some medications like neuroleptics carry a pretty big risk (20%~) of causing a condition known as Tardive Dyskinesia, which can be permanent and extremely debilitating. Polypharmacy is rampant and unregulated (some people can be on a pretty extreme cocktail of drugs).
There’s still atrocities and those who fall through the cracks in the system, but there are success stories presently, which is contrasted by the horrors even in the 80’s (which was fairly tame compared to psychiatry in the decades that came before it).
Psychiatry is in need of reform, and it doesn’t seem like psychiatrists or the for-profit hospitals behind them are interested in enacting that serious reform.
What if locking people up indefinitely (as many were in institutions decades ago) and diagnosing them with subjective criteria isn’t ideal? I’m not dismissing anybody’s diagnosis or hand-waving real symptoms or illness - I’m merely suggesting that an authoritarian system where human rights are stripped with minimal outside observation (with sometimes flimsy criteria and fallible actors) is potentially damaging to mental health and is probably not conducive to healing. It can be a very imbalanced power dynamic, especially as it was in the institutions of the past as you pointed out.
We need an answer to retain the rights of those involuntarily held as best as possible. I think it’s important to make courts more accessible to patients (and their loved ones), providing those held involuntarily with access to second opinions or different facilities (in some cases), and having established (and independently enforced) criteria for release - with appeals available for patients to argue their case for release with legal representation and other expert witnesses (e.g. other psychiatrists, qualified individuals directly involved in their care past or present) and perhaps even family members and other people who were involved with the patient.
Involuntary commitment (for any extended period) should be reserved for the severely mentally ill, who are determined by independent review to be in need of treatment to stabilize - and only those who are a danger to themselves or others, those who committed crimes, and those who are actively violent should be held in higher-security (locked) facilities.
I feel the rest would benefit greatly from conditions akin to a Soteria House (without locked doors, forced medication, or coercion) - the Soteria House model could be expanded, adapted, or modified. Treatment could be loosely mandated by courts, with reviews conducted and alternative treatment plans established if the patient wishes to modify or discontinue treatment before they are thought to be stabilized by their psychiatrist(s) and care team. I feel that maintaining consent, valuing patient input in forming treatment plans, and avoiding coercion is key to address certain states of trauma - otherwise patients are potentially faced with more trauma.
For those who are not thought to be severely ill, but who are thought to be in temporary crisis (and who are not thought to be violent or a threat to themselves or others), stabilization could be attempted in a temporary hold to assess their state, and continued onward with care akin to Soteria Houses or intensive outpatient care and other forms of observation and forms of support (e.g. with their environment and other distressing situations they are facing).
And to respond directly to you, I definitely feel like society was incapable or very underequipped to fix the institutions back then. Society is still largely unable to address distress and its very real manifestations or consequences - such as homelessness and the prevention of individuals from becoming homeless against their will.
Chaos, artificial scarcity, and violence feeds the system and justifies its existence.
Otherwise, why would we still have a mass incarceration system? Why is it still punitive in nature with terrible and inhumane conditions normalized?
A cycle is created that makes people unemployable and industries and those in power reap the benefits at every stage of these people’s lives - any police contact is effectively a scarlet letter. Specifically, many corporations benefit from the slave labor sourced from prisons and the private prison industry is its own can of worms.
With AI tooling screening job applicants with proprietary criteria, public data brokers, mass surveillance disguised as “adtech”, people search websites, social media (where people have a tendency to overshare personal details), systematic reporting of arrest records/etc. in newspapers (generally with no updates to reflect the person’s current situation); you can literally be unemployable in the US with no conviction or crimes that have been expunged or sealed.
If you have a felony or misdemeanor on your record - good fucking luck getting a job in today’s market - background checks are normalized and are extremely accessible to employers. It’s no wonder why people turn to crime to exist, discrimination is effectively legalized - there is insufficient regulation and protections for job applicants.
The only way to prevent crime is to rehabilitate those who commit crime and to provide services to enrich people’s lives before they would otherwise commit crime. We also need to respect people’s privacy upon rehabilitation - we shouldn’t be permanently labeling (or dehumanizing) those deemed to be fit to return to society (e.g. people that aren’t violent or who aren’t a threat). We have to give them a path to participate in society.
It definitely seems to be the case for me. VPNs and other privacy settings can trigger the aggressive captchas as well.
And then failing that one too because you take literally any measure to protect your privacy. And then the next one.
If these countries were given the ingredients to be able to develop and there was no outside demand for mined materials, these children wouldn’t be in the mines.
Big if, but less of an “if” if more people are made aware. It’s absolutely sickening how much we rely on lithium considering how it is sourced.
We are collectively enabling modern slavery and child slavery. These corporations prefer to act innocent because they aren’t sending the children themselves into the mines, but they buy the materials they mine regardless (and there’s no way that they don’t know the reality). Many corporations profit off the back of these people and children and they should be required to pay significant reparations.
What is in our power to stop this? We can spread the awareness of our exploitation of third-world countries - including their children, we can develop technologies that don’t rely on rare materials or difficult to mine materials, we can employ automation to mine what we do need in first-world countries, and we can hold the corporations that profit from these supply chains accountable.
There are battery technologies (e.g. sodium-ion) that we could grasp and avoid mining altogether for energy storage. China is proving that sodium-ion batteries are a very promising technology, even in cars, and the sodium can be sourced from seawater or from the byproducts of desalination (the latter which likely needs to be very quickly scaled considering the fresh water crisis).
When you put it that way, I guess we better hand over thousands every year to Apple for the new iPhone. Wouldn’t want a child slave to be unemployed.
Buy 10,000 disposable vapes every year while you’re at it (if you really care). Maybe a couple cents will trickle down to the children you claim to care about.
If you’re worried about these children losing their wonderful life in the mines, feel free to support them through other means.
Make it your life’s work to spread awareness, bring aid to the affected countries, and support their development - you only enslave yourself by learning to do absolutely nothing against what you see as oppressive.
And getting companies that profit off of these children to support them would likely be fair. Apple, Google, and many others can handle the hit.
Your trolling aside, we all share a personal responsibility to not buy from companies that e.g. utilize cobalt/lithium in their products - slavery/child labor is rampant in those supply chains and Apple et. al are responsible for supporting it.
If there was no demand, these children wouldn’t be forced to work in mines - it’s that simple.
You enslave others by consuming most common products on the shelves. Modern slavery (and child slavery) is more expansive than most know and third-world exploitation is rampant - western supply chains are not immune.
While you support the enslavement of others with your consumption, corporations continue to become more and more powerful.
We invest in battery tech that utilizes supply chains with slavery and child labor to make those disposable cigarette batteries - and they just go straight into the landfill.
Lithium-ion batteries are absolutely not anything to be proud of - it’s a rare material and not scalable like other emergent technologies.
Lithium-ion has the potential for fire/explosion, is hazardous, and has poor cold-weather performance when compared with sodium-ion batteries.
And earlier this year and late last year in Northern California, we had two lithium battery plant fires that very likely contaminated a significant amount of our agriculture and soil.
The contaminated farmlands produce 70% of America’s greens and vegetables (a.k.a. the Salad Bowl of America). We were ill-equipped to address this situation or remediate it - see Status Coup News’ reporting to see how it affected the health of residents in a 50-100 mile radius.
Even if we stored it properly (away from anything it could contaminate including people), lithium-ion is simply not viable for energy storage.
There’s only ifs because powerful forces (that do not represent the will of humanity) do everything they can to suppress or derail renewable energy efforts and divert our collective focus to war and conflict.
China is proving sodium-ion batteries are viable. Sodium is abundant and the batteries seem cheap to produce. Solar panels are also cheap to produce.
Instead of economic war or other forms of conflict, we could cooperate on these technologies and move forward as a species.
It’s all very easy when you realize that war and conflict are not in anyone’s best interest, with consequences that could spell the end of our planet’s habitability, and could cause death and suffering that make previous World Wars look like child’s play.
We already know fossil fuels are undesirable for the planet and we’ve already had plenty of nuclear disasters.
Let’s worry about expanding nuclear technologies when we achieve fusion and the world achieves stability.
If we got our head out of our ass and invested into battery tech - e.g. sodium-ion batteries or proton batteries, we could very quickly build sustainable energy storage instead of relying on technology that is potentially dangerous or continuing to rely on fossil fuels.
Northern Illinois leaders consider reinstating grocery sales tax at local level
Seems like it’s going to affect more than DeKalb, see the article title.
Regardless, I lived in a rural university town myself in the past - much more rural than DeKalb. There were plenty of rich people tucked away in their massive homes. At least enough to raise their taxes just a bit to generate 800k of revenue.
Tax literally anything instead of food, I say - groceries are high enough and not everybody struggling qualifies for food stamps.
How about taxing the wealthy instead of food? Taxing cars is nice too.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Publicly available information is invasive and a violation of privacy.
We have corporations who have effectively set up mass surveillance networks and they call it “adtech”.
There is an entire economy surrounding “publicly available information”. There are corporations that act as as data brokers and people search websites that compile way too much sensitive information about private individuals. Newspapers systematically report on events that aren’t really of public interest concerning private individuals; e.g. arrest records and these articles hang around forever even if the arrest doesn’t result in a conviction or the crime is expunged.
If this was employed by the government or law enforcement, it would absolutely include data that extends far beyond the reaches of publicly available information — and it’s worth pointing out that the US has a mass surveillance network in the form of the NSA/PRISM.
There is zero way you could convince me that AI, prone to hallucination, would be well served to predict crime or criminals. Even if it didn’t hallucinate, it still wouldn’t be possible to predict crime — only potentially anticipate a crime. We aren’t 2D characters following a script — anything can happen.
Law enforcement is already very unhinged. Let’s not cheerlead the addition of any tools that aid in psychosis to their arsenal.
There’s a whole world out there - if anybody can effectively run these models, how will they know to stop everyone?
The current US administration and sphere of influence/power may be tyrannical, but they aren’t omnipresent or omniscient - even if they try to be.
For example, I highly doubt China will be able to be stopped before they burst the AI dam. Honestly, they already have - these AI companies are just in denial because they need more capital for their proprietary, inefficient, and centralized models.