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> a situation where Russian foreign minister and their ambassador to Washington would contact and meet the leaders of the March on the Capitol

If Russia played no role in instigating the conditions of the revolt, and if Russia was a close US ally, then I would not call that a Russia-backed coup attempt.

The analogy doesn't fit, though, because Russia wasn't an ally, it was an adversary with its heart set on undermining US democracy. And Russia did play a role in the events that caused the revolt, with the purported stealing and releasing of the DNC's and Podesta's private e-mails, strategically leaked immediately after the Access Hollywood tape. One could make a case that these leaks got Trump elected due to the thin margins that he carried he election by, and that the leaks created an atmosphere of deep-state conspiracy thinking in the US public that made people more pliable to Trump's stolen election lies.

The leaked call reveals little novel information. Nuland was already having public meetings with Yatsenyuk, Klitschko, and others on the eve of the revolution. It's a foregone conclusion that such meetings were to exercise US influence to promote the US foreign policy position on what ought to happen if the government was to get toppled in a revolution.[1] This isn't evidence that the US instigated the revolution, or that the US was a big part of the factors behind the revolution. It's "US-backed" in the weakest sense of the US having communicated their desired outcome if the revolution came to pass after the ball was already set in motion by Ukrainians.

That's why we shouldn't label it a US-backed coup. That label connotes a large degree of involvement and influence over the causal factors underlying the revolution which can't be supported.

If the US followed Russia's tactics and poisoned pro-Russian Ukrainian leaders, or sowed disinformation in their media ecosystem, then sure, the label of a US-backed coup would be more than appropriate.

[1] Actually, this is me being overly generous. While that is one possible interpretation, another is that they simply recognized that Yatsenyuk will take power due to his overwhelming popularity among Ukrainian people, and are simply trying to preempt and manage the inevitable factional politics that could arise post-revolution.

Because a popular revolution shouldn't be labelled a "US-backed coup", and labelling it as such strips agency from the protesters who made it happen. Getting the label right is important given that this is a critical part of the Kremlin's justification for the invasion: casting the current Ukrainian government as illegitimate, and stripping Ukrainians of agency and their identity.

The evidence that it was a US-backed coup is quite weak; from Nuland's leaked call, to Nuland handing out sandwiches to protesters, to the speculative opinions of Estonia's FM, to the few billions of investments the US has made into civic institutions since 1991 -- it's a little bit of smoke if you squint really hard and apply a good dose of confirmation bias, while simultaneously sweeping under the rug Russia's more aggressive colonial meddling in Ukraine (such as Yushchenko's poisoning).

Maybe better evidence will emerge later about 2014 as records are declassified (such as it did with Diem's overthrow), it's possible and wouldn't be surprising, but barring better evidence, it needs to be labelled the 2014 Maidan Revolution, or something similar.

So this sounds plausible, but since Xi is an autocrat, and since they can just bury/censor a small handful of adverse outcomes, why wouldn't Xi want to ram this through and override the risk aversion of the medics on the ground?

China wouldn't be in this mess if they had followed New Zealand's approach of vaccinating all the old people with a high quality vaccine. Then you can just open up again because the mortality risk of Covid is the same as the annual flu (according to data out of the UK).

In a country with complete control over the information ecosystem, how can it be that so many old Chinese people don't want to take the vaccine? Is anti-vax sentiment the main reason for low vaccination rates among old people in China compared to New Zealand?

> They are already doing that and it will take some time.

Really? The data I've seen (googling and on social media) suggest that there is no change in the vaccination rate.

Why can't they just clandestinely ramp up their elderly vaccination efforts? No face will be lost.

Only because HK's elderly are not widely vaccinated, and also because Sinovac makes up about half of their vaccinations and this vaccine is not as good at preventing mortality. A very similar situation to Mainland China, actually.

So the question still hasn't been answered. Why is Mainland China insisting on pursuing this inferior strategy? The hard-lockdown zero-Covid low-vaccination approach has been shown to be inferior to the alternative approach of ensuring 99% of the elderly are vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna, and then allowing society to open up once this is achieved. My understanding is their vaccination rates haven't gone up much since this outbreak started, which signals that they are not intent on changing course.

A hard lockdown being needed at this late stage in the pandemic signals poor decision making more than anything. Why aren't their elderly widely vaccinated, and why are they still relying on their significantly worse domestically made vaccine?

Not just. Humans invented the styles that DALL-E is using in the first place. The emergence of these novel styles isn't just interpolation. DALL-E, while incredible, seems stuck within the scope of these styles.

Stunning.

My question is whether more compute and more data will be sufficient for the AI to create its own art styles. Everything we see here are within the stylistic paradigms created by previous humans.

No. The non-desert land per capita in Australia is more than twice that in the US.

Not to mention the exorbitant monopolistic fees they can get away with because regulation keeps competitors out of the US, compared to the extremely low fees associated with trading stocks.

> Do you think those people (and their families!) would have been better off if they stayed in Kerala?

Probably not, but the consequence of that shouldn't be to excuse unnecessarily dangerous or abusive working conditions. I think it is morally good to pay people just a few dollars an hour if the alternative to that is that they have nothing. The people who advocate for trade barriers to stop such things are only harming the poor people that they are pretending to care for. But these workers should at least get a safe and respectful work environment. There is too much bullying and abuse that these people face in their work environments which serves no business purpose. It's a big problem in East Asia and the Middle East especially.

I don't like the added cognitive overhead (having to remember how the app works) and lack of physical tangibility of software solutions.

There is automated moderation of Twitter, Youtube, etc, that aggressively blocks or downweights such comments, so it is not surprising that you don't find it. Go and make a Twitter account and start spewing racial hatred, and see what happens. Do you remember all the anti-semitic crap in the Youtube comments from a few years ago (all the triple parentheses etc) that are now mostly gone thanks to AI moderation? The comments section is now actually alright. So your argument is based on the incorrect premise that the sanitized nature of these online spaces is organic. It is actually heavily engineered.

> Mechanically, what would take place?

You would likely get three things:

- Informal networks of political extremists with a recruitment platform of global reach. Similar to r/genzedong in extremism, but far worse. Think ISIS, The Base.

- A tool that authoritarian regimes can use to exercise influence over open societies via coordinated misinformation and sowing division. This centralized effort to divide Western societies via coordinated social media manipulation is already being done.

- A society overtaken by conspiracy theories, with unpredictable consequences. Empirically, sunlight isn't the best disinfectant.

I make these claims by observing the local gradient and extrapolating.

> anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it

The problem is that in the real world you can't silo off dicks like that. Bad opinions (e.g. racial hatred) can spread through the society and cause tremendous damage.

If you're going to argue for zero content moderation, the only good faith way to do so is to first admit that this could be a problem, and secondly admit that you have no problem if Twitter became like 8chan. If you just pretend like these kinds of things aren't possible, I can only conclude you're arguing from a position of ideology.

What scares me to no end is foreign interference by intelligence agencies in domestic affairs done via social media. That is the real danger here. We are seeing the destabilizing effects of that since 2015.

I also just don't see the widespread censorship of conservative opinions that you do. JK Rowling is still there with her TERF views (which I actually largely agree with). Jordan Peterson is still there denying the predominant view on human-caused climate change. r/conservative; nobody wants to censor this or anything like it. Bret Weinstein is still there spreading his Covid vaccine misinformation. Donald Trump got kicked off after repeated ToS violations. Far-leftists also get kicked off (I know they recently shut down a bunch of far-left subreddits) and you don't see that because of your echo chamber.

Yes I agree. The people who go overboard like this are dangerous in their own way, and I'd say are even more dangerous than the free speech absolutists who insist on constraining private companies in a way that is actually anti-1A.

What I advocate for is basically what we have now. Non-governmental, voluntary and minimal censorship of things that are likely to cause outsized harm in the real world. Also called moderation. I want these platforms to voluntarily remove ISIS propaganda, outright hate speech, election misinformation, and a few other categories, and otherwise allow open discourse. These are all slippery slopes (especially election misinformation removal), but that shouldn't resign us to simply throw up our hands and allow Kremlin propaganda to destabilize democracies.

This isn't like [1] due to multiple independent lines of corroborating evidence, including multiple eye-witness accounts, photographic evidence, and satellite imagery from two weeks ago that corroborates this evidence.

It is fine to reserve judgement where there is no good evidence, but that's not what you're doing by comparing it to [1].

The null should be that the Kremlin is lying, especially in the context of fairly solid lines of evidence, and given their recent history of lying about everything and denying everything, even that which we can observe with our eyes (e.g. Lavrov's "We are not invading Ukraine" -- said in March).

The corrolarly of this absolutist perspective is to allow Twitter/Wikipedia/Arxiv/Facebook/HackerNews to become 8chan, which is a reductio ad absurdum of your position that all ideas are equally valid, objective facts can't be agreed upon (or perhaps don't even exist) and one can't possibly design a good moderation system. I reject this position on purely empirical grounds, simply contrast the tightly moderated HackerNews with the unmoderated sewer that is 8chan.

I am not talking about absolutes (at least I wasn't attempting to). The person talking about absolutes was the person I was responding to, not me.

I have no right to complete silence in my apartment block, but I do have a right to not have to listen to my neighbor's loud music at 3am in the morning.

I have no right to never breathe in second hand smoke, but I do have a right to not have to breath it in inside small enclosed rooms.

Our society and the law makes these kinds of trade-offs all the time.

Also, the issue isn't people having to read the speech, it is the speech negatively impacting people (sometimes severely if you are an Asian person that just got knifed on the street) in indirect ways. There is this false belief that speech can't be mortally harmful unless it's a direct call to violence, which I hope we can dispense with since the evidence doesn't line up with that narrative.

I was explaining why your worldview of non-violent speech having no negative impacts on others is misguided, but instead of engaging with that point you decided to withdraw into immaturity and sarcasm. Have a good day.

Unfortunately the real world doesn't work like that. If misinformation about COVID persuades large numbers to avoid the vaccine, and the hospitals get clogged, that invariably impacts me. If misinformation persuades the population to elect a populist, that invariable impacts me. If climate change misinformation persuades the population to block the transition to renewables, that impacts me. If hate speech galvanizes the population against my ethnic group, which causes a 300% spike in hate crimes against that ethnic group, that impacts me.

Clearly, the way ag subsidies are done is largely down to corruption, essentially politicians chasing votes from farmers/rural areas, as well as being bought by the ag lobby.

I wish to challenge two things you've said, though.

> The EU could decide to encourage organic farming rather than industrial agriculture based on Monsanto seeds and pesticides. The latter make possible high levels of production, but to a huge cost for biodiversity and even climate dereliction.

I hear alarm bells when I hear people criticizing "Monsanto seeds" and "pesticides". It reminds me of activists who are detached from practical trade-offs or who've bought into woo around GMOs. As if organic pesticides are much better or proven to be much safer? And if they are slightly safer, who is to say the current consideration of trade-offs is wrong? What's wrong with Monsanto seeds?

> Cereals are heavily subsidized and the same dependency is organized to keep Central & South American dependent for basic food.

I am almost certain this is false. It's attributing calculating, conspiratorial malice to forces that can be easily explained by the stock standard self-interested behavior of politicians and an industry lobbying group.

> but at the same time even the truck drivers earn a fantastic living they can use to support a family. This is only possible because of the decades of strong unions negotiating better pay so the mines had to share the wealth.

How is this to do with unions and not just lack of labor supply, i.e. lack of people with a right to work in Australia who also want to be a truck driver in the middle of nowhere.

Mafia bosses have high status in their orbit, so yes.

That's disappointing, isn't this a legitimately good idea? Judging from the current Russian invasion into Ukraine, a tunnel into Mariupol to deliver supplies would have been useful, not to mention the defensive usefulness of underground bunkers throughout Ukraine which have shielded civilians.

We need to also consider Russia's wheat exports. They've threatened protection measures on their wheat.

Wait, isn't there a contradiction here? You said countries need to protect their agriculture to remain sovereign, which is what the EU is doing. Then you blame the EU for protecting their agriculture. Which is it?