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by bilbo0s 33 days ago
>As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea)

Good news!

You don't need to worry about that anymore! I can guarantee you, as the article implies, money from big tech is being funneled to people perfecting models for in-betweeners as we speak.

/s

I think we may be entering an era where we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level. Because if you think the present where the "1%" refers to the group of people to whom the lion's share of resources in society accrue is bad; imagine a future where the "1%" refers to a group that are the only people any given government and steward class need to keep everything running.

4 comments

>we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level

Who is this "we"? As if society at large gets a say? Do people owning land and houses ask the homeless of how to organize home ownership?

All it takes is a populist with a good message to make a political group. All functional Western nations have voting mechanisms that allow for radical government change, if there is enough public support for it. It might take a decade to fully manifest, but if we're entering an age of such extreme, then I would expect people to eventually vote for such change.
Having the mechanism does not equal guaranteeing the positive result that this mechanism theoretically allows.

Politicians' whole schtick is to promise the sun and the moon and then give their buddies the lucrative government contracts, do insider trading, and generally create hidden rings of influence.

Voting and democracy in general are a facade and have been probably ever since they first existed. Not seeing that seems... a strange form of idealism, to me.

>All functional Western nations have voting mechanisms that allow for radical government change

Voters never get what they vote for.

The RNC tried to stop Trump from winning the candidacy but he won regardless. The fact that MAGA movement is seemingly enthralled to him means at least some people are getting who they voted for, and therefore your statement can't possibly be true.
I doubt they voted for increased fuel prices.
>The RNC tried to stop Trump from winning the candidacy but he won regardless.

That's not an example of people getting what they voted for though.

It's RNC trying to prevent people prevented get the alternative to what they decidedly didn't what. RNC just wanted the same old politics and career players (that people didn't want), and tried to prevent Trump for that reason (same as Dems did to Bernie).

Not that Trump wining changed anything. After he won, he negated on his promises, and just gave same old neoliberal/neocon RNC shit combined with some theatrics for the gullible.

So people prevented from electing who they wanted, and when they finally elected him anyways, they got the same shit they voted him as the alternative to.

Why do you think globalization is even possible to reverse via human thought?

If you accept global competition, then expecting there to be hundreds of millions of job positions with meaningful protection from competition seems literally futile.

Even tens of millions would be a huge stretch. So probably not even a full 1% of 8+ billion people could attain that.

A lot of "us" thought quite thoroughly and, you might say, even correctly, about "how to organize work at a fundamental level".

News flash: the truly influential people that hold most of the capital on the planet don't want those ways of organizing work at a fundamental level. They want serfs and -- if possible -- slaves.

Get to work enacting a change. Most of us are busy surviving and feeding families. You know where the "1%"-ers are. Let's see some results -- on the news.

I am seriously super tired of seeing this "we" trope. As if there's a true democratic way of changing things out there. When was the last time the worker class has been truly listened to? Point me at some real history.

> Get to work enacting a change.

At least in the US, it's questionable as to whether "people" (writ large) really want change deep down inside.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves."

This quote helped me explain why and how average working-class and poor Americans vote for people who think of them as subhuman.

Very good quote, thank you. And it seems like propaganda worked on these people.
You're welcome.

But I would add that at this point I'm not sure this is really "propaganda". In my mind, it's more "the culture."

America is a highly individualistic society and always has been. By some measurements, it's the most individualistic society in the world and perhaps the most individualistic nation-state in history.

If you're American, you're basically taught from an early age that anything is possible and that the sky is the limit. You could be born poor and still become one of the world's richest people. Technically, some of these beliefs are true. But they're exaggerated and the end result is that you have a ton of people who devalue things (like, say, universal healthcare) that they come to see as a threat to the lottery ticket they were born with.

To put it in blunt terms, this is how you end up with a poor redneck in West Virginia voting for a foul-mouthed socialite billionaire from New York City. The latter thinks the former is trash; the former thinks under the right circumstances he could have become the latter.

Unironically, ever since generative art tech arrived I have been anticipating full automation of in-betweening. I am rather (pleasantly) surprised it hasn't already been done.
Full automation of in-betweening was achieved during the 70's, I was there, it was a big deal, and then nobody used it. Interpolation animation, splines and vector morphing are all versions of that tech. The automation is in-betweens is how modern animation software works, but a lot people want 3D characters, 3D views, and the freedom to change perspectives after beginning. So "in-betweening" is now used more for the creation of certain motions that either cannot be motion captured, or are some signature motion for that character and the motion is designed - and that will be in-betweens for the motions between key poses, but those are all 3D motions, so different views can be chosen later. Even if the final production will appear to be 2D hand drawn, it is 3D production beneath, and our original in-betweening method at the individual joint level within an articulated body.