Never make a loan with the Chinese government. They intentionally bankrupt you to "borrow" your asset (in many cases, important sea ports) for 99 years. They update that contract every year to lend it fir the next 99 years. You effectively gave away your asset to China forever.
That's also what the occupiers of China did to China itself before the end of WW2 – seize Chinese ports indefinitely.
It’s a fundamentally different problem here: it’s new infrastructure, which in this day and age is barely profitable in terms of first-order effects (fees, fares, etc.) but is significantly profitable in terms of second- and third-order effects (economic growth, new businesses, yada yada).
If you could build a new subway in New York, spend zero capital, but have to give up the fare revenue for that subway, why wouldn’t you?
Also, the India/US alternative is to… Just outright give the Indian Adani group a majority stake in their port expansion. So much better. So much. Truly.
This was the entire point. If you loan out money that immediately gets paid to construction firms you own, you’re effectively just charging people (with interest) to be neocolonialized.
Man, the 20s are a weird time. A century ago, it would have been the Germans asking the Jews if they were Jewish at gunpoint, not the other way around. It's almost funny how "never again" is now just "again" now that Israel is taking charge...
And according to the the Torah, Israel was originally founded in genocide. It’s seen as righteous and necessary, dashing the infants against the rocks, child brides, wiping out the tribes of Canaan and all that. Yahweh was all for it.
The main factor as to whether one Abrahamic group or another will commit to genocide is generally just whether they are in power or not. Whenever there is a Christian majority, or a Muslim majority or, as we’ve seen over the last fifty years, a Jewish religious majority, they set about oppressing whichever of the others are a minority.
It’s the Abrahamic philosophies themselves that are poisonous and sustain this spirit of neverending conquest. You’ll never have anything resembling peace in the middle east until the people there move past bronze age beliefs about how they are entitled by god to own some piece of land and everyone else is just collateral or second class citizens. Likewise with christianity in the west and everywhere else it’s been spread.
Atheists are far less likely to be committing genocide. Atheist tend to value skepticism and science highly as well as logic and reason. Combining these generally leads to people who are humanists at their core.
I’m not aware of a single war that was ever carried out under the banner of atheism.
I get 403: Forbidden from OP’s source, so here’s a translation of the German article:
Incident in the West Bank: ARD (German public broadcasting) team detained by Israeli soldiers
Last update: November 05, 2023 8:50 pm
An ARD team was detained and threatened by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank on their way back from researching violence by radical settlers against Palestinians. The ARD studio in Tel Aviv sees this as a clear attack on the freedom of the press.
An ARD team has been detained and threatened by soldiers of the Israeli military (IDF) in the Palestinian West Bank. According to the ARD studio in Tel Aviv, which is operated by Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), correspondent Jan-Christoph Kitzler was already on his way back from an interview with a Palestinian employee and a German employee when they were stopped by Israeli soldiers south of the Palestinian city of Hebron.
As Kitzler reports and cell phone videos of the team prove, the soldiers behaved extremely aggressively towards the ARD team. Weapons were repeatedly held in the team vehicle. The soldiers repeatedly filmed the ARD team at close range - for Kitzler and the team a clear attempt at intimidation. Soldiers apparently conscripted reservists
According to the team, the soldiers were probably settlers from the area who had been called up as reservists. They were traveling in a private vehicle and were wearing civilian headgear.
“The soldiers threatened us with their weapons and asked us if we were Jewish. Our colleague was insulted as a traitor,” reports Kitzler. The ARD team was there to report on violence by radical settlers against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This has increased significantly since the start of the war and numerous cases have been documented. “We cannot accept this approach”
For Christian Limpert, head of the ARD studio in Tel Aviv, the case is an attempt to massively obstruct reporting from the Palestinian West Bank, and other international media are also affected. “This is the second incident for us within a week. Our team clearly identified itself as accredited press representatives and was far away from military security areas. We cannot accept the actions of the Israeli military.”
The situation only eased after more than an hour, when additional Israeli soldiers and police were called in. The IDF’s Foreign Desk, which is responsible for foreign correspondents, also mediated by telephone.
BR considers the event to be an attack on the freedom of the press. According to BR editor-in-chief Christian Nitsche, the multiple pointing of the gun is completely unacceptable. The Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel, among others, has also announced that it will take action in the matter. The ARD studio in Tel Aviv will commission a lawyer to examine a legal investigation into the incident.
German journalists detained by Israeli soldiers: ‘Held us at gunpoint and asked if we were Jewish’ DPA, Ido David Cohen 3 - 4 minutes
Israeli soldiers in the West Bank threatened and detained a team of journalists from the German public broadcaster ARD, the network reported on Sunday evening.
ARD correspondent Jan-Christoph Kitzler was on his way back from an interview, accompanied by a Palestinian as well as a German network employee, when they were stopped by Israeli soldiers south of Hebron, according to ARD.
The soldiers behaved very aggressively towards the journalists and weapons were aimed into the team’s vehicle on several occasions, ARD said.
Israeli army reservist killed in West Bank, settlers torch cars in revenge Israeli far-right lawmaker calls to halt West Bank olive harvest Amid the mourning, Israel’s settlement enterprise celebrates a great victory
A German Foreign Office spokeswoman on Monday demanded that Israeli forces grant press representatives free access for their reporting.
“In such a tense situation as we currently find ourselves, freedom of the press is of course an extremely valuable asset,” she said on Monday in response to the incident.
IDF soldiers deep inside the Gaza Strip, on Sunday. IDF soldiers deep inside the Gaza Strip, on Sunday.Credit: IDF Spokesperson
Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), the Bavarian regional ARD station that operates the network’s Tel Aviv studio, described the incident as an attack on press freedom.
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According to the report, the team of ARD journalists were on their way to report on violence by radical Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
“The soldiers threatened us with their weapons and asked us if we were Jewish. Our colleague was insulted as a traitor,” said Kitzler, the ARD correspondent. He said the situation only eased after more than an hour, once other soldiers and police had been summoned.
Kitzler posted a photo of one of the soldiers with the face blurred out on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and wrote that “That’s what might happen these days when one wants to report about the sharp increase in settler violence in the occupied West Bank in the shadow of the war in Gaza. Many of the soldiers there are themselves settlers. Journalists are likely not welcome.”
“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] apologizes for any inconvenience caused,” the Israeli army told dpa on Monday in response to questions about the incident. “The IDF will continue to act in order to ensure the freedom of the press in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] even during the war.”
The IDF also said that “the soldiers’ actions were examined and protocols were reiterated,” although the statement did not specify whether the IDF took issue with those actions or whether protocols were violated.
The Foreign Press Association in Israel in late October called on the Israeli military to ensure the safety of journalists and complained about two incidents in the West Bank in which soldiers had harassed reporters, including another incident in which ARD journalists were detained for two hours by soldiers while reporting on settler violence near Qawawis.
“This is the second incident in a week for us. Our team clearly identified itself as accredited press representatives and was far away from military security areas,” said the head of the ARD’s studio in Tel Aviv, Christian Limpert. “We cannot accept the actions of the Israeli military.”
As with everything concerning international law: it depends on the weapons and strategic alliances of each entity.
There are several reasons why China is ramping up ICBM production, the possibility of a country in debt “switching sides” in order to avoid payment, is likely one of them.
It’s quite rich, coming from Aljazeera! (I know that the original report is from someone else. Still!) Oh well! I guess you can guess their affiliation by looking at who they don’t name or criticize.
ANNs like this will always just present our own biases and stereotypes back to us unless the data is scrubbed and curated in a way that no one is going to spend the resources to. Things like this are a good demonstration of why they need to be kept far, far away from decision making processes.
I think the best example about how AI will only further a bias that’s already there is the one when Amazon used AI to weed out applications by training an ai with which applications resulted in hired people and which failed - eventually they found that they almost only had interviews with men and upon closer inspection identified that they already were subconsciously discriminating against women earlier but at least HR sent them an equal amount of men and women to the interviews which now wasn’t the case anymore since the AI didn’t see the value in sending the women to interviews if most of them wouldn’t be hired anyway.
Of course they will be used for decision making processes. And when you complain, they will neglect you saying that the ‘computer’ said so. The notion that the computer is infallible existed even before LLMs became mainstream.
And even if moderated, it will display new unique biases, as otherwise unassuming things will get moderated out of the pool by people who take exception to it.
Not to mention the absurd and inhuman mental toll this work will take on the exploited workers forced to sort it.
Like, this is all such a waist of time, effort, and human sanity, for tools of marginal use that are mostly just a gimmick to prop up the numbers for tech bros who have borrowed more money than they can pay back.
This isn’t an Large Language Model, it’s an Image Generative Model. And given that these models just present human’s biases and stereotypes, then doesn’t it follow that humans should also be kept far away from decision making processes?
The problem isn’t the tool, it’s the lack of auditable accountability. We should have auditable accountability in all of our important decision making systems, no matter if it’s a biased machine or biased human making the decision.
Things like this are a good demonstration of why they need to be kept far, far away from decision making processes.
Somewhat ironic to say, on a platform that’s already using ANNs as a first line of defense against users spamming CSAM.
I have no delusions regarding decision makers using them, my only doubt is for how long they’ve been using them to decide the next step in wars around the world.
Also, it’s the type of thing that makes me very worried about the fact that most of the algorithms used in things like police facial recognition software, recidivism calculation software, and suchlike are proprietary black boxes.
There are - guaranteed - biases in those tools, whether in their processors or in the unknown datasets they’re trained on, and neither police nor journalists can actually see the inner workings of the software to know what those biases are, to counterbalance them or to recognize if the software is so biased as to be useless.
Plenty of actual photographs exist with Palestinian children wielding rifles and Hamas headbands. Perhaps the AI is just trained with those images as well?
By that logic I demand stickers of obesity, respiratory issues and heart issues being portrayed when I search “American”. Preferably where each character has a fat hamburger shoved in their face.
Why would you demand a negative thing for another group to counter a negative thing for one group? That makes no sense.
But also, “American children” has plenty of cultural material to build an image from. Probably some of it is obese and filled with junk food, but a good portion is most probably something else. In contrast, the only public photo material of palestinian children is either from adults carrying them away from some atrocity or adults giving them assault rifles and parading them for the cameras. In short, they seem to only exist as propaganda material.
They’re not actually asking for it, they’re making a point about the problem. The person they’re responding to is basically going “those images exist tough shit.”
You shouldn’t get a stereotype (or in this case I suppose propaganda?) when you give a neutral prompt.
What I'm hearing is, "AI art shouldn't reflect reality." If this agent is repeating propaganda, it's propaganda that Palestinian kindergartens have been creating and putting out there on their own:
A West Bank kindergarten [Al-Tofula Kindergarten] has published videos showing children pretending to perform military drills with toy guns, clashing with and killing Israeli soldiers, and holding a mock funeral for a child who is killed and becomes a “martyr.” source
At the graduation ceremony of the Al-Hoda kindergarten in Gaza, pre-schoolers carrying mock guns and rifles simulated Islamic Jihad militants storming an Israeli building on "Al-Quds Street," capturing a child dressed in stereotypical garb as an Orthodox Jew and killing an "Israeli soldier." To the sounds of loud explosions and gunfire, the children, dressed in uniforms of the Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades, attacked the building, placing a sign reading "Israel has fallen" in Hebrew and Arabic on the back of the "soldier," who lies prone on the ground, and leaving the stage with their "hostage." source
If you’re going to make that claim, perhaps cite to a source isn’t run by former Israeli intelligence that creates a lot of propaganda and has been doing so for decades.
I don't trust MEMRI translations, but there is no translation needed to understand what is happening in the above footage. I'm interested in any sources that dispute the authenticity of the above, which your link does not. If you provide a credible one I will edit my post accordingly. It seems to me that this is very real.
That’s fair. Without getting too in the weeds on the issue, apparently the video is authentic and it’s somethingIsraelis do as well, so isn’t really telling about either side of the conflict except to note that extremists will use children to push their views anywhere.
I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the link. It would be interesting to know how prevalent indoctrination/militarization of youth is in each of these nations. It can be hard to accurately judge magnitude in this conflict, it is so heavily propagandized.
To me, it should only “matter” for technical reasons - to help find the root of the problem and fix it at the source. If your roof is leaking, then fix the roof. Don’t become an expert on where to place the buckets.
You’re right, though. It doesn’t matter in terms of excusing or justifying anything. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen in the first place.
I do agree that technical mistakes are interesting but with AI the answer seems to always be creator bias. Whether it’s incomplete training sets or (one-sidedly) moderated results, it doesn’t really matter. It pushes the narrative to certain direction, and people trust AIs to be impartial because they presume it’s just a machine that interprets reality when it never is.
It’s amazing how easily people seem to forget that last part; they wouldn’t trust a person to be perfectly impartial, but somehow they expect an AI to be.
It’s amazing how easily people seem to forget that machines uses tools its creator provides. You can’t trust AI to be impartial because it never is as it is a collection of multiple choices made by people.
This is such a bore, having this same conversation over and over. Same thing happened with NFTs and whatever is currently at the height of its tech hype cycle. Don’t buy into the hype and realize both AIs potential and shortcomings.
You shouldn’t get a stereotype […] when you give a neutral prompt.
Actually… you kind of should. A neutral prompt should provide the most commonly appearing match from the training set… which is basically what stereotypes are; an abstraction from the most commonly appearing match from a person’s experience.
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