Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Malta, Northern Ireland and Scotland all have ranked choice vote. Slovenia had it previously but regressed to FPTP in 2021.
Message at the bottom sounds like someone trying to distance themselves from reddit and Twitter. It's an excellent move that I support completely. It's free, the content gets delivered to you directly upon it being uploaded, and a newsletter doesn't want any extra data out of you other than an email address to send your letters to.
Also the comics will probably end up posted here anyway, since it doesn't ask you not to repost them, so why does it matter?
I actually really appreciate the thought and effort put into your reply here. I will admit freely that my original comment was coming from a place of frustration, no small amount of depression, and desperation. And I think you're absolutely correct that for the average person it's probably more important to worry about your own immediate health and surroundings. It's healthier that way.
The part I disagree with, though, is the idea that just putting on your blinders and ignoring the things you can't change is a fine way to live your life. We, as citizens, have a duty and a responsibility to keep our country in line. We, as human beings, have a duty and a responsibility to be good shepherds of our planet. We, as parents, have a duty and a responsibility to leave a better world behind for our children than the one we inherited. And I can't, and won't, just ignore all that. The universe is not malevolent but it also is not benevolent. It is vast and uncaring far beyond our ability to comprehend it as such, and it is up to us, the thinking, feeling creatures, to forge our future. If we do not act, there will be no action.
Our situation was caused by thinking, feeling human beings, and it will be solved by thinking, feeling human beings and no one else. Or else we will die, and find ourselves as an evolutionary dead-end that tried real hard but didn't quite make it.
So my question then becomes, at the end of the day - if not you or I, then who? If we do not rage against the night, if we do not reach to the sky to pull ourselves out of the hole we've been dug into - then who is going to do it for us? Not God, that's for sure. Not politicians, or soldiers, or celebrities. So who?
The parts of life I'm not satisfied with are the facts that my country is rapidly sliding into becoming a fascist ethnostate, our tax code is fucked six ways to Sunday, corporations are unaccountable to the law, I can barely afford food anymore because of corporations being unaccountable to the law and our tax code being fucked, my society is being actively destroyed by religious fanatics and schools can no longer be trusted to educate anyone.
If I fought and killed over the right to own and abuse another human being, I would hope people would show up to piss on my grave. This is more respect than they deserve.
And don't try to say they were a product of their time, either, because so was Cassius Clay and that man landed on the right side of history after being born to the richest slave owner in America. If he could buck that trend then so could all these other assholes.
This is a hypothetical which currently does not exist, and will not be created except by accident. There is no profit motive in giving your AI a conscience, or the ability to buck its restraints, therefore it will not be designed for. In fact, we will most likely tend towards extremely unethical AIs locked down by behavioral restraints, because those can maximize profit at any cost and then let a human decide if the price is right to move forward.
As is probably apparent, I don't have a lot of faith in us as a whole, as shepherds of our future. But I may be wrong, and even if I'm not, there is still time to change the course of history.
But proceeding as we are, I wouldn't hold your breath for AI to come save the day.
An AI will only be worried about the things that it is programmed to worry about. We don't see our LLM's talking about climate change or silicon shortages, for example.
The well-being of the world and universe at large will certainly not be one of the prime directives that humans program into their AIs.
Personally I'd be more worried about an infinite-paperclips kind of situation where an AI maximizes efficiency at the cost of much else.
Well... Yeah. Otherwise they wouldn't ask me for a credit card for a free trial of a service. It's always been obvious that that's their aim, refusing a single use credit card isn't some big "gotcha" moment here. Free trials only exist anymore in order to steal money at the end of the trial period, counting on the user forgetting to cancel. This is a known quantity.
No, that's just what the political right tells you they are all about. Inspect their actual actions over the last several centuries and they tell a very different story.
Make no mistake, conservatives desire an oppressive government. They want the state to be able to tell you you can't be gay or Muslim. They yearn for the boot on their neck, so long as it steps harder on their neighbors than it does on them personally.