UraniumBlazer

TLDR if you don't wanna watch the whole thing: Benaminute (the Youtuber here) creates a fresh YouTube account and watches all recommended shorts without skipping. They repeat this 5 times, where they change their location to a random city in the US.

Below is the number of shorts after which alt-right content was recommended. Left wing/liberal content was never recommended first.

1. Houston: 88 shorts
2. Chicago: 98 shorts
3. Atlanta: 109 shorts
4. NYC: 247 shorts
5. San Fransisco: never (Benaminute stopped after 250 shorts)

There however, was a certain pattern to this. First, non-political shorts were recommended. After that, AI Jesus shorts started to be recommended (with either AI Jesus talking to you, or an AI narrator narrating verses from the Bible). After this, non-political shorts by alt-right personalities (Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, etc.) started to be recommended. Finally, explicitly alt-right shorts started to be recommended.

What I personally found both disturbing and kinda hilarious was in the case of Chicago. The non-political content in the beginning was a lot of Gen Alpha brainrot. Benaminute said that this seemed to be the norm for Chicago, as they had observed this in another similar experiment (which dealt with long-form content instead of shorts). After some shorts, there came a short where AI Gru (the main character from Despicable Me) was telling you to vote for Trump. He was going on about how voting for "Kamilia" would lose you "10000 rizz", and how voting for Trump would get you "1 million rizz".

In the end, Benaminute along with Miniminuteman propose a hypothesis trying to explain this phenomenon. They propose that alt-right content might be inciting more emotion, thus ranking high up in the algorithm. They say the algorithm isn't necessarily left wing or right wing, but that alt-right wingers have understood the methodology of how to capture and grow their audience better.

Income taxes can be made progressive. Sales taxes are almost always regressive. Businesses need to do a lot more paperwork to document these taxes.

Why don't leftist parties campaign to abolish sales taxes and replace the lost revenue with an increase in a progressive income tax?

Am I missing some critical functionality of sales taxes that income taxes cannot replicate?

Edit: Here's an important feature of sales taxes that a few commentators helped me realize. It's better if we think of a sales tax as a "revenue tax" instead. Let's say we are in a country with multiple provinces. A business sells stuff in province A. However, the business and its owners are both located in province B. If sales tax didn't exist, then all money earned by the business would go to province B's government. Province A cannot enact tariffs and stuff like that. Thus, it puts up a "revenue tax" that is taxed to business for all revenue earned, i.e., a sales tax.

For those wondering, no, a corporate tax is not a revenue tax. It's a tax on profit. Non profits for example, do not pay any corporate tax, but they do pay sales tax (which is basically, revenue tax).

I'm sure Lemmy will downvote this to hell, but o3 really is a big big deal. This benchmark was considered to be incredibly difficult to solve. It was highly unexpected that any AI system would meet the performance criteria at least for a few years.

The flip side however, is that o3 is veeeeery expensive to run. It also is not open source. That's why, it hasn't won the Arc prize- which has performance, efficiency and open source requirements. o3 has met the performance requirements for now, which is still very very impressive.

I would recommend giving the article a read to understand and appreciate what this is actually about.

Also, just a little note - We should fight to seize the means of production. We should not fight the means of production itself.

TWAT TWAT

Saw the results of the American elections today. I'm not American, but was following them very closely due to the impact they have on the world. The results went in a way that would make up my worst nightmares.

I was incredibly depressed and angry. I think almost everyone here shares the same sentiment. The next four years are very likely going to incredibly dark for everyone. Entire countries will likely fall to imperialist neighbors. Climate change will worsen. Zooming in to the US, disabled and queer folk will have an incredibly hard time now. More women will die due to abortion inaccessibility. It is very likely that people with preexisting conditions lose their insurance, thus increasing overall suffering and deaths. As I said, a very dark four years lie ahead for the world and Americans, both. Therefore, being depressed right now is absolutely valid.

I think there's a lesson that I learnt here. I spent a lot of time and energy on something that simply wasn't in my control. I am neither American, nor do I own news channels to broadcast propaganda suitable for my hoped outcome. Instead, I could've spent my time on other things, that are in my control, and would make the world a better place. Maybe adopting this mindset could help us?

Listen, I'm not saying that we should just all disconnect from politics. Not at all. All that I'm saying is that we probably should focus more on things in our control now. When elections come, vote. If the government is doing something stupid, go out and protest. Work on your little side project. Work on whatever it is you want to work on. Just try not to doomscroll social media. Doing that would just make you feel depressed and not end up helping anyone.

Therefore, here is what I've planned on doing now. Maybe you guys could find it useful, or maybe not.

• Only participate in politics that is in my control.
• Focus solely on my projects.
• Block all social media posts that talk about depressing/angering topics that I have no control over. I only use YouTube and Lemmy, so doing this is easy for me. On Lemmy, I have put keywords like, "Trump", "Harris", "Elon" and so on in my post filter. I also unsubscribed from all political channels that talk about politics that I have no control over.

As for the Americans who are going to suffer due to a Trump presidency, I am sorry that there are so many stupid people in your country. I'm sure you tried your best. Millions of American showed up to vote against Trump. So many participated in canvassing and so on. So many working class folk donated money to the Harris campaign. Money, that they could've spent on other necessities. You don't deserve this outcome.

However, the election is over. Trump has won. Doomscrolling social media is not going to help anyone. It's a bad outcome, but it is very likely not the end of the world. I don't think it needs to be said, but still- there's a lot more to life than politics. Just because a person that you wanted to win didn't win, it doesn't mean that you can't make the world a better place yourself. Grieve today and wake up tomorrow to focus on a project that you have control over.

AND PLEASE DON'T DOOMSCROLL.

Emile is a guy btw.

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Original creator - deyathemuniz

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/43917853

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