There are 2 things they are trying to do here IMO:

• They are using tariffs to bully weaker countries into worse deals and to interfere in our politics. Here in Colombia the media (all right wing lapdogs) keep talking how president Petro needs to bend the knee and just acept whatever Trump wants to do because it would be so bad for Colombia if we get extra tariffs. And they keep spewing propaganda making it sound like Petro is the one being crazy to kill any remaining support he has (not that he needs any help jajajaja, he has been a really mediocre president on his own and the extreme right is going to get an easy win next election anyway). They are not wrong of course, a trade war between Colombia and USA would hurt Colombia so much more than the USA just because of the relative size of our economies. And Trump and the rest of the republican assholes are using this to bully us and the rest of latin american countries.
• They want to reshape the tax collection in USA to remove taxes from rich people and collect more from poor people. At the end of the day, blanket tariffs on all products is just another regressive sales tax that will fall mostly on poor people. They want to reduce wealth taxes and income taxes which are collected mostly on rich people and instead replace them with regressive taxes like tariffs instead. I mean, his recemt tax changes shifted a huge amount of the tax burden away from the rich and to the poor and middle classes. If you want to put a conspiracy hat, they also think this will create a population boom in the USA. Research shows that people under worse economic conditions have more children, so they want to make life harder to poor people to get more and cheaper workers. At the very least the Musk rat has spoken openly about this, so it’s not crazy to think this is part of their stupid plan.

Long term, the USA is royally fucked because of this. They are killing any good will the USA has with the rest of the world and they are screwing the poor people that actully generate the wealth of their country. But short term rich people will make bank with all this and the rest of us will pay for it.

The issue is how do you “meassure” merit? How do you decide who has earned what they have and who hasn’t?

If you are a conservative it’s very easy, the status quo defines merit. Those who have are those who deserve because the system is working as expected. So rich people ruling is meritocracy for them.

If you are a racist/xenophobe/etc then it’s also very easy, those who are in the “good” (read white in the USA) group are the ones with merit, so they are the ones that should rule.

A few years back, when college degrees where just for rich people with connections, merit was having a college degree because that proved you where educated and hard working jajajaja. Now that a lot more people can get college degrees it no longer means that for some reason jajajaja.

Etc, etc. In general, people use meritocracy to justify their own biases and the decisions they make based on those biases. The USA is of course the current poster child of this, but by no means it’s exclusive to them.

The reality is that when you think about it there is no such thing as merit in the general sense. For example, I get paid well by working as a programmer. And I’m the first one to say that I’m very good at it and deserve my pay. Yet, if my toilet is broken I need to call a plumber and defer to them. So, who says I deserve to earn more than a plumber? I do say so because it greatly benefits me of course jajajaja. But if push come to shove I would absolutely prefer to have a society without programmers than a society without plumbers. So who has more merit?

The simple truth is that we are all valuable in our own context and we should try to build a society where we all can participate and contribute as needed. Ideas like meritocracy are used by right wing people to justify the existence of hierarchies and social classes. If there are better people (with more merit) then of course they should be in charge and everyone else must obey. But the more you dig into the idea, the less it makes sense. Meritocracy is just a very easy trap to fall into because it’s the kind of idea that sounds good to people until you really think about it, but in practice it’s just a useless idea if you want to make rational decisions.

Hahahahah. First, nice strawman. I have never said that all problems in latin america were caused by the USA. You gringos are really touchy with criticism for a country that loves to support coups.

Second, look here https://www.vox.com/2020/5/11/21249203/venezuela-coup-jordan-goudreau-maduro-guaido-explain for example of the ridiculous coup attempt made by the US government in Venezuela. And this was after they had declared Guaido as president and blockaded Venezuela. Note that the equipment and training were provided by US personel. Hell, they even arrested 2 gringos hahaha. It was so patethic that there is no denying anything here my dude. I love how incompetent Trump was, I honestly wish he wins again because of shit like this hahahahaha.

For Bolivia just check this https://cepr.net/data-from-bolivias-election-add-more-evidence-that-oas-fabricated-last-years-fraud-claims/. The OAS, lead by the fearless USA, fabricated evidence to justify a coup. I mean, as soon as they had new elections Evo’s party won by a landslide hahaha. The only reason he is not president is because they now have 2 term limits, which is great IMO. So the coup did do something good hahahaha.

As for Colombia being punished, just look at the declarations from fucking Rubio in https://colombiaone.com/2024/06/13/colombia-us-aid-cut/. They cut the “aid” they provide us just because we picked a left wing president. Note that this “aid” is used to combat narcotrafic on behalf of the USA, wiith Colombia spending even more of our own money. Note that a lot of Colombians, myself included, would like to move towards legalization instead of continuing the war on drugs. But the USA threatens us with a blockade everytime a serious attempt is made.

I could keep going, but I’m pretty sure you are just going to downvote and ignore everything I said hahahaha.

Nah, we don’t do both. Carbon capture projects are bullshit for the most part, see https://time.com/6264772/study-most-carbon-credits-are-bogus/ for example. Some are actually generating more carbon, not less overall. Instead, companies have been using this as a way to “buy” their target metrics, except they are buying offsets that don’t really exist. And they use this to market their products as green/net zero products, which incentivizes even more consumption.

So overall this whole thing is most likely a net negative, as in we would be better without them. And honestly is not surprising at all, technology is not magic. It’s just people want perfect solutions so we don’t have to do anything and the problem goes away, so they keep falling for this bullshit. Case in point, your comment lol.

Ok, I’m going to assume you are honestly confused here. Though I’m autistic too dude, please don’t use that as an excuse. Your problem here is reading comprehension, not autism. There are no social cues to miss here.

The only thing in my comments about you is the fact that no, I don’t think I should be polite when someone is saying stupid and harmful shit like the original comment (not you) was saying. They are being rude with their actions, so they don’t get any respect from my words, period. And you too, to a lesser extent. Even if you don’t realize it, your comments boil down to “you may be right, but you were rude so I’m going to act as if you were wrong”. This is a harmful position to take, and it’s the position all these stupid centrists take to justify doing nothing and maintaining the status quo.

Everything else is not about you obviously hahaha. I mean, you didn’t really say anything worth discussing beyond ponting out how inpolite I was hahaha.

My man, you seriously need to improve your reading comprehension. Not everything is about you. Or are you just trolling?

I called it a stupid take because it was a stupid take. I’m sorry the truth hurts. And to be honest, I’m not interested in having a conversation here. I just wanted to point out how stupid that comment was so people who are actually insterested in being informed can start reading about these topics.

And finally, fuck you too as a treat hahahaha. Seriously, what are you contributing to the conversation here? Because too me you are just distracting us with your moral superiority while ignoring the very serious issues I was mentioning. Downvote me for not being polite, who gives a fuck about fake internet points. As long as some people reading my comment actually go and read about this I don’t give a fuck hahahaha.

Not you, the original comment I was replying too. I don’t understand why you think denying the harmful shit being done by the USA is polite while calling them out is inpolite?

Oh, so you guys get to vote for politicians that keep fucking our countries over. And you guys can go online to repeat your stupid propaganda. But it doesn’t matter because I wasn’t 100% polite. wtf is wrong with you people?

Where did I say that? Nice strawman dude. I gave specific examples of USA intervening in latin america. If you disagree about any of the examples we can discuss them. But please don’t put words in my mouth.

Jesus christ, what a stupid take lol. Just recently they tried to put Guaido in charge in Venezuela (who had support from Colombian paramilitary groups too). And let’s not forget how they took Evo down in Bolivia a few years ago over voting fraud allegations, which later turned out to be just statistical analysis mistakes. And they put that awful woman in charge who commited at least 2 massacres against protesters after taking power. And they are backing Milei and Bukele in Argentina and Salvador. And they are punishing Colombia financially for daring to pick Petro as president. And …

Don’t get me wrong, fuck Evo and Maduro for trying to stay in power forever. And Maduro for sure is a left wing dictator. But go fuck yourself with that propaganda, the USA can’t stop fucking with us latin americans. Educate yourself before talking.

That was always the point. Rich people get to have abortions and live consequences free lifes, while poor people have to raise kids/workers to keep the machine well oiled. I’m so glad I’m not from the USA hahaha.

Look at this guy posts people. He’s just one of the many Milei shills being paid by his fucking government. Lemmy is getting pretty bad with this kind of shit, there are a lot of these single issue accounts with a few “random” posts and comments to give them legitimacy. Sometimes is very hard to know, but this account is pretty blatant. Like most of his posts and comments are pro Milei bullshit “news”. This is going to break this platform, and it’s worrying seeing this so fast in a platform this small.

And Apple has earned any trust? Jesus christ people, like less than 2 months ago they were caught restoring “deleted” photos from iCloud to user devices hahahahaha. Of course fans were excusing them talking about disk sectors like that has anything to do with cloud storage being available accidentally hahahaha.

But yeah, Apple cult followers will find a way to justify surrendering even more freedom to Apple with this BS for sure. And they will be paying top dollar for the pleasure hahahaha.

What a load of BS hahahaha. LLMs are not conversation engines (wtf is that lol, more PR bullshit hahahaha). LLMs are just statistical autocomplete machine. Literally, they just predict the next token based on previous tokens and their training data. Stop trying to make them more than they are.

You can make them autocomplete a conversation and use them as chatbots, but they are not designed to be conversation engines hahahaha. You literally have to provide everything in the conversation, including the LLM previous outputs to the LLM, to get them to autocomplete a coherent conversation. And it’s just coherent if you only care about shape. When you care about content they are pathetically wrong all the time. It’s just a hack to create smoke and mirrors, and it only works because humans are great at anthropomorphizing machines, and objects, and …

Then you go to compare chatgpt to literally the worst search feature in google. Like, have you ever met someone using the I’m feeling lucky button in Google in the last 10 years? Don’t get me wrong, fuck google and their abysmal search quality. But chatgpt is not even close to be comparable to that, which is pathetic.

And then you handwave the real issue with these stupid models when it comes to search results. Like getting 10 or so equally convincing, equally good looking, equally full of bullshit answers from an LLM is equivalent to getting 10 links in a search engine hahahaha. Come on man, the way I filter the search engine results is by reputation of the linked sites, by looking at the content surrounding the “matched” text that google/bing/whatever shows, etc. None of that is available in an LLM output. You would just get 10 equally plausible answers, good luck telling them apart.

I’m stopping here, but jesus christ. What a bunch of BS you are saying.

And what do you think we should do about that? Because all your points seems to boil down to just do nothing and feel superior, the usual centrist. Funny how that just happens to support Israel’s position and enables them to continue with the genocide. Fuck off, you are a disgusting person.

Come on people. Stop enaging these obvious trolls/propagandists/retards. Look the way they respond, “nope” and that’s it, really? Grow up or fuck off dude, you should be ashamed of yourself. People are trying to have a conversation and people like you just come here to distract people with obvious trolling. If you are a paid propagandist you should be fired for incompetence. And if you are not you should be ashamed of yourself.

I get that. But then I don’t go to car forums to complain about my car and then get mad when they suggest my car is shit and I need to change it hahahaha. My point is, these people only want to complain instead of fixing things, and it’s very annoying. Don’t get me wrong, they can complain as much as they want as far as I care. But I wish they would complain somewhere else, it’s just noise if they are not willing to do anything.

To be fair, the conversations I have seen usually start with people complaining about whatever the latest Windows shitfuckery is. Some well intendend, but clearly naive, linux user suggests to just switch to linux. After all, the OPs usually complain in a linux community, what else do they expect?

Then they, or sometimes a different user than the first one, say something like “but switching to linux is work and I have to learn a new thing” like a dumbass. After that it’s almost impossible, IMO, to have a constructive conversation. Other people from the community get so mad that the conversation becomes a religious argument hahaha. After all, how do you help people that want to fix their problems while at the same time they refuse to change or learn anything? And on top of that they get so self rigtheous when people dare to suggest literally anything. The only solution they want is for Microsoft to magically stop being Microsoft and fix Windows hahaha, I hope they get comfortable while they wait hahaha.

Honestly I don’t even try. Yes, Microsoft is the one fucking people over. But people are proud of their lack of knowledge when it comes to computers and refuse to even learn the little bit that will actually fix their problems. And that’s on people, not on Microsoft. I just let them enjoy Windows, they deserve it.

Look man. This comment is actually very different to your initial comment, and honestly it sounds very reasonable to me.

But can you explain to me what you were trying to say in the original comment please? Again, to me it reads like you are saying “rich and famous people are not whitening their teeths in the USA” which is factually incorrect. And to top it off, it looks like you are saying “it’s impossible for rich people to get bad healthcare in the US because they have money”, which is non sense as shown by this example of teeth whitening. And the more I read this comment, plus your very rude response (“are you okay?” Seriously dude, that’s no way to have a conversation even if you were right), the more it looks like this is what you are saying. And that’s what I was answering to.

I’m not saying, and I never said, that you think the healthcare system in the US is good. But the more I re read your comments, the less I understand what you were trying to say if it’s not what I “quoted” above.