I genuinely can't understand the disconnect you people have between a plot of ecologically diverse forest life and a sterile field of corn just for the indulgence of a bag of Doritos.
See, it's not hard to make disingenuous leaps. If you're going to tell me about sustainable local farming don't bother, I'll dismiss it like local animal farming vs. factory slaughter.
All life is supported by displacing or ending others. Even if you don't view plants as ethically problematic, the agricultural practices to feed civilisation, by definition, must upset the natural ecological balance and harm animals.
The reason a vegan doesn't feel upset about eating produce is the degree of removal from the animal harm. They don't see the deforestation or destruction of wetlands or the damage done by pesticides or in fertilizer production. It's no different than an omnivore not feeling guilt when a butcher kills an animal (even if they wouldn't do it themselves).
This harm has always happened since we developed coordinated agrarian societies. The most ethical stance is that humans should return to their natural ecological niche, hunter-gatherers with minimal reliance on agriculture.
However, veganism isn't possible in such a society. The ability to supplement the human diet with plant based alternatives at scale requires disruptive agriculture. Thus strict veganism* in this lens is inherently self defeating.
*The vegan concept of harm reduction isn't impacted here, there are still lots of reasons to go plant based
That makes sense wrt redistribution, but the original comment limited itself to the ethical problem and not the legal problem. I just don't see how it makes sense in that context because it's entirely unclear who owns the work, that's the nature of the technology.
If I train a model on the work of 1000 artists each of them contributes some fractional amount to each weight. When that model generates an image, it's combining a pseudorandom human token input with the weights and some random seed info.
If I provide a prompt of my own making, am I stealing 1/1000 of the content from each artist? Is the result 1/3 mine from my token input? Is the result 100% the property of whoever trained the model? Do we need to trace the traversal of the weights and sum the ownership of each artist based on their contribution to that weight? Is it nobody's due to the sheer number of random steps that convert the input intent to the final result?
What a weird distinction. So if I get a prompt to make a particular scene in a particular artist's distinct style: not stealing. But if I share that prompt (and maybe even some seed info) to a friend, is that stealing? If I take a picture of the generated content, stealing? If someone takes it off my laptop without my knowledge are they stealing from me or the artist?
My viewpoint is that information wants to be free, and trying to restrict it is a losing battle (as shown by Ai training). The concept of IP is tenuous at best but I do recognize that artists need to eat in our capitalist reality. But once you make something and set it free to the world you inherently lose some ownership of it. Getting mad at the tech itself for the economic injustice is silly, there are plenty more important things to worry about in our hell scape.
You could also look into community gardens. Not as convenient or simple as a home garden, but still pretty nice.
You clearly have an incredibly optimistic view and I commend you for that. The raw facts are on my side though.
The world, objectively, has been at an absolute high water mark for peace. The conflicts that happen are nowhere as sweeping or brutal as the historical norm. The headlines that cover our feed about tens or hundreds of thousands dying would be footnotes compared to the wars, atrocities, plagues and disasters of the past.
~~China~~ America for example has no interest in global domination, and nothing to gain from it, but also: Yes, and I want ~~America~~ Britain to have less power.
American hegemony began just like any other: you worry about your neighborhood until your control over it expands your concerns to the wider world. If you told someone in the late 1800s that the need to control Puerto Rico and Hawaii as naval bases would lead to needing 128 foreign military bases worldwide in a little over a century they wouldn't believe you.
The collapse of the British and French empires...
Only "nothing but good" if you think self determination infinitely outweighs the violent political turmoil and instability of the power vacuum. Not to mention many of those subjugated people came out the other side still under the thumb of the new American/Soviet influence.
less recently the Roman Empire...
Wait, are we talking about the same Western Roman collapse where basically all measures indicate a precipitous drop in quality of life for the average person in Europe? Where we famously lost a massive chunk of knowledge and some technology that still can't be reproduced today? Where stability was mainly found in the growth of other empires and the expansion of church influence?
the fucking thing about those, they can actually end
True, but that doesn't mean I want to chance living through them. We're also talking about an unexplored era of major conflicts with nuclear powers. Things might "end" a little more emphatically than we want.
Would you want to be subject to the whims of imperial rulers thousands of miles away?
Depends on the alternative. There are some plausible futures in the crystal ball where my answer would definitely be yes.
brit
frenchfryenjoyer
There are never "less imperialists". It's a function of the power difference between the haves and have not.
Go read any history book on what happens when an empire collapses. Here's a spoiler: it's not good for the vast majority of people.
More than ever, the world is a zero sum game. We know the resources, we know their limits and we know the trajectory of our pale blue dot. If you thought the Pax Americana was bad, wait till you see existential power struggles between peer states.
No you need to explain why one hegemony ending will magically end imperialism
The sales aren't quite apples to apples. Very few WNBA players have the same marketability as a decent NBA player. Clark is a generational talent and the face of the league, but adding up the revenue of a bottom tier NBA roster dwarfs her. For reference, she brings in about 26% (!!!) of all WNBA's $200M revenue, while the lowest revenue NBA team (the Pelicans) brings in $272M.
You are right that the compensation doesn't match up however. Clark's rookie contract is $80k/yr for her $52M contribution compared to (minimum) $1.1M/yr for those Pelicans players contributing $18M.
Could be any number of valid reasons that have nothing to do with eating meat. For example, human safety. Unless you're arguing for a dismantling of civilization due to its natural encroachment, I don't know where you're going with this.