It sounds like you’ve just been around toxic and superficial people in your international travels and then extrapolated from them to their whole countries.
Unfortunately, they have people like that everywhere.
South Korea is one example that I have intimate knowledge of where one's consumer habits (the clothes one wears, the car one drives, the logo on one's handbag) is the ultimate signal of status.
You're automatically pre-judged by complete strangers without having to say a single word.
There are always exceptions to the rule, but it is in fact an unspoken rule over there.
The same is true in India. I live in the US, and when I visit relatives in India, they are nonplussed that I can afford a fancier car but choose to drive a Toyota. Clothes, watches, my phone brand - everything is under constant analysis and people feel free to comment on everything. I am used to it now but it gets tiring.
Nope, the US (especially the West Coast and Mountain States) is extremely non superficial in certain very odd ways:
* Almost nobody cares what kind of car you drive. The richest people I know literally don't care and drive Subarus and Toyotas and Ford pickups.
* Nobody cares about watches or jewelry.
* Clothing? It's literally Costco or Walmart for people I know who have tons of money. Unless their wives/gfs/bfs/husbands buy them something fancy for their birthday.
* Fancy wines and liquor? Wines yes, scotch yes. But it's not outrageous.
The things where you notice the money are private planes and nice houses/apartments (and multiples thereof) and art. And perhaps caring even less what people think of them.
In mountain states everything exposed to nature is just beaten into an average. The environment is so harsh it makes sense things affected aren’t much of a status symbol or at least don’t remain one for long hah.
Not just mountain states. I lived in one of the windy US deserts, and everything outside is minimally cared about because it's getting practically sand blasted several times a year.
Many businesses added specific surcharges to final sales to offset the tariffs they paid. While they have no legal obligation to refund those surcharges they imposed, it would be straightforward to do so and it would be the right thing to do.
> While they have no legal obligation to refund those surcharges they imposed, it would be straightforward to do so and it would be the right thing to do.
I'm actually interested to see how this goes legally. I haven't seen an actual attorney who understands the subject chime in on it yet. But I could see a case being made that a line item like that could have a basis of being refunded if the company charging them itself received a refund. Certainly a long shot, but I'm guessing someone will bring a case at some point to see what happens.
Ironically companies that broke out tariffs charges as line items were lauded for "doing the right thing" and are the only companies who could possibly be remotely on the hook here - any other company simply adding it to general margins is quite obviously in the clear.
Or keep it as a rainy day fund against the next time one of their major markets goes insane with attempted extortion, possibly successfully next time? Their customers paid a price they were comfortable with —- if a company returns part of that to the customer, they disadvantage themselves compared to their competitors who do not do so in the next round of tariffs, since their competitors can use the rainy day fund to delay price rises, capturing customer spend (which is to say, competitor-voluntary-donation-to-customer spend).
So the value-add would be the consumer would get to find out the name of the show or movie that’s playing, the same info that also pops up if they hit the pause button?
Nor is it nonsense to acknowledge how cool it is to recognize your own building or that he was able to accomplish the project without expensive materials. Spew is also quite the verb to use. What an all-around unpleasant comment.
Birds adapt their song to ambient noise conditions. This paper [1] studies the Pearl River Delta (where Shenzhen is) as a natural experiment. It shows spectral changes in the target species correlating to background noise levels. I haven't looked hard enough to make sure there isn't a study that does find complexity changes but it's certainly clear that noise can affect bird song behavior generally.
Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.
There’s a lot more to the character than that so I hope 99% is an exaggeration and people are still reading Peanuts and watching the various animated versions. I’m pretty sure they are.
> Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.
Probably, because that's the most popular example of Charlie Brown as a sucker who never learns, but it's a core part of his character and is shown by many, many other gags. There's also a recurring gag with Lucy and April Fool's Day. There's a whole family of them around baseball and Peppermint Patty. There's another recurring gag where he tries to fly a kite.
The comic can't depict Charlie Brown as able to learn - since he never succeeds,† if he could learn, he'd never do anything at all.
† There are a couple of temporary exceptions. When he runs away from home he meets a gang of littler children who respect him. When he has to wear a paper bag over his head at camp, he becomes a success for the duration.
“No, I didn't know about the exhibit before that day. And then I saw the Al piece and it was just—as an artist myself, it was insulting to see something of such little effort alongside all these beautiful pieces in the gallery. It shouldn't be acceptable for this "art," if you will, to be put alongside these real great pieces.”
In art one often follows impulses. Art is about expression after all.
Plus, if these were really AI creations new copies can be printed. Unless the human “co-creator” did something like paint on the work after printing, not much has been damaged.
It's just garbage in garbage out. AIs reliably induce rage and negativity in humans. Humans become angry and violent if shown AI generated data. It's just a fact at this point.
And it's not even like software engineers are special in that regard. Everyone here is quick to spot and express their opinions on use of AI in articles and everyone seem to like to have their words on rampant vibecoded pull requests.
Freedom of thought and speech means you're free to expect people to thank you for spitting on them, and also that nobody else than you would be responsible for that insanity of yours.
> AIs reliably induce rage and negativity in humans. Humans become angry and violent if shown AI generated data. It's just a fact at this point.
This is more conditioning from moral panic mobs than an innate trait. One could also say that TV makes humans angry and violent, or we could simply stop watching cable news.
Paik, H., & Comstock, G. (1994). The effects of television violence on antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis. Communication Research, 21(4), 516–546. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365094021004004
Results showed positive and significant correlation between TV violence and aggressive behavior
Ironically I used Gemini to look those up. Being a social studies thing, of course there is no absolute proof of this, there are many caveats and ways of looking etc.
Tangential - "find meta-analysis to back up my point" is ridiculously easy with AI, and it can be used on both sides. I could just as easily negate the ask and get compelling results.
I would hate having to write a dissertation right now.
I think you're agreeing with me. My point is that TV does not inherently induce negative emotions, but the content of it can. Similarly, AI content does not have to do the same, but poor quality AI content can.
Yeah. More importantly though, AI seems to be a novel way to pry open the crazy out of some people, with sometimes disastrous results.
Or putting it more charitably, some people seem to be more vulnerable, for whatever reason, to multiple different kinds of mental breakdowns (like the psychosis described by the "artist" "victimized" by this "crime").
While I personally don't get it (how some people are so entranced by AI as to have mental breakdowns), it does seem to be a thing, with some catastrophic results[1]. Granted in some cases the persons involved had prior serious mental health issues, that seems not to always be the case. In other words, be it not for AI, those people could reasonably have expected to live normal lives.
You would not be disagreeing with me, actually. I should have clarified that the problem is somewhere in current implementations of generative AI(Google Transformer derivatives), in my opinion, and is not necessarily the case to every shape and form of AI.
But nearly every single implementation of generative AI data generators appear to exhibit this behavior, with Google Nano Banana(tm) implementation as potential sole exception or lesser offender. Something in it is rage and/or derangement coded, NOT in artistic way that rock or metal music recordings are. Maybe this was what supposed "toxicity" of LLMs discussed heavily as chatbots rolled out remedied by extreme sycophancy to the point that LLMs don't literally flip out people and drive them into state of psychosis. But whatever it is, it's insane that everyone supportive of AI is tone deaf on a phenomenon that obvious, reproducible, and widespread.
All it takes to turn anyone into anti-AI Luddite is to show them a piece of text, image, code, any data that they are familiar with. That's not a simple moral panic.
Unfortunately, they have people like that everywhere.
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