The phrase “is linked to” should be a massive red flag.

If it was smuggling Iranian oil it would say, “is smuggling Iranian oil”, not “is linked to smuggling Iranian oil”.

until this administration is long gone

Based on past performance, the next Democrat administration will repeal maybe 50% of these changes at most.

I’d be down with banning everyone from social media

Reddit moderation has been pretty comprehensively captured by bad actors.

They spend over £50,000,000/year on care, research, and conservation.

A significant portion of what we know about the ancient world is a direct result of their research sharing and activities; for example when the Rosetta Stone was in French hands they kept it to themselves, when it was in Egypt they did nothing with it, but when it came to Britain it was shared with research departments across Europe as well as in Britain, resulting in our ability today to read hieroglyphics and demotic script.

Think about that for a second: if the Rosetta Stone had been left in Egypt, there’s every possibility that Egyptians today would still have no idea about most of their own history or how to read their own ancient texts. You might dismiss this as paternalistic or white-savioury, but it’s true nonetheless.

Even as recently as last year we had researchers finding things like https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/babylonian-map-world-0021631 that simply wouldn’t have happened without the British Museum’s work. So, I’m inclined to cut them some slack.

People give the British Museum a lot of shit, but it’s free all year round for everyone.

If you can’t get your LLM to not deny the holocaust, then your LLM is not ready to get platformed on a major internet site.

LOL

Hard disagree, because it’s like with all the other forms of AI-created slop - with the real thing there’s layers of meaning, and you spend time and mental energy digging into that and getting something from it. But as with AI art and AI prose, you try looking closer at it and it just makes you feel hollow and frustrated at having wasted your time.

There was no meaning, there was no symbolism, there were no clever literary allusions, there was no interplay between the melody and the lyrics, it’s just superficial garbage that tricks you into giving it attention by sounding good on its first listen.

(Edit: lol touched a nerve with some shit talentless musicians)

You can tell what someone’s politics are by what they consider to be a political topic.

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Hopping on this to share that Milo Learns made by some of my Cambodian friends also just added Japanese for conversation practice. It has an online community as well if you don’t like talking to an AI. But sadly it is freemium, so OP wins on that front. https://milo.niy.ai/

Yeah, Capitalism fundamentally isn’t “for all”, it’s for holders of Capital.

Yeah I think this could backfire horribly, when grifters with degrees are given that extra credibility by government decree. Andrew Wakefield is a doctor after all.

That sub wasn’t like this a year ago. This is a stark tell that the sub has either been captured by bad-faith agenda mods, or is being heavily botted. Or both.

weirdest use of that meme format to date

also the irony of 145 IQ man tripping over his own grammar

Lots of easy blocks tonight.

Good idea

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also I’ll throw in that because the yen is so weak vs the dollar at the moment (hence the overtourism), $665 a night is in of itself understating the kind of place we’re talking about. ¥100,000 in 2012 was $1,300. Minimum wage is ¥1,000/hour.

I just had a quick search on a bookings site, and 80 out of the 103 five-star hotels in Kyoto are under that threshold, and of those, 40 are under $350. If you’re being hit by the top rate then the place you’re staying in is bougie as f.

Also also, my reading of it is that it isn’t a 10% tax, it’s a stepped tax equal to 10% of the bottom of its bracket, i.e. it’s ¥10,000 regardless of whether your room was ¥100,000 or ¥300,000.

OP’s “Tourists in Kyoto will soon face a 900% increase in a tax” summary would be more accurately stated as “Tourists staying in one of Kyoto’s 23 most expensive hotels, will face a 9 percentage point increase in tax”.

Shitty headline writing strikes again.

“900%” is both a sensationalist way of describing it, and also not even applicable to the overwhelming majority of visitors.