What else can people do? Try the dozen of commercial offerings themselves? Okay I suppose that's doable, you task one engineer to try them one by one for one month. But then the next model drops and you start all over again...
But then what about local models? You have hundreds of variations to test yourself. It's simply not doable unless it's your full time hobby.
You need benchmarks to at least separate the cream from the crop, so you're left with only a few choices to test yourself.
a LOT of the people who love benchmarks are middle management hard-selling GenAI/LLM as magic tech sauce to vaguely technical executives who only want to know about the money aka headcount savings they so desperately desire.
their collective butts are already glued to the hype train as they chase numbers they (often) manufactured to justify the latest round of tech spend.
lots of good use cases out there - like the incredible progress with medical imaging analysis or complex system models for construction - and lots of crap use cases that need benchmarks to cosplay relevance.
Capitalist countries don't have famines at home. That's different from "capitalism prevents famines". Capitalism is happy to cause hunger, inflict death, or imprison people if it's profitable for capitalists, that's baked into the structure of the structure of the system. There's no systemic feature of capitalism that directs capital generating activity unless it violates natural and human rights.
Once the capitalists get enough control of the government they rig everything for themselves. In a capitalist system money is paramount and they have the most of it, so their opinion is regarded higher than everyone else's. Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections. Sine not everyone can be connected, luck is all that's left for most people, so it becomes a huge part of economic activity along with whoring and warring. See Also: OnlyFans, and the Department of War.
I think the main cause (that's actually quite anti-capitalist) is that banks and people at power have the ability to create money out of nothing, to lend the money into existence, while devaluing everyone else.
It was very interesting to me where I finally understood how banks (and the overall system) create money.
As a bank you start with 0 money, you lend 100 to some person that you "deposit" into their account at your bank. So now on your books you have 100 in liabilities (the money that the person has in your account) and 100 in assets (the money the person owes you). So accounting is balanced. You did not need money to start with, as a bank you just "lend it into existence".
Again, like I said, the capitalism you knew and loved is dead. When Bill Gates became the richest man in the world he had like $10 billion dollars. Today we are talking about trillionares now. As today's elites aspire to be able to own 1995 Bill Gates 100 times over, so yeah apparently he didn't have enough power back then.
Can you entertain the idea that someone several orders of magnitude more powerful than 1995 Bill Gates might have more effective control over the government?
Aren't you begging the question? You are saying that today's richest have more money (though you should probably adjust for gdp growth), and I agree. However, you are automatically concluding that they have more power?
It’s interesting take for sure. However it appears that in real life nowadays most millionaires are self made. I was surprised when I found out about it too. Seems to contradict your thesis.
> Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections.
Don't you consider millionaires as ones getting ahead? If not then I've got to say - it's absolutely spectacular how rich did capitalism make everyone if millionaires are not even considered rich nowadays!
Yeah, that’s definitely corrupt. Doesn’t contradict the fact that people are generally richer than ever nowadays and that capitalism enables that, I don’t mind ultra rich getting richer as long as everyone else is also getting richer.
I don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff.
People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.
I think you're mixing up capitalism with commerce. Commerce is where people buy and sell stuff. This is good. Capitalism is where capital is hoarded by an increasing smaller group of people. This is bad.
Look around you, the economy is aligning itself entirely around gambling. From bitcoin to nfts to the stock market to AI to art to dating apps to social media feeds to video games to venture capital to literal gambling apps infesting our phones ads sports. And finally we have actual members of the government gambling on policy.
The capitalism you grew up with is dead, the arguments for and against it are old and stale. That nature of what it is has changed. It's metastasized, devolved into something else entirely as the middle class is evaporating, the lower class is continually squeezed, billionaires become trillionaires, people are lighting warehouses on fire citing low wages as the proximal cause, and the President is ordering automatic SS registration as he threatens total civilization destruction.
This shit is not working and it's only going to get worse.
Those are diseases of morality, not capitalism. Someone who lights a warehouse on fire because they aren't paid enough is an immoral person. In a communist country they would be called a Wrecker and they'd face a firing squad for their actions.
Gambling, likewise, is a moral problem. It should be illegal or highly restricted and often was. Many other problems we face now could be fixed simply by reinstating laws that used to exist.
You and I probably have very different ideas about what is moral and what is not. For me, the highest moral crime is greed. A lot of people seem fine with it today. So for you to claim that the fire happened because of the poor moral character of the person who lit the fire, I can just as easily say this happened because of the poor moral character of the people who didn't pay him a fair wage, which leaves us nowhere.
That's why I focus on purely systemic arguments. The humans in the system are abstract. It doesn't matter if they are moral or not, they respond to systemic incentives. So if they're acting immorally according to you, why is the system incentivizing degenerate behavior instead of moral behavior?
there a lot of things that may be immoral but it is the system that promotes it or prevents it. our system promotes it (there are ads for kashi and fanduel on nickelodeon) so it is the capitalism
I'm implying that Trump is the paragon manosphere avatar, and his administration is filled with little versions of him. The purpose of the entire administration is to challenge incumbent government apparatuses (it opened with DOGE which broadly did precisely that, they reoriented the DoD from defense to committing war crimes, they took over DOJ and turned it into a personal law firm for Trump, etc.) for the benefit of Trump.
The men in his cabinet like Hegseth and Kennedy try to appeal to the testosterone laden (and deficient) crowd. Women like Bondi and Noem also tried their best manosphere impression, but of course in classic manosphere fashion, both women were booted out of the cabinet first.
To the extent that the military believes, as its leader does, that they are not operating under "stupid" rules of engagement, and their purpose is "maximum lethality" with a policy of "no quarter" for adversaries, the US Military is currently a defacto manosphere army.
In your view, what would a manosphere leader legitimately challenging an incumbent government apparatus look like?
You have completely confused manosphere and far-right authoritarians in your mind.
The manosphere movement is about fighting misandry, for men's rights, and, to be a little reductionist - how to get laid easily and avoid committing resources to women. It's basically the fan club of Andrew Tate and the likes. They are not competent or resourceful enough to take control of a government.
There's an overlap in the venn diagram, sure. But it's much smaller than what you think it is.
No my friend, it is you who have the manosphere confused. Because the manosphere is not a sphere at all but a pipeline to right wing authoritarianism. It's not separate and apart from far right authoritarianism, it's what creates far right authoritarianism. It starts with the "fight misandry" and "men's rights" but it quickly leads men toward MAGA grifters. It's not a men's rights movement it's a movement that exploits vulnerable men.
> There's an overlap in the venn diagram, sure. But it's much smaller than what you think it is.
If the overlap is small, you'll have to explain why there are no major left wing manosphere personalities. Everyone on the left I know and follow who are fighting for men's rights and fighting misandry (a fight I've joined) does not consider themselves "in the manosphere".
> They are not competent or resourceful enough to take control of a government.
They definitely have resources -- more than a few billionaires were responsible for that.
But taking over the government, apparently, does not require competence. All it takes is a thirst for violence, a willingness to break the law and constitution, the backing of major corporations and the richest person in the world, and for enough good people to do nothing.
Hate to break it to you, but they're already in the building. They renamed the "Department of Defense" to the "Department of War", told everyone there are no rules in war except who has the most guns wins, and then proceeded to bomb boats, invade Venezuela, send troops into American cities, and invade Iran, while eyeing Cuba and Canada and Greenland next.
I have no idea how men who take hormones and hormone-blockers feel and prefer. Haven't studied the matter that deeply. I'd say it alters preferences, but that's a wild guess.
Elon Musk posts about self driving car technology coming in the next 3 years (for 10 years): very technology related, super cool, straight to the front page! Take my money!
Elon Musk takes effective control of government functions by bribing incoming President, uses power to close investigations into his driverless car technology that is currently running amok on city streets causing death and destruction: not technology related, off topic and uninteresting. Downvote and flag.
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