I don't think immigration is bad, but if the "problem" of fertility below replacement is caused by the other problem of people who might otherwise want kids not being able to have them because of economic constraints, focusing on solving the first problem by importing competitive and ambitious skilled professionals seems at least kind of questionable.
For bananas, when they're ripe I slice them up and freeze them. Some other fruits are cheaper frozen than fresh, so I buy those frozen to begin with, and mostly eat them with my oatmeal in the morning.
Pick an idea and roll with it, most of them won't work, but the only way to find out what will is experience since nobody is going to tell you the truth about money making methods.
I've read arguments that those figures are misleading because various forms of privilege are correlated with a college education the other way around; connections that could help you get a job, baseline cognitive aptitude, cultural fit with a high paid workplace, having the resources to be free to socialize and network rather than working a job on top of schoolwork etc. There is likely a large group of people who go to college and end up getting little to no benefit in terms of income potential.
You also can't fairly compare average income against median debt, because the outliers at the top I believe will pull the average higher than the median in both cases.
There's also how a higher income does not necessarily mean you are better off, and people who are in debt are obligated to have a higher income rather than reducing their expenses, so the debt itself is a cause of making more. Someone working multiple mentally/physically draining jobs at the expense of their non-work life will have a higher lifetime income, but that might be a situation they wish they were not in, and debt obligations will prevent them from downsizing their lifestyle.
And when I watch AI videos, I get the sense that the people making these things are unable to come up with anything genuinely clever beyond the feat itself
I also feel this way when watching a certain kind of show, where the process seems to have been to write a premise that checks off various boxes, and then the outline was handed to someone else to fill in the blanks, as if all the details are an afterthought, and are fundamentally disconnected from each other. Makes watching it feel like an empty waste of time. Sometimes it seems like it could be good at first, but once you see enough of it to tell, there's that retroactive disappointment.
Someone once told me that art is like emotional nutrition. That made sense to me. Art feeds my feelings. And if that's the case, consuming AI art is like eating styrofoam.
This comic essay goes on to say that the reason for this is that it's not authentic, and what the author went through to produce art is what gives it nutritional value. I don't think that's quite right, because this is broader than just art and what an artist is trying to say, it's a property of all information we consume; we need it, and we want it to be good, not bland and empty and the same as everything else, not irrelevant to our lives. People intentionally communicating their genuine experiences to you through long practice and consideration is something that often meets the bar, but so is a sunset or an animal doing something cute or an unidentified noise outside.
I think what's being described here, something I personally dislike about a lot of AI content online, is something like an equivalent of symbol drawing. You can tell what the person who put it together had in mind, and also that probably not much thought was put into how to depict it beyond generic standards of quality. So there's all this space where information could be conveyed, but it's obvious that it's effectively just noise and only there to look impressive, and because of the disconnect you're basically mentally obligated to only consider the barebones concept. This is made worse and more glaring when it looks exactly like all the other similar AI images and videos.
Which is a shame because it doesn't have to be like that. More effort, creativity, and playing off what the tool is producing makes it not bad to look at imo. So does going the other direction and letting AI output be its own thing rather than a representation of your thought. I still have an image I generated years ago with Disco Diffusion framed on my wall, it's really abstract and barely looks like the prompt but it still is really cool to me because a human being would not have made something that looks like that.
Based on my experience with spaces for discussing and arguing about AI, there is a huge amount of middle ground in peoples opinions between unconditional rejection of the technology and complete denial of every problem or threat that could be associated with it. There's also many different perspectives about what solutions to those problems are a good idea or not.
There is not anything like ideological unity. Someone who is supportive of AI for anti copyright reasons is usually going to have a lot of differences of opinion with someone who thinks AI powered surveillance will solve society's problems by eliminating crime. Someone who wants strong government crackdowns on AI because they think Eliezer is right that a superintelligence will form and kill us all will disagree in many ways with someone who thinks the technology is largely a scam. This is a new thing that's causing rapid changes, so people are going to have different ideas about it.
That's fucked up, they should not do that. Even if they do it in a way that users are actually secure (maybe generating the password in the browser, nothing serverside?), it isn't good to train people to trust a website for this.
This is a good point, there are definitely plenty of times I've gotten a response and ended up embarrassed and rethinking a bit how I approach things, and I'm certainly not advocating to avoid that. And maybe "disable inbox replies" is more something with niche uses and not a general solution here. I guess the main reason I mention it is, most of the time I have felt a similar kind of anxiety about responses has been over some specific comment I believed really should be said but knew was likely to get a hostile reaction, and being able to rule out worries over those specific comments helped a lot on Reddit.
The larger point I want to make though is that the anxiety you are describing in the OP post should be overcome, and shouldn't be a struggle people face alone without help. I want to hear from more perspectives, and it's not great to think it's likely many are deterred entirely by this sort of fear of social disapproval. IMO learning from mistakes is harder if it's considered as and feels like a punishment or enforcement of some external will.
Of course if someone never wants to read comments they can just do that, but I think that's a bit of a different thing because it seems that would indicate disinterest in back and forth engagement here overall instead of just a specific kind.
I wonder though why you feel that you should "face consequences" for expressing an opinion you expect will be unpopular, while at the same time expressing anxiety about the possibility of it happening (when you have conviction you're right even), because that's honestly confusing to me. Why would it necessarily mean you 'screwed up' just because what you have to say triggered hostility? Wouldn't it be better just to be able to worry about it less, and express yourself more freely without chilling effects? People might say this could be abused, but I guess the way I see it is that letting others have the last word is what it amounts to externally, and what you choose to read or feel yourself is private and something you have broad license to make your own choices about.
For me the most common situation on Reddit where I use this feature is if I have something to say in disagreement with someone who is already talking aggressively about something. Where I have good reason to think they're likely to leave a nasty response, and that there likely won't be anything productive left to say, I'll probably have to hold myself back from responding further anyway, so there's no point feeling anxious in the meantime worrying about getting the inbox notification.
I also disable vote scores, though fortunately that's something Lemmy does have now afaik.
I don't see how it's fine because it's basically just a loophole that makes the law useless isn't it? If they have ultimate authority over what is and isn't allowed on your phone, and the owner of the phone has no say in that, what do the details of how it happens matter?
But the meme is making the more extreme claim that no uses exist, so any counterexamples mean it's untrue. Not the best way of criticizing companies that don't know or care what a technology is good for imo.
This, plus I find it way easier to not care now that I don't watch television anymore and have a good adblocker and so never see advertisements for movies.
So what? It may arguably be not a developer's fault, but it is everyone's problem, given the growing dystopian alternatives to an accessible distributed software ecosystem. A problem can be acknowledged without admitting blame. Happy cake day btw.
I don't think immigration is bad, but if the "problem" of fertility below replacement is caused by the other problem of people who might otherwise want kids not being able to have them because of economic constraints, focusing on solving the first problem by importing competitive and ambitious skilled professionals seems at least kind of questionable.