Unions would be useful even then, and if american history over the past decades is any indication, strong unions might be necessary to keep those laws too, lest capital use it's influence to erode them without an organized force to counter it.

Why would the universe being a black hole invalidate religion, any more than, for example, the universe being really big already does? Don't most religions focus more on some entity or entities they think made or govern the universe more than what physical processes are "used" to do that, or what the ultimate shape of the universe is? Even when a contradiction is found, it's easy enough for a religion to just say "well, that was metaphorical", or "just the limited understanding given by (insert deity here) to our ancestors" or something along those lines to make it fit.

A dictatorship of any sort wont get you much different than capitalism does: capitalism has the effect that it does because it creates a situation where power concentrates (because wealth is generally a proxy for power, and having a lot of capital under capitalism allows you to more easily obtain more of the finite pool of it), so that decisions are made that benefit the few with power while the many without much of it suffer the negative externalizes of those decisions, that the wealth of the powerful insulates them from. A dictator represents simply skipping to the end-state of that, where power is highly concentrated among one person and those that directly enable them. They still will make decisions that benefit themselves at the cost of the well being of everyone else, because people are selfish that way. Even if you somehow get a person that somehow cares more about everyone else than themself, that person wont be dictator forever, and since that mentality isnt the norm for dictators, odds are soon enough you'll end up with an "unenlightened" dictatorship again.

Its a great movie quote, but I always found it a bit grating used outside that context, because, well, other animals dont instinctively develop some natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment.

Its not like a wolf will realize that they've been reproducing too much for the local population of prey animals and decide to have fewer cubs, or actively avoid certain prey species that have declining numbers compared to the rest, if theres too many to support the excess ones will simply starve, or wander off in search of prey. The rabbits wont decide to reproduce less if something happens to the local predator population, they simply overeat their food supply until their numbers collapse back down or their abundance causes the number of predators to rise.

The equilibrium is a product of every species acting in a way that would upset that balance if they were not all in competition with eachother, and it is only stable over relatively short periods of time, in the long run it changes under pressure from geological and climactic shifts, evolutionary adaptation, etc. All humans have done, is evolve an adaptation that is too disruptive for this process to look the way it normally does. (namely enough intelligence and aptitude for tool use to effectively adapt to different conditions much faster than the time it would take for anything slower breeding than perhaps a single celled organism to evolve a counter for).

Id be willing to bet that, if you gave any other animal a set of traits that effectively allowed them to adapt to things much faster than the pace of natural evolution, you would get similar disruption.

What's more, such an equilibrium will eventually come back. If humans manage to destroy our natural life support system enough to go extinct? Then it will return as whatever survives our mass-extinction event fills empty niches and carries on as it has. If humans do survive but manage to make large scale civilization impossible and must revert to low tech subsistence hunter-gathering? Then they would be subject to the same growth constraints and competition as other large omnivores. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that allows for high tech industrial civilization to exist with a generally sustainable resource cycle, that doesnt disrupt the surrounding ecosystem anymore? Then that surrounding ecosystem is no longer subject to our disruption. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that just replaces by brute force the natural systems that we rely on, so as to no longer need them to survive, and continue on until the whole natural ecosystem is gone? Then as humans and their pets, crops, livestock, parasites etc would represent the whole of life remaining on earth, that built environment would be the environment, and as it would have to have been made generally self-sufficient and stable to get to that point, it would still represent a stable ecological state, if a very different and less diverse one than what exists now.

That doesnt mean that things wont change anymore once a stable state is reached, even stable environments in nature are not permanent, but humans cant logically continue to diminish a finite natural environment forever. Eventually humans will stop doing that, there wont be any humans to do it, or there wont be a natural environment left to do it to. In that sense, we can be viewed the same as any other disruption caused by any other organism, we've just created a much bigger shock than usual and the process of finding a stable state is still ongoing.

Honestly this seems like a very misleading title. This isn't arguing that AI cannot replace human labor, it even says the reverse. What it's arguing is that AI companies cannot expect to get an amount of revenue roughly equal to the salary of that would otherwise be paid to any labor replaced, which is a much less impactful statement unless one happens to have a strong stake in the financial success of an AI company.

I mean, the guy is a lawyer, I'm not sure I can think of a profession with a more "generic person in a formal but not fancy outfit" stereotype than that.

Well, I've been losing sleep and having anxiety attacks over the possibility that he might worm his way back into office again, so no sympathy

You would think Israel, of all countries, ought to know how blatantly evil this kind of stuff looks.

By that metric, kelvin would be even better though.

As a former cashier (grocery store not walmart admittedly, but I doubt things are that different), I dont think weird uses for the items are the way to go, the cashier is barely even going to notice or care what you're buying. what I bring to freak out the cashier, are some item that needs ID to buy, some big heavy item with the barcode removed so that it will take a bunch of lifting and turning in a hopeless effort to find it before someone eventually has to go find another one and bring it over, and a propane refill if walmart does those (at my grocery store the process to go find a full one was a pain, especially in the winter since they were outside). Further, I try to buy these items with the help of a ton of expired and unexpired coupons mixed together, several gift cards, and a stubborn half-deaf old person who wont take no for an answer.

The ironic thing is, conflating any and all criticism of the state of Israel with anti-semitism could be argued as anti-semitic itself, because to suggest that jewish people in general and the Israeli state/military are one in the same such that criticism of the later is also hateful towards the former, is also to suggest that jewish people as a whole are responsible for the actions of Israel.

As cultural groups as a whole are inherently unable to be guilty of crimes (since even if a large number of people belonging to one commit some crime, such a group will also contain members that cannot be guilty of it, like young children), but states and similar entities, being organized and capable of decision-making, can be, then any attempt to link the moral culpability of a state and that of a cultural group is inherently to apply unfair accusations to that group, and thus hateful to it.

I mean, the United States has, to be fair, developed a food culture that emphasizes using a lot of meat, especially over the past century or so. It's not surprising that people from an area that eats so much meat, who go vegan, are going to want to look for ways to still make dishes familiar to them