Economists don’t call something a recession until rich people start feeling the squeeze. The definition of a recession, while vague, is really designed around that fact. So even if they’re not doing it on purpose, their analytical blinders prevent them from recognizing other conditions that are at least as meaningful to many more people.
Yes but also no. The U.S. isn’t a party to the ICC. It’s not under ICC jurisdiction regardless of the ASMPA. The function of the ASMPA is mostly to serve as political theater.
The U.S. should be a party to the ICC, but it’s not and it likely never will be.
Except the U.S. is not a party to the ICC and therefore not subject to its jurisdiction. It should be, but it’s not. This is bullshit fear-mongering over something that literally cannot happen, in order to distract people from the thing that will and should be happening.
Before we get out the flaming pitchforks, let us not forget that pretty much no one reads or cares about the New York Times. Their readership (print and web) is minuscule compared to entities like CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, MSNBC (and Fox, OANN, Breitbart, Joe Rogan…).
Sure, it sucks that the NYT is sucking Trump cock, but in the end, that won’t move the needle.
I don’t read the Times anymore. I get my news elsewhere. That said, there are a few things to consider here, when it comes to the relative shittiness of the NYT vs other major papers. We have this notion, unfounded, that the NYT “used to be” better, or more progressive, or what have you. Certainly compared to the other two “papers of record” for the country (Washington Post and Wall Street Journal), it’s a raging pinko rag. But the fact remains that it was founded as a conservative-leaning paper, continued to be a conservative-leaning paper in the 20th century and, surprise surprise, remains a conservative-leaning paper. The lean is more Tower of Pisa than Man Vomiting on Sidewalk, but it’s still conservative.
Many of its bad takes (and there are many) are squarely in line with mainstream views. At worst, its views lag behind the country by a few years. And like all major news corporations, it is incentivized to maximize its visibility (and therefore revenue). Given the options of 1) publishing something incendiary that will put the paper in the public eye and help in creating more news to print or 2) doing additional work with the anticipated result of the truth not being nearly as interesting and therefore not nearly as attention-grabbing, they’re going to do the less work option.
Next, the NYT is a victim of the news cycle just as much as the TV networks, if not more so. While the website updates fairly regularly throughout the day, the paper comes out once every 24 hours, and must be prepped hours in advance. This means that breaking news suffers from two issues: 1) it has to be investigated at a speed faster than the TV networks because they paradoxically don’t have the luxury of time and 2) they can’t afford to be tentative when they don’t know something. CNN and Fox especially can get away with saying “we’ll report back when we know more” because that “back” is maybe 30 minutes from now. “Developing stories” exist on news networks. They do not exist for print papers. If you publish, you have to claim to be definitive, or people will stop reading. (“Why should I read the NYT when they just keep saying they don’t know shit?”)
Finally, and we should take some solace from this, it should be noted that the NYT, despite being one of the “papers of record” for the country, is basically screaming into the void. Almost no one reads it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, they’re not conservative enough for the people who can throw money at a news organization when there are free alternatives available, and they’re not progressive enough for the rest of us to care. The number of eyeballs scanning the NYT is vanishingly small compared to the eyeballs staring at Fox News - or even CNN, for that matter. Basically, the NYT just doesn’t matter anymore. They can say whatever the fuck they want. They’re not influencing anyone who isn’t already on the same (sorry) page.
I certainly wouldn’t fault anyone for giving up on the NYT because of its journalistic errors. I certainly have. But we should neither be surprised nor shocked. This behavior is baked into the cake, and it has been since 1851, and got even worse after 1980 when CNN first went on the air. They didn’t suddenly get stupid, and they never betrayed us. We have simply never been their intended audience.
This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.
It also has a 1v1 mode (player vs computer or PvP) that is just fantastic. I actually spent most of my time playing the 1v1 mode way back in the day.
If I’m not mistaken, a “militia” was understood to be an ad hoc, non-standing armed group, supplied by the resources of its members. The amendment was added so that if a militia were ever needed (again), it could be formed, because the pool of potential militia members had their own firearms. Laws limiting citizen access to firearms would hobble any new militia.
Given that armies at the time were only recently becoming “standing” (permanent) armies, and the U.S. didn’t really have one, their best option for making war was militias. They were acutely aware that the revolution began that way, and only later developed an actual (organized, separately supplied, long-term) army.
But very quickly, the U.S. developed permanent armed forces and never had to rely on militias again. At that point the 2nd amendment really should have been obsolete.
Or free Black people.
They weren’t quite the sharpest tacks in the box.
It doesn’t help that the sentence makes no sense. The second clause requires that the first be the subject of the sentence, but then the third clause starts with a new subject, and lastly there’s that weird “German” comma after “Arms.”
There’s more than one way to interpret the meaning, but strictly speaking the only syntactically accurate rendering comes out roughly as:
[The right to] a well regulated Militia shall not be infringed, as it’s necessary to the security of a free State (security meaning the right of the people to keep and bear arms).
…which is also meaningless.
It’s a stupid amendment for lots of reasons, but the big one is that it’s just shitty English.
“I lost a brother once. I was lucky. I got him back.”
“I thought you said men like us don’t have families.”
“I was wrong.”
Wow, right up front, they’re being disingenuous:
“The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.”
…No? Apple won’t bear that burden because they’re going to keep using WebKit. Firefox can keep using WebKit. Not using WebKit is a choice, with pros and cons.
Do you not understand how unions work?
The contract would be a combination contract, for performance and AI training. That’s explicitly the thing that’s been agreed to here.
That’s correct, but it’s important to distinguish something explicitly here. The voices may not be copyrightable, but the dialogue is, as long as it’s not also generated by AI (i.e., dynamically generated). Also, the trained model that generates the voice is still proprietary: only its product (and only the sound itself, not the words if the speech is from a script) can be openly used.
It does, yes. And they can also choose to opt out of future uses of their voice in the AI trained model. Which essentially means that their contracts are on a per-project basis, rather than allowing the game developer to force them to contract for the current project and any future use of the model by that game dev.
That’s… what this agreement proposes.
This deal solves the problem you’re encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.
And it will protect voice actors’ jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the “opt out” language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.
Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.
This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).
Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just … not exist anymore.
It wasn’t awful, it was just hapless. It probably would have gotten its sea legs in a second season.
Sad story: the actress who played the little girl died a day after her honeymoon and 8 days before her 22nd birthday, from a heart attack. (She’d had a heart transplant when she was 15.)
It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.
But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.