The 'wallpapers' in question are pirated games made in renpy (python game engine) or rpgmaker (js based), which makes them a really good vector for malware. As another commenter noted this is a bizarrely common way for Chinese people to get porn through the great firewall.
> After the ban, Balochi priests in the Sindh region complained to the British Governor, Charles Napier about what they claimed was a meddlement in a sacred custom of their nation. Napier replied:
>>Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs!
>Thereafter, the account goes, no suttee took place.
Imperialism gets a bad rap—and it can be bad—but it wasn't black and white as the rash and motivated slogans in the street would have you believe. Empires can have a beneficial and civilizing effect on peoples who are unable or unwilling to address certain issues themselves. The British Empire was a huge force in halting the slave trade. The Spanish—allied with surrounding tribes—put an end to the murderous and psychotic Aztec elite; the Mayans experienced a similar fate. Sati in the Indian subcontinent is another example. Rome's civilizing influence on Europe's barbarians is also well-known.
I am sympathetic to the idea that contemporary views on imperialism are overly-focused on its downsides and blind to its upsides. "What did the Romans ever do for us?" etc.
But I find these arguments a bit tired. I'm not familiar with Sati but I know the Indian subcontinent has been civilized, if not united, for thousands of years. The British brought different values and culture, for sure, and a plethora of benefits. But I can't agree that they had a "civilizing effect" on a people who already lived in a civilization.
> Empires can have a beneficial and civilizing effect on peoples
You can't trot out Kipling's "white man's burden" without at least acknowledging the historical and racial context around it. And in my opinion, justifying imperialism because it's civilizing a lesser people is a sure route to the cruelest forms of domination via chauvinism and white supremacism.
I think it would be better justified as a sort of corporate merger: Your company organization sucks and we think we can get better outcomes for both companies if we put your company under our management.
> The British Empire was a huge force in halting the slave trade.
This is true. At the dawn of the industrial age, those pioneers of industry outlawed their chief competition in the most noble, high-minded, and selfless act of compassion in human memory.
> The Spanish—allied with surrounding tribes—put an end to the murderous and psychotic Aztec elite
Also true. Of course, they then proceeded immediately to set about extorting and exploiting the locals.
The article takes a while to get there, but it is focusing on a set of companies I hadn't heard of ("Transsion, Oppo, Vivo, and Lava") that buy components from last gen smartphones to make cheap devices to sell in the African and South(/east) Asian markets.
Presumably the supply of 5+ year old used phones that fully work is not enough to meet that demand, which is why these frankenstein Android companies exist.
Most available data suggests that sports betting is much worse for the people making the bets, as it better targets people with poor impulse control. Bad bets in political markets aren't causing measurable increases in bankruptcy and domestic violence rates (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-exp...).
I live in IL, and digital slots have taken over so many spaces. Online sports betting is bad enough, but more than that is going on.
Not just bars, but restaurants. Places you might take a date for nice Italian food have little corners with digital slots. Gas stations, Taco joints, sometimes an entire business in a strip mall dedicated to digital slots.
It's insane. The only place like it I'd seen prior to a some years back was Nevada. Businesses must be making crazy money off of them to be so prolific in putting them in, and that money comes from somewhere (i.e. not likely to be casual players).
I passed through some of the cities around Chicago and was shocked by seeing the random slot machines everywhere. It brought to mind the hospital scene in idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wymc2SGJkk0
That said, I actually played one at a restaurant while waiting for a carry out order and it ended up killing some time and paying for our meal that day. The impending downfall of society paid off for me that afternoon.
I don't think that article supports your claim that bad bets in political markets aren't causing measurable increases in bankruptcy and domestic violence rates. It only tells us about online sportsbetting, and it was written in 2024 before prediction markets really took off. If anything, it provides evidence weakly in favor of the argument that bad bets in political markets would negatively affect the bettors.
Sports gambling a few advantages over any other subject that seem near insurmountable to me:
- it has the semi-respectable veneer of something that normal people have done throughout human history
- it has completely parasitized existing sports media to target new users in ways that aren't available for other topics
- some variant of 'sports' is happening 24/7/365 with enough prop bet granularity to capture the full attention and disposable income of addicts. There's an ongoing controversy with a star college football quarterback who was going to MLB games to place bets on every single individual pitch.
You can basically think of gambling addicts as a finite resource that these different companies are competing for. Many people get addicted to lootbox/gacha games at an early age, and even larger portion are already deep in sports gambling. The target demo for non-sports prediction markets roughly matches to people in earlier times who got into commodities futures or optimal strategies for casino games (which clearly existed but never at a scale to rival what we see with sports betting right now).
If your AI alignment strategy is so fickle that it breaks if people simply discuss potential problems with the strategy then you didn't really have an alignment strategy to begin with.
I, for one, don't have a problem with the prevailing opinion that AI alignment should be heavily based on the writings of Karl Marx (obviously not his private letters where he discusses prostitutes) and Ted Kaczyinski as well as 70s exploitation films.
The ZipAir direct flight can get you a week long trip from SF to Tokyo for ~$750 outside of peak seasons, although I'm not sure what their rates for extra bags are if you were only going to shop.
We live in a time where skilled and honest tradespeople have significantly more demand for work than they can actually take on. Having anything resembling a friendly and trusting relationship with them gives you a huge advantage over the other people stuck on months long wait lists who give up and go with the local PE-maxxed companies (which will take shortcuts and screw you over).
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