Iraq fundamentally doesn’t have the power to control its entire territory so it has to pick the least bad option for who to allow to occupy some areas. And considering that one option is ISIS, most of the others start looking a lot more appealing by comparison.
I feel like we don’t get out of our water woes by using the same strategies of the past century. The best dam sites have been developed, moving water from one dry area to another is a waste of money, and conservation can only go so far before it starts to cause real problems, and I think we’re getting close to that point.
So we need to be thinking about new ideas to solve water shortages. There are two I think are very promising.
One is pulling water from floods and pumping it back into aquifers. This is being done to some extent already but we should be focusing on building infrastructure for this all across the state. The amount of water that can be stored in the ground dwarfs our reservoir storage capacity.
The second is the development of new water supplies via desalination. This is expensive and has environmental challenges to overcome, but I still think smaller plants are worth developing carefully to avoid damaging our coastal resources. We should also invest in newer tech to help do this more efficiently and with less pollution. Long term, a system of desal plants up and down the coast combined with aqueducts to move the water to inland parts of the state could solve drought permanently. But I think we need to finish decarbonizing the energy grid before this happens at scale. In the near term, there could be opportunities to build small, cheap desal plants that only run when solar power is abundant and cheap early in the day. But you’d have to keep capital expenditure very low to make this pencil out.
Also, sorry but we need to charge more for water. All this political squabbling can be solved with proper pricing. Ideally there would be progressive pricing so the more you use the more costly it becomes. That way we can impose the real costs on water hogs but keep the poor from being burdened with higher bills.
Voters think that though. Waking them up from the illusion may help.
Plus, honestly, most people drink their own kool aid so I wouldn’t be surprised if our leaders did believe this despite all evidence. The desire to think of yourself as a good person can overpower most evidence.
Thank god for SMUD.
They’re gonna pull a USA aren’t they…
I’d love some context on why she was disrobing in public lol
What was the message there exactly?
I’m not pretending anything. All art does consist of ideas. Some also consists of a physical aspect and that physical aspect can be stolen. The intellectual, or idea part cannot be.
You’re the one who tried to move the goalposts to physical media with your museum analogy. So I modified that to make it as close to this situation as possible but still contain the same concepts–making a copy, and then, yes, using it however I wish after the fact. I didn’t spell that out because I thought the point was obvious but sure we can go there too.
I can take my photographs of paintings and put them into AI training data if I want to. The museum is not going to hunt me down for this because again, it obviously harms no one.
But let me make my own analogy here. If I broke into PizzaCake’s house and stole a physical print of this comic, are you asserting that’s the same as me downloading a copy of it here? Let’s say I use them the same way after the fact, for AI or whatever harmless use you find most offensive.
The entire AI industry stands on top of the IP house of cards you are defending far more fundamentally than any need to access data for free. If they were forced to follow copyright law, sure, their training data might get a bit worse, it might cost them a bit more but fundamentally they would continue to do the same things. In contrast, if they didn’t have a monopoly on the product of that training, there would be no profit model for them whatsoever. And you are defending that foundation here, no matter what you may think.
OP chose the title with the subtext in mind.
I can’t believe we’re debating this. The subtext is so obvious. I can’t tell if you people have the reading ability of a literal child or if you simply refuse to acknowledge it because you don’t want to or what?
But what exactly am I telling on here? I think sexual assault is bad and IP laws are bad. That’s no secret.
Well I’ve never heard it before.
Even if it was created by OP that means they understood the message the author is sending loud and clear, even though you refuse to acknowledge it.
Eh fair. But I’d rather undermine the IP laws that allow them to claim ownership of the models created by the public rather than enforce the current IP system which is rather stacked against the little guy in favor of the mega-corps.
Why does it matter if it’s implied vs stated? The message is clear nonetheless. How is that telling on myself? Your comment is incoherent, so I had to ignore that part to make any sense of it.
I am telling on myself that I’ve seen the harms of laws and norms around IP and the harms around sexual assault. Do you think I should be ashamed of that for some reason?
Shouldn’t people who imply made up crimes like copyright infringement are the same as rape feel shame? That’s what I think.
This is literally you wouldn’t download a car level logic. Stealing a physical object is not the same as creating a copy of something digital and then using that. When you deprive someone of something that obviously affects them. Creating a copy does not do this. The artist continues to have their copies to use as they wish.
I have taken photos of art in museums and strangely I was not arrested. Perhaps because that’s common sense?
Copying is not stealing. It’s insane that this anti-AI moral panic has gotten so severe that it’s infecting and degrading other strongly held and logical positions people on the left have had for literal centuries. Hopefully this will pass soon.
These laws and norms against copying and using IP only exist for rights holders to extract economic rents from ordinary people for doing normal things like copying and modifying art. People did this for thousands perhaps millions of years without restrictions until capitalism came along.
AI companies want art to be up for grabs but they also want to own the products of it. You can object to the first part if you want to preserve capitalist IP norms, or you can object to the second part if you want to overturn them. I know where I stand. Do you?
I noticed you didn’t seek my consent before making this comment. Why do you only think consent matters some of the time?
Literally everyone thinks consent only matters some of the time. If you want to have a real discussion about this, come back when you have an actually coherent point to make.
Because one is extremely harmful and traumatic and one isn’t? Do you seriously think these two actions are in the same moral universe as one another?
If you don’t want people using your art don’t put it out in public. Once you do so, the public should be free to use it as they wish and doing so does not harm you in the slightest.
What is that reason? Go on, explain.
There’s a reason why it’s not required even under the extremely restrictive copyright law of the USA. All art is derived from the work of its predecessors. Parody does not and should not require anyone’s permission to make.
Copyright infringement is based.
She absolutely is and you’d have to be incredibly bad at reading subtext to miss this.
What do you think the word “scrapist” is meant to imply here?
But I guess motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Who said I don’t like pizzacake? Normally I think her comics are funny. I just think this popular narrative that you’re violating someone’s consent by using their art is totally idiotic. You can’t own ideas, sorry. That’s a highly authoritarian idea created by the capitalist class to justify violence against us, and I think it should be rejected even when it’s not used explicitly in that context.
Consent is important when it comes to bodily autonomy. That’s why we talk about consent. If you’re demanding consent in situations that don’t involve you, that’s the behavior of a control freak.
If you can’t understand subtext I’m not going to be able to teach you that skill. But it’s very obvious to those with media literacy.
The title is “scrapist” which I can’t even type without it being autocorrected to rapist. Come the fuck on. You can’t possibly be this ignorant.
FYI this guy is a Christian nationalist.