norb

This story is from April, 2021.... so yeah nothing new here.

Gaetz showed nude pictures of women on House floor, per report

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz allegedly bragged about his sexual escapades with women and showed his colleagues in Congress nude pictures of the women he slept with, according to a new report from CNN.

Gaetz is under investigation after allegations surfaced he had a relationship with a 17-year-old girl in 2019, per a report in the New York Times. The probe includes a Justice Department inquiry into potential violations of federal sex trafficking laws. Authorities are looking into whether the congressman paid the teen to travel with him across state lines.

According to sources with CNN, Gaetz allegedly showed nude images with leaders on the House floor. A source told CNN one image showed a naked woman with a hula hoop.

Gaetz denied the accusations. "I have a suspicion that someone is trying to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward," Gaetz said in a statement to the New York Times.

Gaetz also claims he's the target of a $25 million extortion plot involving an attorney in Pensacola who used to work as a federal prosecutor. The law firm, Biggs & Lane, in Pensacola, called the claims, "False and defamatory."

It’s monkeys throwing poop. They don’t care who they hit, they just want attention.

I am unabashedly stealing this line. Thanks.

This is disingenuous at best. While insurance companies may not offer to pay for "unnecessary" services, they also do not actively prevent doctors from doing them. Sure, someone might go bankrupt because of medical debt, but they aren't dying and no doctors are going to prison for doing what they think is in the best interest of the patient.

So what the government is doing here is more malicious than what insurance companies routinely do.

If you really want to know what will absolutely happen if he gets reelected, look into Project 2025.

https://www.newsweek.com/what-project-2025-trump-shadow-network-plans-overhaul-deep-state-1825780

The reason I think this will happen is it doesn't really rely on Trump at all. He'll just do what he's told by these fascists and go along with it. Same thing he did before with the court packing, but this time on an entirely different level.

Removing career employees out of the federal government is how you actually remove the ability of the government to function. These are the people that actually know the rules AND FOLLOW THEM because if not their jobs are on the line. Unlike politicians, they can't just lie to people and get back in power.

IT.IS.ALWAYS.PROJECTION.

You should still be nervous because he only won due to Electoral College numbers, not votes. He just needs to win in the right places and it's a done deal. And if anything, quite a few of those "right places" are firmly on his side already. He only lost last time because a few of the "right places" didn't go his way, which they still probably can.

Trump doesn't need his own policy objectives. He has republican think tanks to do that work for him. He just signs his name. It's not like it was his idea to pack the supreme court. That came from Heritage Foundation or some such place.

I think this is ultimately worse than DeSantis because Trump will allow ALL THE CRAZIES to get around him (Sydney Powell anyone?) and that is what he'll do. DeSantis will bring your average GOP talking points with extra racism on top, but he's probably not going to bring insurrectionists into the conversation.

Thinking they want sympathy or support is a mistake.

They want fear.

Now, if said AI is generating foraging books more accurate than humans, that’s fine by me. Until that’s the case, we should be marking AI-generated books in some clear way.

The problem is, the LLM AIs we have today literally cannot do this because they are not thinking machines. These AIs are beefed-up autocompletes without any actual knowledge of the underlying information being conveyed. The sentences are grammatically correct and read (mostly) like we would expect human written words to read, however the actual factual content is non-existent. The appearance of correctness just comes from the fact that the model was trained on information that was (probably mostly) correct in the first place.

I mean, we should still be calling these things algorithms and not "AI" as "AI" carries a lot of subtext in people's minds. Most people understand "algorithms" to mean math, and that dehumanizes it. If you call something AI, all of a sudden people have sci-fi ideas of truly independent thinking machines. ChatGPT is not that, at all.

"Easily avoidable" if you know to look for them or if they're labelled appropriately. This was just an example of a danger that autocomplete AI is creating today. Unscrupulous people will continue to shit out AI generated nonsense to try to sell when the seller does zero vetting of the products in their store (one of the many reasons I no longer shop at Amazon).

Many people, especially beginners, are not going to take the time to fully investigate their sources of knowledge, and to be honest they probably shouldn't have to. If you get a book about mushrooms from the library, you can probably assume it's giving valid information as the library has people to vet books. People will see Amazon as being responsible for keeping them safe, for better or worse.

I agree that generally there is a bunch of nonsense about ChatGPT and LLM AIs that isn't really valid, and we're seeing some amount of AI bubble happening where it's a self feeding thing. In the end it will shake out, but before that all happens you have some outright dangerous and harmful things occurring today.

(I am US based and this is my US based argument - please do not EuroTroll me)

But herein lies the problem. "Progressive" often means new or novel. Conservative mostly means "preserve the status quo." (I'm over simplifying for the sake of making a point, I know).

Conservatives are willing to sit on the status quo and work against change as they can. Progressives want to right wrongs NOW and make effective changes for the future. Unfortunately, because our society grows and changes quickly, and what is right today can be wrong tomorrow and the target moves, so progressive goals also move. Meanwhile conservatives are still plugging away at keeping the status quo.

I'm trying to say that the nature of progressives is to change goals and make things better, which makes it harder to coalesce around one goal for 10, 20, 40+ years. When your target is the past, its easy to keep that in sight as you go forward.

But there's also real danger here today.

For example, ‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon