The party of Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz, CDU, is projected to win the NRW municipal vote, with the far-right AfD making major gains.

@Eetschrijver @GottaLaff Well, first you’ve got to wake people up and politicians could do this though no longer through much of the media. And the message needs to be coordinated. It’d be good to back things up with facts but even they don’t tend to work so well today.

@alex_p_roe
Yes, that's what I mean by well-meshed. It's hard to drown out a few hundred megaphones blaring out a propaganda message in unison, especially with the way the opposition is (being kept) divided.
@GottaLaff

@Eetschrijver @GottaLaff Well meshed because it’s very well funded! It’s not easy to overcome so many megaphones. Nobody has managed it so far.

@alex_p_roe
That's the whole point, isn't it? The stakeholders in this obscene scheme are already so rich that they control all the megaphones. And whoever manages opposition strong enough to be noticed is immediately crushed. Litigation against moguls of this caliber is, to all intents and purposes, impossible.
@GottaLaff

@alex_p_roe
Just saw this.
@GottaLaff

We have fewer police on the roads
We have fewer doctors
We have very expensive dental care
We have to retire later
Hate is widespread
Immigrants and migrants are demonised
Well have no jobs and little income in the future
Food quality is falling
Energy costs are rising
Beaches and rivers are polluted
Weaker policing (uk)
Investment in education and training has virtually dried up
The rich are getting richer
We now have “working poor”.
World war 3 is getting ever closer. (2/3)

@Eetschrijver @GottaLaff I’ve been compiling a list - not in order, feel free to add to it - it has a UK bias. Cc @ChrisMayLA6

Thanks to the political #right #neoliberalism and the #farright:
We can no longer afford kids
We no longer have stable employment
We have a polluted earth
University is too expensive for those who could benefit from it
Cars and motorbikes have become too expensive for most people
Housing has become too expensive more most people
Healthcare services are failing… (1/3)

@alex_p_roe
Re. the media: complacent or complicit? More often than not the latter, I fear.
@GottaLaff

We have fewer police on the roads
We have fewer doctors
We have very expensive dental care
We have to retire later
Hate is widespread
Immigrants and migrants are demonised
Well have no jobs and little income in the future
Food quality is falling
Energy costs are rising
Beaches and rivers are polluted
Weaker policing (uk)
Investment in education and training has virtually dried up
The rich are getting richer
We now have “working poor”.
World war 3 is getting ever closer. (2/3)

We have fewer police on the roads
We have fewer doctors
We have very expensive dental care
We have to retire later
Hate is widespread
Immigrants and migrants are demonised
Well have no jobs and little income in the future
Food quality is falling
Energy costs are rising
Beaches and rivers are polluted
Weaker policing (uk)
Investment in education and training has virtually dried up
The rich are getting richer
We now have “working poor”.
World war 3 is getting ever closer. (2/3)

@alex_p_roe Public transport is ceasing to exist. Buses and trains are obviously far more efficient than cars but conservatives hate them because they aren't individual, and have made them so much more expensive than they need to be.

We have fewer police on the roads
We have fewer doctors
We have very expensive dental care
We have to retire later
Hate is widespread
Immigrants and migrants are demonised
Well have no jobs and little income in the future
Food quality is falling
Energy costs are rising
Beaches and rivers are polluted
Weaker policing (uk)
Investment in education and training has virtually dried up
The rich are getting richer
We now have “working poor”.
World war 3 is getting ever closer. (2/3)

@alex_p_roe some call it the culture wars... quote from the same man that said that the only "mistake" from Orwell's "1984" was placing in the future a reality that was already here (the book was launched around (1948-1949)....

@alex_p_roe
The American Dream, 21st century style.
A dream for billionaires, a living nightmare for others.

@brouhaha That appears to be where we are headed but they may well be killing the geese that lay their golden eggs

@alex_p_roe
The billionaires believe that by investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI research, that they will get AGI that eliminates their dependence on human labor. They want the science fiction post-scarcity economy, but only for themselves. Once the billionaires have AGI, they have no interest in the rest of us, and would gladly eliminate us if we get uppity.

@alex_p_roe
The billionaires believe that by investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI research, that they will get AGI that eliminates their dependence on human labor. They want the science fiction post-scarcity economy, but only for themselves. Once the billionaires have AGI, they have no interest in the rest of us, and would gladly eliminate us if we get uppity.

@alex_p_roe
The fly in their ointment is that they're not going to get AGI for a very long time, if ever. Most of the money is going to LLMs, which are not on a path that leads to any intelligence, let alone AGI. Sam Altman promises otherwise, so they keep throwing money at it, and accelerating the destruction of the ecosphere in the process.

@brouhaha Ha! It appears that quite a few billionaires believe LLMs are #AI! They are not (but I will admit to thinking they were initially). Machine learning is AI tech that helps build LLMs but there’s that #hallucination issue!

@alex_p_roe
Yes, AI companies keep claiming that they will remove the "hallucinations" from their LLMs, but it's bullshit. An LLM is, by definition and by construction, a hallucination machine. If you could remove the hallucinations, there would be nothing left.
People are fooled easily into thinking there is intelligence in an LLM because the hallucinations often seem quite plausible on the surface, and they are stated in such a seemingly authoritative way, as if they were solid facts.