Blackstar comments

Mass murderers not welcome at commemoration of mass civilian deaths. Pretty obvious, surely.

Show some balls and refuse to admit them.

“Fast forward five years — there’s going to be all sorts of machine-generated content on the web," he said in an interview. "

Forget the 5 years bit. There's a lot of that going on already, actually. For the companies that use it, that comes in as a saving. For professional writers that basically means a career change. "C'est la vie" you might say.

No one can fully comprehend where we're going with AI, but it's generally agreed that machines will be smarter than us (self aware, able to make decisions independently of us) within 15-20 years at the latest. It goes without saying that "the insights and ramblings of the J expat community 2024" will not be on its radar.

The scariest thing about the phenomenal growth of AI's potential is that the people who express the deepest worries about it are those who know the most about it (but have withdrawn from the production side of it)!

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is limit/end your social media use. If you need to "share", send emails to people you actually know.

I know some people think the only way this dominance will end is when Guardiola leaves or if City are heavily punished for allegedly breaking finance rules.

Hard to see it any other way unfortunately.

Dumb article. If you're born in a developed country and blessed with a decent IQ, your destiny is in your own hands. Make of it what you will. Unless you are blighted by genuine physical deformity or suffered horrible parental abuse, there's no reason why you can't have modest social success too. There are ways to train yourself to gain slightly improved social confidence. Seek them out, you smart guys.

Fascism is on the rise to greater or lesser degrees in many parts of the world, and the lies spread on social media to often gullible publics is a huge factor in this. If more effective control of disinformation & outright smear campaigns on Twitter etc can't be achieved, the platforms ought to be shut down totally. They are destroying democratic societies, day by day, bit by bit.

Oh, but wait... free speech!! Just say any crazy #:*# you want to make up about people, governments etc., and that's okay, right? I forgot. Silly me.

@Fighto is completely right on this.

Lots of "What's wrong with hugging?" comments, but such posters are apparently ignorant about Japanese culture. Some parents don't even hug their kids here. Weird? Yeah, to us maybe, but that's how it is.

A teacher who decides to "approach the boy on the sidewalk and take him back to the school parking lot where he hugged him" IS... yes, IS... a red flag. In fact it screams "****pervert". Some really naive posts here.

And @Quo Primum manages to slip in an irrelevant gripe against women (Nice one, sad sack) ... "A female teacher NEVER would have been arrested for this". Correct. A woman would never have been so bloody stupid as to have done this!

@Onlooker

It's all about profits of his company, not about ethics, human rights, social issues, etc.

Correct.

@Ricky Kaminski13 

it: 's getting a bit silly at this point.

Yes it is, because we keep having to read your brain-dead posts.

Suggestion to J-Today: This is a story that has had it's time. The morons were out-debated yesterday & the day before. Isn't there something more newsworthy going on somewhere?

Behaving like the CPC?

Behaving like the jerk off he is.

@JJE

A bit of victim blaming could be in order.

You accidentally said something that made sense. Yes, victim blaming is in order. Emmanuel shamelessly baited the Muslim community over an extended period of time, insulting Islam time and again. He was disowned by the most senior ranks of his church in Ethiopia for his outlandish comments/behaviour. Yes, he got what he was asking for!

And yes, of course he wants the footage to remain online. He wants anti-Muslim violence to erupt. That's what he's been about for some time. Ideally, once he recovers from his wounds he should do an extended period in jail. It won't happen, unfortunately.

@JJE makes my point.

If you were on drugs you might think his post was interesting, but on closer inspection it's semi-literate nonsense, equating Assange's leaks of government secrets related to international policy to the current topic-the government's desire to keep domestic social/religious tensions from boiling over.

We know the stabbings happened. What do we gain by viewing them?? Answer: Nothing.

What do we lose by publishing the footage? Answer: We encourage those most personally affected by the violence to potentially be violent/vindictive in response.

@Woody Lee

Social Media has improved the lives of millions across the globe, Social Media brought Tyrants and Dictators to their knees and ended the grip on power of so many like them.

I couldn't disagree more! How naive you are. Are Xi and Putin on their knees?

As someone who spent half his life in the pre-Internet era and has lived the second half with it (a perspective you probably don't have), I yearn for (an impossible) return to the days when the loudest voices on important issues were those who were most qualified to comment, most knowledgeable, experienced, directly involved etc.

Nowadays, the voice of experts is drowned out by the daily rants of idiots on social media, who in turn influence the even more severely mentally-challenged in droves. The result: a cacophony of garbage passed on and on by nut jobs with varying degrees of mental illness, which is seriously paralyzing the ability of democracies to function as healthily as they should.

Meanwhile, authoritarian states such as China and Russia, which are efficiently focused on limiting the access of their citizens to only "information" that they approve of, are benefiting from all this, laughing their heads off while the West circles the drain hole to the tune of "Pizzagate", "democracies are fascist states unless they're primitive anti-vaxx regimes", and countless other nonsense of the type.

Trump and Musk are just two of the most obvious toxic symptoms of this madness of self-love, lust for power and attention, no matter the scale of the damage they do to the societies that raised them.

Chairman Rexton

Ricky Kaminski13Today  12:44 pm JST

Problem is here folks, Musk is pretty much right on this one. No matter how much of the kitchen sink of trigger words ( guns, Pauline Hanson really? ) you can throw into one article the sheer fact of the matter is Aussies don’t want , nor need censorship by any arrogant, holier than thou class of do gooding narcissists. It’s a slippery slope. We can deal with reality despite your need to protect us. Thanks.

Any time a mainstream opinion piece masquerading as a news article whacks "far right [politician's name]" into an article, it's safe to dismiss it as butcher's floor sweepings. Pauline Hanson is completely correct on this matter.

Pauline Hanson is not mentioned in this article. What are you talking about?

Ricky Kaminski13

Problem is here folks, Musk is pretty much right on this one. 

No. Completely wrong again Ricky.

The one useful word in your post was narcissist, but unfortunately you weren't able to draw the simple line in pencil between the two big words in the story book: "Musk" and (clueless) "narcissist"

What I said was, radicalization was not only on one side. The guy who got stabbed was a raving radical, and yes the kid had been radicalized too. A sad state of affairs. "Don't blame Muslims only" was my point.

Australia would be better served if Albanese and the Australian government put their efforts into clamping down on the content, either on-line or in person content that brainwashed that kid into being radicalized.

Governments don't have the reach to affect every area of life as much as we might hope. There's only so much any government can do, especially when it comes to religious belief. Do you think that maybe government agents in false beards could hang out in houses of worship all over the country, waiting for someone to say something offensive, and then call in a SWAT team?

Moreover, you're suggesting that radicalization was on one side here. It was not. That so-called "Christian" church is an Ethiopian sect run by Emmanual (the guy who got stabbed), who has been disowned by the founders of the church in Ethiopia for his wayward, radical ranting. Radicalization was going on in that church for some time, until the inevitable response came.

For people of deep faith, I guess there's only so much you can take. I would prefer a secular world, but you have to deal with life as it is. The least we can do is to stop automatically assuming that muslims are always the "radicals", and the rest are perfectly fine.

Since Covid, Australia has begun to resemble a police state!

Um...no, it hasn't actually.

You could possibly argue that there's been a bit of a slide towards a nanny state over the past couple of decades, e.g. compulsory bicycle helmets, pool fences etc., although even that kind of stuff isn't exactly crazy.

Give Lurch (Dutton) a term in office and we might have cause to re-think that though.

P.S. This Emmanual character, the "Christian" who got stabbed, had been disowned by the wider church body (the base, in Ethiopia) some time ago, for his loopy rants on various topics. Insulting Islam and the prophets of Islam is NOT what serious religious leaders of any faith do. This nutcase did. The fact that he got a face-full of cold steel was hardly surprising.

"Pro-terror materials are a particularly strange hill to die on, but fits the company's chaotic and negligent approach to the most basic user safety considerations that under previous leadership, the platform used to take seriously," said Alice Dawkins, executive director of internet policy non-profit Reset.Tech Australia.

This says it all, as far as wanker Musk is concerned. Regarding the usual intellectually-challenged nonsense from Ricky & co: No you fool, that's not fake content. That's real violence. And sensible leaders are interested in turning down the heat on sectarian violence, not fanning the flames. Thanks Albo! Keep up the good work.

@buffalo

The article is about predators in general (& their declining numbers). It doesn't advocate introducing species from one system to a different one.

Bad for everyone. Even his wife hates him.

@Philosopher's Stone

No criticism allowed, since it's okay for Blacks to take on Japanese names, so I take on Black names. Otherwise double standards shrugs

How about Japanese using Western stage names? Are you going to throw a tantrum about that too?

Osamu Kitajima (喜多嶋 修), also known by the pseudonym Justin Heathcliff, is a Japanese musician, producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist.

Akira Yamanaka (山中 明, Yamanaka Akira, September 2, 1946 – August 7, 2011), better known as Joe Yamanaka (ジョー山中), was a Japanese singer and actor.

Hiroshi Morie (Japanese: 森江 博, Hepburn: Morie Hiroshi, January 22, 1968 – October 29, 2023), known exclusively by his stage name Heath, was a Japanese musician and singer-songwriter.

Not to mention the dozens of Japanese bands using Western names (Judy & Mary etc.)... Crawl back under your rock.

@zibala

Incredible the influence he has over world affairs, and interesting that even other world leaders already expect him to win the election.

In the same way that (other) deadly viruses have incredible influence over world affairs. Leaders have to prepare contingency plans on how their populations can survive them, if the worst case scenario comes to pass.

"I predict that before the party nominating convention in August, Biden will courageously withdraw from the race. If he designates Michelle Obama to run in his stead, I suppose the election will be thrown into chaos," Yoichi Shimada, professor emeritus at Fukui Prefectural University remarked

What a ridiculous statement!! Is this guy really a professor?

Biden will not "withdraw". 2. Michelle Obama is not a politician, and has shown absolutely no interest whatsoever in getting involved as a candidate. Biden can't just say "Hey, I pick you to run instead of me" to random individuals.

Agreed. Get it out into the open. Maybe he's being shy about naming names because it would be hard to prove guilt in a court of law?? I don't know. Seems like there must be no documents to share, otherwise he could have passed them on like Snowden did. I can't quite get my head around this. More news to follow, hopefully.

There's an old saying about how you don't appreciate something/someone until it/they are gone. We take our liberty as free citizens for granted nowadays. There's no guarantee we'll always have it.

People lusting for authoritarianism, @Blacklabel (who shows signs of some education) foremost among them, ought to pay more attention to the lessons of history. Even if you think it's going to great to have a demagogue to tell everyone what they can & can't do, what if your niece/nephew or aunt/uncle thinks differently? Are you going to feel okay about them being dragged into a ditch somewhere and shot in the head? Because that's the way things are heading, with your fantasy super hero orange chimp, and sons, leading the regime.

Check out this thorough portrait of Mussolini's time in Italy. The parallels with then & what the chimp wants now are impossible to ignore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLpEGVEX9qo

And the economy would be doing even better if know-nothing Republicans trapped in their Trump cult lunacy stopped blocking desperately needed military aid to Ukraine. The vast majority of money for military aid to Ukraine GETS SPENT IN THE USA!! Americans in factories around the country make that ammunition etc.

@zibala 

A recent poll found only 35% of US adults call the national economy good.

And you're not just making that up... (of course!). Link please.

@kohakuebisu

However, I would question why the headline calls it a "solid" 3.2%. Solid by who's and what definition? 

Solid by the definition of any half-qualified economist who has ever walked the planet, regardless of their private political leanings! Educate yourself before posting garbage.

Okay. I think this is a semantic problem. We have slightly different ideas about what "punching above their weight" means in this context.

For me a team's "weight" implies their size, status etc. A big club is a big club, regardless of their current form (you're talking about form). Chelsea are in a similar boat to Man Utd (a more extreme example). Utd have been rubbish for years, but they're still a big club. If they do okay in the next match against Liverpool, it wouldn't be right to say they were "punching above their weight". They're a big club with talented individuals. They just can't get organized as a team, with a coherent playing style. Same with Chelsea.

A lot of opinion in there.

Informed opinion, from someone who follows the league very closely. I wonder if you do.

In any case, regardless of how much those on the Chelsea injured list were seriously missed (& only James was, I assure you), you only have to look at the substitutes benches to see that Chelsea was still stocked with experienced players valued at many millions of whatever currency whereas Liverpool were almost entirely down to teenagers from the academy, some with zero minutes of first team football, others with a few minutes (e.g. Danns).