Forget empathy. Trumperinas do NOT vote their own interests.

MAGAGAs (make america great and glorious again) are poor and oppressed but vote to lower the taxes on the billionaires and to raise them on themselves, vote to take away public services from themselves, vote to remove the remaining 2 regulations on the megacorps, banks, and big landlords that oppress them.

In a world that made sense everyone in favor of deregulation should be forced to ride Boeing, and leave us, the sane folks, alone.

They got convinced that the interests of the billionaire class align with their own. That’s stupidity. You can’t fix stupid with empathy.

I don’t want empathetic people. I want people to rep their actual material interests, cogently and sincerely.

Right now we have people voting for the “leopards eating faces” party get surprised when their faces get eaten, because the morons wanted to believe they were the leopards too.

Servative trash. No mercy for the servatives. And I am tired of all the moralizing language. Kumba fucking ya. Horseshit. We ain’t gonna hug and kiss this shit all better. Morality is a fairy tale and we cannot base a world worth living in on a lie. Morality is a lie on the scale of religion. Morality is what causes people to self-restrict and self-censor. Morality is what prevents the guillotines.

If morality were against the status quo and against the interests of the billionaires, it would have been outlawed!

We all need to rep our material interests. Even one billionaire is a policy failure.

I don’t want *dormant* malware on my PC either.

“Why not?”

–Micro$oft, probably

Don’t forget that legally we count corporations as people, and corporations can live on indefinitely.

Originally copyright provided a monopoly for 14 years, plus one optional 14 year extension.

www.popularmechanics.com

Crows Are Self-Aware Just Like Humans, And They May Be as Smart as Gorillas

Caroline Delbert

5 - 6 minutes

• In a 2020 study, crows performed a complex task that involved hundreds of firing sensory analytical neurons.
• Crows can do jobs, share knowledge, and even ritualistically mourn their dead.
• Recent research suggests crow brains tightly pack neurons to help make them smart.

Crows are extremely intelligent. They can use tools to get what they want, like New Caledonian crows in a single South Pacific island of the same name, which shape twigs into hooks to catch grubs from rotting logs. And according to new research, crows are even smarter than we thought.

****Crows and other corvids (a family of birds that includes ravens and magpies) “know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds,” according to a 2020 study in Science**. **This is considered a cornerstone of self-awareness and shared by just a handful of animal species beside humans, such as monkeys and great apes. Crows can also use their complex brains to find creative solutions, such as dropping nuts on the road so passing cars can crack them open, for example.

But do they have true consciousness?

Crows Have Brains Packed With Neurons

The ability to think through a problem and work out an answer may be due to crows possessing a high number of brain cells that process information. This trait appears not only in humans, but in non-human primates, too. A study published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in January 2022 comparing corvid brains with those of chickens, pigeons, and ostriches found that corvid brains have more tightly packed neurons—between 200 and 300 million neurons per hemisphere—enabling efficient communication between the brain cells. Crow intelligence is at least on par with some monkeys, and in fact, may be closer to that of great apes (like gorillas), according to a 2017 study published in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.

Evolution Gave Crows Great Ability to Reason

In the 2020 study, scientists put crows through a series of puzzling tasks. The researchers measured neural activity in different kinds of neurons with the goal of tracking how crows were sensing and reasoning through their work. They sought to study a specific kind of thinking, called sensory consciousness, and they chose birds in particular as representative of a branching point in the evolutionary tree of life. The task is simple, but involves some high-level brain stuff, as described in the study:

After the crow initiated a trial … a brief visual stimulus of variable intensity appeared… After a delay period, a rule cue informed the crow how to respond if it had seen or had not seen the stimulus. [A] red cue required a response for stimulus detection (“yes”), whereas a blue cue prohibited a response for stimulus detection.

The researchers write that sensory consciousness is the ability to have subjective experiences that can be “explicitly accessed and thus reported,” and that it comes from brains that have evolved over time. Consciousness is associated primarily with the primate cerebral cortex. Bird brains are different, “since they diverged from the mammalian lineage 320 million years ago,” the researchers write.

However, the crows performed in a way that affirms their sensory consciousness, which scientists in the 2020 study say could mean the “neural correlates of consciousness” date back to at least the last time birds and mammals shared that brain section:

To reconcile sensory consciousness in birds and mammals, one scenario would postulate that birds and mammals inherited the trait of consciousness from their last-common ancestor. If true, this would date the evolution of consciousness back to at least 320 million years when reptiles and birds on the one hand, and mammals on the other hand, evolved from the last common stem-amniotic ancestor.

In an analysis in the same issue of Science, another researcher, Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, makes a critique of the study’s hypothesis. The structure being studied, she says, could resemble another structure because of physical properties more than a shared evolution or an indication of extremely early consciousness. The size of the structures matter a great deal, too.

“[T]he level of that complexity, and the extent to which new meanings and possibilities arise, should still scale with the number of units in the system,” Herculano-Houzel explains. “This would be analogous to the combined achievements of the human species when it consisted of just a few thousand individuals, versus the considerable achievements of 7 billion today.”

Either way, crows have bird brains they can be proud of.

Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She’s also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all.

This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Don’t forget digg.com.

Capitalism.

Basically entities flush with wealth do not make their decisions out of a sense of economic survival.

Capitalism is all about brutal survival for the lower classes and for the upstarts without any background.

At the same time capitalism is all about a decision making process that is leisurely, capricious, and forgiving for the aristocratic upper classes.

If the company is sufficiently large (don’t know if reddit qualifies, but my past employers have, so speaking from experience here), their own upper management is robbing the company on the inside every day when they make deals with contractors by taking kickbacks as opposed to what benefits the company. Make no mistake, all the upper management that is sufficiently aristocratic are looking out for their personal interests instead of the company’s. In other words the same mentality of personal gain at all costs that supposedly drives the creation of some of the companies is also their undoing. “Greed is good” capitalism eats itself. Large ultra consolidated/merged corps are every bit as bureaucratic and internally Machiavellian as any government can hope to be. Their very existence is a tax we all pay and we don’t get a vote about how these corporate fiefdoms run both themselves and us.

Reddit at this point is a very important and well backed propaganda tool, the backers can afford to pay their CEO and there is no hurry to make profits, and they have plenty of time and resources for every manner of business mistake.

Profit is theft.

Economic rent is theft.

Taxes are not theft.

It all depends on what you measure and what you don’t.

Selective measuring of the economy will let you say whatever you want.

“More jobs!!!11!!1!1!!!1111!1!1!!!”

“More precarity and high turnover, high pressure, shit conditions, shit pay, shit flexibility, shit benefits, no real pension commitment, underemployment.”

Even if all the measures do exist, you don’t have to report them if they go against the narrative.

I don’t like the idea of calling it a non-payment when receiving compensation in the form of valuable assets in addition to money.

Receiving stocks or gold bricks or houses or blow jobs, or anything else of value, is payment, and should be taxed as such.

Do you know why the pirates had democratic rule?

There’s always money/wealth in the economy. If the workers don’t have it, someone else does. Find where the money is, and tax it. Then redistribute.

It’s not a hard concept. It’s a question of the political will. We know what to do, but will we do it?

Copyright infringement was never stealing to begin with. If I steal your pencil, you are no longer in posession of it. If I copy or download your pencil, we both have a copy, and you are not deprived of your property.

He doesn’t need to sell, no.

It’s collateral for a low interest loan.

Look up “buy borrow die” on a search engine.

PayPal Holdings Inc. will reduce its workforce by about 9% as Chief Executive Officer Alex Chriss, who took over in September, grapples with rising competition, profit pressures and a raft of analyst downgrades.

In a letter to staff on Tuesday, Chriss said the decision was made to “right-size” the company through both direct cuts and the elimination of open roles throughout the year. Affected staff will be notified by the end of the week, according to the letter, which was seen by Bloomberg News.

PayPal, which employed around 29,900 workers at the end of 2022, announced a similar round of cuts last January. The latest move will affect about 2,500 workers.

Eliminating jobs will allow the firm to “move with the speed needed to deliver for our customers and drive profitable growth,” Chriss said in the letter. “At the same time, we will continue to invest in areas of the business we believe will create and accelerate growth.”

Shares of the payments giant have plunged more than 20% over the past year as earnings faltered and the company lowered its full-year guidance for adjusted operating margin. PayPal named Chriss last year to replace Dan Schulman.

PayPal was an early disrupter in the payments industry, but rivals including Apple Inc. and Zelle have since crowded the space, leaving PayPal struggling to keep pace. At least four analysts downgraded the stock this month, citing a range of concerns from rising competition to pressure on profitability.

Chriss said on PayPal’s third-quarter earnings call that the firm’s “cost base and complex structure” had slowed progress, an issue he plans on addressing to boost the firm’s operating leverage. The San Jose, California-based company is set to report fourth-quarter results next week.

“There hasn’t been a lot to celebrate” over the past few years, Chriss told CNBC earlier this month.

Since Chriss took the helm, he’s revamped PayPal’s leadership roles and made clear

that he plans to streamline what grew into a bloated business during the pandemic.

Block Inc., which offers the Cash App and Square payments services, began cutting jobs Tuesday as part of its goal to trim the workforce to 12,000 by the end of the year. Headcount as of the end of the third quarter of last year was just over 13,000, according to the firm.

We live under a two-tier “justice” system.

“There is a group the law protects but does not bind. And there is a group the law binds but does not protect.”

You give me hope, thank you.

OK, you’re a hardy soul then. I support your efforts. 💫

You’re telling me you don’t fill up your car?

Every single gas station in the US of A uses a sub-penny pricing scheme. I have not seen a sigle exception yet.

So you never patronize any business that uses the .99 and .95 pricing schemes? Gas stations are the worst offenders with their sub-penny pricing schemes.

Practically all ads exaggerate to the point of lying. “Luxury apartment for rent” <– just a run of the mill apartment, not luxurious. Etc.

Business culture is a culiure of lies.