Yeah that's "the government and people part", it's talking about the average. Of course the rich enclaves in Mexico are doing better than the average, you can find that in many places on the planet that are on average terrible places to live. But taking that into account makes it harder to crow about the ignorance of Americans, as it's so historically fun to do.
Yeah but the guy said Mexicans are incapable of fixing “anything” in their country. Which makes is clear he has no actual connection to what it’s like to be in Mexico.
As someone who has actually done that, and speaks Spanish, and has spent considerable time in over a dozen Latin American countries my impression of Mexico is that it’s one of the wealthier and more advanced countries in the hemisphere and often feels like a borderline first world country on par with Southern European countries like say Greece.
There's no definitely about that at all. The city of Westminster issued a statement that seems fairly clear that they were as surprised as everybody else but are taking steps to protect it.
Yeah, one of my distant friends is a councillor in a borough where Banksy did a mural years back and it was definitely much more about ensuring the standing "Send in workers to paint over any graffiti" reaction doesn't happen than some sort of "That's nice, the committee which issued the permit for this didn't tell me when it would happen". So far as she told me she heard about it the same way most people did, it was on the local news that morning.
Actually it’s a great example of something different, where the person who was original and eventually becomes ubiquitous and groundbreaking and widely imitated to the point where it's hard to understand just how original they actually are.
There are many examples of the same thing: Andy Warhol and the soup cans and screen-printed portraits with different color backgrounds or Led Zeppelin and English folk hard rock songs that have hobbits in them are two of them.
Eventually, it's hard to even process their work in the context of how predictable and trite it seems to be a few decades later.
This is exactly what everybody said about rap and drum machines and sampling when I was growing up in the mid to late 80s.
They were right and wrong. A lot of it was really formulaic bullshit, and much of it doesn't hold up at all. But it also spawned one of the most creative and exciting periods in music history.
Will this be the same? It feels like it won't, but that's how things feel in general because I'm old. So who knows?
Not a valid comparison, I feel. I may be hindsight, but rap and electronic music came from vibrant underground scenes and to many critics and music fans of the time was seen as at least interesting and at best ground breaking.
AI music on the other hand comes not from the underground, but from corporations. You'll be hard pushed to find any critics or music connoisseurs singing its praises.
It's hindsight. At the time it was a pretty mainstream opinion that it wasn't music at all, just talking over fake drums and stolen copies of other people's songs.
How would this even work though? I'm a real musician and producer/engineer. I've gone on tour, put out several albums, and so on. I've also been involved in the music business and worked with a bunch of really well-known artists.
I also have been playing with Suno like everyone else, and have made a whole bunch of songs that I think are hilarious that I've shared with my friends, where I write all the lyrics and detailed notes about what I want the song to be, and then AI does the rest.
I'm not going to post it to Spotify, but if I did, what am I on their list? Am I verified or not? I'm a real musician. I have rooms full of musical instruments that I can play, and I can send pictures of them, but how does that relate to this policy of theirs?
Yeah, as I mentioned in another comment, this should be at the track level, not artist. Artist makes no sense. Only a matter of time before MJ's estate starts cranking out some new tracks under his name.
But that's just a personal choice. If I made something amazing and I wanted to launch it, I would. And I'm still lost as to how Spotify would classify me under these rules.
I am a practicing Zen Buddhist and I wouldn’t agree with this description, at least not in my experience and the community that I’ve participated in.
Specifically I would say the concepts of “striving” and “intent” aren’t ones I would use.
What it actually is takes a little more to pin down (famously) but I would consider the concept of surrender to be more applicable. In fact I would say the absence of striving would be a good sign you’re on the right track.
I would consider staring at a wall without intent to be completely compatible with Zen practice.
This is where Zen gets tricky and most people drop out.
All spoken words have duality and as a Zen practitioner I’m sure you know the ultimate goal is non duality, so you can never say it directly
But to your point, yes non - striving is the ultimate goal also, but you cannot ever aspire to it without striving in the first place. Being a zen practitioner is all about understanding nuance, so some level of striving is necessary.
The most famous zen trap is trying to not try, which is inescapable and also impossible to explain to a layman. The discipline I speak of is being committed to walking that fine line of trying to induce not trying… for years.
Staring at walls is compatible yes. But true zen is a difficult discipline. We have to be inclusive though, so yea 5 minutes of mindfulness is good if it works for them
i’m not sure but they may be speaking about rinzai zen. watched a few bits and bobs about rinzai and some of the practices are kinda of that “willpower” ilk. dunno, never practiced it, not my vibe.
they definitely were not describing soto-zen tho, that’s for sure.
edit — i find it almost koan-esque that there’s two schools referred to as “zen”, both of which generally dislike the label “zen”, both of which have very different practices and methods.
I don't follow. If you provide criteria I can most likely provide evidence, unless your criteria is "vaguely cylindrical and vaguely squishy" in which case I obviously won't be able to.
The person I replied to made a definite claim (that we are "very obviously not ...") for which no evidence has been presented and which I posit humanity is currently unable to definitively answer in one direction or the other.
When two things are obviously radically different (a squishy mass of trillions of interconnected carbon based blobs fed by some sort of continuous oxygen based chemical reaction, and a series of distributed transitors on silicon wafers) then the burden of proof shifts to the other guy to provide the clear and convincing evidence that they should be considered functionally the same thing.
But I made no such claim. I was explicit that my position is "humanity is currently unable to definitively answer in one direction or the other".
Two things being physically different does not exclude their also having functional similarities. The argument presented amounts to A and B have large physical differences, A does X, therefore B does not do X. That doesn't follow.
Important thing to know about Derek Thompson is that he has a very specific job in the culture.
His job is to present compelling, interesting narratives about why the world is the way it is and what we should do about it that have one specific attribute.
The attribute is that we must never actually do anything to address the real problem, which is that the lion's share of the wealth and resources are being claimed by a tiny group of people who use monopolies, coercive tactics, buying up politics and technology to hoard and protect their wealth and power.
Needless to say his job is a great job to have because those people will be happy to pay him and promote him. It's how he makes a living.
The reason people are so sad is because they realize there's one set of rules for them and one set of rules for the people in charge with money and power. It's become absolutely obvious that if you ever get any kind of edge or get ahead on a smaller scale level, one of those people from the Epstein class or Wall Street will soon come along and take it away from you.
They'll make you pay a subscription to use your own car. They'll use algorithms to increase your rent. They'll get you hooked on streaming services, buy up all the competitors, and then raise the price. They'll take away your rights to complain about it through an arbitration clause, use non-competes to stop you from hiring people if you're a small business trying to compete. If you do manage to compete with them directly they'll use access to incredibly low-cost subsidized capital to undercut you. If you somehow navigate all of that and manage to succeed they'll buy you and turn around and consolidate your company with what they're doing to go back to their extractive profit model.
The delusion of this article is the idea that people don't really understand what's happening to them, or what the causes are, or that it's this big mystery. People actually are pretty intuitively connected to what's happening, and they'll lurch towards anyone who seems to be, at least sort of, trying to do something about it.
The problem is they don't have any choices who will actually fight for them.
> The attribute is that we must never actually do anything to address the real problem, which is that the lion's share of the wealth and resources are being claimed by a tiny group of people who use monopolies, coercive tactics, buying up politics and technology to hoard and protect their wealth and power.
Yes, thank you for saying this. Truly the "Steven Pinker" of these times. "There is actually something wrong with you if you're not loving this".
Although saying this on this platform, unfortunately, won't get much traction.
Of course, on average Mexico is poorer, has a lower GDP per capita, and so on. But the level of ignorance among Americans is astonishing sometimes.
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