Death from “old age” is more likely.

That is exactly why I said it

If you open up your camera app and spin around and take a picture, 99% of the picture will be garbage.

If you boot up a AI art program and type in a random prompt, 99% of that will be garbage.

Photographer have specialize lenses and choices of FOV that affects how the pictures look. Ai artists have specialized weight and loras that affect how the picture will look.

Photographer don’t just take pictures at random. They set and frame the scenes - doing prep work and framing. AI artist can use base pictures instead of random noise to bias the outcome (image to image).

With live subjects, photographer can either give no guidance, or direct the subjects (think “look at the camera and say cheese”, only more nuanced). With AI art, there is a whole subfield of prompt engineering l which is akin to this.

After a photographer take pictures, they do minor touch ups and photoshoping to clean up parts that didn’t come out right. So too with AI artists.

And with both, you can get 100s if not 1000s of pictures of a subject. The photographer and the AI artist true test is being able to pick from those thousands the one or two good shots.

Yes there is a bunch of legal and copyright problems with AI art. When the camera was first invented, people argued that you couldn’t take pictures of crowds without getting everyone’s concent, nor could you take picture of other people’s property with out breaking the law. That the legal realities around photography weren’t settled didn’t mean those taking picture back then weren’t artists, and it doesn’t mean that people doing AI art today aren’t artists. AI generators are like camera in that you get out better results depending on how much work you put it.

“I am a photographer!”

“So you just push a button and steal people’s privacy? Not real art!”

Everything can be automated, just with lower quality, speed, and a high up front and ongoing cost.

But for a large segment of jobs, no one cares about quality. Speed can be increased by increasing the number of parallel automatons, thus cost. If you really want to get rid of all work, raise the minimum wage to $100/hour for one year. Don’t tell anyone that it will only be a year. By the end of the year, almost every job will be automated.

Biden was deporting more immigrants than Trump did in his first term WITH A WORKING GOVERNMENT. Trump can’t do more with less, so to appease his base, he is targeting particular people and doing extreme things to cover up the fact that he is deporting less.

Sort of like how he called his huge middle class tax hike during his first term a tax cut. He knows his base won’t actually check and will call truth tellers anti-trump liars.

The market has factored in these tariffs. They haven’t factored in the retaliation tariffs, since they haven’t been announced yet.

I feel like there should be a name for a tariff terrorist. A tarrifist? A terofist?

If Trump wanted a 51st state, all it would take would be a tweet.

The people of that state wouldn’t object. The democrats wouldn’t object. The state could be a part of the union before the end of his term. Every flag flying from now until a hypothetical 52nd state gets added, people could point and say “That 51st star - that new design - that was all president Trump.” He was the reason the flag is like that - he would be remembered every time anyone in any capacity flies an American flag.

But he won’t do it.

Because he hates Puerto Ricans.

“I don’t belong to any organized political party - I am a democrat!”