Ah, so you’re a landlord, that’s why you’re so evil. Your whole argument here is basically “I can’t exploit them for maximum profit while doing basically nothing so they all are subhumans who don’t deserve help”. That’s vile, man.

Also, I’ll take an educated guess and say that you’re in New York. And since it’s America, these homeless people didn’t have access to psychiatric or narcologic help during their stay, and probably didn’t have any relatives/friends/social workers to support them (you and your friends clearly never offered help beyond what’s required for you and them to receive money). And battling mental illness alone, while still stressing about a job and where to love after the contract expires and they’re kicked out because they’re too disabled to look after themselves doesn’t lead to a speedy recovery. Same applies if they’re battling addiction.

At the same time, yearly police budget of NYC is 5.8 billion dollars. Given that there are around 100 thousand homeless people and NYC median rental rate of ~3100$/month for a studio appartment, NYC could pay for a full studio appartment for each homeless person for the whole year, and it would cost under 2/3 of the police budget. So yeah, it’s not THAT expensive in the grand scheme of things.

And your solution is, let me guess:

Step 1) make up a situation to be mad at.
Step 2) get mad at it.
Step 3) ???
Step 4) allow police to hunt homeless people for sport.

Now, to be serious, step 2 in your example is a lie fed to you by the police state in order to manufacture fear of homeless people and justify its own existence. Therefore the rest of your post is bullshit as well. And when your neighbor has a mental health crisis, you should call social services and doctors, not the police. The fact that your first instinct is to punish and incarcerate mentally unwell people instead of helping them to get better says a lot about your current mindset actually.

Not if they get defunded

Adding to what all the others said, majority of those who cross the border on foot are asylum seekers, and even if they don’t have documents, they are still in the country legally until the court makes a decision on their asylum claim.

Then what’s your problem with the comic?

And this is exactly the message of the comic. Yet you disagree with the comic…

I thought about it and… yes it is racist

Yep, near Saratov, around 700km south-east from Moscow.

Have you contacted ANY Russian anti-war group before making that comment? Vesna, Media Partizans, Voice of Reason movement, Freedom movement, Resistance movement, Rospartizan, BOAK, The Black Bridge, Freedom of Russia Legion, Feminists Against War, or any of the others?

Not 1000 protesters. 1000 DETAINED protesters. And during the same day the protests happened all over the country. I may have not been entirely clear in my comment, but you could’ve at least checked the Wikipedia.

Since the start of the war until 6 March [2022] nearly 13,000 have been detained.

And it’s nearly impossible to calculate how many actially participated and escaped before getting detained. And that was before the mobilization, that was when only the professional military was involved. After the mobilization the protests reignited.

And what exactly do you mean by “Russians aren’t passively resisting”?

What do you mean “Finally”? The protests in Russia started on 24th of February 2022. Over 1000 protesters were detained just in Moscow that day alone. And the protests continued after that.

The problem is, these protests achieved nothing, they only resulted in fines (which undoubtedly went to funding the war), protesters being beaten, detained and some even got a criminal charge. So the protests died down because continuing them only fueled the regime more. Some people shifted to solitary picketing, some started doing online activism, some started sabotaging the railways and burning down enlistment centers, some left the country altogether and some, undoubtedly, just gave up.

I meant that these things aren’t as noticeable from outside of the country. Like, foreign news outlets probably won’t report on it much. Plus, eggs are more of an exception because of sudden shortage and prices rising rapidly. For most of the other goods the price grows more gradually and isn’t as obvious. Like in that metaphor about slowly boiling a frog.

Another problem that is noticeable from inside the country (at least by those affected by it) is that certain medications are vanishing from the pharmacies because they are no longer imported and they were never produced locally, or the local production is insufficient to meet the needs. I don’t know the full list, but the stock of ADHD meds is definitely low, and I’ve heard from friends that they had to switch to a different antidepressant due to shortages.

Uhhh, yes. It was 3am when I wrote this, so my brain probably farted hard

Adding to all the reasons already listed, Russia isn’t striving. For example, right now there is a number of towns and cities experiencing outages in central heating (with houses designed around central heating so basically no other option to heat their appartments) while the weather dips to -20°C (around -4°F). All because the centralized boiler facilities weren’t properly maintained due to the lack of money (or, to be more precise, due to money being diverted towards the war).

There are other signs, like plains malfunctioning and flights getting delayed because some component broke and cannot be replaced due to sanctions, and they happen more and more often. Also the less noticeable stuff like prices of common goods increasing by a factor of two in the last couple of years while salaries barely increased at all.

So yeah, Russia is keeping itself afloat, but it isn’t thriving at all

If there’s nothing wrong with people losing jobs, then go on, resign from your job. Be the change you want to see in this world.

Does this suck? To my ears, it doesn’t. Not unmistakably human by any stretch, but still pretty good. And that’s 9 years ago

And by “AI singing” do you mean “a famous voice overlaid on another singer’s performanse” or something closer to text-to-speech (text-to-song)?

Vocaloids are far from perfect, but they can be damn good in hands of a good producer. Plus, isn’t that the original point? “AI VA were invented so soon all VAs will be AI”?

And to produce the example you provided, it required a big voice bank from people who are very experienced in voicework. Top Gear/The Grand Tour have over 200 episodes where the hosts have basically the same characters throughout the show spanning like 20 years. And it still ain’t perfect. It’s damn good, but there are hiccups here and there.

So to produce a good AI voiceover, you’ll need experienced people doing a lot of work. And to get experienced human actors you will need humans acting. Hence, my point

Well, I meant it more like “can you imagine how horrible such a world is?” Not just “can you imagine it?”

Because yeah, you barely need to imagine it at all

Vocaloids were invented in 2000, with commercial release in 2004. Human singers aren’t extinct yet.

It may be possible in the future for a synthetic voice to sound fully human with a full range of emotions. But I believe that human actors and voice actors will still be used because 1) it’s easier to explain what to do to a human professional, 2) unions exist and they will push back against it.

Acting is an art. What world is it where robots do art while humans do the tedious manual labor?

To summarize:

There was a dude called Igor Girkin, he was in the Russian military. His crimes include, but aren’t limited to:

1. Shooting down Malaysia Airline MH17 in 2014
2. Torturing and executing Ukrainians
3. Terrorism in Eastern Ukraine under guise of separarism
4. Involvement in the annexation of Crimea (at least illegally crossing the border as a part of military force and threatening citizens)

is arrested in Russia for saying that the Russian army is performing poorly in Ukraine and Putin and Shoigu (minister of defence) are not managing the situation appropriately.

It shows that in Russia, showing honesty about war is more of a crime than murder and terrorism. Combined