I mean if it is its clever - put a bunch of made up products out there to gauge interest without needing to invest any capital, then actualy make the products that garner the most attention. Makes way more sense than trying to manufacture and market things from scratch
The context is important here - Australia had a continuous indigenous population for over 60,000 years before white settlement. White Australia never had an agreement with indigenous peoples at large, and through relentless expansion of colonies, spreading diseases like smallpox, introducing alcohol and drugs, forcibly abducting and schooling children, heavy incarceration and a slew of other typical British colonial shit ended up leaving them disenfranchised, alienated, and excluded. Indigenous Australians prior to colonisation had a deep affinity with the land and tended it like custodians, but because they didn't build towns or farm like Europeans, they were just swept aside without ever really being acknowledged or addressed.
The Voice was asked for as a product of the Uluru Statement of the Heart - not long, worth a read- https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/
It was really first and foremost about having an acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, the settlers cocked things up and that it'd better to fix things together. It's not asking for anything "more" or extra, it's about correctly telling history and reframing our national dialogue to be coming from a place of partnership, instead of colonialism, so we could fix some of the very real issues modern Australians face as a result of hundreds of years of callous racism. It was a chance for white Australia and government to really listen and maybe find better ways of doing things.
But now instead we get to try to explain to our kids why 60% of the country don't think representation or inclusion matters while indigenous Australians will continue to struggle without a government that can listen to them.
I strongly, strongly suggest you revisit some of the preconceptions that led you here. I was going to instinctually retort, but instead took 5 minutes to read the relevant Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa#West_Africa. It is clear that the topic is more nuanced than I originally thought, so thank you for bringing that to my attention, but it's a crude and broad brush to imply that most slaves already existed in slavery prior to the Atlantic trade. There is also a significant difference between slaves in Africa who were exchanged between local groups in a wholly African context, versus slaves chained up and flung across the Atlantic with a 12% mortality rate and forced under a European slavery conception.
I suspect your response has rubbed others the wrong way, as it did myself, so consider this an attempt to find a common ground for dialogue - whatever the history of Africs prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, I think we can agree that what happened was utterly grotesque and an atrocity upon the history of our common humanity.
I envisage a world where your browsing Netflix, and based on past preferences some of the title cards are generated on the fly for you. Then based on what you click, the AI engine warms us and generates the film for you in real-time. Essentially indistinguishable from the majority of Hollywood regurgitation.
And because the script is just a series of autogenerated prompts, its like a choose your own adventure book, you can steer the narrative the way you want if you elect to. Otherwise it'll be good enough to keep most monkey brains happy and you won't even be able to tell the difference most of the time.
It is too easy for most unions to become corrupted by self interested parties. It's the same with any human endeavour. Relax the boundaries enough and people with less scruples than you will worm their way in.
There's needs to be legislative framework that protects the rights of every worker, every industry, everywhere as a baseline. Then construct sensible unions for various industries from there. Otherwise they become fragile, susceptible to personal influence - who's going to run against a 10 year incumbent union president?- it needs an iron core underlying it to protect workers rights.
It sounds like a cursed item in D&D or something.
The Book of Faces Wondrous Item, very rare
This enchanted tome magically records the likeness each humanoid slain in its vicinity, preserving a snapshot of their life and memories. The book can be read to glean superficial information about it's subjects. As an action, you can tear a page from the book to summon a ghostly spirit of its subject, which will be magically compelled to answer questions. The spirit knows nothing the owner did not know in life.
The Demon Lord Elgor Ithym is said to have a keen interest in this book...
Ooh I know some of this!
Sauron was a Maia (lesser primordial spirit), who along with Morgoth (a fallen spirit formally known as Melkor) was at odds with essentially every other spirit and the general concepts of peace and tranquility that were sought by the creators of the universe. After Morgoth was defeated, Sauron inherited the role of the eponymous Dark Lord and sought to rule Middle-Earth in its entirety.
The Wizards were the Istar, a group of Maiar tasked by the Valar (greater spirits) and Manwe (the king of the Valar) to travel to Middle-Earth and aid the Free People in their fight against Sauron. They took the form of elderly men and roamed the lands to counter and subvert Saurons influence. Their mandate prevented them from open conflict, which is why they took on the role of advisors and supporters instead of just fighting Sauron head on or rallying armies to fight him. Their origins were unknown to any of the Free People, but the Elves for sure new that they weren't just Men - since they lived for thousands of years and had gifts that no mortal Men possessed.
Bombadil is likely another Valar, off in Middle Earth doing his own thing - in ancient ages many of the Valar visited or lived in Middle Earth, so it could be that he didn't return to Valinor and just hung around. His complete disinterest in intervening in the conflict is one clue, and the fact that he exceeds Sauron in raw power as the One Ring is completely mundane to him, whereas Gandalf fears that it will overpower him, is another.
Showing him a modern blender hitting 30,000 rpm
Good catch, I think we've been bamboozled ladies and gentlemen. Well played OP
This is a good summary; as a reddit exile myself who exclusively used Sync, I think it's worth emphasising that Dawson has done an amazing job of making the transition from reddit to lemmy pretty seamless from an app design point of view. I can set my views and filters up identically as they were in the Reddit version of the app, and the lemmy experience becomes essentially identical to reddit.
There's definitely a conflict between "paid closed source app" and "FOSS fediverse", and there's arguments to be made about whether user revenue should be directed to server expenses to maintain communities or front end app development to attract more users, which I think will be interesting to see play out. But at the end of the day Sync makes lemmy "useable" in a way that replicates the reddit experience, which is what a lot of migrants were after - other apps (while arguably more feature rich in terms of the fediverse) just didn't quite hit the dopamine-feed the way Sync does.
Definitely seems AGI related. Has to do with acing mathematical problems - I can see why a generative AI model that can learn, solve, and then extrapolate mathematical formulae could be a big breakthrough.