Well, in this hypothetical scenario you can just as well say that Cuba is defending from the future threat from USA, the same way USA is now defending from future threat from Iran.
Not future threat though what US has put Cuba through the last 70 years any aggressive military from Cuba is probably justified. And no any attack from Cuba on US will still be morally ok if they attack US military and US banks etc.
There were always people creating illusionary worlds to control other people who gladly believed their lies, there still are.
We live in a chaotic and illegible world, but humans crave legibility so much that they will rather believe the fantasies that take their freedoms (wealth, agency) than deal with the chaos themselves.
Religion is one such a narrative, but governments or corporations have their own, just as harmful. Or - as many people seem to think - actually beneficial, because "people cannot handle the truth". Which I don't subscribe to.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you can't kill an idea, because it was never alive.
Humans are just primates hardwired for selection bias and paredolia. We rationalize but we aren't rational beings, we're primarily driven by emotion and ego. We're smart enough to recognize death but also smart enough for mortal fear.
And that's even before we get to the vast political and cultural power of religion which even in this "atheistic" age still manufactures consent or justifies the policies of most governments around the world.
Unfortunately, gods will never die because they will never not be useful and people will never stop anthropomorphizing their environment.
I'm buying ungodly numbers of books and I'd say more than half of what I get from Amazon is PoD, and print quality varies. In my country (Poland) they have one huge advantage: the price. It's quite often somewhere between 30%-50% cheaper than alternatives which is significant given book prices.
One thing that is pretty annoying is when a PoD book that had colors in the original no longer has them, e.g. on charts, but text still refers to them with color names.
I'll likely stop buying from Amazon too because over the years quality of PoD books also seems to be dropping, it wasn't that bad years ago.
I am not gp, but I like to have a nice collection of unread books to browse and pick from, not (to almost quote someone, from my vague memory) "shelves full of books to impress others with what I have already read".
> The public is slightly fearful and wary of AI based not on their experience with it, but because the only picture they have of it in their mind is the negative one.
Can't relate. I was super optimistic until I saw what overreliance on AI and ubiquitous public access are doing to my peers and - from what I hear - to school-attending generations.
Haha, I completely get it. It sounds dystopian on paper! But when you're actually in the middle of a screaming match, having a neutral machine strip out the anger so you can just read the core issue is surprisingly therapeutic. It’s definitely a weird timeline, but it’s a highly functional one!"
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