Yes. That’s why gasoline is considered relatively elastic.

The real crisis is diesel. A farmer can’t just not plow the field. A truck driver can’t just not deliver the goods. A plane can’t fly halfway to its destination.

European diesel is up about 40% since June, and U.S. diesel futures jumped 53% in the third quarter. In some markets, diesel is trading around $200+ per barrel equivalent while crude is nowhere near that.

That’s why this matters so much. Diesel touches agriculture, trucking, shipping, construction, and manufacturing.

When diesel gets this expensive, everything, and I mean fucking everything, gets more expensive.

Just so I understand your argument:

1. Killing is morally wrong.

2. Therefore, anyone who kills is morally equivalent to anyone else who kills, regardless of motive, scale, necessity, or circumstance.

3. So killing a mass murderer makes you just as bad as the mass murderer.

Is that your position?

Happy upcoming birthday my fellow Libra!

If I’m going to spend the next 300 hours staring at a character’s ass, I’m picking one I actually want to look at.

Now that is a defensible argument.

Yes, these principles are violated constantly. But I think that is precisely why it matters that we continue to insist upon them.

You started by arguing that collective punishment is simply how international politics sometimes works. You pointed to Germany, to Gaza, and now to the prevalence of atrocities around the world.

But there is a danger in that reasoning. When “people do this all the time” becomes our answer to an atrocity, we begin normalizing the atrocity instead of opposing it.

Article 33 does not say collective punishment is prohibited only when the world is behaving itself. It prohibits it precisely because history demonstrated what happens when we accept collective guilt and the punishment of civilians as ordinary features of war.

Laws are only as meaningful as our willingness to uphold them.

It requires more than writing them down.

It requires the willingness to condemn violations where they occur, when they occur; friend or foe.

We must confront the scale of the destruction Israel has inflicted across Gaza. More than 170,000 structures, roughly 69 percent of Gaza’s prewar buildings, had already been damaged or destroyed by January 2025.

We should confront the conclusion reached by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry after examining the broader pattern of killing, deprivation, destruction, displacement, and official conduct: that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass

Do not look at the frequency with which these principles are violated and conclude that resistance to them is futile. Draw the opposite conclusion.

Their violation is the reason we have to keep insisting upon them.

Demand better. Do not concede what is right simply because others have.

No. The fact that people still commit atrocities does not mean those atrocities were never rejected.

People still murder. People still torture. People still commit genocide. That does not make murder, torture, or genocide accepted principles.

Collective punishment was explicitly rejected in international humanitarian law after the horrors of the last century.

And “but the Muslim world” is not a defense of your argument. It is just pointing at someone else.

You defended collective punishment. You minimized the suffering of innocent civilians. You justified that suffering as the consequence of political decisions made by a population decades ago.

Those were your words. They are still sitting there for everyone to read.

You cannot erase what you argued by pretending you argued something else.

“I made no such prediction.”

That is semantics after the fact.

“We’ll see what is remembered 50 years from now” is plainly an appeal to future historical judgment. You used it to wave away criticism in the present.

You do not get to hide behind the fact that you left the prediction deliberately vague. The implication was the entire point of the sentence.

If you meant nothing by it, then it was meaningless. If you meant what any ordinary reader would understand it to mean, then yes, you were invoking how history would judge this.

“We’ll see what is remembered 50 years from now” is a remarkable thing to say while defending collective punishment, considering we already have a thorough and tragic historical record.

The last century gave us genocide, mass civilian killing, collective punishment, and entire populations being blamed for the actions of governments and armed groups.

The humanitarian laws written in response explicitly rejected the exact moral logic you are invoking here.

You are not offering some hardheaded lesson from history. You are resurrecting an argument the last century already taught us to reject.

Instead of predicting how history will remember this, maybe you should read some.

Hahaha! I love it!

An actual house so ugly it looks like AI slop. Thanks for looking it up and sharing.

Either that is the ugliest home design or this is AI generated nonsense. Those buildings make no sense.

I think the vitriol around AI has crossed into moral absolutism for a lot of people. There are legitimate criticisms of AI, but “AI can be harmful” does not logically mean “all AI use is unethical” or “AI has no useful purpose.” Treating every use as morally equivalent is just hasty generalization and guilt by association.

At some point, “AI is bad” stops being a conclusion and becomes a sacred value. Then useful examples are not considered on their merits, they are dismissed because they threaten the moral position. You can criticize harmful uses of AI without pretending the technology itself has no legitimate use.

Power.

Not a nicer car. Not a better vacation. Not a bigger house.

The ability to buy companies, fund institutions, shape industries, influence politics, and absorb enormous losses without changing your lifestyle.

At a certain point, more money stops buying a better life. It starts buying more control.

deleted by creator

Ah, but how much? Where does me end and the machine begin?

Lets assume you are correct and I had no part in the reply. Here is a 100%, hand to keyboard question from me.

Would you like to talk about what it said?

I spent this morning sitting with this exchange, coffee in hand, reading back over what I had written.

I’m not especially interested in responding to the insults. And I’m going to set aside the argument about how AI systems are trained, plagiarism, consent, compensation, and so on. Those are legitimate ethical questions and I share them, but they are a different conversation.

The part that stayed with me was the simpler claim underneath all of that:

“You didn’t write this.”

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my original answer had blurred together several different things.

I had been treating “writing,” “authorship,” “ownership,” and “responsibility” almost as synonyms.

They aren’t.

You can originate an idea, develop an argument, direct how it is expressed, edit it, approve the final version, and take responsibility for publishing it without necessarily having composed every sentence yourself.

Nickiwest had responded to my original comment and said “That sounds more like the job of an editor than the job of a writer.” and that got me thinking about my old work as an art director for a studio.

I could come up with the concept, find references, explain what I wanted, reject drafts, change direction, combine ideas, and go through revision after revision until the finished image expressed what I had in mind.

That was real creative work.

But I still wouldn’t say I drew the picture.

The idea might have been mine. The direction might have been mine. The judgment might have been mine.

The drawing wasn’t.

I think AI creates a similar complication with language.

If I give an LLM a thought and it produces a sentence, then no, I did not necessarily compose that sentence in the ordinary sense.

If I argue with it, reject things, rearrange them, rewrite parts, refine distinctions, change the reasoning, and decide what survives, then I have obviously contributed something substantial. But calling every form of that contribution “writing” may sometimes be too simple.

Sometimes “writer” will be perfectly natural.

Sometimes “editor,” “director,” or simply “AI-assisted” may be more accurate.

What interests me more than the title is what happens during the process.

I can put a half-formed thought into language and look at it from the outside.

Sometimes I read a sentence and realize, that sounds like something I believe, but it goes further than I mean.

Sometimes two ideas I had been treating as the same turn out not to be the same at all.

Sometimes an argument looks convincing in my head and falls apart the moment I see the missing step written down.

Sometimes the model gives me wording I dislike, and figuring out why I dislike it forces me to understand my own position better.

Then I put that thought back in and try again.

The result I am looking for is not better prose, it is a better thought.

That is basically what happened to me this morning.

My original position was that the work was mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, put my name on it, and accepted responsibility for it.

I still think responsibility matters enormously. If I publish bad reasoning, false claims, unsupported accusations, or generic slop, I do not get to shrug and say, “The AI wrote it.”

I chose to publish it.

But I no longer think responsibility settles the question of who “wrote” something.

An editor can be responsible for publishing a piece without having written it. An art director can shape an image without having drawn it.

So now I think the more interesting questions are smaller ones.

Who originated the idea?

Who developed the argument?

Who decided what belonged?

Who noticed the mistakes?

Who revised the thinking?

Who directed the expression?

Who actually composed the prose?

Those answers may not always point to the same person, and maybe that is fine.

What I don’t think follows is that the human contribution disappears the moment a machine becomes involved.

My ideas do not disappear. My judgment does not disappear. The things I accept, reject, revise, and ultimately stand behind do not disappear.

But neither do I need to pretend I personally composed every sentence if I didn’t.

I’m comfortable with that distinction.

And I think it leaves me somewhere more interesting than where I started.

What fascinates me about A.I. is the strange process of having a thought, seeing it reflected back, noticing where it fails, and slowly discovering what I actually mean; what I believe.

This reply is a product of that process. I do not care what title we end up giving the result, I enjoyed spending my morning with it.

Oh! I wasn’t sure you would read it, let alone reply. Writing it was a fun little excursion from my day, so I’m glad at least four lines made it through.

My offer still stands if you’d like to posit a position and defend it.

And I meant what I said about ignorance. I would genuinely love to be shown that I’m wrong. Sincerely. I would. Being wrong means there is something for me to learn, something against which to temper the mind.

What do ya say? Want to offer me something more substantial than slop?

A sneer is easier than an answer, and certainty is a lovely refuge when you have no intention of defending it.

You accuse me of surrendering thought to a machine, and then, the moment you are asked to justify that accusation, you surrender thought entirely.

How convenient.

With a wave of the hand, every difficult question disappears. You declare the words contaminated by the tool that helped shape them and thereby absolve yourself of any obligation to consider what they actually say.

No examination. No argument. No possibility of correction.

You accuse me of regurgitating the output of a machine, yet what have you offered in return?

A familiar sneer. A borrowed insult. A conclusion retrieved intact from the cupboard of approved contempt.

You recognize the hated object, produce the expected response, and call the reflex thought.

That is the irony you seem determined not to notice.

My argument from the beginning has been that a machine must be tempered by a human mind. It possesses no responsibility for what it produces. Whatever value emerges from its use depends upon the person capable of examining it, rejecting it, correcting it, shaping it, and finally standing behind it.

But a mind cannot temper anything if it refuses examination itself.

And that is where your position becomes more interesting than your insult.

A mind that refuses examination begins to resemble the very machine you claim to despise. It receives a familiar stimulus, reaches for the familiar pattern, and produces the familiar response without troubling itself over whether the response is true.

Input. Recognition. Output.

The machinery of contempt.

Ignorance itself is no shame. Every one of us is ignorant of almost everything. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again. If you can show me where, I gain something from the correction.

But there is something contemptible in making a virtue of ignorance.

In encountering an argument and proudly announcing that you will not examine it, then mistaking that refusal for discernment. In treating incuriosity as wisdom. In believing that because you have protected yourself from an argument, you have somehow defeated it.

You have not defended your position.

You have insulated it.

Those are not the same thing.

Thought requires a certain vulnerability. You must permit an idea close enough to examine it. You must risk finding weakness in your own position. You must allow the possibility that another person, even one using a tool you despise, might know something you do not.

Without that, certainty does not become strength.

It becomes brittleness.

You tried to cut me with the accusation that I had surrendered my mind to a machine. But in your eagerness to make it, you performed the very surrender you condemn.

You saw the signal.

You retrieved the response.

You refused examination.

You produced the slop.

And so the question remains exactly where I left it:

Will you defend what you believe?

Or is your conviction only strong enough to survive so long as you never allow an argument near it?

I did not say “authorship is when I make a few edits and sign my name to slop.” That is not my argument.

My argument is that authorship is grounded in the origination of the ideas and intent, control over what goes into the work, judgment over how those ideas are expressed, endorsement of the final form, and responsibility for the result. Assistance with the linguistic realization does not, by itself, transfer authorship.

You point out that the machine has no meaning, association, appreciation, or delight in the words. I agree. But I do. That is precisely the distinction I am making. The machine does not know what I mean, care whether it represents me, recognize when an analogy fails, or decide whether an argument is worth defending. I am doing those things.

You seem to be defining “writing” as personally generating the initial sequence of words. Maybe that is where we actually disagree. But that definition cannot simply be assumed and then used to prove that I am not writing. Why should authorship reside specifically in first-pass word generation rather than in the thought, intention, judgment, revision, and control that determine what the final words mean?

That is the argument I am interested in having.

Why?

I was hoping “a writer that doesn’t write” was the conclusion to an argument rather than the entire argument. I’m perfectly happy to be wrong. What I can’t do is respond to an argument you’re keeping to yourself.