True, but their votes also make no difference in the grand scheme of things. The only thing that does make a difference is if your boss is the CEO of a big company that donates to politicians. But you can’t counter that.

That you’d bring up the minimum wage argument kind of shows exactly what I was talking about. Most people think this is remotely relevant and keep bringing it up as an argument when all it does is show how little they know of how economy works. This is the kind of people that got Trump in office, no thinking, just parrotting what feels good to say because they’d like it to be true.

The problem with that like I said is your opinions and beliefs become really shallow and you pretty much just swallow whatever you feel like believing. To actually make sense of politics takes a whole lot of time, though most people, even on lemmy, actually know really little of it. However everyone on this platform is super confident in their opinion, though they don’t seem to able to debate it at all.

This was the big issue with direct democracies. You can help the problem a bit with representative democracies or republics, but you still have people taking a few minutes or sometimes hours every couple years to vote for the one that sounds better to your ears. This is how you get someone like Trump as president. People can’t really be trusted with any decisions about something they know nothing about.

One person changes nothing anyway. What would my vote change in a 80% conservative region? I’d rather spend that time on things I enjoy.

*Bit of a different situation in the US, but the US isn’t the entire world.

You do realize most people can’t really afford to care about politics right? When you’ve got people to care for, a job to work, a house to maintain, hobbies to participate in to keep a sane mind, how much time do you really have to spend on politics? Because whatever amount that is, it’s not enough. All sides spend a huge amount on propaganda and to see through all that takes more effort than normal people can spare.

Besides, there are far more important things you could focus on other than politics. That might depend on where you live and how old you are, but most people out there just don’t see the effect of politics beyond the occasional headline and higher taxes/inflation. Why not then spend the time you would spend on politics doing something that has an actual impact?

Other humans can feel emotions, or so you’d believe, but I have no proof of this. All I see is they receive certain input (I call you a shitface) and produce certain output (You punch me in the balls). LLMs can mimic this. But is one of the two more valid than the other? From an observers’ point of view they are the exact same.

That’s dumb. The “work” in maintaining this excel file was the prompting and overall agent logic. In reality you’d be using something like openrouter and the instant claude “dies” for whatever reason you swap to whatever the freshest AI is. This never becomes ancient, it keeps up with the times.

Saves input tokens and uses more output because of OCR, and output is priced way higher.