It’s more than just damage control. Everything you said should be enough to get people to vote, but the sad reality is reducing it to that may not be enough. If you’re reading this and considering whether or not to vote, OP is 100% correct. You need to do it. Make no excuse, get it done. But try to feel good about it too. You’re not just voting for one person, you’re voting for an entire administration, and Biden has proven himself in that regard. Under a Biden administration you’re going to have competent people working at all levels of the federal government, which is a big deal. Biden’s administration has done a lot of good as well that is easy to gloss over in favor of focusing on his negative attributes:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-biden-accomplishment-data/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/
You also need to be at the polls to vote for your down-ballot candidates. Do not underestimate the importance or closeness of those races.
No candidate is ever going to be perfect for you. Personally I wish we were finishing the 8th year of a Bernie Sanders presidency. But that doesn’t mean that because I didn’t get it perfectly the way I want it I’m going to take my ball and just go home. I hate the democrat strategy right now, but please don’t let yourself be told that Biden has been a bad president. He’s done some things you can be happy about and some things you can wish were different. If you want to see those differences, the best way you can do that is to be politically active and work for that change. Not participating means you forfeit that right.
It seems pretty obvious to me at this point that the DNC would rather lose than have an actual progressive win. None of the shitty things that Trump wants to do will hurt them, (stupid take if they cared at all about their descendants but they’re either too arrogant or too ignorant to worry about that) but actual progressive policies that helped average people WOULD hurt their way of life. Marginally. Like, the tiniest little amount. Like, your yacht can only have one master bedroom instead of four. But why give that up when you don’t have to?
“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”
I’m voting for Biden though, and I’ll keep voting as progressively as possible in the down ballot elections. If a progressive movement from the bottom up can start by doing things like getting rid of FPTP, we still have a chance. And to anyone thinking about not voting, please do. The president is one person. They are the single most powerful person individually, (taking aside impact on the judicial system) but the collective impact on your day to day life is far more influenced by down ballot positions. Research your down ballot candidates and vote. Many of those races are decided by only a handful of votes. Yours matters.
All that conservatives will see is a violent black man. Gun control will continue to not be part of the solution. He was going to do it gun or no gun, if those women had their own guns they could have defended themselves, clearly it was a mental health issue….
FWIW I didn’t downvote you for this. I read the Ars article and saw the bit about them making it unlimited during the early pandemic days, but it seemed to imply that is was above board during other times. So if the whole case hinges on their actions during lockdown when people lost access to their own local libraries it becomes a letter vs spirit of the law thing to me personally. They broke the letter of the law, did they break the spirit of it? Was what they did immoral? The justice system isn’t perfect and as a society we continually refine and redefine our laws and have been forever. The state of Louisiana just signed a law into effect that requires poster sized copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom, kindergarten through college. If someone breaks that law, what side of history will they be on?
If unlimited lending was something that IA was doing all the time, I can see it both ways. If it was for a few months during lockdown, then I think the court got this wrong.
That’s unfortunate and disappointing. It’s John Oliver’s recent LWT on Indian elections. He stated in the show that the site was created to get around any potential government censorship.
I’ll just leave this here
http://oppositesnakes.com This is definitely just a website about opposite snakes, totally not related to the topic of this thread in any way.
This comment feels pretty derogatory to me. We know that, and if you had bothered to read the thread before coming in and making assumptions you’d have seen that. You’re missing the point. An enormous amount of information can be inferred by knowing your activity and fitness levels. This guy is on his feet 14 hours a day? Here’s a coupon for some shoe inserts. This guy spent 5 minutes pacing back and forth down the candy isle and didn’t buy anything? We need to give him a nudge to make that purchase. This person does yoga every morning and only buys organic produce? Well, they probably don’t shop at Jewel honestly but hey did you know we carry aluminum free deodorant in the health department? Your motion and fitness data can absolutely be used to infer a general level of healthiness, which is often times (and often incorrectly) also summarized as your BMI.
It was also wisely mentioned elsewhere in the thread that targeting advertising is only the tip of the iceberg as far as what can be done with the profiles these companies build about us. But none of that exactly fits very well into a title for a post.
If they were interested in my location they could request location data. What are the odds they are doing this to directly market products to people based on health data?
Inb4 “They already do that based on what you regularly purchase”
Of course, yes they do. This appears to be one more layer on top of it. And surely they wouldn’t share that information with the pharmacy, right?
Never ever trust Bing
Heavens no. I wouldn’t trust any LLM right now for factual information. Its value to me is a creative tool to in this case give you a head start on how to approach the problem. Your example of how something as simple as double counting could make the result off by an enormous factor is a perfect warning for how as well as they can bullshit it, there isn’t really as much critical “thinking” happening in that black box as some people would like to believe.
Now if we see tighter integration with Wolfram Alpha on the other hand…
All of that is solid advice. As someone who builds their own PCs for gaming, runs Apple laptops for when I leave the house, and was a former Linux user in a past life, I will add that if you choose that the laptop format is the right choice for you, don’t write off Apple immediately, budget permitting. Yes, they are expensive. They compete at the high end laptop space, not at the low end. If you have a strict budget then yes, better value can be found from other brands. However, in the high end space, they are very competitive for what you actually get. Pros are great battery life, high build quality, and one of if not the best trackpads on any laptop out there. I don’t know the specifics of your situation, but Apples accessibility features are also excellent. Yes, they gouge you on RAM and SSD upgrades, which is inexcusable. However, last time I checked, Microsoft with their Surface line and Dell charge the same upsells, in one case for Dell, even more egregious. So we can hate on the industry as a whole for that.
All that being said, for the absolute best value for your money, it’s 100% a desktop PC.
That’s fair. It’s also a little misleading because there are other cosmic events that could happen that are both closer to us and potentially further away, and have in the past. I wouldn’t say we are immune from the hazards of space but my comment could have been construed that way.
None. Space is big, and stars that can potentially supernova are rare. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supernova_candidates
It really do be that way tho https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/47713/
Alright the exchange is funny but
ACKTUALLLY…
Antioxidants are at best nothing and at worst bad for you. The whole thing is marketing wank. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2099529/
Yeah, I’m fun at parties.
That’s valid. Honest question, do you think that the content creators that you enjoy would be able to exist as profitable businesses in their own right without a platform like YT to get them started? I guess my point is that if not YT, it would be some one else, and they might start out with roots the same way YT did, but eventually as they grow wouldn’t they end up in the exact same position? I guess the way I see it is that this enshitification happening everywhere is two tiered, for one, it’s plain corporate greed driven by the pressure of needing to grow forever, and for that part of it, I’ll keep blocking ads, or if it’s a platform level thing like Reddit, I’ll take my ball and find somewhere else to play, like here! But I do think that another factor is the sheer economy of getting so popular and being crushed under your own weight, like the Tyranny of the Rocket. It’s inevitable unless the fundamental way the majority of people use the internet changes, and that ship probably sailed decades ago.
I agree with everything you said, which is ultimately why instead of paying for YT premium I support creators I like in other ways. YT does get a little bit from me when I watch on devices like my TV that don’t have uBlock, and I’m fine with that balance.
Don’t get me wrong I use an adblocker, and if I’m on a device that can’t run one, I stop watching videos if a mid roll ad shows up. If their ads were less intrusive, I wouldn’t block them. I’m only saying that the claim that YT/google deserve nothing is a pretty big stretch.
Tictok? Instagram? You are not wrong about that in the long form VOD space but lots of creators come over from tictok after establishing a following because YouTube pays out a lot better.
Feel however you want to feel about ads, but that’s a brain dead take. Storage of all that content and delivering it to anywhere in the world is not free. Very few creators would be able to build that kind of CDN on their own and be profitable, probably impossible without a large established following first.
Two posts, two different instances, two different sets of comments. Ok, there are pros and cons:
Segmenting the conversation means that different opinions and perspectives have a bigger opportunity to rise to the top in each discussion. That’s good.
There is also a risk of too few different viewpoints being present in one instance or another, making the possibility of an echo chamber forming higher. That’s bad.
I’m not suggesting that there’s a single perfect way to handle it, nothing is that black and white, but maybe there is a chance to do better. Perhaps crossposted content could contain a second link underneath between the body of the post and the comments section that could inform users that an identical post existed on another instance. Perhaps the comment sections could be merged but the user could choose to filter by instance if they wanted to.