What would rioting do though besides serve as an excuse to ram in fascism

We should remember that most Americans still live in blue states with sane governments. The federal government can’t just barge in and do whatever it wants, and if tries to do so, the social contract that binds the nation together is broken and secession becomes a real possibility. But that’s unlikely because Trump is far too clueless to know about any of the problems he’ll run into if he tries to implement any of his plans.

Which is fine for him because it was always a con anyway. He talks and acts out of his ass. What he will do is anyone’s guess, but it’ll at least be restrained by what’s realistically possible.

Race stuff gets clicks and views

There’s a million reasons people have given me for voting Trump, none of them rational. But the classic tropes of fear and disgust won out again. I’m old enough to remember the 2004 election, then it was gay people. Now it’s trans people and dark-skinned migrants. I really didn’t think those old tropes would work this time, but it just keeps working. Americans will just keep falling for it, apparently.

While it’s depressing that we’re reminded of the power of dumb at hateful people yet again, we should remember that nothing actually changed in that regard this election. We’re just discovering what’s always been there beneath the surface. I don’t think the malaise we’re feeling now is so much about what Trump will do - sure scores of people will die from bad policy, but that’s nothing new. Rather, we’re upset about what this reveals about ourselves. But we shouldn’t be upset about the act of revelation, because it tells us what we need to fix.

What did the mobilization accomplish? I watched as police reform in my area, which seemed on the path to success pre-George Floyd, was killed off in a backlash to the protests and riots. Chauvin was convicted not on the protests, but because of the people who stood there and got the video. Beyond that, I can’t see a single point of lasting success for BLM. By embracing inflammatory but attention grabbing messaging like ACAB and defund the police, they got attention alright, but that attention ended up painting the whole police reform movement as a bunch of rabid psychos.

See this article for a more well researched take on what I’m saying. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-views-on-black-lives-matter-have-changed-and-why-that-makes-police-reform-so-hard/

What we often call “the government” is actually many separate systems each with several moving parts. One man doesn’t control it, no matter what sentences are written on what pieces of paper. Trump has all the corruption he needs, but he’s not smart enough to know what he’s doing.

So to act like there’s no hope is just way too defeatist. Trump is gonna fail, and we can exploit those failures. But the last time we didn’t react to his failures correctly, because of course he just won again after what most historians consider the worst presidency in American history. So the first smart thing we can do is ask where the anti Trump messaging and media failed. And actually try to answer that question.

Ok everyone chill. Yeah, it sucks. But we kinda foresaw this ever since Biden decided to run again. Take a deep breath, think about it more later. The worst thing is to be angry instead of smart. Remember George Floyd. Remember specifically how everyone got angry and did dumb things about it, and today efforts at police reform are actually in a worse place than they were before he was murdered on video.

Think about ways to counter Trump that will be more effective and less just expressions of rage. I think the biggest problem is the media that really plays to Trump’s reality TV-style politics. It’s not enough to wine that the voters are too stupid, but what do we do about it?

So as I understand it, overarching priorities of Trump supporters are:

1. ending sex trafficking
2. stop making the poor poorer and
3. fighting election fraud

So they’re excited about a guy who:

1. By his own admission/bragging, had a 15 year long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
2. Passed the largest corporate tax cut in history, and plans to eliminate income tax which is paid at a higher rate by high income individuals, replacing it with tariffs that fall disproportionately on the poor.
3. Made numerous fraudulent claims and tried to submit a fraudulent slate of electors after the last election in an attempt to subvert the will of the voters.

True but if Tesla keeps acting like they’re on the verge of an unsupervised, steering wheel-free system…this is more evidence that they’re not. I doubt we’ll see a cybercab with no controls for the next 10 years if the current tech is still ignoring large, highly predictable objects in the road.

Probably just someone traumatized by a sidewall puncture.

Part of the problem is that the images suck. Honestly. Here we see a bunch of body bags, we know literally nothing about who’s in them. But on Oct. 7 there were lots of images and video of what happened, with people’s faces visible.

The most effective thing that could be done to support Palestinians, infinitely more effective than spray painting neighborhoods and camping in public spaces, would be to give them cameras and a means of releasing video. As long as it’s just numbers, no one will care.

X/Twitter has its own data centers, this is for physical equipment under X’s control. They need to get a judgment (which the article indicates they’re working on) before they can do anything. Presumably after months to years of litigation they can then repossess the servers, but then X would probably at the last minute pay the bill.

Yeah it’s that terrible, but look at the rest of the world. Putin enjoys a lot of support from the same people he’s sending to die, Modi in India wins elections by a large margin on a platform of basically “Fuck Sikhs and Muslims”. Add China and basically most of humanity lives under someone who is blatantly racist, corrupt, generally horrible, or a combination thereof. And Western Europe doesn’t have a leg to stand on either, the UK ignored dire warnings and voted for Brexit without even understanding what it is.

Humans don’t believe what’s objectively correct, they believe what they want to believe. This makes feeding people what they want to hear a very successful strategy, and one that psychopaths have an advantage in pursuing.

Well building battlemechs does seem like the obvious next step on Elon’s progression

It really comes down to feature removal. Elon annihilated Twitter’s staff, and the more features they can cut, the less staff they need. It may not seem like much to maintain a block feature, and if you have a staff, it’s not. But you do need to have probably some sort of blocker backend service, a blocking UI, probably an unblocking UI (I dunno if that’s a thing I don’t use twitter), storage that keeps track of who blocked who, and somebody who knows how all that works.

Musk has said that humans drive with only eyesight, so cars should be able to drive with just cameras.

This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they’re not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.

Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn’t. We tolerate crashes because we can’t improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it’s irrational not to do it.

It works for me because I’m into a lot of the stuff discussed on Lemmy. My biggest problem with reddit was that at some point they seemed eager to smoosh all the subs together into one big Basic Betty fest. For example having r/all be a mandatory sub and having a million default subs…It kind of felt like towards the end everyone was discussing the same stuff on every sub, and it was basically the same stuff being discussed on Twitter (and many posts were just pics of tweets).

I know Lemmy kinda has some similar issues, but because the whole ecosystem is its own niche it still works for me.

Organizational structure and membership of the Chamber of Commerce.

Just deleted Uber from my phone. If they’re gonna use my payments to turn around and lobby to keep me locked into subscriptions that don’t even involve them, I’m gonna be a lyft guy from now on.

Is it still fraud if no one falls for it?

So basically the wildest conspiracy theories about Twitter pre-Elon are true now, but in reverse