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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.

    While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.

    Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.


  • Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.



  • Sonori@beehaw.orgtoPolitics@beehaw.orgBernie Would Have Won
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    2 months ago

    The silver lining is that everyone from Lemmy, to youtube, to Bernie seems to have correctly identified the problem early on this time around, so much of the anger is being directed towards the party establishment for screwing up the easy win as it is towards Trump. The question is whether or not that anger can be turned towards productive action to gain control of the DNC, or will be quashed by the establishment once again.

    Time, and agitation, will tell.








  • The bible isn’t the infallible word of God though, at least not according to anyone but the most fundamentalist and not particularly literate sects, it’s a collection of stories sometimes about God and mostly about their fallible human followers originating from entirely different religions, cultures, and centuries that were passed down though oral tradition and copies of copies of copies for centuries. Hence why so much of it is open to debate even within a given church, even before getting to how much of it is explicitly metaphorical or any of its actual history might have affected how said stories were retold and which parts survived.




  • Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?

    This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.

    And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s

    Don’t get me wrong, fuck the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.

    The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.

    Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.

    Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.

    If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.

    Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company that just donated to our campaign and is making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.


  • Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into via an over the air update.

    Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.

    It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.

    Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.

    I sure am glad that the government may not be willing to provide social housing without a five year wait list while you to live in a tent under the freeway and get all your worldly possessions, photos, and documents thrown out by police, but is always proactive about ensuring that billion dollar companies never have to worry about facing even the slightest consequence of their own active decisions to undermine the fight against climate change.

    Biggest /s possible.


  • Ok, i’ll bite.

    While I get the instance name is lost on some visitors, it’s fascinating to see Republican campaign material posted here in complete seriousness. So much about how dare the government possibly have impeded people heavily involved in far right campaigns in making money off distracting the working class with made up culture war. How dare other private businesses want to throw the out and proud Nazi’s off their platform.

    A few offhand points, it is absolutely within the State Department’s remit to identify foreign infuance campaigns, even if they don’t always get it right.

    The fact that the Twitter Files also showed that companies can and did push back on numerous recommendations after their own investigation disagreed without repercussions would seem to be pretty damming evidence that they really were recommendations about potential misinformation accounts and not government censorship.

    Similarly, the comments on identifying misinformation is based on the ludicrous idea that there is just no possible way for an investigation to tell the difference between a truth and an outright lie, and thusly anyone attempting to do so or tell others about the serial liar much be censoring them.

    The best evidence that the government isn’t actually trying to censor these group is government doesn’t use this sort of lukewarm, you might want to take a look at these accounts methods on pleople who it actually wants to censor like leftists, they just declare them a potential terror theat and send the FBI or police in to rough up the environmental group or activists.

    But hey, they called the New York Post sensationalist and massive transphobe campaigning to get trans people banned from public restrooms prone to misinformation, so I guess the deep state really is censoring poor Donald Trump and his friends and we should be outraged not at the blatant campaign to mislead the poor into voting against their interests, but of the most lukewarm, liberal, halfhearted response possible to it.

    In short, get back to me when they’ve done something more than politely ask the mods to look into a questionable user, like have even approached the sort of things they do people trying to block pipelines on a weekly basis.


  • Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…


  • It means that despite being fifteen years old, it still takes more electricity for a single bitcoin transaction than to drive an electric SUV from Florida to California, cost per single transaction has still spiked over 50 USD twice in the last six months, and it remains too prone to wild inflation and deflation for any serious business to actually price anything in.

    In other words, it has the same inherent value it always has, none at all.



  • “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

    Even more importantly when it comes to assessing properly, machine learning, now referred to as AI, has been continuealy shown to not just repeat the biases in its training data, but to significantly exaggerate them.

    Given how significantly and explicitly race has been used to determine and guide so much property and neighborhood development in the training data, I do not look forward to seeing a system that is not only more racist than a post war city council choosing where to build new moterways but which is sold and treated as infallible by the humans operating and litigating it.

    Given the deaths and disaster created by the Horizon Post Office Scandel, I also very much do not look forward to the widespread adoption of software which is inherently and provablly far less accurate, reliable, and auditable than the Horizon software. At least that could only ruin your life if you were a Postmaster and not just any member of the general public who isn’t rich enough to have your affairs handled by a human.

    But hey, on the bright side, if Horizon set UK legal precedent than any person or property agent is fully and unequivocally legally liable for the output of any software they use, after the first few are found guilty for things the procedural text generator they used wrote people might decide its not worth the risk.