BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Genuinely, thank you for this. This actually helps me build a more informed perspective and I do appreciate it.

It'd be nice, but I genuinely don't see how that could be accomplished without a constitutional amendment. And even then, you have the deeper issue of how to regulate speech that isn't directly associated with the candidate. It's not a big improvement if you have some billionaires just throwing their money around, while a candidate they oppose is legally barred from raising money. I don't see a way to actually implement something like this in a practical way when the stakes are as high as they are. Ultimately, the reason this market is so big is because it truly is that important, and no amount of legislation can really change that. Block traditional TV and radio ads and it'll just shift even more to social media. Block direct campaign social media ads and the money will shift to a bunch of bots and astroturfed viral campaigns, which can't be easily blocked without also blocking individuals' ability to express their politics, which would absolutely, and rightly, violate the First Amendment.

Edit: I'd also just add that the people at large ultimately play a role here as well. If ads didn't work, if we actually formed our views and voting habits based on facts and policies and nothing else, then there wouldn't be a point to ads. But we're fundamentally emotional beings and so here we are.

Insulin is a bit complicated. Older formulations of insulin are cheap at this point, but the newer formulations that are more convenient and easy to use are still patented and can be very expensive. There are also newer delivery mechanisms like pens that cost much more than the traditional vial and syringe.

Medical pricing is an insane clusterfuck of imaginary numbers being shuffled around, but total insulin spending in 2022 was around $22 billion. The problem is much deeper than simply needing to raise taxes to throw even more money at the problem (and you're not going to find a simple $22 billion in taxes lying around anyway); you really need to address the core issue of why it's been getting so expensive in the first place, and that's a more complicated issue of corporate greed and regulatory failure. For one issue, it's extremely hard for a manufacturer to become properly licensed to produce insulin, so there's a huge wall any would-be competitors have to climb. Additionally, it is illegal to import it, so Americans are unable to buy insulin from other countries where it's produced much cheaper. Obviously big pharma loves that.

https://diabetes.org/newsroom/press-releases/new-american-diabetes-association-report-finds-annual-costs-diabetes-be

The problem is homes being hoarded as investment vehicles instead of places to live, thats gonna apply to any kind of investment firm.

The awkward thing that people don't like to talk about is that this also applies to individuals and how they then set regional housing regulation. As of now, individual families are strongly incentivized to do anything possible to increase the value of their own homes, which includes blocking any new construction and setting onerous requirements that exclude poor and other "undesirable" people from moving into the area.

Fundamentally, you cannot have housing be a super productive investment asset AND have it be affordable. These are fundamentally opposite goals, and it applies to individual families just as much as it applies to hedge funds. A town cannot hope to have its property values go up to the moon and simultaneously be surprised when its young people can't afford to live there. Until this contraction is addressed, we're gonna be stuck here, but new construction, ideally of cheap units but literally anything helps, can at least help to stem the bleeding.

In particular, her tour was a massive three hour retrospective covering her entire career rather than being focused on one new album. Combine that with a few re-recordings of old albums and her successfully getting a new generation of Gen Z fans and you've got one very popular star.

Israel has a right to exist

Under most definitions of Zionism, you are a Zionist. When the term was coined, it referred to the idea that the Jews should move to Israel and establish some kind of formal community.

Of course, now Israel does exist, so that original frame of reference no longer exists and the term generally means "a perspective towards Israel that matches or opposes what I think".

At the beginning, opposing Zionism would mean that you don't think Jews should move back to the Levant. Of course, that did happen, so now what? Perhaps it means you think that Israel should remain at its current borders and not expand, but is that really anti-Zionism when it's literally the accomplishment of the Zionist mission? Or perhaps anti-Zionism is the belief that Jews should be forcibly removed from Israel or killed. That is unquestionably anti-Zionist, but it's also blatantly genocidal.

Basically, Zionism is a pointless term today and no one should use it. If you oppose Israel's current government - a perspective shared by most Israelis it should be noted - just say that, and consider avoiding a term that some people will plausibly interpret as advocating for their genocide.

Gaza isn't really comparable to Afghanistan though, since it's so much smaller. It's more comparable to Kabul, which relative to the rest of Afghanistan was thriving. I'm pretty sure most Kabul residents preferred life before the Taliban.

I would call it likely, but I think an occupation and nation building is way more possible in Gaza than it ever could have been in Afghanistan.

There was actually a jobs programs allowing Gazans to work in Israel. Some of the Gazans then participated in the October 7th attacks and murdered civilians in the very villages they were working in.

Nothing technically would prevent that, but eventually that evidence would end up in public court and the ruse would be up.

That is sickening, but I'd point you to what's right below that headline.

The army has removed the commanding officer of the unit and opened an investigation

So some asshole commander committed atrocities and is facing consequences for it, because this is not an accepted practice in the IDF, which was the claim I'm asking for evidence of. Do you think Hamas officials punished anyone involved in the October 7th attacks who committed sexual assault or attacked civilians?

In case you were unaware, you come off as a literal child. Cheers.

Sure, but at that point, it's a legitimate question of what goal you're trying to satisfy with E2EE. This doesn't prevent metadata analysis being used for marketing purposes - and if that's something you're strongly against, that's perfectly fair - but it does make it completely impossible for message content to be provided to law enforcement, even in the face of a warrant. That is hugely powerful, because we've already seen cases of FB Messenger texts being used to go after women who get abortions, just for one example. In countries with truly oppressive governments, that benefit can't be overstated.

Sure, Facebook will try to sell you some shit, but they're not going to send the police to arrest you. Having E2EE is a strict improvement over the status quo, and if you do care deeply about privacy on the more commercial side, there's always Signal or other privacy-first services.

Most people don't so openly state that they don't care about facts or evidence and form their beliefs primarily from vibes, so thanks for at least being upfront about it.

So, no evidence. Gotcha.

For WhatsApp, given how much noise the UK law enforcement has been making about trying to ban encryption, I'm inclined to believe it actually is working. I'm sure Facebook does some metadata analysis and that does feed back into their advertising profiles, but that's a different thing from being able to turn over actual message content that's supposedly been encrypted over to law enforcement.

But hey, if you do find actual evidence, I'm all ears.

It really needs to be stressed that the founding fathers were not in any way a single group with cohesive ideas. There's a reason that 90% of early American history is these guys arguing about essentially everything.

Some were genuine true believers in Enlightenment philosophy. Some agreed with it in principle but were willing to make sacrifices for the sake of pragmatism. Some didn't give a shit but saw which way the wind was blowing and realized it would be more profitable to go along. And some were simply virulent pieces of shit.

Did capitalism not exist in the 60s?

It's not like your phone or wallet are exactly clean either. Or the restaurant door, for that matter. Or the human cashier you'd be passing money to.

If something like this is a concern, just wash your hands or use some sanitizer before you eat. I struggle to imagine that kiosks caused a demonstrable increase in disease, but hey, maybe there's some data out there.

Food is a much harder industry for new tech to disrupt, because no new startup can ever compete with the beef supply chains that McDonalds etc. have established.

It's easy to launch a website to a some online thing. It's much harder to an absurd amount of agricultural products all over the country for cheap.

Okay, but you'll find that some laws are a bit more controversial than murder being bad.

Exhibit A: points vigorously all around

Those kind of obsolete laws tend to not be enforced either, and thrown out if they ever are, so it's not really a significant problem. It's important for economic and social stability that the law have some amount of stability and that we're not constantly revamping everything every decade or so.