They were always going to. As long as Xitter has a user base with money to spend, the large corporations do not care. Anything they do like withdrawing advertising is all for show.
And after all, are you going to cancel your Netflix subscription over this? I actually probably would personally but my partner uses it quite a lot, so we're sticking around. Some people will cancel no doubt but nowhere near a critical mass that will affect their bottom line and they know it.
One thing that people fail to understand when voting third party is the overall makeup of the two big parties. Republicans are very homogenous. One need look no further than a picture of all republican senators and compare it to a picture of all current democrat senators. Both pictures will have a majority of white men, but one of those pictures will have a much larger number of minorities (women, people of color, etc...).
The democrat party is really an amalgam of lots of different types of people with different cultures and different desires unified by an interest in more progressive policy. But it's much harder to keep every sub-group of people happy. If even one of those sub-groups grows weary or defects to the other side, democrats lose.
I was happy for a while to start to see some cracks in the republican party, but I underestimated their ability to stick together despite having utter contempt for their populist leader. So many republicans detested the idea of a Trump presidency right up until he won. All of a sudden, they rabidly and staunchly defended his every action. There have only been a very few number of principled Republicans that have stood their ground against Trump, and one by one they're either losing elections or declining to run again. It's sad really.
Someone once explained representative democracy this way: Choosing a candidate is like riding a bus. None of them are going to come directly to where you are and none of them are going to drop you off at your exact destination. The best you can do is choose the one that gets you as close as possible in the shortest amount of time. Sometimes you're not even gonna get that close and you'll still have a long walk to your destination, but at least you'll be closer than where you started. Sometimes you have to take one bus then transfer to another to get to your final destination.
When the alternatives are buses that are traveling the opposite direction, your best available choice becomes very clear.
The place where this analogy falls apart is that by not taking either bus, you may actually lose ground and get further away from your destination. So I guess when the alternative is a bus that stands less than a 5% chance of arriving, you ultimately end up being shoved onto the bus that the majority of people are riding.
The margin was so slim that he effectively didn't. If one or two democrats held out (and there were a few specific people who always did) then the votes would fail.
You would think so. But the reality is that large companies would often rather let a property sit empty than devalue it by accepting a lower amount. And when they control enough of the market that there's no good competition, it breaks the whole "free market" thing.
You or I would be hurting (I presume) if we owned a property and weren't living in and weren't making any money off of it. These holding companies just see a line on a spreadsheet under the "assets" column.
So conservatives don't care if the children of liberal parents are victims?
That right there is my point. What are the deaths of a few children so long as there are zero restrictions placed on gun ownership? They won't care until it affects them in a very personal way. The people with the capacity to change things are presently choosing not to. One has to wonder what would finally cause them to do something.
And I'm not even asking for anything crazy like the assault weapons ban that has been floated recently. We can't even get the most reasonable legislation passed.
Our answer to "more gunmen" cannot be "more guns". Or, rather, it can, but take a look around. How's that working out for us?
My rant illustrated my point, yes, but I don't think it's the gotcha that you seem to think it is.
My point is that people are voting for politicians who are actively working against many of their constituents interests. And they're tending to vote that way because they believe politicians' words instead of observing their actions.
If you care to refute any of my points, feel free.
That's downright fantasy talk. Voters minds have been so poisoned that they don't give a shit about policy anymore. Republican politicians haven't had an actual platform for at least a decade.
Their platform is only to stimie any progress and protect the rich. They may say lots of words but one need only look at the way they vote and yet are still consistently reelected.
They say they'll fix things but never do even when they control both houses and the presidency. That should have been a republican free for all in 2016, but nothing of value happened for those two years. No immigration reform. No healthcare reform. No gun reform. Oh, but they did pass a tax reform bill and guess who that helped.
A significant problem isn't just the lack of housing, it's the lack of affordable housing. Builders keep building single family homes in spread out suburbs which is problematic in its own way. But not everyone could afford those homes regardless of whether they are buying or renting.
Investors owning single family homes is a big problem, the bigger problem is exacerbated but not explicitly caused by that. Affordable housing simply isn't available in places where it's needed. That's why people say we need more homes.
I don't really see how the data lost is actionable in any way
Agreed unfortunately. An important thing in US law that people often don't know is that in most cases, you need to prove that you were damaged in some way. Unless the company broke a specific law, you probably just have to accept it until you have problems relating to identity theft. And even when that happens, you'd still need to prove that the the attacker used the lost 23andMe data.
I personally don't understand why people use these services in the first place. Let's all let some private company that we know nothing about build an absolutely massive database of people's DNA. And let's voluntarily do it and even pay them for that "service". Sure, that sounds like a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Hope your minor curiosity was worth the massive privacy invasion.
He's still got my "not-Trump" vote. I don't particularly like him or how well he has performed, but considering the alternative? It's no contest for me.
That much I can agree with. If someone takes a picture of me, I should have some say in how that image is used, even if the default assumption is that a person in public is plainly visible to everyone including photographers.
But there's a lot of nuance here. Maybe a celebrity, or any person really, doesn't want an unflattering image used. Fair enough I suppose, but to what extent is that actually enforceable?
Or maybe the subject wants to use the image of themselves for their own purposes. Does the photographer deserve compensation for their role in creating the image?
What about unflattering images of politicians or government employees? What about criminals? There's a line to be walked here as well. We already have this sort of concept in slander laws. Public figures have a higher bar to prove damages resulting from statements that might otherwise be considered slanderous or libelous. There are also free speech and freedom of the press issues associated with government entities.
Yes, you should have a right to decide how your image is used, and yes, you should probably have some shared ownership of images of yourself unless you agree otherwise. But the reality isn't so clear cut.
Admittedly, I haven't looked into how other parts of the world that don't default to lack of privacy in public handle this. Some of these questions must have already been hashed out.
While you make a valid point here, mine was simply that once something is out there, it's nearly impossible to remove. At a certain point, the nature of the internet is that you no longer control the data that you put out there. Not that you no longer own it and not that you shouldn't have a say. Even though you initially consented, you can't guarantee that any site will fulfill a request to delete.
Should authors and artists be fairly compensated for their work? Yes, absolutely. And yes, these AI generators should be built upon properly licensed works. But there's something really tricky about these AI systems. The training data isn't discrete once the model is built. You can't just remove bits and pieces. The data is abstracted. The company would have to (and probably should have to) build a whole new model with only propeely licensed works. And they'd have to rebuild it every time a license agreement changed.
That technological design makes it all the more difficult both in terms of proving that unlicensed data was used and in terms of responding to requests to remove said data. You might be able to get a language model to reveal something solid that indicates where it got it's information, but it isn't simple or easy. And it's even more difficult with visual works.
There's an opportunity for the industry to legitimize here by creating a method to manage data within a model but they won't do it without incentive like millions of dollars in copyright lawsuits.
I think what you're saying is really important to the overall discussion. The initial cost is only one factor when considering cost of ownership.
You might be able to buy an EV for about the same price as a similarly equipped gas-powered car. But instead of oil changes and mechanical upkeep of the engine, now you have a whole new set of systems to maintain and repair. There aren't a ton of repair shops out there yet for EVs. Even though there might be fewer mechanical problems overall with EVs, the cost and difficulty of getting a repair can be much higher.
Then there's the battery issue. A gas car engine will remain mostly the same in terms of mpg and overall power output throughout the life of the vehicle. Sure, there will be deterioration, but it could be much worse with batteries. I'd be somewhat hesitant to buy a used EV because it can be difficult to know what state the batteries are in or how much longer they will last.
They were always going to. As long as Xitter has a user base with money to spend, the large corporations do not care. Anything they do like withdrawing advertising is all for show.
And after all, are you going to cancel your Netflix subscription over this? I actually probably would personally but my partner uses it quite a lot, so we're sticking around. Some people will cancel no doubt but nowhere near a critical mass that will affect their bottom line and they know it.