Schadrach @ Schadrach @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

Let's see...I've been banned from subs I've never viewed so much as a single post from for having commented on other, entirely unrelated subs.

I've been banned from r/atheism for "egregious immorality" which ironically sounds like the sort of thing you'd be banned from a religious sub for.

The point of course is that if you don't want to see it, you refuse to use any platform that allows others to see it. Which must make it awfully hard to use the internet. Surprised you manage to even use Lemmy.

Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn't seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.

Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

Except when we're talking about someone like musk donating millions to a candidate, he's not donating directly to the candidate, he's donating to some third party who's advertising for the benefit of the candidate but isn't technically coordinating with the actual campaign as an end run around campaign finance limits.

That's the whole point of a PAC - hypothetically they exist to forward some issue but often that's just code for a specific set of candidates for various offices.

For example, Americans Against Murdering Babies is probably going to support GOP candidates across the board, likely emphasizing abortion. Whereas Americans For Medical Privacy is likely doing exactly the reverse.

Didn’t the Supreme Court rule that, unless a candidate was engaged in open bribery, campaign contributions constitute free speech?

The core of the CU decision is that engaging in political speech is not a campaign contribution. Even if you spend money to engage in that speech. Even if you pay some 3rd party organization to engage in that speech on your behalf, unless that 3rd party organization is operating in collusion with the actual campaign.

Or to put it another way, if you run off a bunch of flyers supporting Kamala Harris and pass them out, that's not a campaign contribution despite ink and paper (and your labor) not being free. If Staples agrees to print those flyers free of charge for you, Staples is not making a campaign contribution. Unless the campaign itself is involved with the process. Now, just scale that up to massive corps and political nonprofits.

People try to describe it as "deciding money is speech and corporations are people", but both of those are long held by law - corporations have had 1A rights for a long, long time and likewise arguments that restricting things used to engage in protected expression is in fact restricting protected expression have held for a long, long time (for example you can't just place a $10,000,000/week tax on printing presses to silence newspapers).

Wrong Supreme Court decision. They said Citizens United.

Fair enough, but I think that this case should be taught in law school as an example of prosecutorial negligence in that if he were simply charged appropriately, 2nd degree non premeditated and/or manslaughter, he would be in prison now for a minimum of 15 years but probably closer to 25 years.

The choice to only charge 1st degree, which took on the burden of proving premeditation, was the biggest legal blunder of our time… worse than Alex Jones’s lawyer sending the full cell phone copy to the prosecutor, which was an absolute joy to watch live as it happened.

You think? His defense was a pretty standard self defense argument. Or does having shown up to the general area at all remove his ability to claim self defense under those charges?

All of his shootings were legally self defense, and based on the evidence presented at trial the jury absolutely decided his case correctly. Grosskreutz will have a hard fight in his civil suit against Rittenhouse after admitting on the stand that he pointed his gun at Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse shot him. He might actually have an easier time against the city, county and police for not having sufficient police response to the previous shots fired.

Rittenhouse was also a complete and total idiot for being there in the first place, even more so for separating from his group, and he hasn't demonstrated substantially better judgement any time since. Because he's immensely, painfully stupid.

The only thing I don't really get is why everyone seems so damned intent about spending time, attention and effort talking about him in the first place, regardless of what political side you're on. I mean it's weird they treated him like some kind of aspirational figure, it's even more weird that they're now accusing him of being trans as though that changes the value of anything he's said before or since. But we really, really don't need to give him any more of a spotlight than he already has.

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn't remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.

Don't they, err, already do this?

I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don't think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.

But it still pisses me off the city allowed those pricks to even gather in the first place.

First Amendment basically means the government can't bar people from rallying or protesting based on what beliefs they are doing so in the name of. Same reason why there are no hate speech laws, and why basically the only expression that is inherently criminal is expression that requires doing another crime to create (think child pornography, as you can't make it without sexually abusing children).

Less a brand name because multiple companies can make parmigiano reggiano, but it's a combination of requirements designed to protect local industry - for example, for it to be parmigiano reggiano cheese it has to be made with one of two lists of three ingredients, the milk has to come from cows from a specific region of Italy, a certain percentage of the feed for those cows must come from a specific region of Italy, is aged for a certain minimum time, etc, etc. It's an entire set of industries protected by a legal definition of a cheese.

When you see "parmesan" instead of "parmigiano reggiano" it's a similar sort of cheese that isn't made within the legally protected definition. Most often it's just not made in the one specific part of Italy with milk from cows from that part of Italy fed by feed from that part of Italy, it's made somewhere else using dairy that doesn't have to be imported. Or it's aged "enough" for the flavors to develop but not the full time required. Or both.

There are a whole array of product designations in the EU that basically exist to protect individual agricultural industries from competition by requiring that products be made in a certain place, or using products from a certain place in order to prevent outsiders from duplicating the product, increasing supply and driving down prices.

Basically the same logic as "if it's not from the Champagne wine region in France it's just sparkling white wine." Also the same reason why "real" balsamic vinegar costs a fucking fortune.

At that point, the government's already paying for it, so why not just implement universal healthcare?

Because private health insurance companies are major donors, and no politician wants to upset the donor class?

There's an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don't operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there's really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn't do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.

I still think it would be worth a try if Harris only referred to Trump as “the convicted pedophile”.

He hasn't been convicted of being a pedophile yet. Best we can do without walking the line as regards defamation is something like "convicted felon, found liable for rape, GOOD FRIEND of Epstein who is currently fighting for your vote because it's the only real chance he has to escape the law and he knows it."

Legally you have to miss two federal elections, then they have to send you a letter to the address on your voter registration and you have to fail to respond to that letter and then miss a third federal election at a minimum before they can remove you. Or they have to have evidence you've moved or died.

So if you vanish from the voter rolls and none of those are true, fix it and then start looking for a lawyer or start organizing with others in the same vote to get a lawyer as a group. And VOTE.

Leaving Harris a mystery is the worst thing Democrats can do.

This is half the reason he doesn't want to do it.

The other half is that "man yelling at clouds* might beat "well meaning elderly man with a poor memory" but doesn't stand a chance against anyone who can consistently string three sentences together in a coherent fashion.

Having the debate would both make Trump look bad and make Harris less of a mystery and neither of those things helps Trump.

She doesn't have to worry about people turned off by Biden in general to win the nomination. She doesn't need to care about voters at all to win the nomination, she just has to appeal to a handful of DNC operatives because the primary is over.

Assuming the Biden can't simply reassign his delegates to Harris that is - in which case she's essentially already won the nomination before she even started running.

Now the election on the other hand...the election also isn't particularly about what she has to offer. The election is all about Trump. People are either voting for Trump or not-Trump, and the vast majority of not-Trump voters aren't all that concerned with what form not-Trump takes so long as it isn't Trump. It's entirely a matter of turnout.

I'm more curious whether she'll go for a milquetoast generic moderate Democrat or a progressive well to her left - if nothing else it will say something about what she sees as her bigger weakness. I'd put odds on a white guy either way to appease the lesser racists (aka the same reason Biden was Obama's VP).

I mean, that is essentially how Biden ended up as VP.

And aside from the racial angle how Pence ended up as VP - a milquetoast, boring standard politician type to counterbalance Trump's lunacy, someone hypothetically to be the adult in the room.