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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BL
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2 yr. ago

  • If trump was honestly reported without emotion and click bait and outrage, he'd be a joke.

    Again until you run into the absolute informational silos that are FOX, OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart, Daily Wire, etc.

    The people that watch those sources are almost exclusively getting all their information from those sources. To Murdoch its not just about the money and the ad revenue, its the control over public perception and opinion. So unemotive boring reporting just gets left behind as the more bombastic sensationalized reporting gets more popular.

    Unfortunately journalistic integrity doesn't sway public opinion.

  • There's no real right answer to the situation. Deplatforming is an incredibly effective tool to reduce his reach, but deplatforming also only does so much when he can just create his own platform (like truth social, doing rallies) or other platforms just promote him harder in response to deplatforming (see OANN, FOX Newsmax).

    On the other side, it's also important to shine a light on what he's doing, so he can't just go back to doing exactly what he's been doing without any public acknowledgement or challenge.

  • While it is propaganda for the oligarchy, it's still true that billionaires have the money and power to tie up the IRS with lawsuits to drag out the process and can sway politicians to support policies that favor the wealthy and and divert funding away from the IRS.

  • Amazon sells products at a loss, that's not where they make the bulk of their money anyway (its the control over web traffic through AWS and widespread data collection and wholesale, a whole separate bad practice). They operate their product sales at a loss so they can be cheaper than their competition. They are able to do so because they have so much money to support them in a war of attrition far longer than any other business can. Regular storefront rent keeps going up and they'll eventually go under but state governments will throw huge sums of public money and tax breaks toward Amazon to build a fulfillment center.

    Once that competition is gone and they become a functional monopoly, they can charge whatever they want and nobody really has anywhere else to go.

    Starbucks employs basically the same strategy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Starbucks

  • In case this is genuine asking, here's the coded logic dogwhistle:

    H is the 8th letter of the alphabet So 88 = HH, which was used in WW2 communications by the Nazis for Heil Hitler.

    So people who just so happen to randomly put 88 into a random thought online are signaling to the people in the know that they're also in the know.

    Before you say "but thats stupid and childish, why would anyone go through that much effort to hide their shitty beliefs that way?" that's exactly the purpose of dogwhistles. It' high effort enough that normal people wouldn't expect anyone to put that much childish effort into it, and anyone who points out the dog whistle looks crazy to the normies because of how childish it the dogwhistle is and the dogwhistlers get to feign innocence being attacked by the twitter mob over a number.

  • There's a few Neil DeGrasse Tyson clips I remember seeing around about various scientific and religious interactions.

    Like he calls nonsense on the BCE/CE vs BC/AD change because scientists, and really most of scociety, operates on the Gregorian Calendar which was created by the Catholic Church under Pope Gregory XIII and is the most accurate calendar we've ever made to account for leap years. Why deny the creators of a fantastic calendar their due respect just because they were religious in a time when everyone was religious?

    And in a different he also talked about the Baghdad House of Wisdom and how throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, Baghdad was a center of intellectual thought and culture, until the Fundamentalists got into power and declared manipulating numbers was witchcraft, and ended up being a huge brain drain in Baghdad for centuries.

  • To an extent it depends how that religion interacts with science. There's quite a few major foundational discoveries that came from priests and ordained clergy from the Catholic Church: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists

    Within the Catholic Church there are a few orders of clergy dedicated to scientific discovery, especially the Jesuits.

    Granted a lot of them conducted science under the broad philosophy of better understanding the universe God created, but if the end result eventually improves the lives of people, I don't see how that's an inherently bad thing.

    If we wanted to be a bit more accurate to the hustoru of the real world, religious fundamentalism is opposed to science.

  • I have a few edge cases where a printer is nice to have and I don't need the quality of a print shop, I find proofreading documents to be a lot easier on a physical paper easier than a screen and I can mark changes, and when I'm playing TTRPGs I like to have a printout of my map with enemy locations and notes so that I can place everything on my battle mat the way I intended to without messing with tablets, phones or laptops.

    Even with the time it takes for me to drive to the nearest Staples and have them print it (all in all probably an hour long trip), having a cheap printer on hand saves the time and money spent getting a printout after like 2 printouts.

    At the end lf the day it's not about the usefulness or obsolescence of the printer. It's about the bullshit subscription services have unnecessarily wormed their way into every aspect of our lives. If I buy something, it's mine, I own it, nobody else should be able to tell me what to do with it, beyond things that are already illegal.

  • Ugh I hate these arguments about giving bad actors easier access. Bad actors are going to figure out flaws and security holes whether it's open source or not. Security through obfuscation is a temporary measure and having more eyes on the source means more chances for good actors to find flaws and publicize them for fixes.