kava @ kava @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Call me tin foil hat man but I think the COVID was just a way to take spotlight off of Biden so he couldn't say anything stupid

Almost every time he's spoken publicly in the last few weeks he's made some gaffes. Imagine a press statement and he mixes up Kamala'a name with someone else.

Not worth the risk. Biden speaking in public is too risky, might mess up the message they're trying to send.

Have you not been paying attention? Every time Biden goes up to speak, he makes a fool of himself. At the debate he was mumbling and staring blankly into space with his mouth open. He then did an interview afterwards to try and calm the mood that only make it worse. Then he showed up to the NATO summit and introduced Zelensky as Vladmir Putin. He called Trump the vice president.

All in the course of a couple of weeks. Biden simply isn't all there. His polling numbers were on a downward trend and the key problem is that concerns about his age and mental capacity can only get worse with time. It will never get better.

There was no other option but to change Biden. Everybody knew this after the debate. I think it took so long for him to drop out because they didn't know who to replace him with. Kamala isn't pilling any better and in some places worse.

But it seems the DNC has done their research and figured Kamala is the best chance they're gonna get. Which I think is a grim omen for the near future.

Biden was 100% going to lose. Kamala is probably going to lose, but at least there's a chance.

There was no other move here. Democrats put themselves in Zugzwang by Biden seeking re-election in the first place.

There are very few items worth keeping Windows for. I have window on a VM on my MacBook for one specific program for work.

On my desktop, I used to dual boot but deleted my windows install after a couple of years.

All the games I play on Steam work on Linux. There are some multi-player games that have anticheat that don't work well with Proton.

Besides that, if you're a professional and you need a software like Photoshop or Ableton or whatever, when you can't get by with the open source alternatives, then I think it's a valid reason. Although even in that case, I prefer MacOS

MacOS is a little annoying at first because it has a bunch of safety rails but with some tweaking, you can get it more or less functionally identical to Linux.

Ideas spread between humans. On systems designed to facilitate communications between people, these ideas will likewise spread. Did AfD exploit TikTok's algorithm or is right wing populism seeing a large growth worldwide?

When the printing press come out and certain news agencies starting "Yellow Journalism" were they exploiting that system of communication for profit?

Did JFK and Nixon exploit TV for their own political purposes?

I believe wholeheartedly that every social media algorithm should be open source and transparent so the public can analyze what funny business is going on under the hood.

But is it any different from how TV channels pick what shows to play or what ads to run? Which articles get printed and the choice of words for a newspaper?

I think people are quick to jump on TikTok because of some unusual socially acceptable jingoism but I don't see how at its core is fundamentally different from other forms of media, let alone other popular social media platforms.

It's sort of legally gray but generally speaking in the US downloading is a civil offense but not a criminal one. You can get sued by the copyright holder for example but you won't end up in jail over it.

People usually never get sued for it because it's not worth it for Comcast to pay for lawyers to try and extract any money out of regular people. Not only will they almost certainly be unable to even recoup the lawyer fees, they risk getting a lot of bad PR for no gain.

What's usually considered an arrestable offense is uploading aka distribution. Once you start hosting seedboxes then you enter the area where you're liable to go to prison.

While there's some element of truth to what you've said- the DNC is using the "End of Democracy" meme as one of their primary themes in their campaign messaging- I don't think that had anything to do with this shooting.

Statistically speaking the vast majority of domestic terrorism comes from far-right extremists. We don't know the motivations behind the shooter at this point in time, but the consensus seems to be so far that he was conservative.

I think it's much more likely he was radicalized online and either

a) wanted to kill Trump to further polarize the political tension in an accelerationist sense (sort of like how far-right organizations were shooting both protestors & police during Euromaidan. Just to increase the outrage, the violence, etc).

Basically an attempt to weaken the regime

Or

b) he became a white supremacist and those tend to hate Trump. Go on stormfront forums and see what they say about Trump. They think he's a jewlover, fake messiah, etc. They hate Jews, Trump loves jews. Therefore, Trump is a potential target.

Or

c) was just nutty plain and simple. Ie killing Trump would unite him with some cartoon character from Nickelodean in the afterlife.

All of those are vastly more likely than someone being radicalized by DNC messaging, I believe.

Dems promise status quo. America as a whole does not want status quo. Cost of living keeps going up while technology rips apart society in ways we would have never predicted a decade ago.

As long as the only alternative to Trump is status quo, Trump will always win. The DNC's only real concern is maintaining the current power structure. But it's like Blockbuster ignoring the rise of Netflix. The winds have changed. The future is going to be radically different for better and definitely for worse.

I appreciate the list. I'm not saying there aren't valid concerns, just that in my day to day life it's one of those items where the steps needed to avoid browser fingerprinting is usually more work than the value I personally get from my perspective.

I've looked into this, and I'm not clueless. I've developed websites, I've done a lot of stuff with Selenium / Puppeteer, and have toyed with Firefox browser extensions.

I understand the tools they use and it's just very tricky to fully eliminate this type of thing. For example they can even use the browser window size. Are you going to randomly change window size to some novel dimension when you open up a tab?

What about the JS engine you use. For example using Firefox already narrows down your anonymity by like 95% or something because only a small amount of users use the browser. Etc etc

It's hard to do this correctly, and I feel like VPN + private window usually takes care of the price fixing thing on the list, for example. When I'm searching for flights I usually do this.

I also use JS blockers in order to try and mess up the scripts that Facebook & Google have hidden over the internet to track you. But ironically, doing that again reduces your anonymity. They know that if their scripts don't work on you, you get narrowed down again to a very small % of users.

It only takes a few of those pieces of data to be reasonably sure that it's you. Browser fingerprinting is tricky to really avoid. It's not impossible, of course. Just saying to really do it right it might be more effort than it's worth.

I don't think it's taking shelter as much as trying to find an answer to something that has no answer.

For example Eistein I don't think was trying to take shelter from reality. He wanted to look at reality as deeply as possible and he managed to peek through and see more than almost anyone ever had before.

But he still believed in a God. This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.

In a practical sense, I'm an atheist. I don't think Jesus turned water into wine or the Buddha achieved enlightenment and entered a higher plane of existence or whatever.

But I acknowledge there might be supernatural or supranatural items / phenomenon/ or even beings that we can't ever fully understand.

Nobody showed up because the DNC wanted it that way. It's standard operating procedure to blindly stand behind the incumbent because statistically incumbent has a higher chance to win.

It's the safe option, so the DNC put their weight behind Biden.

If DNC actually wanted an open primary with all sorts of people trying to win, we could have done that. But we didn't.

Now it's becoming obvious Biden has no chances of winning this election because of his deteriorating mental condition. Not only that, he's even less likely to be an effective head of state. Why are we choosing to put ul an almost-senile guy to represent the strongest country in the world?

I think another primary is fully justified. The best course of action would have been to have a real primary in the first place. But what else are you going to do at this point?

Biden can't win and even if he could he shouldn't win

I remember back in the day everyone used Firefox. Then Chrome came out and there was a nice ad campaign and it was actually way faster.

Then slowly everyone switched to Chrome. At some point in the last 15 years, it switched to Firefox being superior.

I switched back to Firefox maybe like 7~ years ago? But I did it for open source reasons.

Yeah I'd only worry about it if I were trying to buy drugs on the dark net or something. I guess if torrenting became illegal I would also worry.

You can stop pretending anytime. Go ahead and do the research. Maybe you assume you're right and don't know. Maybe you know you're wrong and your pride doesn't allow you to admit.

Who knows

So you give up pretending Biden has any other accomplishments?

I don't understand what even to say to people who think bombing brown people is OK as long as the plane flying it has a pride flag.

I named his biggest accomplishments. There's a reason he's more unpopular than Trump, an already deeply unpopular president.

We are fucked as a country but I'll be fine.

Infrastructure bill, climate bills (even though he's also given more fossil fuel approvals than Trump and oil companies are making nearly 3x profit under him), OTC birth control... what else?

High inflation & high interest rates & high government spending on war.

I would support a candidate that would

A) reduce cost of living

B) raise wages

C) enact immigration reform

D) stop funding endless war

Right now neither candidate promises any of those items. Those 4 items would make a massive difference to virtually everyone in this country.

I couldn't care less about trans bathrooms. Sure, they deserve respect and equality and all that jazz. But I'm sure they would also like a good paying job and being able to comfortably afford their rent and groceries a lot more than kids being allowed to go to drag shows.

Don't you see how they've successfully managed to trick everyone into accepting these BS culture war issues as some sort of substitution for real meaningful change? They have their boot on your neck and you're happy about it.

We're accelerating downhill, I think there's only a few years left before another big war

Protectionism against China check

Expansion of border wall check

Unconditional support of Israel check

Detention of asylum seekers at border check

Soaring corporate profits check

Massive number of oil and gas drilling approvals check

Virtually no meaningful legislation or policy that improves quality of life or lowers cost of living for working class Americans... check

Trust me. It's not as different as the kool-aid would have you believe. You can't just wave a pride flag around and pretend to be a progressive. I don't buy it.

MAGA agenda is gonna happen under Biden too. Biden expanded border wall. Abortion rights are getting dismantled under Biden. Inflation and interest rates are pressing down on working class Americans under Biden - meanwhile corporate profits soar, especially oil companies. Oil companies are making 2-3x higher profits right now than during Trump.

Sure, the rhetoric coming out of white house is going to be more racist, more xenophobic, more anti-gay, etc.

But fundamentally I think the changes this country is going through is much deeper than presidential office. If Biden were a strong leader, maybe he would be able to stem the tide.

But he is not a strong leader. He is the last gasp of air that the establishment neoliberals are desperately trying to maintain. One last attempt to maintain the broken status quo of the great experiment we started under Reagan.

The tipping point has already been reached, a tsunami is coming and people should get ready for that

The same as if Biden wins. I don't think the office of president is going to meaningfully change my life. It did not the last 8 years either.

Either way we're headed to war, economic troubles, radicalism, etc. Biden and Trump are both stepping stones towards the authoritarian state capitalist system we have been cultivating for decades.

People are going to be fine as long as they do what every person in Latin America did under the military dictatorships supported by the US. Shut up, do your job, and don't make waves.

Don't worry, it can't last forever. These systems have a tendency of falling apart eventually. The next manifestation will be better. Just like WW2 had to happen to bring us our post-60s civil rights era society.