megopie @ megopie @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

There are many different metrics that can be used, in politics and campaigns we’ve focused on one set for a while now because it generally gave us an accurate idea of how people were going to feel. If it no longer accurately predicts that, then we need a new set for political discussions.

This is not a case of online spaces filtering experience, nation wide polls and indicators suggest that people are generally unhappy with the economy. To turn around and tell people their wrong for not liking the state of the economy because one set of metrics looks good is tone def at best and political suicide at worst.

This is a serious issue with the Democratic Party right now, they’re relying on metrics and measurements that do not properly reflect the realities of the average voter. It goes beyond just misreading economic numbers, they are struggling to even understand what voters will respond positively to in general.

Many of the questions they ask in polls are somewhat obtuse and don’t touch on what voters think the issue is. They ask “how important is X to you” but be it, immigration, environment, healthcare, or guns. All that question does is tell the party how much to talk about certain issues, not how the voters want them to be addressed or treated.

Decision makers with in the party apparatus have a strategy of working with in narratives that are accepted by the voters they’re trying to court. Narratives crafted and popularized by traditional media/news/journalistic sources. Ideally these narratives would be crafted to best reflect reality, a difficult task that requires a lot of talent and large dedicated staffs. Right now though narratives are being crafted by under staffed, underfunded teams, at the behest of powerful moneyed interests who are keeping news sources afloat; revenues from digital distribution having failed to match that of old print and cable distribution. These same interests provide the bulk of funding for political campaigns.

So narratives are crafted that are divorced from reality the public is experiencing, in a shallow effort to control public opinion, making the public increasingly distrustful over time of these traditional news sources. The party relies on these narratives to communicate with voters. They also takes ques on what policy to support based on how the voters identify with the narratives and what the campaign donors want. But increasingly voters do not identify with the narratives at all, so the party is left speaking past voters trying to speak to narratives that voters ether haven’t seen or are baffled by.

It’s worse now than ever though, many managers have been steeped in tech optimism their whole working careers. The failures of “revolutionary new systems” have been forgotten about while the success of other things are lauded.

They’ve been primed to jump on any new “innovation” and at the same time B2B marketing has started adopting some of the most manipulative practices that used to be only used on consumers. They’ve crafted a narrative that shapes discourse so the main objections that appear are irrelevant to the actual issues managers might run in to.

Stuff like “but what if it is TOO good?!” and “what if the wrong people get their hands on this AMAZINGLY POWERFUL new tech?!”

Instead of “but does this actually understand anything or is it just giving output that looks correct?” or “ Wait, so, how was this training data obtained? Will there be legal issues from deliverables made with this?”

The average manager has been primed by the zeitgeist to ask the sales rep the kinds of questions they want to answer.

Dutch babies are generally made with more a batter than a dough. Kind of like pancakes or Yorkshire pudding.

How much you want to bet that a lot of that money is going to end up being used to pay trumps legal fees, fines and settlements?

Yah, this is very much politicians being terrified of how much TikTok undermines the narratives they want to play to.

It’s probably not a data mining machine for china, they’ve done a fair bit to divest them selves from china at this point. If the CCP wanted to data mine Americans they can just buy that information from data brokers.

I suspect the main reason so many establishment politicians are terrified of it is because of how it suggest content.

Because there is very little direct user input on what it shows, It tends to spin people off in to communities and places people wouldn’t normally end up in. Trends there also tend to spread fast and unpredictably, most people won’t know about a trend until it shows up in their feed, making it difficult to monitor by a third party.

It can really throw a wrench in political messaging when you can’t be sure what narratives and ideas your constituents have been exposed to. These issues come from social media generally, but most big social media platforms are a lot less volatile in the trends, are easier to monitor, and are less likely to send people off in to spaces that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to.

I mean, this will probably kill the platform long term. Not the stock its self, but what’s going to happen when they need to start answering to an outside pool of share holders.

The website became popular because of its user curation and moderation. That meant it was showing people what they wanted to see and allowed them to self select into communities that facilitated that.

They’ll be forced to bring in smooth brained business types that will focus on putting ads and “native content” in people’s faces as much as possible. At the same time cracking down on “not advertiser friendly” content and mod teams that don’t play ball.

All of this has kind of happened already to some extent, but it’ll get a lot worse when shareholders demand they bring in consultants or new leadership who think they know better than the team that’s been struggling with this for over a decade. Even if the average user won’t understand what is wrong, they’ll spend less time there as it starts to fail to show them what they want. But hey, the share holders might make their money back before the platform dies.

See the consistent problem these kinds of groups have, is that there just aren’t enough people who agree with them and fit their preferences to do even a fraction of what they want.

They think they can just repress everyone who doesn’t agree with them, but repression is expensive and inefficient, and it takes more people to maintain that kind of governing system than a system where people just go along with it.

Accessing public domain content that’s not hosted digitally otherwise.

I mean, they didn’t need machine learning systems to do this. they’ve been paying people to take pictures with him for a while now, got plenty of mouth pieces they have on the payroll too. Just a bit cheaper now.

This election was going to be dirty with our without this nonsense. As far as ride or die trumpers are concerned, there are no rules this election. They’ve convinced them selves the last election was stolen, so, they have a moral blank check to do anything in their minds.

Signalis is a 2.5d top down 3rd person single player survival horror title available for switch, it is probably one of the best modern examples of the genera taking clear inspiration from older titles like silent hill and resident evil 2. It’s very story based and currently on sale for the switch, I would highly recommend it.

It is a new game, but it very much has an old school vibe and is clearly leaning strongly on what made older titles great.

Recommending that he be investigated for treason is not the same as him going to court and being convicted of it. That’s kind of the rub of the whole situation, removing a candidate from a ballot because they’ve been accused of treason is a really bad precedent to set.

The case was about wether he could be removed from the ballot (having not actually been convicted for treason yet) but some of the judges used it as an opportunity to state that only congress could do that for federal elections. The case was pretty open and shut on the first part, not so much on the second.

Daily reminder that the constitution does not explicitly give the Supreme Court the right of judicial review, they gave them selves the right to strike down laws as unconstitutional by “interpreting implied powers” from the constitution.

I really like tapes, if only because they’re a very versatile and accessible format. The tech behind them is also simple in a way I really like. I enjoy world building and because tapes and their readers are so relatively simple, they fit in well with worlds where there is technology but no huge supply chains and economies of scale to make more complex things practical.

I also like mini disks because they’re so interesting in how they work.

Not much of this is relevant to the music I suppose, but it’s why I have these things and music on them.

I played Signalis and really enjoyed it, I actually found it a bit inspiring, if a truly tragic game. The core gameplay was fun and engaging, the puzzles never felt grating or frustrating and completing them or figuring them out was quite rewarding, and the combat was a good mix of resource management and brought just enough tension.

The story and aesthetic was probably the highlight though, it wears its cultural influences on its sleeves, classic cosmic horror, evangelion, ghost in the shell, 2001 a space odyssey. It brings some new elements to the mix as well, notably the East German aesthetic and the dread of a surveillance state. . At once dread inducing and tragic, but also beautiful. I’m very curious to see more from the duo who made it, and am curious if they’ll do more in the setting or move on to something else.

The framing is a poor one, it is built on a fundamental lie about how money works in the US government. It’s a very weak framing that only ever convinces people who already wanted to defund a foreign effort. More importantly, most of this bill isn’t tied to Israel, it’s tied to other efforts like Ukraine, so really what this is arguing for is to stop supporting Ukraine. Most of the funding for Israel comes through other channels.

So to support this framing is to just undermine support for Ukraine and do little to stop Israel. Support for Ukraine is non-negotiable.

Because Ukraine is generally a fairly popular foreign ally with little mainstream controversy around supporting them. So if you wanted to undermine support for them, easier to knee cap support for the bill from the other direction.

Frankly I don’t like the “but we could be spending this better at home” argument because the people making that argument invariably would refuse to actually do so, and instead just give out another tax cut.

That money would never end up going in to a single payer healthcare system, SNAP, education or building out more sustainable infrastructure. We don’t do these things not because we don’t have the money for it, we don’t do these things because they would undermine the influence of large financial and corporate interests.

There is a much better argument to not fund Israel, and it is that they’re attempting to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, have flaunted all of the treaties and agreements they made for near on 20 years, and they’re current leadership was undemocratically put in power.