mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world

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40

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673

Joined

2 yr. ago

Agreed, and besides that, travel bans are about the stupidest possible measure you could take to curb the spread of a virus even if there was a new one that was dangerous.

Imagine you're in China on vacation or business. Biden says we're implementing a travel ban. Would you just shrug your shoulders and get an apartment in China? Or work out a way to get into the US via a third country?

All it does, in reality, is make it more complicated and difficult to track the people who are coming into the US from China, because preventing that completely for any length of time is more or less impossible.

Edit: Source 1 and Source 2

Bold of you to assume we'll definitely be having elections in 2028

Register + vote in 2024

The most hilarious thing about the whole thing to me was the way he said, "blackmail me with money?" as if he's definitely automatically wealthy to a level that he doesn't have to worry about being bullied.

Leave aside the whole framing where the only reason people might be pulling out is to blackmail Elon Musk personally, and just assume that that's true and analyze the question of whether he's big enough to be immune if they decide that's what they want to do. Musk is worth somewhere around $100-200 billion personally. I picked, totally at random, a single one of the advertisers who have pulled out, and learned that Eli Lilly has a market cap of around $565 billion. Remember this? Back from a year ago?

Eli Lilly and Co. stopped showing ads on Twitter the day after an account impersonating the pharmaceutical company — complete with a purchased blue check mark — posted, "We are excited to announce insulin is free now."

Eli Lilly asked Twitter to take it down, but the tweet remained up for hours, because the platform's staff was stretched thin due to recent layoffs and resignations. The tweet garnered hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes, and Eli Lilly's stock soon took a dive.

Not true. When rich people steal from investors (or other types of equally-rich people), they face consequences right the fuck away.

The system has the ability to work. It just doesn't care about democracy as much as it cares about capital.

"Shattered" is a book which goes into a bit more detail about what went wrong with the Clinton campaign. Also, this particular review represents a rare moment of lucidity from Matt Taibbi, back when he hadn't quite completed his devolution from whip-smart political correspondent into a Trump apologist for some fucking reason.

• Wireshark
• GIMP
• screen
• ssh -X
• Electricsheep
• strace
• valgrind

Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right "home" server to join; that's critically important for Mastodon in a way that it's not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who's genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don't think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I'm not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV

Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I'm happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.

I'm also not shocked to learn that he's uninterested in talking with me about it. Just fire and forget.

I'm honestly very much against "This is obviously BS, from my point of view, and so we'll remove it" as a moderation technique, but @jason235 this type of post makes me sympathize with that approach, since it seems to be quite clearly posted in bad faith.

I have some small amount of experience with this, but based on the little I know, here's what I can say. First question is what is your goal? To get customers, or to create a community? Below is general advice but it's hard to say just talking about it in the abstract.

If you want a community, I would probably advise to just treat it as one more channel, have separate pages in Meta / X / Fediverse / Pinterest or whatever as separate communities, since in a lot of cases there won't be overlap between them. I wouldn't recommend abandoning your existing Meta or X pages to set up a Fediverse page instead, although making a contingency plan for the slow motion demise of Meta as a platform for the long term seems like a good idea.

If you want to drive sales, then for me Google Ads always worked better than buying advertising on Meta or X or etc anyway. Have you measured conversion numbers from Meta? They make it easy to spend money definitely, but I always found the ROI in terms of pure paid sales to be pretty bad from them.

You could have just linked to the underlying source, Fox News.

"For many years now, both the United States and Israel have been living in a policy fantasy world where we have tolerated Hamas' existence in Doha and believed that Doha would be a moderating influence," Richard Goldberg, the coordinator for the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on Iran, told Fox News Digital.

I believe that to the extent that Richard Goldberg was responsible for Trump's Iran policy, that's a severe indictment of his qualifications on anything.

"The presence of the Hamas office shouldn’t be confused with endorsement but rather establishes an important channel for indirect communication," the minister wrote.

The Qatari Hamas liaison office has played a role in helping secure the release of 50 hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners and a four-day ceasefire. Qatar first announced the agreement once both parties had finalized it last week.

Sounds like this was good thing then. No?

Looks like your other post was removed, which I honestly don't agree with, although I would describe this story as clear propaganda attempting to put "Obama" and "Hamas" and "shocking revelation" all in the same sentence.

Link?

Why does everyone hate this article just because it doesn't have any kind of footnote "AND OF COURSE THEY ARE WRONG AND OUT OF TOUCH" explicitly

Also why is Arianna Huffington on this list with her infinitely more reasonable take on it with no comment

Sounds to me like the individual most-megabillionaires of today aren't as rich as their individual predecessors, but there are a lot more super-wealthy people in general and the general populace is poorer on average.

You're going to get a lot of hate for posting this, because it's disinformative crap and Putin is a war criminal.

If you want to see a talk that does actually bring this perspective -- more or less, that Putin does have valid reasons for seeing his security threatened by the expansion of NATO -- without the propaganda crap and without somehow trying to say that that justifies Russia invading a sovereign nation to rape and murder its civilian citizens, then watch this talk by John Mearsheimer. Inflammatory title aside, it's excellent.

Yeah. Because the OG books were written by people who loved the game. There are still a few people at WotC who love the game, but they're trying to hold back the tide of people who want to extract as much money as they can out of it.

Sadness

Yeah, this is a fair point. He does list those examples, yes. The thing is I simply don't believe that those examples are wholly true. I do think you have something of a valid point that he was alleging things beyond "people found out and told other people," so my example and the way I presented it wasn't wholly fair.

Here's what Thomas says:

Amici ’s examples relate principally to Proposition 8, a state ballot proposition that California voters narrowly passed in the 2008 general election. Proposition 8 amended California’s constitution to provide that “[o]nly marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Cal. Const., Art. I, §7.5. Any donor who gave more than $100 to any committee supporting or opposing Proposition 8 was required to disclose his full name, street address, occupation, employer’s name (or business name, if self-employed), and the total amount of his contributions. 1 See Cal. Govt. Code Ann. §84211(f) (West 2005). The California Secretary of State was then required to post this information on the Internet. See §§84600–84601; §§84602–84602.1 (West Supp. 2010); §§84602.5–84604 (West 2005); §85605 (West Supp. 2010); §§84606–84609 (West 2005).

Some opponents of Proposition 8 compiled this information and created Web sites with maps showing the locations of homes or businesses of Proposition 8 supporters. Many supporters (or their customers) suffered property damage, or threats of physical violence or death, as a result. They cited these incidents in a complaint they filed after the 2008 election, seeking to invalidate California’s mandatory disclosure laws. Supporters recounted being told: “Consider yourself lucky. If I had a gun I would have gunned you down along with each and every other supporter,” or, “we have plans for you and your friends.” Complaint in ProtectMarriage.com—Yes on 8 v. Bowen , Case No. 2:09–cv–00058–MCE–DAD (ED Cal.), ¶31. Proposition 8 opponents also allegedly harassed the measure’s supporters by defacing or damaging their property. Id. , ¶32. Two religious organizations supporting Proposition 8 reportedly received through the mail envelopes containing a white powdery substance. Id. , ¶33.

Those accounts are consistent with media reports describing Proposition 8-related retaliation. The director of the nonprofit California Musical Theater gave $1,000 to support the initiative; he was forced to resign after artists complained to his employer. Lott & Smith, Donor Disclosure Has Its Downsides, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 26, 2008, p. A13. The director of the Los Angeles Film Festival was forced to resign after giving $1,500 because opponents threatened to boycott and picket the next festival. Ibid. And a woman who had managed her popular, family-owned restaurant for 26 years was forced to resign after she gave $100, because “throngs of [angry] protesters” repeatedly arrived at the restaurant and “shout[ed] ‘shame on you’ at customers.” Lopez, Prop. 8 Stance Upends Her Life, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 14, 2008, p. B1. The police even had to “arriv[e] in riot gear one night to quell the angry mob” at the restaurant. Ibid. Some supporters of Proposition 8 engaged in similar tactics; one real estate businessman in San Diego who had donated to a group opposing Proposition 8 “received a letter from the Prop. 8 Executive Committee threatening to publish his company’s name if he didn’t also donate to the ‘Yes on 8’ campaign.” Donor Disclosure, supra, at A13.

So this construction has been called "The Ship of Theseus". It's actually a very cleverly dishonest method. How it works is that someone makes the statement:

People exercising their freedom of speech have received death threats because the location of their homes and businesses was shown

While not mentioning that:

• "Freedom of speech" means they gave money
• "Received death threats" means they claimed they'd received death threats, in a lawsuit where they had a vested interest in skewing the perceived consequences they'd received as far as possible. As far as I can tell there's no other indication of death threats.
• "Location of their homes and businesses" means what city they live in. You can look at how the records look here, or here if you want to look it up for federal contributions. Doesn't look like it contains addresses, although Thomas's argument very deftly makes it sound like it does without saying so.

So if you attach significant caveats or reconstructions to every single element of the sentence, it's technically true in the aggregate.

I think some of the conduct Thomas talks about is actually pretty bad to the extent that it happened. It's also illegal already, though, and with good reason. Death threats are illegal, showing up and disrupting a business and refusing to leave is illegal, blackmail is illegal. Firing someone because you learned something you didn't like about their politics is legal, and likely to remain so. Thomas draws up this whole construction, out of like 3-4 anecdotes, where it sounds like the most urgent problem is that people found out who "supports" some measure and then it's common for people to go out and harass them, and that the only solution is to make it secret who spends money on what political campaigns, when you have to look at this whole thing in a manner that's skewed by three or four levels of separation from the plain facts of how it happened in order to reach that conclusion.

Every attack of this type is hurting someone in the world. Some are worthier targets than others but the people who are committing the attacks definitely DGAF about the impact.

In case you missed it, read Justice Thomas's "scathing tirade" linked in this article dissenting from the decision "yes of course you can give unlimited money to support candidates and causes". He's extremely concerned that they're committing the egregious fuckup of making it still legal to disclose who it is that is giving away the unlimited money.

"Look at this!" he says. "There was this simple election, and simply because of people exercising their free speech about it, they got death threats. Also by 'exercise their free speech' I mean give money. Also by 'death threats' I mean people found out that they gave money and told other people. So clearly anyone who doesn't want money in politics thinks people should get death threats for exercising their free speech, with all the chilling consequences this will have for our democracy and our free speech. Also money in politics is fine and dandy of course. Everyone loves money in politics."

I am only slightly exaggerating the nature of his argument here.

Like some other commenters, I'm surprised it's that high.

To me the "American Dream" consists of, if you work hard, we'll take care of you. And if you participate in civil society you'll get a civil politics that works for you. The first is completely dead for way more than 64% of people, although there are little sparks of it coming back somewhere at the end of this road that UAW and friends are starting on. The second is still alive a lot more than people realize (observe the progress in abortion referendums and sensible people taking back school boards) but it's definitely under threat as well.