ofcourse @ ofcourse @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Would it be possible to create a webapp version of this? With ICE and CBP freely able to search phones now, I am worried about retaliation if they find this app on the phone.

I agree that she should run, but as an independent candidate because the DNC will never give her a honest shot in the primaries.

Americans however are unlikely to elect her especially due to electoral college as there are plenty racist and misogynistic voters in the swing states.

But if she’s able to raise money in the process to give her a real shot, US will finally have a viable third party candidate. If it looks like she’ll only split the Dem vote without winning, the raised money can be used to support progressive candidates in local elections.

Either way, I think US needs a progressive liberals party and soon because there’s a lot of House and Senate seat elections coming up and as we have seen from the GOP playbook, local elections are as relevant and influential as the national ones.

American Capitalism, with its abundance of neoliberalism, works on the premise that given no external involvement, the market will take care of itself. Companies will make products that people like, or will be out competed.

The American dream extends from that idea that workers can work wherever they want and have completely free movement. So if someone is smart or a hard worker, they have plenty of opportunities and will eventually be successful.

In reality, neither of the above are true. Markets are not capable of taking care of themselves, e.g., because there is inertia, inelasticity, and barrier to entry for many high-capital businesses. Government has propped up most “desirable” large industries through heavy subsidies and tax breaks, like oil, farming, telecom, and tech. Workers do not have free movement, some from self inertia to want to stay close to roots, family, friends, but mostly from the same neoliberal policies that remove social safety nets and fail to provide everyone the basic necessities.

Add to that the fact that a solely money based capitalist system has no ability to measure environmental degradation, wealth inequality, or population satisfaction. And the government is more than happy to step in when it’s businesses being hurt vs people - think too big to fail or propping up businesses during covid/after natural disasters.

Even if a true capitalist system were allowed to exist, it is ultimately anti-competitive. A business in a segment that’s doing well will slowly acquire other businesses in the segment to become a monopoly. Eventually the monopoly will keep growing and acquire the largest businesses in other segments. Besides regulations, technology disruptions can break this cycle but those are fairly rare, and are mostly a recent and likely short lived phenomenon.

Finally, capitalism requires economy and population to keep growing, in the absence of which, there is complete stagnation of movement and the system will collapse into feudalism, like what happened during the Dark Ages.

Anyway, I think you are both right and wrong. Capitalism as people imagine it to be feeds into the ideal of the American Dream. But both true capitalism and its reality actively thwart it, by closely interlinking the economic system with the political.

This is awful. Now the Democrats will have to set up internal meetings over the next few weeks to figure out the most appropriate language to condemn this, after which they will forget this happened.

The silence and inaction of the Democratic leadership since Trump took office is a major contributor to the Republicans and the police state to keep escalating project 2025 agenda without impunity.

Censoring is model dependent so you can select one of the models without the guardrails.

Until Republican lawmakers change their voting patterns, these articles mean nothing and IMO are poor journalism. Lawmakers can say anything about their reelection worries and polls almost always show swings in the opposite direction after elections.

I don’t buy the smaller platforms being hurt more argument.

It’s not hard to prevent undue burden on smaller platforms by adding in the bill that it only applies to platforms with more than $1B in revenue.

We need to get rid of 230 because it has given way too much immunity to the biggest internet companies and they have been simply shrugging away all their responsibilities. Let’s work out how to make this bill work for the people instead of shutting it out.

The Democratic Party’s sole strategy looks like maximizing their big donor and independent votes. So they keep moving toward center-right.

1. That strategy has failed 2/3 last times so may be try changing it Sherlock.
2. The big donors don’t care about anything besides their own personal gain. The only difference is that “Democratic” big donors also pretend they care about the people. May be get on the ground and talk to your constituents instead.
3. Even if you get the independent votes, your main base is completely alienated and does not trust you. So all you will get are the independent votes losing you the election.

This Democratic Party is like the monsters in Scooby Doo - the villain wearing the mask of the common person so they can get closer to you before stabbing in the back.

Why is Bhutan one of the most weird countries? Oh, WIRED.

Sounds like talking points of someone paid off by social media to sow division about the bill.

1. I don’t see why it’s an issue that this would apply to moderation of all user generated content on very large online platforms. That’s the point. The platforms are pushing false and controversial content to drive engagement and have not implemented the necessary guardrails to verify correctness and minimize harm (like, when a post/blog is inciting violence).
2. That’s a definite possibility in the current regime that the bill will be used to silence dissent. But from what it looks, the White House doesn’t need bills to silence dissent. Everything in the country is being done by and fought between the executive and the judiciary with 0 public involvement. At least with a bill, there are >500 people involved in passing/blocking it so a larger surface for people to influence the decision.

I would be more concerned about this bill never seeing the light of day because I don’t think the US Congress of this decade is capable of passing any major laws.

It would be so cool if we could generate the entire amount of future energy usage all at once and just store it. May be we could launch the energy store in space and place it so that, let’s say it takes about 8 minutes for the energy to reach us.

Apple fucked up no doubt. Given how hard they pushed AI as a key feature of IPhone 16 I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a class action lawsuit for this.

But it’s also interesting to read a few things from the article that makes me hopeful for when Apple finally releases the features:

1. Let’s be honest, AI by Google, MS is shit right now. They are claiming the same promises which most of the time don’t work, but Apple chose to delay release until they could get better consistency.
2. The executives are taking personal responsibility? I hope that’s the case and no developers are thrown under the bus for this. I’ve rarely seen an article mention personal executive responsibility from a tech firm for delays and qa issues.
3. I hope marketing gets reigned in so they won’t push other unready features the next few years.
4. I hope Apple releases some open source AI tooling to re-gain good will. Would love to see some more competition in the AI space.

Recent recessions have shown that the top 1% get richer after the recession. It makes sense when you think about the super rich having the cash to invest is now much cheaper stocks and property while everyone else is struggling to make ends meet.

So I wonder how much the Nazi and the monkey want to avoid a recession. The monkey does not have to worry about reelection and the Nazi is a psychopath.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, Canada was well on its path to elect a right leaning government. Trudeau has already resigned and his party was in the gutters. So that tells you how majority of Canadians have been feeling. There is extreme false-facts-driven anti-immigrant sentiment going around, imo, propagated by the same media that is doing so in the US.

Luckily, Nazi musk and his orange monkey’s moves have taken off the veil for some Canadians so there is still some hope for sanity prevailing in their upcoming elections.

The fact that Democrats should be raising their voices as loudly as possible against this admin’s moves but instead a sizable 10 of them voted to censure the 1 Democrat who tried to in fact do that, tells you everything about the Democrats’ plans.

At this point, there are only a handful of them who are rallying their constituents and speaking out about this admin’s atrocities, but the majority is completely MIA. Then they wonder why their voters are MIA during the elections.

The era of US-Canada being brothers in arms is over. I doubt US will be receiving any favors in the future without something in return. And if Canada chooses to expand their supply chains outside of the US, which they 100% should, there’ll be no coming back to a scale of trade as it exists today.

Athletes have always leveraged unfair advantages in sports. There’s a reason there’s super tall players in basketball and short ones in gymnastics. May be they should enforce that average height of teams must match global averages. Countries with fewer resources just can’t support athletes in many sports so why not make that more fair?

There’s research showing that some women athletes (i.e., born with female reproductive organs) have higher testosterone levels than many men, and even some male athletes. So why are they allowed to compete in women sports instead of men?

There’s a lot of ways to make sports more fair. Banning transgender people without fair science based facts is not one of them and is plain bigotry. It’s like saying an athlete on anti-depressants should be banned because they are happier and more motivated so have an unfair advantage.

Because isn’t there a recent article saying most of Tesla parts are imported from Mexico! Daddy Musk wants them cheap cheap parts.

It’s been 8 years of the lesser evil with Democrats and I’m sick of them. I cannot in good conscience support them any longer because they have time and again chosen to maintain the status quo.

The Biden administration did many things to help Americans, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act and the student debt forgiveness. But most of it is being dismantled by the current administration. And the Dems knew this would be the case. Yet they chose to go the executive order route or the highly diluted down IRA. It’s not the people’s problem that you cannot get your party members in line. Why would we vote for you if you cannot deliver?

Nancy Pelosi chose not to even allow the bill to prevent members of Congress from insider trading. Republicans are using it to line their pockets like never before. You want to have your cake and eat it too. Well the people are sick of your hypocrisy and it showed in the elections.

It’s been more than a month of rapid fire gutting of the US government. What has the party done as the main opposition besides “coming up with a strategy”? Because it’s impossible to do anything meaningful without revealing how much you have gained from the system.

The Democrats who truly care about change need to spin off their own party. That’s the only way enough people will be mobilized to make a meaningful difference in the next elections.

1. Rampant unchecked capitalism of recent decades has created large wealth disparities akin to the earlier decades of the last century. It is no longer possible for one person in a household with a regular job to support a modest lifestyle for their family. All benefits especially medical for the whole family, being completely intertwined with the current job reduces mobility and further feeds into the wealth gap by keeping wages low. It’s easier to blame the powerless for this state of affairs than the powerful because the powerless cannot object.
2. The fear of the other has been accentuated by media and misinformation. Targeted algorithms feeding most of the information that is consumed has created echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs and fears. The propaganda state has never had it easier.
3. The large military and police has given never before control to the state about what is allowed to be protested. Combined with the day to day struggles, it’s extremely hard to come together for what is right. The ruling class is able to maintain the fine balance between absolute misery and general dissatisfaction that it is still better to struggle through a thankless job than to say fuck it. Failures of recent large uprisings like Middle East and Hong Kong have reinforced the futility of standing up against the rulers.
4. Evil has many heads and there’s always one head that you can find alignment with. It could be the deregulation of businesses, lower taxes, anti abortion, racism, but as long as there’s one thing you can align on, the general sense of powerlessness makes it easier to overlook the other heads.
5. The line between evil and good has never been murkier, especially with globalization. If you focus on the betterment of your community, it would be considered good, but what if it leads to suffering of others outside the community. Is it also evil? What is community - is it the people in your neighborhood, your religion, your country, fellow business owners? The fuzzier these lines are, the harder it is to untangle them.