pivot_root @ pivot_root @lemmy.world

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1,681

Joined

2 yr. ago

I give it until his next delivery of ketamine.

Same. We got not-the-onioned

Bro, if people hate you and you company enough to employ and pay others to protest, then you and your company must be an all new level of shitty.

His people—conservatives—don't follow logic. They have a victim complex and see anything that negatively affects them as someone else's fault and not the consequences of their own actions. If there isn't an obvious perpetrator, they scapegoat one into existence.

I've debated some of these people and it's hopeless trying to get them to connect the dots. You can keep presenting them with logic and evidence, and they keep shifting the goalposts and changing the topic to justify their beliefs. A summary of one of my attempts to convince someone that Trump isn't universally beloved by average Americans went roughly like this:

• "Trump has improved the average citizen's quality of life"
• "Then why are there 5 million protesters coming out every month?"
• "I haven't heard of any large protests"
• (links to 50501 Wikipedia page)
• "They're 'protesters' funded by the left"
• "All 5 million of them? That would be extremely expensive, even if it's just $100 a person. Nobody could afford that."
• "Remember, all the billionaires are Democrats" (Thiel? Musk?)
• "That's not even their playbook. It's cheaper and more effective for them to lobby for changes that benefit themselves."
• "But they can't do that anymore because Trump is in charge, so now paid protesters are their preferred choice"
• "Suppose they are paid. With 5 million people, there's absolutely no way that they're being paid will remain secret."
• "OK fine, maybe it's only a couple hundred thousand being paid."

I don't doubt that some tiny handful of people would be paid to protest for some reason or another, but I highly doubt it's anywhere close to what MAGA conservatives think. IMO, it's more likely that protesters would be paid by the other side to make the protest violent so they could crack down on them.

I don't normally victim-blame, but streaming an unreleased game is really asking for it.

It's one thing to pirate a game for yourself. That's just called being poor or being someone who doesn't believe in copyright. The only party who can argue they're being harmed is the developer, who may or may not have received a sale otherwise.

It's another thing to pirate an unreleased game and stream it for others. If you do that and receive ad revenue or donations, you're profiting off of someone else's work. Not only that, but you're also harming the console modding community by incentivizing the publisher to go after homebrew developers and emulator developers. It wasn't a coincidence that shortly after some asshat streamed an unreleased Zelda game being played on Yuzu, Nintendo decided to finally come down on the emulator with an iron fist.

In conclusion, between pirating a game to enjoy yourself and pirating a game to play on a for-profit streaming platform, one of those two things is morally gray and the other is someone being a selfish fuck.

If we can't have lead paint, we can always have lead food dye /s

It's pretty disheartening to help someone find old media and they show a giant box of USB sticks and hard drives.

Equally disheartening is knowing that both of those have a shelf-life. Old USB flash drives are more durable than the TLC/QLC cells we use today, but 15 years sitting unpowered in a box doesn't have very good prospects.

That's kind of the problem I'm getting at.

If the Supreme Court isn't stepping in and threatening real, immediate consequences laid out by themselves, Trump and friends are pretty much free to ignore it. They don't respect lower courts, and they're insulated from consequences handed out by lower courts anyway.

If Boasberg wants to hold them in contempt, what can actually be done? Consequences applied to them as a collective mean nothing (they'll just ignore them again), so the only thing that can actually scare them is seeing personal consequences like asset seizure or jail time.

Suppose they are threatened with jail time, though. They have a complicit SCOTUS protecting them as individuals. The Supreme Court would step in and either take four years to decide whether that specific punishment is warranted/justified/allowed, say the lower court doesn't have the authority to punish an individual member of the administration for the actions of the entire administration, or any other manner of bullshit excuse.

The punishment has to come from the Supreme Court, and it has to be something that the members of the administration are actually scared of. Anything other than that is all bark and no bite.

Edit: Bad explanation on my part.

I appreciate the optimism, but I really don't think they're going to listen to this one. SCOTUS rulings without clearly defined and severe consequences for both the administration and members of the administration are effectively toothless. Without those being up-front and the court prepared to act upon immediately, Trump's administration is free to ignore the ruling and carry out their plans while the court spends time fighting amongst itself internally about how to respond. By the time they come up with something and act on it, it's too late and likely too much of a slap on the wrist to be an effective deterrent.

I italicized the word "might" in my last comment for a reason, unfortunately. The Supreme Court can be a threat to the Trump administration, but they need to be organized, unified, ready to act, and unwilling to pull punches. If they're going to be effective, they have to be prepared and willing to respond to and immediately shut down the "shock and awe" tactic being used. No waiting, no delaying, no debating. That's what the administration is counting on to get away with their bullshit: the courts not being fast enough to stop them while also not being harsh enough to actually punish the individuals in its leadership with personal consequences.

On a darker note, if the SCOTUS ever does get their shit together and do that, it's probably going to lead to another January 6 the first time it happens. I can't see Trump accept being blocked by the court and punished without crying to his cult about "an attempted coup by the Supreme Court."

Doing what you're doing and protesting, calling Republican representatives, and voicing an opinion is the only civilized path forward if that's still even possible. Republican Party members have to turn on Trump, Vance, and The Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 if there's going to be any chance of a peaceful resolution to their path of destruction. As long as he's protected by the party line and insulated from impeachment, he's going nowhere.

I don't think asking the courts to do anything is the answer, however. Trump's government has proven that they don't give a single shit about what the judiciary has to say. They're happy to ignore orders and they receive zero consequences for doing so. The only court they might consider listening to, the Supreme Court, is filled with Republican judges and judges Trump personally put there. They're as good as useless, and they helped create the problem with their ruling giving sitting presidents immunity from any consequences of vaguely-defined "official acts".

Active checks and balances are in shambles and the constitution is being used as toilet paper.

• Judges that try to hold the administration accountable for anything are being ignored and labeled "activist judges"
• The House let the "No Rogue Rulings" act pass onto the senate. If they pass it, it legitimatizes administration's decision to ignore lower court orders.
• Republicans are scared of speaking out or acting against Trump.
• The administration is trying to weaponize the IRS against educational institutions that don't fall into line.
• The administration is actively weaponizing withholding funding (which is congress' domain) to make organizations fall into line.
• Musk is dismantling social services while lining his own pockets and feeding government data and PII into his company's LLM.
• People are being kidnapped out of their cars and homes by ICE and sent to a concentration camp with zero oversight.
• ICE is going to schools and trying to take people's kids to lure out their parents.
• Citizens are being "accidentally" kidnapped by ICE.
• People who refuse to kiss the ring in various leadership positions are being ousted and replaced with loyalists.

Even if the Supreme Court, House, and Senate all grow spines and try to do something, Trump and co are going to ignore it. That's what happens when a "dictator on day one" is voted into office.

The data can be filtered. I can't figure out how to get a breakdown of it by incident type and year, but filtering to incident types that aren't plausibly unrelated (murder-suicide, escalation of dispute, anger over discipline, and targeted domestic dispute), the data from my source shows 1185 incidents and 1366 casualties recorded since 1966. The total number of incidents of all types is 2981.

Assuming the ratios for incident types don't fluctuate, only 40% would fall into the categories I filtered for. With the combined total for just 2023/2024 being 679, that's still 269 incidents over two years. I'll correct my previous comment.

As for the NPR article you linked, the source I'm using is aware of it and mentions it in their methodology page. They try to account for the lack of granularity by using multiple sources and cross-referencing them.

"Stupid," nah. Bigoted, yeah. Conservatives never feel safe when their homogeneous neighborhoods are invader by others.

The DNC. It's a tried and true strategy to screw over the progressives.

I cited where I found those statistics. Their methodology included events such as brandishing firearms, bullets hitting schools, and premeditated school shootings. It's not mass school shootings with fatalities occurring nearly every day of the year, but my point still stands: there have been enough of them in general that the pigeonhole principle applies.

A horrifying fact:

In 2024, 2023, and 2022, there were 132, 139, and 123 gun violence incidents in schools ^[1]. Totaling 384, by the pigeonhole principle ^[2], it's a guarantee that some (not necessarily mass-) shooting takes place on the anniversary of at least one other shooting.

Edit: Updated statistics to be more selective about the incident type.

They also hate neurodivergence. RFK's little speech talking about it like an acquired disease and promising to "reverse" the autism that made children "regress" was very telling.

Anyone using Twitter to communicate and organize is a fool at this point. Whatever someone says or posts on there is going to be used against them by Elmo or Trump, guaranteed.

That would be reasonable if it was in good faith. RFK is not performing research to gain a better understanding of neurodivergence. He's looking to affirm his personal opinion by finding a correlation to conflate into causation.

Blaming environmental risk factors for the uptick, he accused the media and the public of succumbing to a “myth of epidemic denial” when it came to autism. He also called research into the genetic factors that scientists say play a vital role in whether a child will develop autism “a dead end.”

He's rejecting existing findings.

“Genes don’t cause epidemics,” he said. “You need an environmental toxin.”

And prescribing his belief as the correct one.

Do you notice how he said "toxin" instead of "factor" as well? This is an intentional choice of words, framing autism as a disease caused by harmful factors. This is not somebody who is interested in understanding it.

Autism rates among children have increased nearly fivefold since 2000, when the C.D.C. first began collecting data on the condition’s incidence in children. The C.D.C.’s new report attributed some of the increase in autism’s prevalence to more screening for the condition. And researchers have pointed to several other factors, including greater awareness of what autism looks like, more access to services, more parents having children later in life and broader definitions of the disorder.

There's more awareness and openness about autism than there used to be? How shocking similarity with the "increase" in homosexuality some decades ago. Maybe it's new-fangled chemtrails turn people gay and autistic.

Mr. Kennedy vowed that under his leadership, the health department would focus on looking into certain substances, like mold and food additives, and parental obesity to try to reverse rising rates of autism in children.

Again, he is not looking to understand what autism is or how it affects those living with it. Those are not words of support for a demographic of disadvantaged people. Those are words aspiring to eradicate an extrinsic medical condition like HIV or cancer.

“These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old,” he said.

Yeah, because children that young aren't screened for it.

But again, notice the word choice? "Regressed." This is somebody who sees neurodivergents as undesireable and beneath himself.

Make no mistake: RFK isn't promising any other solution to autism than a Final Solution.

That's the poor man's solution. If you're rich and famous like Elon Musk, you can IVF away the undesirable traits like neurodiverge or the presence of an X chromosome where there must be a Y instead /s

I would say it's worth a complaint that you're barely getting a tenth of the speed you're paying for, but with cable/broadband, there's a million and one potential causes for throughput being degraded and Cox customer support is useless.

Is the node saturated? Is there a coaxial splitter in your wall blocking high-frequency signals? Is the run from the node to your house too long or noisy? What about the run from your house to the DOCSIS modem? Is there interference somewhere? Are there coaxial ports unnecessarily connected and degrading the signal? Did they just bond the minimum number of channels to reach the theoretical maximum of 500 Mbps under perfect conditions?

Who knows! Cox doesn't know, and Cox doesn't care. But hey, maybe you can be tricked into spending another $20 for even more unfulfilled promises!