“Well by ‘Swiss-made’ we meant partially made by someone with Swiss ancestry…except replace ‘partially’ with ‘barely’ and ‘ancestry’ with ‘Miss’”

It works for me because I’m into a lot of the stuff discussed on Lemmy. My biggest problem with reddit was that at some point they seemed eager to smoosh all the subs together into one big Basic Betty fest. For example having r/all be a mandatory sub and having a million default subs…It kind of felt like towards the end everyone was discussing the same stuff on every sub, and it was basically the same stuff being discussed on Twitter (and many posts were just pics of tweets).

I know Lemmy kinda has some similar issues, but because the whole ecosystem is its own niche it still works for me.

That consciousness is real and not an illusion

Organizational structure and membership of the Chamber of Commerce.

Just deleted Uber from my phone. If they’re gonna use my payments to turn around and lobby to keep me locked into subscriptions that don’t even involve them, I’m gonna be a lyft guy from now on.

Is it still fraud if no one falls for it?

It all goes back to the negotiation at the start of the country: “We want to vote” vs. “We don’t want those people to vote”

So basically the wildest conspiracy theories about Twitter pre-Elon are true now, but in reverse

I used to work with Ukrainian contractors at a company I left before the war started. I always wonder if those guys are doing ok. I guess as the picture shows, being a software dev doesn’t mean you stay out of combat.

The sign shown says “My pillow, $14:88” 14:88 as pretty much everyone knows by now is a white supremacist meme. In the video they say “sieg heil, heil Trump” which sounds a bit over the top to me. Like you’d think they’d be aware that nazis are unpopular and aren’t doing Trump any favors…

Of course I considered that these might be pranksters pretending to be nazis, but they just seem a little too into the bit. One of the guys on the boat has a German nazi t-shirt (probably rather hard to buy/get printed nowadays) and another has a “moms for liberty” shirt, an organization very closely tied to the GOP. I mean they really committed to it if they are pranksters. I think more likely these people are actual nazis, and particularly dumb ones at that.

To me it makes sense because without the driver, there’s less need to maximize passengers per vehicle. Plus the added weight for the extra, often unused seats is a bigger problem for EVs because of the need to minimize weight (which then requires more heavy batteries). Generally the vast majority of taxi trips are one or two people, so you don’t wanna make them any bigger than necessary. And if there’s 4 people, they can just take 2.

The problem isn’t the number of seats, it’s that there’s no plan for them to become actually self-driving.

Question - assuming they are human controlled, how do these compare with bots created by competitors like Boston Dynamics?

Also conspiracy communities attract sociopaths who seek easily manipulated people, and this often takes the form described here of touting oneself as the megamind who has been silenced by the establishment. I’m thinking of the Weinsteins specifically, who actually claim that between the 2 brothers and 1 of their wives, they deserve 3 separate Nobel Prizes but have been stifled by conspiratorial forces in academia and government.

You can always just shame them

I don’t believe in shaming. But what I will say is that the far-right Israel supporters, like Miriam Adelson who supports fully annexing the West Bank and gave $100 million to Trump, are going to be voting for Trump this election. Whether you wanna do anything to counter them is up to you.

It’s exactly the kind of thing that feels good to say, but doesn’t convince anyone at all. Which is why Republicans keep winning despite ideas that should be extremely unpopular. They tie themselves to emotions about masculinity and patriotism and paint the other side as a source of disgust and fear. While Democrats look at people who support or don’t seem eager to stop Trump and say angry things at them, which just makes them not want to help Demcorats.

The “I’m voting, are you?” argument featuring nutty alt-right Maga crazies is far better because it says “hey, you can help stop this nutjob.”

Start with what makes a good president? Obviously there’s the issues and all that which people focus on, but that’s subject to debate. Objectively, some qualities are definitely good, like being good at both urgent and non-urgent decision making, good at managing/organizing/handling chaos, capable of outsmarting adversaries, being a unifying force rather than a divisive one. Just to name a few. So let’s look at those:

• Decision-making: She’s relatively young compared to recent presidents, definitely a bit more in touch with modern reality and less tied to the old ways of doing politics. She’s faced a tough choice with her running mate, and while Walz has been criticized by some, given the short timeframe it’s clear she at least didn’t fuck it up. Her debate prep clearly succeeded, and she’s avoided any scandals despite clearly Republicans trying very hard to find them. All of these show a record of decent to good decisions.
• Managing, etc Obviously her campaign started in the midst of chaos, and there were a lot of fears regarding that transition. And it went probably better than anyone expected, with everyone quickly gaining confidence in her.
• Outsmarting adversaries She did a better job at this in the debate than any candidate in my memory.
• Unifying force Again I’ll refer to her getting everyone behind her after Biden dropped, while also keeping Biden’s support. Don’t underestimate how unlikely that seemed before it happened.

I’ll avoid comparing Trump who is obviously severely deficient in all of these respects. But I could go further and say she obviously compares favorably to Biden too, and compared to Obama, I’d give her an edge on outsmarting adversaries and managing, and Obama probably gets the edge on the other 2. But we’ll see.

That’s not what happened in 2022, at least not quite. Don’t underestimate Trump’s ability to insert himself and mess up whatever easy wins the GOP would otherwise have.

Another thing that gets no attention is that she is one of the few members of congress who didn’t invest in individual stocks but just does index funds to prevent conflicts of interest/insider trading. I really wish democrats would do a better job of contrasting Trump’s corruption with theirs but then again I guess they gotta pick something and run with it.

These are all interesting polls and slightly more supportive of changing Israel policy than I would’ve expected, but they don’t really answer the key question: if Kamala came out and announced a key change to the relationship with Israel, like withholding military aid, would her numbers improve or get worse? The top poll doesn’t really answer it because the Biden administration clearly has been trying to make a ceasefire happen, without success. So 49% represents the current reality.

I’d also point out that in the second poll, 13% of Democratic voters support more weapons for Israel. If Kamala loses 13% of Democrats, or even a quarter of that number, this election is over.

It’s not illegal in the broke an actual government law sense, but it certainly violates every moral principle I’ve ever heard of. Instead of being generous and grateful for his wealth, the richest man has decided to buy the largest place where news is shared on the internet, fired almost all the employees primarily out of spite, and pirated the network for the sake of turning it into a propaganda platform for an attempted dictator who will make him even richer.

This is what cancel culture is made for. Not some comedian misspeaking. This.

It’s funny how this maps exactly onto the Hunter Biden files, except that everything Republicans lied about happening is now actually happening.