Rottcodd

As I just noted on another response, mostly it was that I came up with a delicious turn of phrase and couldn’t not post it. And yes, while broadly I think that Google deserves every bit of shit that’s thrown their way and more - that they could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and the internet could only benefit - this particular incident really isn’t a good example.

I have to admit that I was so pleased with that turn of phrase when it came to me that I went ahead and posted it in spite of the fact that this specific incident doesn’t appear to be a good example.

It’s really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from “Do no evil” to “Don’t even bother pretending not to.”

It’s cynically amusing that we’ve reached a point in US history that Supreme Court justices with no integrity don’t even bother trying to hide the fact that they have no integrity.

I think that’s actually part of the vetting process when a new nominee is chosen. Most of the public focus is on ideology, but that’s likely just the first phase of it for the people reviewing possible candidates. It’s likely that after they get a pool of candidates who are ideologically acceptable, they actually look for a particular combination of arrogance and an utter lack of integrity, so they can, it is hoped, end up with somebody who will not only be corrupt and dishonest but defiantly and determinedly corrupt and dishonest - somebody who can just be set on whatever path they’ve been bribed to follow and then set free, and their own egos will take over and keep them on that path.

It’s safe to assume that one could graph the atrocities committed by the Israeli military, duplicate it, shift it a day or two down the timeline, and one would get the graph of news articles censored by the Israeli military.

Axiomatically, no, since it isn’t even AI in any meaningful sense of the term, so it fails to live up to its hype right out the gate.

When Tom Cotton says “little Gazas,” what he means is “little communities of people I reflexively hate and want to see die, and you should hate them and want to see them die too.”

Undoubtedly.

And that in no way contradicts, or even really addresses, my point, which is not about overall expenses, but about the distribution of them - the portion that goes to employee wages vs. the portion that goes to executive compensation packages.

They thought by raising wages, owners would cut into their own bottom lines.

I don’t think anyone actually thought that.

They’re simply making the point that the problem is not the wages paid to the employees, as you imply, but the obscene salaries paid to executives and franchisees.

That the American execurives and franchisees are not going to take the necessary steps to correct that problem pretty much goes without saying, but that doesn’t in any way change the fact that that is the problem

TikTok doesn’t engage in speech at all. TikTok is s platform on which people engage in speech. Those people include Americans.

So TikTok being legally considered a person or not, having rights or not and so on is irrelevant, since TikTok’s nominal rights aren’t being violated in the first place. The rights of the Anerican people are the ones that would be violated - they are the ones whose freedom of speech would be restricted.

IANAL but I presume that’s the argument they’re using - that when they say that it’s a violation of the first amendment, what they mean is not that it violates their supposed freedom of speech, but that it violates our inalienable freedom of speech (as it in fact, and obviously, does).

So… aren’t these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?

I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.

It’s as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then… um… you know… um… do some business… kinda… stuff…

“If you’re thinking of taking the tribe cross-country, this is the automobile you should be using - the Wagonqueen Family Truckster!”

Just imagine you go to a fediverse site, click “log in with ActivityPod”

It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.

That’s where the whole thing went wrong. When things started getting centralized, the internet started turning into a walled, commodified, ad-infested, bot-generated shithole controlled by a handful of loathsome megacorporations.

That’s exactly the sort of shit I want to get away from, and I rhought that getting away from that sort of shit was the exact point of ActivityPub.

Privacy would also increase because you could control every aspect of you identity

I don’t think that’s true.

I see no possible way that a centralized identity can be more private that an array of separate ones. And rather obviously, with a centralized identity, you don’t control every aspect of it, because it’s an established fact - when you go to a new site and sign up with that identity, it is exactly and only what it’s already been established to be, and it’s immediately tied in with all the others that use the same identity.

On the other hand, when I go to a new site and create a new identity from scratch - one that only exists on that site - I actually do control every aspect of my identity. It’s whatever I make it right there on the spot, and it shares exactly as much or as little detail with my other identities as I want it to.

Granted that I’m very cynical, I just can’t escape the feeling that all of this is cover for the real goal, which is simply to centralize the fediverse, so that a new group of opportunists can squat on top of another piece of the internet and extract rent from ir. We’re being told that this “problem” needs to be “solved” because “solving” it will, so they hope, create the next Google.

Why would Gazans attack a pier being built to being them aid?

It’s far FAR more likely that the attacks were carried out by Israelis. It wouldn’t be the first time they attacked people trying to provide aid to the Gazans. Hell - it wouldn’t even be the first time this month.

Serious question - why is this considered a problem? I don’t get it.

It doesn’t seem to be for convenience, since you’d still have to sign up for and sign in to different sites separately (which is obviously unavoidable - the alternative would be centralization, which is exactly what we’re trying to get away from).

Is it an ego thing? So that people can conveniently establish a sort of identity brand in the fediverse? Is it all about accomodating would-be influencers?

Or is it some sort of psychological thing? Like people just feel uncomfortable with separate identities spread around the fediverse? Like they’re somehow disjointed and fragile?

I can’t make sense of it. I have easily a dozen accounts spread around the fediverse, mostly but not all under the same name, and I have no issue with that. I don’t see a problem that needs to be solved. To the contrary, if anything, I’m wary of the idea of consolidating them - that just feels too much like moving back to centralization, just by a different scheme.

I just don’t get it.

Sort of.

More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.

I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.

Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.

Yes - it is sociopathic.

That’s not a coincidence.

Dog Soldiers