WatDabney

If he's elected, they'll have free rein to do whatever they want to whoever they want, and they will.

Him being sent to prison would just be a trigger to release the hatred and urge to violence that's already festering inside them. That hatred and urge to violence is still going to be there if he's elected - it'll just manifest a bit differently.

I sure hope so.

There's a significant number of Trumpers who are just itching to put on their ~~brown shirts~~ red hats and start wreaking violence.

At this point, it's not really a question of if they do it, but just of when. On that point at least, Trump is right. He just doesnt acknowledge the fact that the reason those people are reaching a breaking point is that he's self-servingly fed them a steady diet of propaganda and hatred.

So they're going to go off the rails - they're vtoo ignorant and too angry and too misled to do anything else.

The worst-case scenario would be that they do it after Trump has (god forbid) been elected. Because then they're going to get official sanction. They really will be the new brownshirts.

The best-case scenario is that they do it soon, and in response to Trump being rightfully sentenced for the crimes of which he has been rightfully convicted. In that case, they're going to have neither the illusion of legitimacy nor official sanction, and they'll just reveal themselves as the lawless, petulant, violent asshats they are.

This is actually true.

Most notably to me, the ability to sift through and collate enormous amounts of data has led to surprising things like diagnosing diabetes through retinal scans.

But those sorts of things, beneficial and impressive though they might be, remain at the fringe of AI research for the simple reason that those sorts of uses are too niche to provide the revenue stream that all of the bubble-building corporate parasites demand. Their focus is on the AI-as-a-substitute-for-real-intelligence aspect (and increasingly "AI" as just a meaningless marketing buzzword), since that's where the money is. And unfortunately but not coincidentally, that's where most of the public attention is too.

And yet again it cynically amuses me that AI has become "artificial" intelligence in the sense of "fake."

It's a shabby substitute for real intelligence, used by people who don't possess any of their own to impress other people who don't possess any of their own.

I would presume it's not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.

For the moment, they're working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it's hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.

So... by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.

At a "non-profit" (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.

Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We're watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.

England's already the snooping capital of the west, isn't it?

It seems that every time a new privacy-invading technology comes floating down the pike, England just instantly adopts it. They don't even hesitate -it's like, "Ooh... new survellance technology? I'll take that one and that one and that one and... you know what? Just give me the lot!"

And every time, I cynically reflect on the fact that Orwell was English.

Imagine Israel, of all countries, crying to the UN, of all organizations, about a purported "flagrant violation of narional sovereignty, international law and Security Council resolutions."

I laughed out loud when I read that. As if that isn't exactly what Israel does virtually on a daily basis, and has done for decades now, and while thumbing their nose at the UN the entire time.

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me.

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That's the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that's the case, it's pretty obvious what the real problem is.

No surprise there.

There was never even the slightest chance that that balloon could pass through US airspace unobserved, and China possesses FAR more effective, secure and difficult-at-best methods with which to spy. So very obviously, it was intended to be discovered. And presuming that to be the case, the important bit then was the reaction its discovery would trigger.

So it was safe to presume from the start (as I did) that some significant part of the social media noise about it was simple astroturfing explicitly intended solely to further whatever response whoever wanted.

Oh look - more intellectually dishonest anti-vaping propaganda...

I smoked for thirty years before I discovered vaping and switched. My lungs feel better now than they have at any other point within my memory.

But if whichever lying shitstains are responsible for this clearly deliberate propaganda campaign had their way about it, I would've never gotten that chance, and I'd still be smoking, and dying or dead.

And why? What's their goal? Why are they trying so hard, and so brazeny dishonestly, to undermine a thing that can save lives? What's their interest in making it impossible for people like me to have an alternative that's undeniably at the very least MUCH less of a health risk? Why do they want smokers to keep smoking, and keep dying?