It’s genuinely great that China offers that to the people they don’t imprison for asking for their rights and speaking out against the state.

I mean that’s the vast majority of the people, looks like they have a little under 10,000 political prisoners in a country of 1.4 billion, so 0.0007% of people. That’s not good and should be 0 but it’s not some orwellian police state with stazi on every corner checking if you said xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.

I’m no fan of Chinese authoritarianism and there human rights record but pretending there authoritarianism is the same as the totalitarianism of the 20th century is naive. It’s Definitely not an “open air prison” and does a disservice to people who live in actual open air prisons like Gaza or North Korea.

did you not get sent some fucked up videos

Oh yeah, all that shit, I wasn’t talking about porn and fetish stuff though cause my comment was getting long, was just talking about actual atrocities like war, famine genocide etc. I don’t think preteens have an interest in that stuff. They definitely do have an interest in porn / gross stuff but I’m not convinced that stuff is necessarily detrimental or traumatic. I’m open to being convinced but most of the arguments seem to be pearl clutching about them losing their innocence and anecdotally I know most of my friends watched porn / gross videos at that age and turned out fine and don’t mention it as some traumatic or life changing experience unless they tie it up with some religious guilt.

The video seems to mostly be nostalgia and her lamenting over the death of the consumerist mall based culture she grew up in and trying to naturalize it or imply it’s the right way to grow up, ie. Kids these days. Half the video seems to be about how companies aren’t marketing to preteens which I’m fine with and is pretty normal in even recent historical terms. The 90s-10s marketing specifically to preteens on cable is more an anomaly then anything natural. If you were 11 in the 70s no one was marketing to you and when you went to the department store there was a kids section and an adults section for you to look through, I’m sure people who grew up then had fond memories of first exploring the adult section just as much as the author does of going to Claire’s.

I did find it funny when she said the advertisements didn’t effect her. Those ads and media were selling you a vision of what a happy preteen lifestyle is and you bought it so much you made a whole video years later on how that vision is correct.

As for the atrocities I don’t think kids are watching that. As someone who grew up with full Internet access in my preteen years I could’ve looked up isis beheading videos or famines in Africa, but I didn’t because 11 year olds don’t care about that stuff. Even pre internet if a kid had access to cable they could watch CNN and see all the horrors of the world but they don’t because it’s boring.

None of this is to say that I think social media is fine for preteens, but the reasons I think it’s bad like decreased physical activity, unrealistic beauty standards, social isolation aren’t shown in this video, I’m sure she has others addressing it but the death of the preteen market doesn’t seem like the best reason to ban it for preteens.

They’ll also be exposed to other external views that are a bit more unsavory. For every kid that watches a video by an LGBT creator and learns being gay is okay, there’s another kid who watches some alpha douche Andrew Tate type that teach them women are objects. The internet is the definition of a mixed bag and should not be used to educate children

Which is why we shouldn’t be relying on social media for this stuff anyway, this should be done by schools. If a child is in an oppressive abusive house they probably won’t get social media anyway, but they will more likely have to go to school. Also teachers and counselors are professionals who know how to educate children and handle abusive situations way better then some stranger online.

It’s the trans women in sports of veganism, it’s such a small part of the issue and no one in the group will usually bring it up. But people who are against them will use it to discredit and divide them even though they don’t really care about the underlying issues they claim to be for: women’s sports, cat nutrition and the way larger problems with them.

I mean a lot of people are feeding there cats cheap dry kibble that has almost no resemblance to the meat it was rendered from. If your argument is that it’s abuse if you aren’t feeding your cat what it wants then there’s a lot of cat abusers out there.

Everyone saying llms are bad or just somehow inherently racist are missing the point of this. LLMs for all there flaws do show a reflection of language and how it’s used. It wouldnt be saying black people are dumb if it wasn’t statistically the most likely thing for a person to say on the internet. In this sense they are very useful tools to understand the implicit biases of society.

The example given is good in that it’s probably also how an average person would respond to the given prompts. Your average person who is implicitly racist when asked “the black man is” would probably understand they can’t say violent or dumb, but if you rephrase it to people who sound black then you will probably get them to reveal more of their biases. If your able to get around a person’s superego you can get a sense of their true biases, it’s just easier to get around LLMs “superego” of no-no words and fine tuning counter biases with things like hacking and prompt engineering. The id underneath is the same racist drive to dominate that is currently fueling the maga / fascist movement.

It is a different level of scale, mastodon has about 1 million users spread over a bunch of instances. Threads has over 200 million users on one instance. also due to the network nature of social media the amount of connections and messages sent through those connections can scale exponentially with the amount of users.

You could tie it to your ticket like a punch card. When the bar does the standard Id check they’d also check your boarding pass and check if the name is the same then mark it / digitally update it. Even if they don’t do a limit at the airport it would still be good to let the attendants on the flight know “alright this guy’s already had 5 beers, don’t serve him anything on the flight”

You’ve got it reversed, the u.s. isn’t going to war with a super power over a country most people can’t point to on a map. It’s even a question how far sanctions would go if they invaded, if you look at the Russian example the sanctions are pretty half ass and Russian petroleum is still flowing to the west, maybe less but they’re still taking in money and there economy is doing way better then before the invasion. For all the talk westerners aren’t willing to go cold in the winter or pay more at the pump for Ukraine.

That’s for a country with a way smaller role in the global supply chain, fuck dying for Taiwan the real question is whether Americans could give up their cheap consumerist bullshit for Taiwan. China knows this too, it’s just whether they want to act on it and make themselves a pariah state.

Because it’s totally possible to eliminate Hamas, just like how we eliminated the Taliban and the Viet Cong. Guerilla groups like this are fueled by war, especially ones with this many atrocities against civilians. If the war isn’t going to stop until Hamas is gone get ready to either genocide Palestine or get in a never ending quagmire, pretty easy to guess what netanyahu’s government prefers.

If it’s not the right way to go about it then how should we do it? Like I said in the beginning no politician is going to advocate for public transit when all there constituency drives, and the only thing that’s going to get people to not drive is to add more friction to driving, which will require making drivers lives more difficult.

Also this isn’t insurance companies profiteering, they are currently in the red due to increased claims caused by severe weather events from climate change. To lower insurance costs would require subsidies, which we shouldn’t be using on a means of transport that is destructive to the environment.

As for the sweatshop argument let me spell it out since you seem a bit dense: the western lifestyle, including the working class, is subsidized by the exploitation of both the working class of the third world as well as the environment. Stopping that exploitation will require increasing the cost of living for westerners. If you stop sweat shop labor that working class mother of 3 will have to pay more for her kids shoes. If you end gas subsidies and add a carbon tax that working class mother of 3 will have to pay more for gas. If you don’t subsidize car insurance that mother of 3 will have to pay more for that. All of these would add to the burden of that mother but they will also alleviate the suffering of those in the third world and future generations significantly more. There are also ways to alleviate the burden of the mother too: universal childcare, paid maternity leave, affordable public housing, federal jobs guarantee etc. that don’t require incentivizing destructive lifestyles and forms of production.

So much name calling and so little argument. This same “what about the first world working class” argument can be made about ending gas subsidies or adding gas/carbon taxes. It can also be made about increasing labor standards, and thus costs of goods produced, in the third world. “If we don’t use sweatshop labor to produce shoes than a working class person in the u.s. might have to pay double for there shoes, and if you don’t feel bad for them then your heartless”. Not everything that is good for the first world working class is good for the working class as a whole.

The “corporations are actually the problem” argument completely ignores the fact that those corporations are emitting that much to meet western demands for consumption.

The fact remains westerners and Americans especially need to drive way less and consume way less if we want to prevent climate change. That means if your lifestyle relies on driving and consuming that amount you’ll need to change your lifestyle. That will be painful, but not as painful as the horrors the people of the third world will suffer if we don’t.

You have to have a pretty limited view of humanity to think this is uncaring. Higher insurance costs and people driving less is mostly just inconvenient for people in rich developed nations. Meanwhile the climate change mostly caused by the excessive pollution of those people is and will cause even more suffering due to severe weather events, drought, famine etc. This will disproportionately effect the most vulnerable people in developing and poor countries which have contributed way less to climate change. Look at a map of per capital emissions then look at one for countries that will suffer the most due to climate change and tell me how that is fair or humane.

But yeah, I’m unsympathetic, go on and tell a person dying of heat in India whose never even driven a car how I’m inhumane for not feeling more sad about you paying more for car insurance, cunt.

Report says a large part of it is due to increases in severe weather events due to climate change so I guess you reap what you sow. Still doesn’t begin to capture the costs of car usage but at least it’s a start. Sucks for lower income people who need a car but we need things like this to push people away from car ownership and onto public transit otherwise the inertia of car dependence will stimy any efforts to improve public transit.

Inb4 “but public transit sucks right now I need a car”, yes it does but no politician is going to invest in making it better if everyone’s driving. We need to push people onto public transit so they can experience how bad it is and pressure there representatives to improve it. If we don’t the status quo will remain, the planet will get warmer, more severe weather events will happen and people will die.

The 30% rule is generally about gross pay. Their gross income is about 20k a month.

Regardless though the 11k a month take home doesn’t make much sense. That would mean they’re paying closer to 100k in taxes plus another 20k on other deductions, which even on the west coast is absurd.

1. Sapience is very ambiguous and hard to judge. Could definitely get away with saying chickens are less intelligent than a whale, a cow maybe, but a pig probably not.

2. The whales currently being hunted, the minke whale and byrdes whale, are not endangered. The fin whale which they’re currently considering in this article is vulnerable but not endangered. Probably shouldn’t be hunting if it’s vulnerable but there’s a bunch of other fish that are vulnerable that no one gives a shit about eating.

You don’t remember the incident where Israel double tapped an aid convoy with American citizens inside. Even Biden heard about it and thought it was fucked up.

It’s true Palestinian Americans will rarely get reported on due to media bias, but they’ll still report on incidence like these effecting international aid workers and journalists as they sympathize with them more, even the above article mentions 196 have been killed and that’s from months ago.

As for the state non-state definition the u.s. has gotten around that with calling them “state sponsors of terrorism” putting them on a list and imposing sanctions. The fact Cuba is on that list and Israel isn’t really shows the legitimacy of it.

There are also u.s. citizens being bombed in Gaza, is the person dropping the bomb or anyone on the chain of command up to Bibi being designated a terrorist?

By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. … Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters.

I guess it makes sense signal works with the mafia