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AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

@ AmbitiousProcess @piefed.social

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7 mo. ago

  • And to quote an especially important part about one of the Author's views from that Wikipedia article:

    (emphasis added)

    Subsequently, Chenoweth has noticed that both nonviolent and armed resistance have been decreasing in efficacy since 2010, concluding that this is the result of authoritarian regimes learning from history, coordinating with one another, and training their armies and police to discourage defections within their ranks. Consequently, Chenoweth has advised that civil resistance movements take these changes into account and alter their tactics accordingly.

    To quote even more from this publication, also by one of the authors. (emphasis also added)

    The 3.5% participation metric may be useful as a rule of thumb in most cases; however, other factors—momentum, organization, strategic leadership, and sustainability—are likely as important as large-scale participation in achieving movement success and are often precursors to achieving 3.5% participation.

    New research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak. This suggests that there has been at least one exception to the 3.5% rule, and that the rule is a tendency, rather than a law.

    Large peak participation size is associated with movement success. However, most mass nonviolent movements that have succeeded have done so even without achieving 3.5% popular participation.

    The key point is this:

    The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future.

    The very people who publicized this theory in the first place have been repeatedly, publicly trying to clarify that this is descriptive, not prescriptive, yet if you ran with the wording of 50501 and other related movements, you'd think that 3.5% is a magical number that if you pass, the administration instantly backs down. (source: 50501 - Hands Off protest statement: "History shows that when just 3.5% of the population engages in sustained peaceful resistance – transformative change is inevitable.", emphasis added ofc)

  • A lot of these protests, especially in bigger cities, have all kinds of booths at them too. The one near me had like 6 for just one congressional candidate, one for a mayoral candidate, and multiple for revolutionary socialists/communists, along with people walking all over the rally handing out fliers about a general strike.

    Tons of people sign up for these things, or even if they don't sign up to strike/canvass, end up changing their voting habits accordingly. A lot of local stuff can be really impactful, since a lot of the policies most directly felt by people are local policies (e.g. is the pothole in front of your house fixed? Is your rent expensive? Is there visible poverty on the streets? Are the buses slow?) rather than federal ones (e.g. "we cut billions in research grants but you'll only really start noticing the overall effects yourself many years from now")

    I do wish we could just get all the people going to things like this to head over to ICE facilities and block 'em day and night, but it's a good consolation that they're taking some other actions regardless.

  • Bargain

    Jump
  • I'm talking overall, including things like their crackers, and relative to weight, in terms of if you were to eat a similar amount of food off a charcuterie board.

    Regardless, lunchables tend to have highly processed cheese and meat that has a lot of saturated fat, added sugars, and yes, a lot of added sodium. About 33% of your daily sodium in a tiny pack with 3 few millimeter thick slices of meat, 3 of the same of cheese, and 3 (small) crackers.

    That same pack also contains 35% of your max total daily intake of saturated fat, in just 250 calories, which is over two and a half times the daily max recommended rate of saturated fat compared to calories.

    I do think that lunchables tends to have lower fat content relative to other meats, like hard sausages, salami, or prosciutto, but a higher sodium content relative to them. The overall lunchables sets tend to have more calories than their respective weights in other foods often found on charcuterie boards.

  • Bargain

    Jump
  • ...but with more variety and less processed ingredients and better taste and less calories and less sodium and less lead and-

  • Navidrome's alright, Jellyfin has, in my opinion, a bit of a better UI, but not by a huge amount, and it's handled my metadata a bit better.

  • And even if you get a printer that doesn't require as much tinkering, like Bambu ones, then you can just get way to into 3D modeling instead!

  • Both are effective.

    Communicative protests give people hope, get them organized with others, and shift less politically motivated people into taking political action.

    Concrete actions, including strikes and civil disobedience, are often initially supported and emboldened by communicative ones.

    The problem begins when people expect a concrete action from a communicative protest. (See: Beautiful Trouble)

    This is also precisely the reason that at my local hyper liberal, 50501-organized protest, on top of everything I mentioned in my prior comment, there were also people informing others about not just how to engage in boycotts of various companies that provided the biggest material support to this administration, but also getting people to commit to a general strike, something most people there didn't even know was a possibility beforehand.

    Communicative actions help to both support existing concrete actions, and also create the hope and motivation for many to start taking those actions. In an ideal world, everyone would simply instantaneously jump to doing concrete actions, but that's unfortunately not a reasonable expectation to have.

  • Belief that we are on the precipice of things getting better is a delusion.

    Did I say that?

    Hope is not optimism. There is a significant distinction if you care to look up their definitions. It gives me more confidence that resistance is still possible, and gives others the courage to both do and desire the same, but it certainly does not make me pre-emptively expect the best outcome to simply happen as a result.

    I do not believe that we are on the precipice of things getting better, make no mistake.

    But simply being angry and hopeless does not produce change. And believe me, there is nothing more soul crushing than finally realizing the reason you've felt the way you have your whole life is because you're nonbinary, after you've already surrounded yourself with tons of trans friends, then see an administration call them all terrorists, revoke their medical care they need to survive, and signal to neo-nazis and far-right thugs that they will do nothing to stop politically motivated violence against you and the people you love, while friends and people you work with are being threatened with violent black-bagging and deportation.

    I do not "happily walk in the street", I angrily organize with people in my community to get as many people as fucking possible dedicated to making ICE agents uncomfortable any time they appear, to get candidates in power with a goddamn spine, to stop the people I meet from ending their lives over this administration's actions, and to give people who are minimally politically active a reason to start doing more.

    We've already had people in my community transition from these hyper-liberal No Kings style protests into simply walking to ICE buildings and protesting there until late into the night, because they realize that people have their back. Blocking exits for deportation vans and making these thugs feel unsafe is something they would not have done otherwise.

    I've already lost someone to suicide because of this administration's actions. I've helped comfort many others. Even a communicative protest that had ZERO community organizing, charity involvement, or other forms of collective action like we've seen over and over again with these rallies would do good in my community, because it shows so many fucking people that there are people that will stand with them no matter how hard this world gets.

    Any action matters. Anything to give people more hope is worth it. Anything that organizes people and gets them to take more concrete actions down the line is worth it.

    I won't lose another friend.

  • Protesting and marches are still an incredibly effective tool. I think what you're rightly pointing out is that communicative protests are not having many concrete effects in their own right, but that's already a known factor.

    Communicative protests bring people together, they give people a sense of hope, and they strengthen existing community organizers and groups by allowing people to be recruited into local efforts that do produce concrete actions.

    For example, I went to the recent Workers Over Billionaires rally near me. I knew damn well that it wasn't going to physically do anything to stop Trump, to harm billionaires, or reduce the power of the administration in its own right.

    But y'know what I did see happening there? Hundreds of people signing up with a local group that helps immigrants safely make it to, and stay in, local public schools, and hundreds more getting advice on how to unionize their workplace, along with many people getting socialism-related literature, signing up to canvass for a local progressive candidate, and being given tons of stickers and pamphlets that will likely help promote a ton of other local progressive groups that all in their own way either concretely harm the administration's efforts, or help people in the community with all sorts of socioeconomic problems.

    And at the end of the day, I, along with many others, felt much less despair. And if you want a strong movement, you want people that have hope, and not hopelessness.

    Sure, there's a ton of very liberal people there wearing their "if the 3.5% rise up, dictators FALL" shirts thinking that communicative protests like that one will magically depose Trump if more than 3.5% of the population participates, but in the end, these protests have time and time again massively increased participation and funding going to groups that strengthen working class people's power, and harm the administration's efforts to harm all sorts of people, and that's better than nothing.

    You're not going to get a 60 year old wine mom to go and break the windows of an ICE building, but you can get her to donate money to organizations that consistently file legal challenges, or encourage some friends to vote for a candidate that could eventually put much stronger legislative protections in place.

  • Finding new music is harder (I imagine)

    In my opinion, it's harder, but not even necessarily because it's harder to do it in the end. More because it's just harder to get started.

    For example, I find way more music I enjoy listening to through Bandcamp than I ever did on Spotify, but that requires having existing artists that I follow and can see their recommendations for, having a feel for which genres I actually like instead of a vague mental concept of what I like to listen to that I can then keyword search by in Bandcamp's search/discover section, and hoping that the human curators on Bandcamp's newsletter pick artists I like. Bandcamp doesn't really have algorithms, so those are my only real options.

    It's more effort, but it's infinitely more rewarding.

  • Oh, of course the legislation is to blame for a lot of this in the end. I'm just saying that Discord could have already partnered with a number of identity verification services that do already have this infrastructure up and running, with standardized and documented ways to call their APIs to both verify and check the verification of a user.

    At the end of the day, Discord chose to implement a convoluted process of having users email Discord, upload IDs, then have Discord pull the IDs back down from Zendesk and verify them, rather than implementing a system where users could have simply gone to a third-party verification website, done all the steps there, had their data processed much more securely, then have the site just send Discord a message saying "they're cool, let 'em in"

  • In my opinion, they're still somewhat at fault, because this was them failing to find and configure their software to work with a third-party identity provider who's infrastructure was built to handle the security of sensitive information, and just choosing to use email through Zendesk because it was easier in the meantime. A platform that I should note has been routinely accessed again and again by attackers, not just for Discord, but for all sorts of other companies.

    The main problem is that legislation like the Online Safety Act require some privacy protections, like not collecting or storing certain data unless necessary, but they don't require any particular security measures to be in place. This means that, theoretically, nothing stops a company from passing your ID to their servers in cleartext, for example.

    Now compare this to industries like the credit card industry, where they created PCI DSS, which mandates specific security practices. This is why you don't often see breaches of any card networks or issuers themselves, and why most fraud is external to the systems that actually process payments through these cards. (e.g. phishing attacks that get your card info, or a store that has your card info already getting hacked)

    This is a HUGE oversight, and one that will lead to things like this happening over and over unless it becomes unprofitable for companies to not care.

  • Bitcoin bros actually did this at one point by making a space heater that was also a Bitcoin miner.

    You get heat at similar energy efficiency to just running a regular space heater, but it pays back part of the energy bill with Bitcoin it mines. You could see how this could probably be adapted to other things, like what's mentioned in the article (distributed cloud compute).

    The main issue is that space heaters and other in-home heat generation units are still infinitely less efficient than things like heat pumps in many circumstances, since those can reach over 100% efficiency since they only transfer heat, rather than having to generate it from scratch.

  • These were images of people's ID's, along with photos of their faces to check for a match, not stock photos or even just real selfies on their own.

  • These were photos submitted via the compromised support provider (Zendesk) via the Discord support portal.

    Automated age verification via their partner (k-ID, which has its own issues) is a separate system, which was only available to some users. Other users had to contact Discord support manually and submit photo ID, which went through Zendesk, which was then compromised in this breach.

    https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041820932-Help-I-m-old-enough-to-use-Discord-in-my-country-but-I-got-locked-out

    Additionally, for the automated process, it's the video selfie that's on-device and never transmitted, but photos of your ID and selfie photo are transmitted, just supposedly deleted afterwards. Those ones are *not included in this breach, as far as we're aware, as it's an entirely different third-party with wholly separate infrastructure.

  • The fact the cancellation page has been seen crashing multiple times, and that so many people are actively posting screenshots of their cancellation does lend credibility to the fact that it's still happening on a large scale, though.

  • I'm also not sure if that number now counts reposts/retweets, though it would still be ridiculous to be retweeting that many posts that consistently. Clicking one button is always going to be quicker than writing even a one-word tweet and posting it, so it would check out.