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Lyrl

@ Lyrl @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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237
Joined
8 mo. ago

  • The audacity

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  • Human brains are all susceptible to pattern triggers, although the exact parameters for the trigger vary from person to person. This is essential for survival of our species - among other things, it's why most parents keep taking care of even difficult children who make their lives miserable.

    Game and social media companies have really fine-tuned the methods to trigger the most money spending among the highest percentage of the population. Not spending on value, but spending compulsively and addictively. And like addicts to all things, most victims will fight tooth and nail against the idea their behavior was influenced by the algorithm, which makes it really difficult to get momentum for government regulations.

    I have some hope from how our society has developed better methods for preventing and responding to opioid addiction. Still a long ways to go, but addiction is more widely recognized as a disease and not a personal failing; access restrictions have reduced the rate of new people becoming addicted; the most effective treatments like Suboxone are gaining traction over the preachy "just be miserable without drugs" programs. Similarly with overeating (food addiction) and the new weight loss drugs - an effective treatment existing has really opened people's eyes to systemic changes being more effective than preachy moralizing "just eat less".

    So hopefully we will get laws that are enforced against predatory dark patterns. Someday.

  • I cannot imagine what lawsuit led to this

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  • The damage thing might be intended in the way packaged things intended to be swallowed say not to use if the seal was broken. I think it means if you open the new product for the first time, and it clearly had a transport accident and is soaked with unknown liquid and covered in white powder, don't give it to your cat.

    If it looks as expected when you open it, and you know later damage was caused by your household and is mechanical only, that's fine. Like it's fine to use the sour cream that had an intact seal when it arrived in your house, but if the first time you open it from the store the seal is cut, toss it.

  • U.S. plans to stop recommending most childhood vaccines, defer to doctors

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  • I scrolled through all the policy headers in the Project 2025 Wikipedia article, and didn't find anything like this. If anything, my impression from Project 2025 and aligned people is they want the "right kind of Americans" (conservative married Christian whites) to have many more children than they currently plan to.

    What you might be remembering is the way Project 2025 and aligned people make references to Social Darwinism themes. One example article covering this: https://worldcrunch.com/in-the-news/rfk-jr-health-agenda-german-view/

    “A very central concept of social Darwinism,” says Roelcke, “is that of contraselection.” This refers to the idea that social measures and medical care in a society override natural selection. And according to social Darwinists, this is a highly problematic behavior in modern societies because it leads to so-called degeneration.

    “Social Darwinism,” says medical historian Roelcke, “is about taking away social support or access to medical care from the weak, that is, the sick or vulnerable, and leaving them to fend for themselves.” The fact that they then died earlier was not only of no concern to the Social Darwinists, but even desired.

    Kennedy’s handling of the largest measles outbreak the U.S. has experienced in decades clearly shows echoes of social Darwinism. Namely, when he falsely claimed that no healthy children were dying from measles and that poor nutrition played a role in the deaths. RFK Jr. is saying between the lines that it’s not the healthy, the fit, and the strong who are dying, but only the weak.

  • TV watch you and...

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  • I do not like this development. Angry upvote.

  • Tesla Robotaxis Are Crashing More Than 12 Times as Frequently as Human Drivers

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  • My commute to work includes a main city road with two lanes each way and a turning lane, and sometimes there is a school bus that stops.

  • Do you have strong opinions about universal basic income?

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  • No, prices don't come down. That's not how economies work. People get raises. In a healthy economy, wage gains outpace inflation. Purchasing power goes up even though prices haven't dropped.

    Our current US economy is not healthy - it's "K-shaped" with the higher-earning consumers (top 10-ish percent) doing so well they overwhelm the average across the entire economy to make the overall numbers "good" even though people in the bottom half or so are struggling. So most people aren't seeing the purchase power increases that they should. But if things were healthy, it would be wages increasing faster, not prices coming down.

  • Burrowing owls enjoy Caribbean cruise after an early exit from OOTY

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  • Ships having these larger areas with live plants is newish, I wonder if bird stowaways will become more common. Sad that birds of prey would go hungry in those cases, unless the humans are interested in their welfare as in this instance. Maybe ships will develop bird deterrent designs to their parks.

  • Do you have strong opinions about universal basic income?

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  • If UBI enables people to not have to work, I would rather have nine people playing video games, and one passionate creative person starting a society-benefitting business, than make all ten do make-work. Many would hate the video-game freeloaders, but I'm fine with them if I get new great services and technology from the unleashed passionate people.

  • Do you have strong opinions about universal basic income?

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  • If you have five people who want houses in place X, and there are four houses in place X, something has to give. The government could choose which of the five gets kicked out of place X (rent control does this, basically), the government could force the four houses be demolished and replaced with more, smaller houses (the character of place X would change, which probably no one wants), rents could rise until one person decides going to live somewhere else is their best option or two people decide being roommates is their best option. In none of these situations do the five people who want one of the four existing houses all get what they want.

    If a popular, growing community has a plan for housing densification, but it's going to take five years to build out, rent control is a reasonable bridge policy to keep the community together while the construction happens. But this idea that rent control can somehow by itself solve the underlying problem of not enough housing units in the places people want to live is a pipe dream.

  • Do you have strong opinions about universal basic income?

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  • Inflation happens when demand increases faster than supply can keep up. The pandemic supply chain disruptions are a large recent example: none of the supply bottlenecks would have been difficult to solve, but the solutions would take two to five years to spin up. Absent some kind of regulatory rationing or allotment system, increasing prices let customers self-select on who really wanted the stuff that year and who did without.

    As long as UBI was rolled out incrementally over years, supply would have the time it needed to expand, thereby preventing inflation. As a real example, the Alaska Permanent Fund has been going for decades, and I've never seen an argument it has increased inflation.

  • Zohran Mamdani hires car-hating activist Ben Furnas for NYC transportation team: ‘War on drivers’

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  • In Amsterdam, seniors and those with disabilities can drive tiny cars (like the Japanese Kei cars, I think) on bike paths. They have the protection they need for their health issues, they go slow so their slowed reaction times aren't a safety risk to themselves and others on a regular car road, and they have full access to groceries and medical appointments and social visits. Win-win.

  • /r/Tennessee doesn't want people posting about the Tuesday election

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  • Structurally, I don't think anything is stopping a conservative safe space community from being spun up on one of the more neutral instances. But if conservatives have mainstream safe spaces already on x, Facebook, reddit, and smaller more extreme places like patriot.win, why would they come to lemmy?

    "Conservative" can mean a really wide variety of things to people who identify that way. Like the other reply to you, I am not sad there aren't lemmy communities dedicated to celebrating bad things happening to brown or non-Christian people. But it does seem like a hole to be missing discussions of fiscal responsibility (actual responsibility, not the "two Santas" scam) or how to effectively increase the proportion of children in two-parent households (actual increase, not the "redirect welfare money from poor people to middle-class marriage counseling").

    US conservatism broadly used to have policy pieces I agreed with, but the fake implementation in the times and places they have had power has made me really disillusioned.

  • /r/Tennessee doesn't want people posting about the Tuesday election

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  • It worked to keep gun sales hugely high volume and high profit for decades. "The dems are about to take away your right to buy guns, go buy them now while you can! We've said this every election for the last thirty years, but this time it's serious!"

    It sucks so bad that it's such a long-term effective strategy. Fighting it would mean figuring out how to regulate both social and traditional media to reduce engagement bait lies, but I don't know if we have a path to that.

  • /r/Tennessee doesn't want people posting about the Tuesday election

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  • In first-past-the-post election systems, campaigning on fear is well established as the winning strategy. In this case the fear the D candidate is playing on - loss of health care access - is more fact-based than the fear the R candidate is playing on - xenophobia - but both campaigns know fear-driven turnout is the only way to win.

    I hope ranked choice voting makes more inroads. I am under no illusion it would break the two party system (Australia has used it for eighty years and still has two main parties), but by making second choices relevant it gives a winning election path to a pro-cooperation, get-things-done style of campaign.

  • /r/Tennessee doesn't want people posting about the Tuesday election

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  • You see the same effect in person, too, with HOAs being the most notorious example. But there are many volunteer-based organizations that do incredible good work. Power tripping is a thing to watch out for and build guardrails against, but thankfully it's not universal.

  • Trump’s golf trips have cost taxpayers $71m since January and could eventually top staggering $300m, report says

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  • Insider trading is a bipartisan rep problem for sure (legal! since they make the laws!) Not sure it's any better or just different: in the case of the reps, the corruption wealth gains are not direct money from taxpayers. Stockholders get the short end of the stick on that one.

    But the president historically has held to higher standards. What Trump is doing is a new level of corruption, both for the specific office of president and for the direct taxpayers source of his wealth gain. It's reasonable to have fresh outrage over it, even for people with outrage fatigue on the Congress insider trading issue.

  • Trump’s golf trips have cost taxpayers $71m since January and could eventually top staggering $300m, report says

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  • Trump famously slammed Obama’s frequent golfing at a rally in February 2016, promising that, as president, he would give up visiting his courses in Scotland and South Florida.

    “I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” Trump said. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”

  • Trump’s golf trips have cost taxpayers $71m since January and could eventually top staggering $300m, report says

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  • And this is a conservative estimate!

    Most of the costs come from military and law enforcement salaries, which haven’t kept up with inflation, so the figures aren’t adjusted to current dollars... the real costs are almost certainly higher than these unadjusted estimates.

  • Trump’s golf trips have cost taxpayers $71m since January and could eventually top staggering $300m, report says

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  • What do you mean by "it" that they all do? Because it's definitely not spending this much time, or amount of money per trip, that they're all doing.

    In contrast, former President Joe Biden’s trips to Wilmington, Delaware, and Rehoboth Beach cost far less than Trump’s golf trips because he used smaller aircraft or helicopters, as the local airport cannot accommodate a 747.

    Former President Barack Obama was also known for his frequent golf outings, but they were far cheaper than Trump’s, as he would also use smaller aircraft or play at nearby courses, including on the course at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews.

  • Trump’s golf trips have cost taxpayers $71m since January and could eventually top staggering $300m, report says

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  • The apologist say it's good for networking. Which maybe in theory, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny how he's using it.

    Trump has also used golf as a tool for influence and relationship-building. Politicians and world leaders, from Finnish president Alexander Stubb to US senator Lindsey Graham, have played rounds with him, seeking to win favor or maintain alliances.

    And the stretch to justify continues:

    Trump’s latest health report also cited his frequent golfing as proof of his physical fitness, framing it as part of an active lifestyle.