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UnderpantsWeevil

@ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

Posts
212
Comments
14438
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Trump Bored to Sleep During Board of "Peace" (Genocide) Launch

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  • Likely because people over the age of retirement do most of the voting.

    But past that, its because our machinery of politics is too sclerotic to implement any kind of reforms that might inconvenience anyone in charge. Literally who would author the legislation? Who would vote for it? Who would sign it?

    FFS, we've had both parties talking about Term Limits for 80 years running, with not terribly much to show for it. Only 17 states establish term limits for their state legislatures.

    While the idea has some broad popular appeal, it rarely impacts anyone's partisan voting pattern. If anything, the age of a candidate tends to improve their odds of winning election. Voters reflexively don't trust people younger than them as representatives.. So campaigning as a young person promising to exclude older candidates can be a tough sell.

  • The owners want to close this Colorado coal plant. The Trump administration says no

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  • I mean, it's also disproportionately expensive, both in terms of capital and labor. The joke of this is Trump just kinda paying off coal barons to do nothing, because the pastiche of the coal mining community is more important to him than the generation of electricity.

  • Removed

    that's weird

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  • the -ism on display in the second photo is racism.

    You can definitely go into the deep history of Levittowns, Master Planned Country Club communities, and Red Lining in the big metro areas. But I think the advent of the modern suburb speaks more heavily to the mix of "Free Real Estate" and enormous state subsidies for rural development following the S&L crash of the 1980s.

    Like, there's no reason these can't be high rise condos with racist building managers, rather than cookie cutter ranch homes with racist HOAs. The suburb isn't merely about racial segregation, it is about individualist alienation. Breaking up the extended family unit into the nuclear family cluster, subdividing the working class into thinner and thinner economic tranches, and fencing people into gilded cages complete with 30 year golden handcuff mortgage notes.

    You can debate over the exact degree to which civic planners intended to separate and capture individual specimens of human labor. Or how deliberately the 1950s architectural model of personalized kitchens, TVs, and car ports manufactured an increasingly pliable working class subject. But the subdivision doesn't end at the color line. We are a fully balkanized society.

  • I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day | Anonymous

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  • Social media absolutely removes the inhibitions of just about all kinds of assholes, builds pat-each-other-on-the-back support groups for them by putting them together with like minded assholes and then algorithmically shovels all that shit on everybody else because anything that elicits strong emotions means more clicks and anger from being offended is one such emotion.

  • Outcry after Ambassador Mike Huckabee suggests Israel has God-given right to Middle East land

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  • Sorry. A bronze age manuscript says so. No arguing with that.

  • A Web Revival: the Internet didn't die, you're just not on it

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  • But the video is encouraging the construction of websites that can easily be self-hosted

    It's claiming they can be self-hosted, certainly. But they're also claiming this is some kind of "Web Revival". Do you know anyone who is building neocities sites and self-hosting them, much less getting any meaningful amount of traffic on their self-hosted websites?

  • Killing of Mexican drug cartel boss ‘El Mencho’ triggers wave of violence

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  • Zero planning for repercussions

    You're viewing the backlash as a bug rather than a feature. Vance will be back on TV in a week, arguing the US needs to intervene directly.

  • The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem | How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?

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  • Holy shit, the Atlantic are finally acknowledging there’s a problem

    The Atlantic only sees a problem when a guy they don't like is in charge. Their editorial staff will forget all about the GOP's Nazi Problem the minute Jeb Bush is running the RNC again.

  • Ford warns OSAP students not to pick 'basket-weaving courses’, pick ‘inherit trust fund’ courses instead

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  • Sorry, this was Rob Ford, not his brother Doug. There's no video that I'm aware of, just an apology for...

    “Nobody sticks up for people like I do,” Ford said on March 5, 2014, before unleashing a string of racial and ethnic slurs. “I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”

    which was anecdotally reported and later confirmed following a late-night bender.

  • Ford warns OSAP students not to pick 'basket-weaving courses’, pick ‘inherit trust fund’ courses instead

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  • "Everyone should learn how to manage trust funds," says scion of billionaire family dynasty mostly known for smoking crack and throwing business cards at people while shouting the n-word.

  • it's how it's

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  • 80s fashion model v 90s fashion model

  • Palantir sues magazine that revealed Switzerland rejected its approaches

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  • Persona, Discords "Age Verification" Service, creates a profile of you, sends it to the US Feds and deems you suspicious based on your appearance, exposed by Hackers

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  • It never works though.

    If you get under the hood of Mangione's actual history and ideology, the guy was an Effective Altruist insider. Not some Far-Left Antifa Radical, but a staunch techbro anarcho-libertarian who initially sympathized with Balaji Srinivasan's Network State and Peter Thiel's vision of fully capitalist Start Up Cities.

    He'd never have normally registered on a dragnet like this.

    But, more importantly, he's a near-singular instance of vigilante violence against a business executive. To say "it never works", you need to ignore the enormous security apparatus surrounding Fortune 100 senior executives. And the relative infrequency of these attempts in general. Since Thompson, there hasn't been some wave of executive assassinations. The closest we've seen was another lone wolf shooting of Charlie Kirk. Has a billionaire ever been deliberately targeted and killed... ever?

    Whether it is through a reasonably robust security state, a militantly apathetic public, or the general anonymity of business executives, the real physical risk to billionaires and their CEO stogies appears to be nearly zero.

  • Persona, Discords "Age Verification" Service, creates a profile of you, sends it to the US Feds and deems you suspicious based on your appearance, exposed by Hackers

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  • This is all very bad. But, much like with the tools used during the War on Terror to track "potential terrorists", I suspect this system has a problem of excessive false positives and false correlations.

    Historically, the response to this kind of data sweep was not to target people based on the information but to justify targeting of people after the fact. Also, the FBI made a habit of setting out honeypots for (typically mentally ill or extremely naive) would-be radicals or even radicalization programs intended to foment prosecutable misconduct where none had existed.

    Case in point, the Newburgh Four

    In 2008, FBI-paid informant Shahed Hussain met James Cromitie in the parking lot of a mosque in Newburgh, New York, a town with a high poverty rate and large Muslim community. (Cromitie was not part of the compassionate release request that has set the other three free.) Hussain befriended Cromitie, a down and out petty drug dealer. Hussain claims to have told Cromitie that he was a member of a terrorist organization in Pakistan, which Cromitie allegedly expressed interest in joining. In subsequent recorded conversations, Cromitie made hateful antisemitic remarks, but according to evidence presented during the trial in 2011, when Hussain encouraged him to “make a plan, pick a target, find recruits, . . . procure guns, and conduct surveillance,” Cromitie did nothing. Hussain sought to motivate Cromitie by assuring him he would be rewarded in the afterlife for a jihadist attack, to no avail.

    Hussain began offering more significant financial incentives for executing an attack, including promising Cromitie a BMW and cash, but Cromitie remained uninspired, taking no action to develop an attack plan. Even FBI agents thought that Cromitie was “unlikely to commit an act without the support of the FBI source.” Hussain’s enticements became more extravagant, including offering to pay Cromitie $250,000, an unauthorized inducement the FBI captured on a wiretap. Apparently tempted by the big payoff, Cromitie accompanied Hussian to scope out a potential target, but thereafter avoided Hussain and his persistent attempts to resume contact.

    Cromitie avoided Hussain for almost two months. After losing his job and desperate for money, he reinitiated contact with Hussain and agreed to plot an attack. At Hussain’s urging, Cromitie recruited other Muslim men, David Williams, Onta Williams (no relation), and Laguerre Payen, to serve as lookouts. Like Cromitie, they too were impoverished with histories of petty drug crimes and mental illness. With the four men along for the ride, the informant Hussain pushed the scheme forward, selecting a synagogue and U.S. Air Force base as targets and driving the defendants across state lines (to ensure federal jurisdiction) to pick up mock weapons arranged by the FBI.

    If these programs are allowed to run their course, I suspect we'll see similar stories springing up as less ideologically motivated judges recoil at investigations and prosecutions where the crimes themselves are entirely orchestrated by the investigating agencies.

  • What are some Ship of Theseus bands, where all original members have been replaced by someone new?

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  • Certain irony in that, given Matthew Sorum's involvement successfully lobbying Beijing for animal rights reforms.

  • The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents

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  • I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper

    It's weird that we don't consider the mass production of cheap paper and quality pens/pencils a technology.

    analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole

    I'm not going to become an Evangelical for Ctrl+F because I don't think it's worth the fight.

    But I will say an analog classroom with 8 students taught by a professional teacher five days a week is vastly superior to an analog classroom with 40 students taught by a TA three days a week.

    Do with that what you will.

  • The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents

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  • Teachers are a cost-center

    Technology is a profit-center

    What are you, some kind of socialist? Your system will never work. We'll all run out of money!

  • The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents

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    • Correlation
    • Causation

    Hey, Computer, what's been happening to

    • Average Class size
    • Average teacher years of experience
    • Average annual hours in school

    Had it been?

    • Up
    • Down
    • Down

    But sure, also, they've replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.

  • AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains

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  • The final frontier

  • AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains

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  • Isn’t it incredible that “AI” is sold as a product that is ‘PhD level smart’ (lol), but if it doesn’t do the straightforward thing you asked of it then it’s your fault.

    Have you ever tried to get a PhD to do anything?