Claw it back. It’s well established that Congress can un-spend money now.

You either put it in the DSL or people start writing generators for your DSL.

Ever tried doing a large installation of the blumat drippers? Like a 10’x20’ veggie plot. I’ve got the standard 1/4" vinyl drip lines buried under straw mulch currently. It’s a very dry climate.

This seems to be more about where a person is searching for the knowledge they need to improve the human condition. In the case of both the believers and the sceptics, the answer is external. Not just external to themselves, but external to humanity. For the believers, it’s the divine. For the sceptics, science. It appears that Tolstoy would rather they seek knowledge from humanity itself, and to apply that knowledge directly for the improvement of the human condition. A more introspective, human focused approach.

Brother Ali is also an excellent option in that genre, although his most directly political tracks are not his best IMHO.

Maybe. Are you a homicidal AI?

No fate but what we make. You can put in the effort to keep your mind and your ears open. Absolutely worth it IMHO.

The implication is that they are all good friends from the same social circles.

Honestly bad article. Author can’t even accurately describe the thing they claim doesn’t exist.

excludes droughts and heatwaves

Those seem important

I like people in theory

The above poster at least brought a reference. Here’s another covering the backfire effect in general https://psychotricks.com/backfire-effect/

People are a tricky problem. They don’t often work the way one would think, and certainly not the way we might wish. I think it’s a fair position to take that the social media environment, and the way people with opposing views interact there, has had a non-negligible impact on the rise in extreme views. That definitely includes trolling.

But here I am offering a differing opinion with a reference in support of the backfire effect, which is some next-level irony.

I tend to consider the two key characteristics of a state to be the claim to the right to demand tax, and the claim to the exclusive use of violence. The definition of statecraft as the act of managing capital is a formulation I have not heard before, and doesn’t strike me as persuasive. It seems to have strange implications, like that Goldman Sachs is a state.

Your arguments here seem more in support of institutions than states. Asking whether one can have capable municipal water service without a state is a different question than whether one can have capable municipal water service without institutions. The necessity of institutions in this case seems an easier argument.

The answers to these kinds of issues is never disclosures or ToS or admin vigilance. It’s always technical. Everything which is technically possible will become normal.

Lemmy is not popular because it is a well designed piece of technology. Frankly it’s a pretty naive implementation of activitypub. It’s popularity comes from being the biggest alternative around when Reddit pissed off a good chunk of its users.

The only way to control how data is used, is to make it technically or practically impossible to do so. Until then, expect all the data on the fediverse to be used in every way possible for any purpose, and act accordingly.

I guess if you wanna go off at people like that, I have to go through your links and point out that

1. Providing services to a cyber warfare organization does not make one a cyber warfare company. I bet they contract out their cafeteria services too. The article specifically states the contract is for data analysis.
2. Doing data analysis for target selection also does not make one a cyber warfare company.
3. Data analysis is not cryptography. Also, my personal computer is encrypted. Am I a cryptographer?
4. Receiving data from your customers does not make you a data collection company, and the article points out that the data is being collected by Oura. Compare that with the NSA who for example have internet backbone splitters installed at the major telcos, or put cell spoofers in cities.

Why is doing data analysis for unethical ends not enough?

Palantir is a data analysis company. Data analysis is just one part of what the NSA does. Other important functions of the NSA include cyber warfare, cryptography, and data collection. I have not read that Palantir does any of that.

If different people with similar visual characteristics have similar behavioral characteristics, doesn’t that imply that perhaps we can judge a book by its cover?

Haven’t read the book, but the title suggests things could have been different. That something happened to make things bad. If that’s the argument, it is completely wrong. Israel could have turned out no other way. Extermination is the only possible outcome of a colonial ethno-state.

Imagine explaining to a patient they have permanent neurological damage because they wanted to sniff their video games.

I have a hard time believing that Gore would have made a difference on preventing 9-11, but I’m sure the response would have been different. Maybe no Patriot Act, maybe no Afghanistan War, almost certainly no Iraq War. That’s a big enough difference for me.