.world is a little too block/defederation-happy. I moved from .world to SJW because they blocked a piracy community.

Another interesting question is if they vote for one of their local DA or sheriff candidates or just obtain.

Meh, startups and businesses are capitalist organizations, and I think the idea of patents is questionable outside capitalism, so these wouldn’t really be a good metrics. I’d guess the richest countries “innovate” the most because they can support more risky endeavors. The U.S. is the capitalist imperial core, so it probably innovates the most. Other capitalist nations like Haiti, probably not so much.

The best measure of innovation would probably be something like scientific publications. China wins by raw numbers, Vatican City wins per-capita (???).

It’s probably a mix of things, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the politicians most heavily advocating for banning it expect to get some big payout. The first I’ve heard of the TikTok ban was from Trump who was trying to coerce them to sell it to Microsoft (I expect he would’ve got some financial benefit from this). In terms of the data-collection, potentially harmful and biased algorithms, and data exfiltration by government agencies, it’s not like the U.S. companies are much better.

I’ve always heard ingesting flouride makes developing teeth stronger, and does nothing for adults. Found a review of studies: https://www.cochrane.org/CD010856/ORAL_does-adding-fluoride-water-supplies-prevent-tooth-decay

tankie

🤨 I’ve never heard a right-winger, or even a liberal use that term.

IMO, the U.S. will become similar to Russia. It’s not some sudden societal collapse scenario; just an oligarchy with high levels of corruption and incompetence. Most people will conform or keep their heads down to avoid the consequences of stepping out of line. If you’re in a possibly targeted group, you may want a valid passport though. And it’s always been a good idea to keep at least a months worth of non-perishable food on hand in case of supply chain disruptions. Possibly stuff like emergency propane heaters and a propane tank could be useful too (they’ve been useful for me in the past already without an authoritarian government or social unrest). Knowing your neighbors and helping eachother out in little ways is probably the most powerful thing though.

Source? First I’ve heard of anything like this. I’d imagine a lot of things would have to be settled in court given the US’s strange laws giving states so much leeway in how they conduct federal elections.

Well, yeah, the spectrum certainly exists, but almost all of us fall hard to one side or the other.

I’ve heard it described as a bimodal distribution. Bisexuality seems pretty common though. Statistics say it’s more common for women to identify as bisexual than lesbian. The majority of women I’ve dated have been bisexual, but with a preference for men. Most non-straight men I’ve known have been fully homosexual. Personally, I’m straight. I’ve always had a hard time trying to figure out what a conventionally attractive man was (mostly to make myself more attractive), and still sometimes get surprised when someone describes a particular man as attractive. I find most women physically attractive, at least in certain ways (though I have certain preferences, of course). Personality seems to be what makes or breaks the attraction for me.

I use LLMs for multiple things, and it’s useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you’re trying to find or learn about something, but don’t know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don’t exist). It works OK for things like “translation” tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don’t use it anymore. I’ve had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.

Off the top of my head, scenes in:

Poor Things

Nymphomaniac

Antichrist

Requiem for a Dream

Saltburn

Ideally, the Democrats would be unabashedly pro-immigration and advocate for solving the “problem” by making it much easier to immigrate legally and getting those currently undocumented, documented. This would make immigrants harder to exploit, address fears of immigrants under-cutting wages, and paying more taxes and social security. That addresses all the somewhat legitimate worries I can think of; the rest of the “problems” I can think of are just rooted in racism and lies. Immigration has been and is a net-positive for the U.S., and a pro-immigration stance should be an easy argument to sell to voters that’s also backed up by many studies and data; including conservative think-tanks like Cato. Pro-immigration sentiments were very popular in the U.S. until this recent bout of anti-immigration propaganda. Even now, Americans hold contradictory opinions, like being pro-mass-deportation while being in favor of expanding pathways to citizenship: https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/polling-around-mass-deportation-far-more-complicated-right-wing-media-let

Also from the article (which I agree with):

To be sure, Democrats are wary of getting stuck talking about an issue where Trump always polls better than Harris. Backlash to a Democratic president and a surge of migrants at the Mexican border have helped make Americans suspicious of immigration at levels not seen since 2001. As Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma explained to Mary Harris on Wednesday’s What Next, the share of Americans who think immigration should decrease has risen from 28 percent in 2020 to 55 percent today. And some polls have found that a majority of Americans support mass deportations.

But results like that are an indictment, not a vindication, of Democrats’ reluctance to talk about immigration. Mass deportation would separate 4.4 million U.S. citizen children from their parents. It would require the largest police action in American history, wipe out millions of jobs, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and destabilize the economy. Industries from milk to housing construction would be damaged for years. Los Angeles and Houston would see their populations fall by 10 percent; Florida would lose 1 in 20 residents. A million mortgages could be at risk.

I.e. Democrat’s position is unpopular because they offer little-to-no pushback to anti-immigration arguments. In fact, Harris, Biden, and many Democrat politicians, seem to be embracing the anti-immigration narrative. In a sense, they are complicit in aiding fascism, IMO.

GPL’d clients. Everything is encrypted/decrypted on the client before sending/receiving to/from the server. I may later switch to a self-hosted solution, but don’t want to set one up right now (was using BitWarden’s cloud before).

I just exported my data from BitWarden and imported into ProtonPass. Was pretty easy. Hate the color palette of the app and browser extension though, lol.

Isn’t one of the arguments for raising minimum wage that higher incomes will result in more consumption and social program contribution?

It decreases inhibition as well. IIRC, that’s one reason it’s hypothesised lead exposure contributed to the crime waves, and why blood lead levels are correlated to incarceration.

This was hard for me to follow. I think it’s targeted toward people steeped in “peak oil” discourse.

His first assumption seems to be that economic growth is primarily caused by fossil fuel consumption (which probably is largely the case for the last couple hundred years or so).

He postulates, based on data trends, we are nearing worldwide “peak oil demand,” which will cause worldwide economic stagnation for the foreseeable future. This thinking is kinda of the reverse of how I normally think of it (economic growth drives oil demand), but I suppose it’s valid if fossil fuels are consistently too expensive to extract more of (lowering demand).

My takeaway: without growth, capitalism becomes a zero-sum game and cannot function “properly,” so this peak-oil-demand will result in world-wide economic collapse or probably something slower (a crumbling?).

However, his analysis states as a fact that renewables aren’t as “productive” as fossil fuels, so won’t be able to cause future growth, or at least growth at the same pace as the last couple hundred years. I’m not sure I agree with that because I’ve seen charts that show the levelized cost of renewable electricity production to actually be significantly lower than that of fossil fuels.

Allred came across weak, because he has the same position as Ted Cruz/Republicans on some of their worst policies (immigration and Israel), but he has to slightly “moderate” them a little to avoid turning-off base Democratic voters. This is a problem with the Democratic party as a whole, and it’s a losing strategy. Voters who strongly support Israel and being “tough on immigration” will be more swayed by the person that full-throatedly supports these position, and voters that disagree with these policies won’t be swayed by inconsequential concessions to them.

I have. My bank did a chargeback like they would if it was a credit card. I was told it would’ve been a lot harder to get my money back if my PIN was used. But, I’ve only seen that option available for in-person purchaees.