Haha… If elections had any impact, it’s long time ago we would have seen any changes… ! Every year the same parade, with the illusion of choice between a turd or a piece of shit… Either way, they both come out of the same a Hole and reeks the same…
Money = power ! Vote with your wallet instead… Stop buying unecessary things, just shut down your TV, radio, mobile… and open your mind to the REAL outside world, reconnect with your intuition, stop filling your body with deadly poison and stop being a brainless sheep (not saying you’re, it’s a figure of speech).
You can do both. You always get the same shitty options to vote for because most people don’t vote, and even fewer of them vote in primaries or participate in the political process in other ways.
The reason you only get to vote for the “lesser of two evils” is because you don’t participate in primaries (assuming you are talking about the US system here). If MAGA can get a psycho like Trump to be their party nominee, you can get your kind of psycho nominated as well.
Primaries are where you actually get a chance to express what kind of candidate you want. Hell, you can even run for office! Generals are where you hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils because otherwise it’s an automatic vote for the worst of the two evils.
I agree voting seems pointless sometimes. But it’s still important. But it’s a lever of power you have access to and nobody can take it away from you no. And you can spend the 364 other days of the year impacting politics in other ways.
The reason you only get to vote for the “lesser of two evils” is because you don’t participate in primaries (assuming you are talking about the US system here)
Just popping in to remind you they destroyed the Iowa caucus to stop Bernie.
There was some shady stuff on behalf of the DNC but he legitimately lost. He didn’t get the votes. Because his voters didn’t vote in the primaries. A number of reforms have been made to the primary system since then, a bunch of the people who oversaw that primary got fired, and many states are now moving towards ranked choice voting which will eliminate the need for primaries entirely. If half the people who complain about how voting is useless actually participated in the primary process, our political landscape would look a lot different. I used to be one of those people, I get it, the whole damned thing is a bit of a racket, but it doesn’t change that voting takes 5 minutes and has a concrete impact on who runs the government.
Edit: And that’s the presidential race. You can make much more of a difference, and the rules are much less wonky, in local and state elections. Hell, many of those positions are entirely uncontested.
He “legitimately” lost after they handed Iowa to a nobody loser like Pete to render Iowa irrelevant in the future. You don’t really think Pete won, do you? Sure, they gave the appearance of “cleaning up” after Iowa, but that was always the plan! Now Iowa is done as a relevant caucus state.
I voted in Iowa. Getting my caucus vote made irrelevant showed me the Democratic Party is not a viable vehicle. They’ll literally throw out your votes if they don’t like it.
That worked out well for Florida that one time. But you’re missing what gets people nominated to the general primaries, boat loads of money. If you don’t have that, good luck getting anyone you want to win to run. Thoughts and prayers and wishing don’t fund a campaign, but money does.
All of these bills they pass about spying on you (“PATRIOT” act, PRISM, etc) all have pretty astounding bipartisan support. I mean they can’t agree on anything except when it comes to spying on us or wiping out whole societies of people that don’t look like we want them to look. They all fucking incredibly come together and agree on that. Every time.
This assumes the only source these companies collect from is your internet traffic. It’s not.
And even if it was, VPNs don’t protect against fingerprinting.
For the past few months I’ve been using kanary which is a service that searches for your information on hundreds of different data mining sources and submits deletion requests for you.
I started with ~225 exposures and it’s gone down over time but I’m still sitting at ~50 exposures and it seems to have plateaued.
This information was data like who I’d married and when, past and current addresses, family members, etc. None of which was gleaned from internet traffic.
Right, but you’re talking about two distinctly different things. The ISP doesn’t own the websites you visit. They only have a record of your traffic. The individual websites that you visit can bust your privacy through 3rd party cookies, browser fingerprinting, cross-site tracking, and a bunch of other methods created to circumvent the user security features built into the browser. Nobody shares that information back to the ISP for free. The real issues are that huge companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have scripts running on millions of websites, so they can track you everywhere you go. But they’re still just single companies. The linchpin is that they then sell that information to Big Data brokers like Cambridge Analytica, and Informatica. Those companies combine literally everything you do online, everything you submit, all your history, all your data points, and build these fully accurate pictures of you. You need to take proactive measures to prevent this sort of data harvesting that go well beyond a VPN. But your ISP doesn’t have these systems in place. So unless the ISP is buying your profile from Big Data, and then selling it to the NSA, having a VPN is enough to thwart your ISP, and the issue identified in the article. You still have to take a bunch of other precautions to prevent the larger issue if you truly want any anonymity, and they’ll probably figure you out anyways.
OMG, I don’t care about which boogyman you fear, it would have happened eventually regardless of color in the position. Money and power speaks much louder than political party.
Lot of talented highly educated people as well. There are some difficulties though, namely in regards to how… complicated the legal situation is for companies and investors is. It’s very much a system where the bureaucracy is so thick that you need someone who has connections to get through it all.
This is not to say that laws in India should be changed to suit the needs of foreign investors, just that the internal complexities make it difficult market to work in as a foreigner. Perhaps that’s for the best given the history of foreign “investment” and “business interests” in India.
Can we make an enshittification graphic that you can put a website/product on and track it as it goes through the enshittification cycle? We gotta move Reddit from stage 1 enshittification to stage 2 enshittification (going for an IPO).
Stage 2 involves a disorienting attempt to portray everything as fine with the website/product when in actuality enshittification is aggressively accelerating.
That’s a pretty cool idea for a website, tracking the enshittification of major sites and products. I’d read it but I’m sure it’d be a lot of depressing, hard to monetize work for those involved to run.
And I’m sure inevitably, the site will become harder to run as more and more companies enter the shit list. Over time - features will be cut to save effort. List entry will be out sourced. The company itself, of course, will not see the irony. Finally - a new website emerges to track the enshittification of enshittification tracking websites. And the prophecy continues.
Yeah, it’s almost as if people don’t want to have kids when life is complete dogshit and the future only ever looks worse. But hey, maybe that mandatory optimism thing they’re trying to enforce will turn it around. Don’t believe your eyes and ears, everything is wonderful!
Fuck it. Hope the great filter eliminates us with extreme prejudice before we get off this rock and ruin more fucking planets.
Everything points to humanity already having overcome the great filter, and for Elon’s family, bodyguards, and indentured serfs, to colonize Mars in the near future.
This reluctance to tie the knot is worrying policymakers grappling with a decline in births and a rapidly aging population in a country that was once the world’s most populous, and where marriage rates are closely tied to birth rates as unmarried mothers are often denied child-raising benefits.
I heard the CCP wanted birth rates to climb. That’s not how you do it. The slowing economy doesn’t have to have this effect on young people. The Chinese government has a much stronger ability to manage these effects than democratic free market economies. I hope they would manage to use that.
I did not fully get from the article what exactly it is that makes marriage too expensive? Surely getting a marriage certificate is not prohibitively expensive? And shared / dual income would make it easier to stay on top of finances…
In order for a man to marry they need to own their own home & have a decent car. This is the societal norm in today’s China, without these things the women’s parents will not approve & they are still a confucianist society to a point, so eloping is quite rare. Now in Shanghai the home owning part is not so easy :-) Though the article is not great, because the “wealthy” part doesn’t make much sense.
(wealth starts with owning a large home, while driving a “Benz”)
Bet good money to see a full court press from China discouraging turnout in the 2024 election.
A Trump win is far better prospects for them being able to invade Taiwan before the demographics of it become impossible to overcome than a Biden win, and white TikTokkers aren’t gonna be convinced to vote Republican, expect a LOT of disinformation about how Biden doesn’t do anything or how he’s exactly the same as Trump and any other crock of shit you hear the twits spit out whenever they want to explain why not voting isn’t handing Trump the win or why doing that isn’t a fucking first order act of betrayal of the disemprivileged.
The international situation is the biggest argument against Trump. Another 4 years of incompetence and self serving is something we cannot really have right now without huge consequences. Kind of feels like all the arguments in the US are just a distraction from the bigger issues.
do u really compare the most dense city in the world to… that?
or u try to make a point that so many buildings were destroyed yet so many arabs are alive thus Israel is doing a great job not harming the population?
Gaza is not even remotely the densest city in the world. There are several cities in Israel alone that are denser.
Also, yeah, the death toll among civilians is a tiny fraction of that in these cities during WW2 despite similar levels of destruction, which does support the claim that Israel is actually warning people.
The claim he called propaganda was that every male over 18 +40% of women are seen as, and killed as, terrorists by the Israeli army, not that there wouldn’t be dead civilians. Nobody, literally nobody, claims the latter. Also YOU are funnily the one doing that by being anti-Israel? That, other than Hamas, is an actual country with civilians. Just stop the polarisation and dramatisation. One can be against wannabe autocrat Netanyahu, the war crimes the Israeli army is committing, and yet hope they kill every single Hamas member. Gaza has to be freed, from Hamas and Iran’s snd Quatar’s influence. Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
do you genuinely think that the actions of Israel are going to actually achieve the goal of killing every single Hamas member? what the Israeli government is doing is actively building support for radical action, because the position Israel is taking, the actions they’re taking, are unreasonable and abhorrent. if your goal is to kill all the insurgents, you lose. because there is no practical way to do that without victimizing the population, killing innocent people, and driving the survivors of that terror campaign into insurgency themselves. we’ve seen this play out before, in so many places. Israel is doing nothing but ensuring the continuation of this conflict.
Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
maybe there was a track record. there isn’t one any more. the only record the people of Gaza care about is the death toll. how are they expected to trust a country so willing to deliver death, disease, and famine upon them? how are we, as people who care for the lives of our fellow human beings, expected to side with racists and murderers? Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Very well put. It reminds me of the quote:
If there were an Oscar for best theatrical performance by a country, Israel would win every year. It’s a country based on theater. It’s a lunatic state - completely insane.
Your conclusion is wrong from what they say. Don’t project and polarise. Killing civilians is horrible and must be stopped. But that’s different from targeting them as terrorists. And you know that! How will this mess be ever solved if even on the most basic level are these stupid dramatisation and accusations?
Yes I know, it was a facetious comment because anyone still supporting Israel appears to be in a different reality than I, and I see no point in debating this issue.
Oh Germany, how I love your rules. A protest against the AfD in Hamburg was dismissed by the police because of the announced 10,000 people between 50,000 and 100,000 actually showed up.
reuters.com
Active