whocares314

joined 1 year ago
[–] whocares314 96 points 5 months ago (13 children)

It’s more than just damage control. Everything you said should be enough to get people to vote, but the sad reality is reducing it to that may not be enough. If you’re reading this and considering whether or not to vote, OP is 100% correct. You need to do it. Make no excuse, get it done. But try to feel good about it too. You’re not just voting for one person, you’re voting for an entire administration, and Biden has proven himself in that regard. Under a Biden administration you’re going to have competent people working at all levels of the federal government, which is a big deal. Biden’s administration has done a lot of good as well that is easy to gloss over in favor of focusing on his negative attributes:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-biden-accomplishment-data/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/

You also need to be at the polls to vote for your down-ballot candidates. Do not underestimate the importance or closeness of those races.

No candidate is ever going to be perfect for you. Personally I wish we were finishing the 8th year of a Bernie Sanders presidency. But that doesn’t mean that because I didn’t get it perfectly the way I want it I’m going to take my ball and just go home. I hate the democrat strategy right now, but please don’t let yourself be told that Biden has been a bad president. He’s done some things you can be happy about and some things you can wish were different. If you want to see those differences, the best way you can do that is to be politically active and work for that change. Not participating means you forfeit that right.

[–] whocares314 71 points 5 months ago (3 children)

It seems pretty obvious to me at this point that the DNC would rather lose than have an actual progressive win. None of the shitty things that Trump wants to do will hurt them, (stupid take if they cared at all about their descendants but they’re either too arrogant or too ignorant to worry about that) but actual progressive policies that helped average people WOULD hurt their way of life. Marginally. Like, the tiniest little amount. Like, your yacht can only have one master bedroom instead of four. But why give that up when you don’t have to?

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”

I’m voting for Biden though, and I’ll keep voting as progressively as possible in the down ballot elections. If a progressive movement from the bottom up can start by doing things like getting rid of FPTP, we still have a chance. And to anyone thinking about not voting, please do. The president is one person. They are the single most powerful person individually, (taking aside impact on the judicial system) but the collective impact on your day to day life is far more influenced by down ballot positions. Research your down ballot candidates and vote. Many of those races are decided by only a handful of votes. Yours matters.

[–] whocares314 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

All that conservatives will see is a violent black man. Gun control will continue to not be part of the solution. He was going to do it gun or no gun, if those women had their own guns they could have defended themselves, clearly it was a mental health issue….

[–] whocares314 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

FWIW I didn’t downvote you for this. I read the Ars article and saw the bit about them making it unlimited during the early pandemic days, but it seemed to imply that is was above board during other times. So if the whole case hinges on their actions during lockdown when people lost access to their own local libraries it becomes a letter vs spirit of the law thing to me personally. They broke the letter of the law, did they break the spirit of it? Was what they did immoral? The justice system isn’t perfect and as a society we continually refine and redefine our laws and have been forever. The state of Louisiana just signed a law into effect that requires poster sized copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom, kindergarten through college. If someone breaks that law, what side of history will they be on?

If unlimited lending was something that IA was doing all the time, I can see it both ways. If it was for a few months during lockdown, then I think the court got this wrong.

[–] whocares314 2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

(citation needed)

[–] whocares314 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That’s unfortunate and disappointing. It’s John Oliver’s recent LWT on Indian elections. He stated in the show that the site was created to get around any potential government censorship.

[–] whocares314 26 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

I’ll just leave this here

http://oppositesnakes.com This is definitely just a website about opposite snakes, totally not related to the topic of this thread in any way.

[–] whocares314 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This comment feels pretty derogatory to me. We know that, and if you had bothered to read the thread before coming in and making assumptions you’d have seen that. You’re missing the point. An enormous amount of information can be inferred by knowing your activity and fitness levels. This guy is on his feet 14 hours a day? Here’s a coupon for some shoe inserts. This guy spent 5 minutes pacing back and forth down the candy isle and didn’t buy anything? We need to give him a nudge to make that purchase. This person does yoga every morning and only buys organic produce? Well, they probably don’t shop at Jewel honestly but hey did you know we carry aluminum free deodorant in the health department? Your motion and fitness data can absolutely be used to infer a general level of healthiness, which is often times (and often incorrectly) also summarized as your BMI.

It was also wisely mentioned elsewhere in the thread that targeting advertising is only the tip of the iceberg as far as what can be done with the profiles these companies build about us. But none of that exactly fits very well into a title for a post.

[–] whocares314 6 points 6 months ago (5 children)

You know, I almost thought for a minute there was going to be a chance there was something cool behind it, like, “it can guide you to the exact location of a product that you’re looking for with x,y,z precision such as how AirTags work” or, “they look at data to optimize placement of items in the store to make it easier for people to find things efficiently” but it’s actually just another degree of shittyness. That stinks.

[–] whocares314 13 points 6 months ago (8 children)

That sounds pretty plausible I’ll give you that, and strictly speaking in iOS if they were gathering BMI and that type of data it would come up as a request for “Health”

So with that said to purpose would this information serve them given the way you described it? And is there any guarantee that it wouldn’t also be used to further build their marketing profile? Not trying to be argumentative, you have me genuinely curious now.

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