The title gore of these headlines is a bit silly. I get that Amnesty International uses colons in its headlines, but burying the fact that it’s Amnesty International saying these things just makes it look like the group they’re talking about is the one saying it.

Eighty years ago a generation came together across 51 countries to fight fascism and put an end to a genocidal regime bent on conquering as much territory as it possibly could.

And then their children handed it all over without a fight over the next several decades in exchange for some trinkets and the promise of carrying their social and economic power to their deathbeds. What a fucking waste.

Thank goodness Boint Boint is here to explain.

Is it actually a free speech issue, though?

It’s not as though SCOTUS is trying to rule on whether to ban short-form video or content from particular person. The allegation in regard to TikTok isn’t ‘dangerous speech’, it’s the platform’s collection of user data and the manipulation of available content via an algorithm that they claim is a tool of a hostile foreign entity. Neither of those issues constitute ‘speech’ whether related to a foreign or domestic company.

It seems to me like this is being framed as a speech issue to protect other vendors with hostile algorithms. If Google were forced to stop pushing AI and paid results to the stop of its searches, would that be a free speech issue? If Facebook were forced to put more weight on users’ choices about what shows up on their feed rather than pushing dodgy political posts and paid advertisements, would that be a speech issue?

Honestly, deciding that toxic algorithms are protected speech seems like a much more dangerous precedent to me than coming to a conclusion that a company that’s beholden to a foreign entity that may be forcing it to engage in hostile intelligence operations and soft power can be restricted.

If someone made a piece of malware that ropes your PC into a botnet and uses it to perform DDOS attacks, would banning it be a speech issue if it happens to come in the form of a blogging platform? A chat client? A music sharing service?

Just having speech on a platform doesn’t mean everything that platform does qualifies as speech and requires first amendment protections.

You can help by asking ChatGPT to produce the most processor intensive prompt it can come up with and then having it execute it repeatedly. With the free version this will burn through your allotment pretty quickly, but if thousands of people start doing it on a regular basis? It’ll cost OpenAI a lot of money.

Sales taxes are basically a flat tax applied based on consumption. Aside from some things being exempt from sales tax and other things being taxed extra, it basically just puts a disproportionate burden on the working class and makes it harder to make large purchases.

It certainly should be opposed by progressive politicians in the long run, in favor of a more progressive income tax system and more direct taxing of revenue. The problem with that, though, is that you’d kind of need to do both at once, or raise taxes on higher brackets first.

You’d also need more legitimately progressive politicians who aren’t beholden to the interests of big business and the ultra rich.

One of the major barriers for me to switching to Linux as my primary OS was a simple hardware limitation. I use a Logitech MX Ergo, and I spend much of my time in Discord voice chats. The open source driver for my mouse, Solaar, wasn’t able to be configured to properly hold down the mouse buttons that I use for push to talk. That, to me, is a complete deal-breaker.

I also haven’t yet spent the time to figure out JACK audio as an alternative to Voicemeeter Potato, which is another big hurdle, but if my push to talk doesn’t even work there’s little incentive to do that.

I’ll have to see if Solaar has been updated to get this functionality working yet. If it has, maybe I’ll give it another shot. I honestly would love to switch to Linux. I prefer it in a lot of ways, but short of learning to make a driver myself or code something to fill the gap, it’s a barrier I haven’t really seen a way around. There seems to be a fair bit of that with Linux in niche use-case scenarios, which is I think one of the major obstacles to more wide-spread adaptation.

I’m a little confused by this. It seems like the question here itself is Anglocentric. These games presumably are being discussed if they’re big, just, like, in the places where they’re big. Japanese games are only discussed in the US because we have typically had a ton of ports of Japanese games. We do a lot of business with Japan, and many of our console game studios and even the consoles themselves are and were Japanese.

Nintendo, Sega, Sony, even Neogeo were all Japanese consoles. Other than Xbox, it’s tough to find an American console that was relevant in the US more recently than Atari and Colecovision. We had a lot of American computer games, cabinets, and developers for Japanese consoles, sure, but it’s not really surprising that Japan is featured prominently in the minds of American gamers.

Why would games that were released to markets that don’t port games to the US or advertise here be known here or discussed?

I’d imagine that Indian gamers very much see Indian games as part of their gaming history. Same with Vietnamese gamers and Vietnamese games, etc. Presumably they’re also better known in nearby countries and other places with overlapping languages or trade deals that involve localizations of their games.

There’s definitely some bias toward particular types of games getting attention vs not, and some of that is certainly rooted in sexism, but I’m not sure Americans mostly talking about games they actually have access to is quite the scandal this article wants to frame it as.

I’d certainly be interested in seeing some ports from countries that we don’t see many games getting much attention among gamers in the US and other primarily English speaking countries.

I mean, typically if you ask in a way that isn’t totally overwhelming and pushy and then accept a “no” when you get one, you’re going to be fine. Maybe if you get to know her at least a little first and feel things out before immediately throwing it out there you’ll have better luck, but I think for the most part if you’re respectful and considerate about it you’re not going to have too much backlash.

If this question is actually “how do I shoot my shot with zero chance of a negative reaction”, though, you kind of don’t. That’s part of the risk of putting yourself out there.

404 Media: we’re not like the rest. Except when we are.

I wouldn’t assume that most queer-supporting activists are atheists. They’re probably not latching onto bigoted religious organizations, but there’s a massive range of worldviews between adherence to any particular religion and a firm belief in a lack of deities or of other things we’d typically qualify as religious, spiritual, or supernatural. They’re probably unlikely to be your typical churchgoing conservative Christian, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re fully landing on atheism specifically.

Next time could you post some kind of warning that this is literally just 20 minutes of this guy reading out transphobic posts? Thanks.

This does seem like more of a climate change related article. That said, access to cooling shelters could also be construed as an issue of social safety nets.

I do kind of feel like the moderation in this particular community or subcommunity or whatever we’re calling it is a little bit subject to unilateral judgement calls that reflect personal preference more than particularly justifiable positions. Oh well. Can’t win them all.

Have you actually seen the posts from the people this thread is about?

One of them is literally in the habit of sending people death threats and encouraging suicide. There’s a difference between supporting neopronoun use and being completely blind to literal bad faith trolls.

If you can’t tell the difference I don’t know what to tell you.

Edit: Some of y’all need to go touch some grass.

So like, how about these big tough military guys stop hand-wringing and do something about it. Fulfill your oath and defend the fucking constitution.

I mean, from Walmart’s perspective yeah absolutely that’s what it is. But consumers aren’t profiting from their home towns being utterly decimated financially. Legislators at a local level aren’t really either. I suppose legislators at a state and national level might be kind of but they still end up with a shittier world.

The overarching motivation isn’t so much about profiteering as being suckers and subscribing to the idea that corporate America has our best interests in mind. If workers and local municipalities were focused on maximizing their own value, rather than being good little cooperative serfs and sellouts, we wouldn’t have this issue.

Convenience and intellectual laziness got us here.

I think a lot of what we’re feeling now is just the result of misplaced leftover cold war era anti-communist anxiety ironically resulting in the withering of a less centrally orchestrated American economy in favor of consolidation. It’s just that said consolidation ended up handing everything to oligarchs instead of to some collective representation of workers. In either case, you get the same issue of the people who decide on policy being fully detached from both the needs of the people they ostensibly serve as well as the actual effectiveness of the measures they enact.

It’s kind of wild to think about just how many industries have been going in this direction too. Like when I was a kid i remember even most of the local convenience stores and a lot of the gas stations being small businesses. You almost never see that anymore.

Lack of reinvestment is one that I feel like is cloaked in systemic economic stuff enough to be hard to spot, but once you think it through it’s incredibly obvious.

Like, even if Walmart didn’t consolidate what would be several businesses per town and pay less to its employees per unit of labor and extracted consumer value, there’s all this profit that it doesn’t spend locally.

The six or so shops and one given Walmart likely runs out of business not only would have been staffed less efficiently (read: paying more per required amount of labor by distributing that labor between more employees at more shops), but the profits would have been more likely to be spent locally. Quite literally, the money you spend on a shovel or a pair of socks or a cell phone charger would be going back to the local economy in greater quantities, simply because the people making the profits were locals. They’re shopping at local stores, hiring local labor, eating in local restaurants.

The more that businesses in the area aren’t based locally, the more that money is sucked out of the local economy. In the case of Walmart it’s money from across what once would have been several different sources of goods, all while consolidating potential sources of employment. Add all the other massive corporations that have taken the place of local businesses, from chain supermarkets to fast food to Uber to Amazon, etc, and it’s no wonder people are struggling financially and our infrastructure is falling apart.

It’s pretty obviously toxic when you think about it on a systemic level.

Why is this so hostile?

This doesn’t surprise me. The CVS we have downtown seems to always have only one person working and they’re constantly bogged down with inventory stuff. I think there’s actually someone at the counter ringing out customers like one out of six trips that I make over there, if even that much.