A feature that makes it easier for their users to migrate to a competitor? Blockchain Capital invests $15M in BlueSky. Insert that Anakin / Padme meme:
Anakin: Now that we’ve invested, let’s make that federation feature priority 0
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
Anakin:
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
The purpose of an apostrophe is to warn people that there’s an S coming.
Voting booths are secret places where people can admit how they really feel without feeling judged. Trump won the popular vote because he appealed to a lot of people who didn’t wear MAGA hats, or walk around in garbage bags.
The sad thing is that this isn’t really a shock to the rest of the world. There’s a reason why, for decades, Americans going on backpacking trips have put Canadian flags on their gear.
The only saving grace here is that it might not be that most Americans are cruel, racist, sexist, classist, etc. It might just be that they’re incredibly dumb. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews of Trump supporters and the vast majority are idiots. They believe in crazy conspiracies. They say they love Trump’s policies then can’t name any of them. They can’t accept that he actually legitimately lost all his legal cases. They regurgitate things they’ve heard, but clearly haven’t even spent a second thinking about, because they go blank as soon as they’re asked to elaborate on anything.
And, if the problem is really that they’re morons, it may not be their fault. For some reason, the US obsession with free speech and free markets means that Internet companies can keep feeding people bullshit that makes them angry, which keeps them engaged, which keeps the ad dollars flowing. US TV networks can tell absurd lies under the guise of news, and they’re apparently immune from being sued for doing it. “Concerned parents” funded by lobbying groups can fuck up the education system so that kids never learn anything that might make them feel bad. The US is allowed to have a government funded state media network that delivers factual video, audio and written news and information around the world. But, most Americans have never heard of it because it’s not allowed to compete with the for-profit media in the country itself.
I dunno, maybe the world can save the US. The fact is, Europe does occasionally have strong influence in the US. Americans have to deal with cookie banners because of a GDPR law that doesn’t apply in the US. Maybe if the EU took on the US tech monopolies it would actually affect the way Americans are brainwashed. But, unfortunately, I have serious doubts about whether the US can dig itself out of the hole it’s in. Right now it looks like the hole is just getting deeper and deeper.
I heard yesterday about how a lot of Imams in Michigan posed for selfies with him.
Everyone knows where he stands.
I strongly suspect that isn’t true. I think anti-Trump people know where he stands, but I bet a lot of pro-Trump people are about to be in for a big surprise.
Don’t forget that workers like tips because tips allow you to cheat on your taxes. I’ve never met anybody who worked in a tipped job who reported 100% of the tips they received.
Another issue is that everybody thinks they’re above average. Waiters / waitresses think that if there are no more tips, they (being above average) will lose out.
It’s not some kind of sneaky thing where if workers are paid with tips the customers pay more. When workers are paid in normal wages instead of tips, the prices are just higher.
The problem is that many tipped workers love tips because most of the time they can avoid reporting all of them, so they pay less in taxes. Employers like them because it can make their prices seem lower because the price on something like the menu isn’t actually the final price someone pays. The people who hate tips are the customers who can never be sure what the final bill will be, and who often have to “tip” a minimum of 10%, often in advance, for service that isn’t tip-worthy.
It’s ridiculous to pretend that businesses don’t have business models that support paying a living wage, or that without tips they’d go out of business. The only difference is that they can list lower prices knowing that the final bill will include a tip. If tips were eliminated they’d just have to list the items with a slightly higher price. The customers also know that that tip is going to be included. Other than European tourists, nobody goes into a restaurant and thinks that the final bill will merely be the cost of the food they ordered. They know they’ll be expected to pay a tip too. Getting rid of tipping would just mean that the tip would be $0, and the food would be a bit more expensive.
Hardly. Historically there has been a lot of cheating in elections. Look at Chicago up to the 1970s. Election fraud was common there.
Nobody can prove that there’s less cheating in Chicago elections today than in the 1970s, but people trust that it’s more honest.
Can you prove that your vote was counted and that the number of votes for your candidate went up by one as a result? If you can’t prove it, then it’s based on trust.
Right, but no way to verify who you voted for.
And, you have to trust that the website is telling you the truth. You have no way of verifying that it always gives the same answer to everybody. I guess someone could test that there’s some connection to their real ballot by intentionally screwing up their ballot. But, that doesn’t mean that there’s any way to prove that when it’s counted that the actual tally for the person / people you voted for are going up not down.
First, I’m writing about a person who’s watching and doesn’t know if they can trust the system. My point is that there’s no alternative to trust in the system, the system is built on trust.
Second, if you’re inside the system, if you’re an election worker or a government authority, you can tell who voted. But, you can’t tell who that voter cast their votes for – at least in a functional democracy.
The authorities can, and should, have all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that all the votes are being handled safely and counted correctly. But, if the public doesn’t trust the authorities, there’s nothing that the authorities can realistically do to convince the public that everything is above board. You can’t “prove” that the system isn’t rigged.
Yes, and again, it’s all based on trust.
The scary thing about elections is that, by design, nobody can ever “prove” they won.
Votes are designed to be anonymous. They have to be. If they’re not, they’re very vulnerable to manipulation. If someone can prove how they voted, then they can either be bribed to vote a certain way, or threatened to vote a certain way. If you can check that your vote was counted successfully for the candidate you chose, then someone else can check that you voted for the candidate they chose.
That means that, by design, the only security that elections can have is in the process. In a small election, like 1000ish votes or fewer, someone could supervise the whole thing. They could cast their vote, then stand there and watch. They could watch as other people voted, making sure that nobody voted twice, or dropped more than one sheet into the box. They could watch as the box was emptied. Then, they could watch as each vote was tallied. Barring some sleight-of-hand, in a small election like that, you could theoretically supervise the entire process, and convince yourself that the vote was fair.
But, that is impossible to scale. Even for 1000 votes, not every voter could supervise the entire process, and for more than 1000 votes, or votes involving more than one voting location, it’s just not possible for one person to watch the entire thing. So, at some point you need to trust other people. If you’re talking say 10,000 votes, maybe you have 10 people you trust beyond a shadow of a doubt, and each one of you could supervise one process. But, the bigger the election, the more impossible it is to have actual people you know and trust supervising everything.
In a huge country-wide election, there’s simply no alternative to trust. You have to trust poll workers you’ve never met, and/or election monitors you’ve never met. And, since you’re not likely to hear directly from poll workers or election monitors, you have to instead trust the news source you’re using that reports on the election. In a big, complex election, a statistician may be able to spot fraud based on all the information available. But, if you’re not that statistician, you have to trust them, and even if you are that statistician, you have to trust that your model is correct and that the data you’re feeding it is correct.
Society is built on trust, and voting is no different. Unfortunately, in the US, trust is breaking down, and without trust, it’s just a matter of which narrative seems the most “truthy” to you.
It is. It’s that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.
What makes you think there’s a threshold?
The best thing about Khan is that there’s nothing quiet about her work.
You’re right, but it probably also means she’ll keep FTC chair Lina Khan as chair of the FTC
I really hope so, but we’ll see. There has been a lot of pressure from rich democratic donors to dump her.
Trump’s niece doesn’t know anything more than the rest of us. And, even if Trump did “promise” Musk a key government role, we all know how likely he is to keep his promises.
But, what Musk is doing is clever, though evil. He’s ingratiating himself to Trump. If Trump is elected, he won’t consider Musk an enemy which is absolutely key, and might throw Musk a bone. If Harris is elected, she’ll govern using traditional norms and values, which means not vindictively prosecuting people who helped her political opponent, even a guy who went right up to the line of what’s legal in trying to get Trump elected.
Heads Musk wins. Tails he doesn’t lose.
If you can’t hold a security clearance, you shouldn’t be able to run for any office, let alone POTUS.
It’s 2019. Biden is running against Trump. Trump arranges for Biden’s security clearance to be revoked. Trump is now running unopposed.
It’s worse than that.
https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901
Dorsey’s already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.