Regarding rigging voting machines, that’s conspiracy theory territory, however you did miss that Democrats are more likely to be working jobs where you can’t easily take time off to vote, or it’s that or lunch, or the time they give you isn’t enough, so doing it in advance by post is pretty much the only way you can vote.

There hasn’t been an insignificant number of times I’ve found out about a new product or event I’m interested in, a sale for something I already want, or something like that through advertising.

It’s rare as a proportion, but it definitely does happen.

I believe that ads are just yet another tragedy of the commons type of thing, where bad actors not only ruin it for everyone, but also convert good actors to being bad actors.

I’d say there’s three tiers:

• Ads showing you things you actually want or need, and providing you with new information.
  • These are going to have high CPMs, so you don’t need many per page, and having more per page will decrease their value, but kind of require tracking to ensure their relevance.
• Ads showing you things you might not want or need, but might cobsider buying, or information that isn’t immediately relevant.
  • This is the baseline for reasonable quality, untargeted ads, and CPMs for these are going to be fairly low, but much higher if you click on them
• Ads promoting scams, malware, and things you neither want nor need.
  • In this case, the CPMs will be virtually zero, so the site is forced to cram as many on the page as they can. They’re also encouraged to get you to click by mistake.
  • This makes people block ads or trackers, reducing the number of ads in the first category and forcing more sites to adopt these patterns.

It’s kind of sad that it’s going this way (and has been for a while) but I guess it’s going to end up with just a return to paying for media with money rather than ads.

The surge starts around 2016, could be political instability following David Cameron leaving/Brexit, smartphones being common enough that muggings increase, changes in policies due to Sadiq Khan being elected, children who grew up during the recession growing old enough to join gangs, or a number of other things

I think the drop is 2020 and then it never recovered actually?

Ah yeah, I was looking at the mail/password manager/docs side instead… They’ve also got Proton Drive on there as well though

It’s interesting they haven’t recommended anything proton here when proton as a whole works very well in a bunch of these categories… I imagine it could be because they’re a competitor to Tuta

Probably Switzerland.

All AI is good for is giving instructions on how to make bombs, and generating images of tits, but they caught on so now we just end up with search summaries saying it’s not physically possible to [xyz].

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Yeah, and if you have a green card or passport with a visa it’s “probably” fine, unless they’re having a bad day or whatever.

I’m not sure about a passport from a visa waiver country though, because no shot ICE agents know that Lithuanians and Singaporeans can be in the US without a visa.

That’s from the videos that get widely shared.

95% of interactions are gonna be them being dicks but backing off when they realize you’re there legally. The other 5% are gonna be the ones you see.

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Good (ish) though, obviously that 1000 isn’t coming linearly, it’s with progressive taxes, so it’s going towards subsidising food for everyone, so the baseline cost is lower.

Personally I think that only staples (grains, legumes, root vegetables, maybe squash) should be eligible for subsidies, but even then it’s good.

The correct way, really

In the UK we’re super lucky to have Scan, in-store if you’re in the North West or online otherwise, but for the US I guess it’s too big for a single good store to cover nationwide, then when you get too big you inevitably lose the quality that helped you grow

HDD or a folder is open, floppy is save, surely?

The thing with PE is they only invest what they’re willing to lose, which the vast majority of their investments do, but the tiny fraction that don’t make enough money to fund profits and cover losses.

If 95% of companies in the stock market lost money, that’d be the end of days, but that’s because generally once you graduate to an IPO you have to be pretty profitable.

The whole point of a pardon is “we know you did the crime, but don’t think you should be punished.” It can only come about if there’s an ulterior motive, like corruption or if you agree to work with the government towards their goals, initially working on dangerous projects etc. Allowing it to be overturned later would undermine that as it wouldn’t make the danger worth it.

Essentially: it’s not designed as a change from North/East/South/West, it’s designed as a from-scratch way to refer to those directions.

The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, so let’s say East is “Sun” and West is “Setting-Sun.”

Polaris/The North Star is in the North, so let’s call that direction “Star” and the other direction “No-Star.”

When you say “Setting-Sun-Sun-Star,” you’re saying the direction is more similar to the path the sun takes through the sky than it is to the North Star, and in the direction the sun sets.

16 directions is pretty arbitrary anyway though, usually 8 is enough and then you don’t have the confusion of repeated words.