Whoa, back up there. Nobody was talking about CSAM until you brought it up.

I was at a music festival about a week ago and there were several dozen people wearing these, they were kick ass

That’s effectively already how SpaceX manages to function, they (allegedly) have an entire team of people dedicated to distracting Musk with bullshit whenever he visits the office so that the actual engineers can work in peace without their CEO mandating stupid ideas.

They saw the “Human eyes don’t have LIDAR so Teslas don’t need them either” and said yeah, fuck that, we can’t allow him input here.

Also alive and well in the rave scene, but we’ve always dressed funny

Edit: also, these communities probably overlap a lot…

The Nonce Formerly Known as The Nonce

The oligarchs use VPNs to make their corporations function. They won’t be made illegal. Blanket banning all VPNs in America leads to an instant grinding halt of all commerce.

All armed forces members are required by oath, and therefore by law, to refuse unlawful orders.

The Shadow Wizard Money Gang

You run into a subtext problem here though.

Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits

Making this argument to shareholders means you’re telling them “I wish to shrink your profits”, no matter what else comes after that comma that’s a non-starter for an American CEO. 99% of shareholders don’t give one Kentucky fried fuck about the company, they just want free money. You get between them and their free money and you’re gone, replaced by the next failing-upward ghoul in line on LinkedIn.

The idea of having a well established, respected and non-abusive company is no longer a reality in America. The stock market is a vehicle for gambling on shareholder feelings. It’s no longer about the company at all, just about how much you can hype up the company to then pass the bag along to someone else.

Wal-Mart shareholders don’t care if Wal-Mart craters into Hell tomorrow, so long as they get paid dividends and are able to offload their shares at a profit before it dies.

Shitty reward??

Excuse me, Dawnbreaker is the coolest looking useless sword in the game. That’s not shitty, that’s home decor.

They are actively under fire from fascists, and the rest of the world is failing to step up and help. They need what they can get.

This is extremely cursed and it will definitely have strings attached that no one wants, but in a question of survival vs not, I don’t blame them one bit. This is a decision centered around “we have to survive today to solve this problem tomorrow”.

She in awe of my 'tism

Why bother? Need money to get to Heaven?

Do you want to go to a full war with Russia

Yes. Fascism must be stamped out internationally, and they’re in hilariously bad condition after sending millions of soldiers to die in Ukraine. They lose an average estimated 5,800 more soldiers per month. This has been going on for years. Now (or soon) is definitively the best time to strike back and this opportunity will not arise again.

Would you do the same for Palestine which is in an even more dire situation then Ukraine

Yes. Fascism must be stamped out internationally. This one might actually be a fight, but the only reason it would be one is because of the massive amount of funding and arming that we did for Israel.

Yep. Republicans have the rabid following that they do because they accomplish tasks. Horrible, fucked up, stupid tasks that should never have even been tabled for discussion, but they get them done. 99% of Democrat messaging my entire lifetime has been “We’re gonna do [X]! Oh, wait, no, we can’t do [X] because we don’t have a supermajority. Shucks. Well, we’ll surely get 'em next time if you just vote for me again!” and people are, understandably, getting fucking tired of that. Especially when these same Dem voters watch every single conservative election cycle jam through abject bullshit without pushback. If they can get these things done then why can’t you? Why can Trump loot my 401k and Medicaid directly into his own pockets but Obama couldn’t enact universal health care? Why do we only ever ratchet toward the right?

Democrats have been chasing the mythical “centrist swing voter” for decades while voters have increasingly polarized into left vs right and the centrists have evaporated. Anyone who remains a centrist, now, isn’t even going to go vote because politics clearly do not play any part in their lives.

We now have the additional problem of the rabid MAGA crowd being so vehemently anti-Democrat that not only would they never vote blue no matter what they were promised, they’re statistically likely to go make attempts on the lives of Democratic officials or those running for office. So anyone who wants to run as a Democrat with an actual progressive platform are putting double the number of targets on themselves.

I think the only real way forward is a third party, one that can sidestep our red vs blue team sports mentality and say look, things are pretty bad for everyone right now. You don’t have to vote for a Democrat or a Republican to make things better. You can come vote for us instead, we’ll get this train back on track and you don’t have to go tell the boys that you voted for a Democrat

…But then our problem becomes making this third party actually electable, which has historically been a huge problem in America.

Am I the only person who remembers Trump all but admitting on national television that Musk rigged the voting machines in his favor?

And then all the highly irregular ballots that appeared that are, and I quote, “consistent with vote manipulation” as per the neutral third party assigned to investigate?

And then nobody investigated it at all because we “couldn’t be taken seriously about it” because of the huge Stop The Steal right wing uproar the prior election.

Don’t trust those reported numbers, they are almost certainly fabricated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States

Personally I feel that YouTube’s data centers need to be a public resource. Nationalize them, pay out Google appropriately for their value, and then turn it into public property. YouTube can remain just the way they are and will undoubtedly retain market share because they’re recognizable and everyone already has a YT account, but other people can spin up their own video front-end services to compete, while drawing from the same leviathan-sized backend data store which would now be publically owned.

There is just too much general knowledge available through YouTube for me to say it’s a good idea to let it all rot behind a corporate firewall. I would love to force YouTube to shut down to then in turn force the availability of third party options. But if we shut it down without a plan to recover their server data then we’ve just lost a massive international educational platform. Just think of how many people you know personally who learned to fix their car or write code via YouTube University, then expand that to encompass the entire internet-connected world.

I don’t think there’s a chance in hell this would ever happen, because Google would never open its datacenter to become a public resource no matter how many infinites of dollars you paid them to do so, and the American government (where Google is based) would never legally force them to do so. But I really don’t see any other viable path forward to dethrone YouTube and de-monopolize the video sharing industry.

Someone using their position of authority to parrot “god” is exactly the kind of person that created Mormonism. The LDS church was literally born from this exact sort of thing.

You’re absolutely right, it goes completely against everything the Bible tries to teach, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a very big deal to them.