• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • The dems have no coherent message and strategy because they are an attempt to unify basically everything that isn’t the far right under one banner. That means that different politicians under it, and different voters that vote for them, want fundamentally different things. Taking a firm, party-wide stance that satisfies the left wing of the party would risk driving off the segment that is just “conservatives that dont feel comfortable with how openly bigoted the republicans are”, and vice versa. But trying to please everyone by committing to nothing and running on good vibes eventually results in people getting frustrated with voting for a party that doesn’t advance what they want.


  • What if that is true though? What if it’s even virtually guaranteed to be true, given the effort and time required to reasonably prove something like that combined with the limited resources given (and which we can afford to give) to the justice system to do so, and the sheer number of crimes to deal with?

    Honestly, the more I hear about the number of cases of people being convicted falsely, or where it’s hard to tell if they truly were guilty, due to evidence being poor, or misconstrued, or based on faulty foresic science or known unreliable sources like eyewitness testimony, the more I worry that if called to serve on a jury I’d be effectively unable to do so, because I have come to doubt if the justice system is even capable of proving something beyond what I would consider to be a reasonable doubt.





  • Something that occurred to me this morning is that its a bit worse than just them sucking up to Trump with that to get unbanned; to my understanding, he’s just stated he wont enforce the ban law, so if he was to change his mind, he wouldnt need congress to pass another I dont think? He’d just need to start enforcing the existing one. That means that TikTok has a strong incentive to continue sucking up to him throughout his whole term, to stay on his good side. But it goes further, because it also creates an incentive for other corporate social medias that compete with TikTok to do the same (though admittedly, their owners seem to want to anyway), in the hopes that they can convince him to enforce the ban again and remove some of their competition.





  • To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.



  • It’s mainly just that, since information can be copied without removing access to the original from the current possessor of that information, I don’t see a good justification to restrict use of it. If you steal something, the original owner loses while you benefit. Since the unexpected loss is probably felt worse, this is a net negative and therefore a bad thing. But, if you copy information (which IP by nature is), you can give it to an arbitrarily large number of people without even taking it from the original, enough benefit to in my opinion outweigh the frustration that loss of control causes. Capitalism adds another element given it also ties monopoly over a given bit of information to artist compensation, but even without capitalism, I don’t think information should be seen as property


  • The way I tend to feel about this is that it’s a jerk move if you’re mocking some other group, or reasonably could be seen as mocking them, or try to claim that you/your group invented the thing you’re using, but otherwise, borrowing stuff people like from other cultures is just one of the ways cultures evolve.

    I can see some people objecting on the grounds that imitating something distinctive makes that thing less unique to the original group, or that an imitation by outsiders won’t include some aspect important to the original and then that people that see the imitation won’t get that aspect.

    I can certainly understand why those feelings could lead to frustration, but applied strictly, the idea that certain things belong exclusively to the cultures that invented them both requires forcing people into precise boxes as to which culture they belong to, and sort of resembles a type of socially enforced intellectual property, which, being against IP as a concept, is something I feel like I’d be hypocritical agreeing with.