Yeah I just hold shift and ctrl and start mashing function keys until I figure it out LOL.

You’re not offering any alternatives.

Yeah so Israel is a democracy. You’re saying a democratic country is a Nazi country.

I think a common thing among Nazis is to try to de-legitimize democracies. Trump does it, Putin does it, and you’re doing it while claiming they’re the Nazis. What does that make you?

Also Hamas came into power by winning a plurality of the votes and refused to hold elections after that. Their goal is to at best ethnically cleanse and at worst commit genocide to remove people of a certain ethnicity from a region. They use extreme violence and a narrative about past injustices to maintain power. They keep people in a perpetual state of angry fervor to control them. That all doesn’t seem just a little fashy to you?

How do you know when you’re not the one being a Nazi accusing your enemies of being a Nazi? Is it just that you’re always not the Nazi and everyone that disagrees with you is a Nazi? How are you different from Trump, Musk, Putin, etc?

What you see and don’t see on social media is already decided by nation states. It’s just countries like Russia, China, and Iran do it covertly.

They can push the things they want to the top of the algorithms with a relatively small (for a nation state) amount of resources. Sure they usually don’t outright ban content (but that can happen too by spamming abuse reports) but they can effectively shadow ban people by simply promoting everything except for the things they don’t like and use bot spam to do the social media equivalent of signal jamming.

And of course (as we’ve seen with Musk) the leadership of social media companies can be influenced (by a combo of same the misinformation they use on everyone else + money) and made into assets for nation states. This allows them to have some influence over who gets officially blocked on social media.

Yes it’s not ideal to have nation states influencing speech, the current is to have foreign adversary nation states influencing speech. The choice is between having democracies having a de jure influence on social media or have authoritarian countries have a de facto influence on social media.

We now need a “verify you are a captcha” mechanism to counter this.

Yeah, right? Captchas have trained users to do whatever weird thing a webpage tells them to do, so now people will do this without thinking about it.

Yeah it is. Most computers come with windows pre-installed so most people never do this kind of thing.

And there’s also things people need to be careful of. Like wiping all out all of their cherished photos by formatting the entire drive. Considering that casual users probably shouldn’t attempt to do this. Not trying to gatekeep or anything, but there is potential for data loss for a user that doesn’t back up their data properly, which is common for casual users.

Apparently it nags you if you don’t have a 365 account. So it’s just more enshittification.

Well the cops might be taking pics of a dead body the next day. So then they could say “yeah we probably should’ve responded to that one last night, but we just couldn’t risk that it might’ve been one of the 0.01% of these calls where it turns out it’s an internet swatting thing.”

Buy 'em out, boys!

Dude’s gotta feed the monkey. You could donate some money to him on patreon then he wouldn’t need to have an amazon affiliate link.

What do estimate the percentage of these calls are some internet loser swatting someone rather than it being a legitimate report of domestic violence? You may be underestimating the number of actual domestic violence situations where the police need to intervene be a few orders of magnitude.

Someone calls an emergency number and says “My husband has a knife and he’s threatening to kill me!”

Should the operator say “nothing we can do until you provide provide me with some evidence, ma’am” ?

Pollsters are compensating for that undercount of unlikely voters. 2016 they were low, 2020 still low but pretty close. They will have scaled it up to be more accurate this go around.

Except there’s a few snags there. In between the 2020 election and now, there was an insurrection, Roe v. Wade was overturned, Trump was convicted of crimes and indicted for many more. These are things that a statistical process can’t really account for when putting weight on how likely a respondant is to actually vote.

Trump lost in 2020. Do all of these events incentivize more people will turn out for him this time than in the last election? Or will less people turn out for him?

Every time something unprecedented happens it negatively impacts the ability for a scientific statistical process to predict the outcome. Science can’t predict things there’s no model for, and how do you can’t have a model for something you haven’t seen before. And a hell of a lot of unprecedented shit has happened. Maybe next time a convicted felon that tried to overthrow democracy runs in an election there can be accurate polling, but it’s not going to be the case in this election.

There really is no way to know what will happen on election day. So there’s else to do other than maximum effort until election day.

It’s forecasting, not a prediction. If the weather forecast said there was a 28% chance of rain tomorrow and then tomorrow it rained would you say the forecast was wrong? You could say that if you want, but the point isn’t to give a definitive prediction of the outcome (because that’s not possible) it’s to give you an idea of what to expect.

If there’s a 28% chance of rain, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to rain, it actually means you might want to consider taking an umbrella with you because there’s a significant probability it will rain. If a batter with a .280 batting average comes to the plate with 2 outs at the bottom of the ninth, that doesn’t mean the game is over. If a politician has a 28% probability of winning an election, it’s not a statement that the politician will definitely lose the election.

You don’t have one in your Democracy Scrapbook?

In real life, Qaddafi got rid of landlords in Libya. It resulted in a lot of housing problems.

Some people don’t have wealthy parents that can buy them a place to live outright. There is a need to have housing available that doesn’t require someone to have wealthy parents or get out a large loan. The ability to rent a place is important.

The real problem is the high cost to own a place to live which results in people having to rent when they’d rather own a home.

Nope. A stock is a share of a company. A company has assets and revenue. Stocks either provide dividends (which is a share of the profits) or will invest their profits into growing the company which increases it’s value, which in turn increases the value of the share.

Certainly stocks can be over valued, and I’d say many of them are right now. But that aside there is a value in a share of company that isn’t based solely on someone else valuing it hoping someone else will value it more.

But it really doesn’t work as a currency.

Real currencies represent debt, not value. You work a week and you’re owed something for that work. You get currency that represents what you’re owed. You’re not meant to hold on to currency, it represents an incomplete transaction. When you spend the money you get the value of what you’re owed.

Crypto currency depends on it having value. People holding onto it in the hopes of it increasing value. If people stop holding onto crypo-currency the value would crash and it would be useless.

It’s not really feasible to take out a loan denominated in crypto currency. Sure it might be technically possible to make this happen but you’d be a fool to borrow crypto currency as if it increased in value (which it has to do to avoid crashing) you’d end up owing more value than you originally borrowed even before any kind of interest might be charged. There’s a reason why central banks want slow by steady inflation: people can be confident that if they take out a loan they won’t wind up owing more in value terms than they originally borrowed.

Crypto “currencies” simply aren’t currencies because the nature of it being required that they have an increasing value to avoid crashing means they can’t perform the basic functions of finance.

People buy crypto currency in the hopes that it will increase in value. Inevitably everyone who might possibly be interested in buying into crypto currency will have already bought into it. There’s a finite number of people in the world. When that happens it will no longer be increasing in value and then what do the people that bought into it as an investment do? They sell. And the value crashes. This means is fails at the other requirement of a currency, a stable value.

It’s a pyramid scheme and everyone knows it. The crypto guys are just trying to get in the last few pumps before they dump it entirely.

Hey now… money laundering is a useful service to people in certain professions.