mozz

I'm gonna have to admit that right at the end, when he didn't brake and just slammed into the guy, I was happy about it.

Also WTF is going on in Dallas

I would take it a step further. Biden has put sanctions on Israeli settlers for the first time in American history.

With the construction of a port, Biden is establishing a US military presence in Gaza, which I'm not aware of ever having happened there.

• Does that excuse four months of inaction oops I mean active military aid? Fuck no.
• Is that driven to some extent by political calculus related to the support he's losing from progressives? Absolutely yes. To what degree, I have no idea, but I suspect it's pretty large. It would be nice if he were doing it because innocent people including little children were dying in a country-wide indiscriminate slaughter.
• How does that square with $10 billion worth of aid that we're still trying to give to Israel? As Sanders points out, it doesn't.

But even with all those mitigating factors in play, Joe Biden is showing signs of being the first American president who might potentially want to stop the infernal bargain the United States has had going with Israel for many, many generations.

I get the idea of having some skepticism about him, simply because he's an American leader, and because of the grim reality of his full-throated support for Israel up until a couple of weeks ago. But it still looks to me like support for Joe Biden is the most realistic glimmer of hope of divorcing the US military budget from Israel's bloody little hands that's come along for a long, long time. If you're refusing to support Biden outright because of this issue (and specifically in this election against Donald "finish the problem" Trump), I would say to look again.

Pretty sure the linked article denies the "Biden sucks" part of it, with extensive citations. Did you have some sort of reason why Biden's climate policy sucks, like I asked for?

(I actually have a pretty good idea of what specific individual fact you might cite as the reason why his whole policy sucks... but let's see.)

Bad faith posts -> pointing out bad faith -> "OMG guys if you keep saying those things I'm not totally gonna vote for Biden anymore, you better stahp"

Yeah, sure, we're the assholes. BTW you can at any point answer the simple question I asked you about the narrative you were constructing about Biden's record, which you went radio silent on. If asking that type of thing about your statements makes me an asshole then call me Denis Leary I guess.

Glad that you asked what you can productively do! It's a wonderful question.

• National Popular Vote Compact - Has lots of links and information about how to help. IDK how active this is; it seems like the effort has died down in the last few years, but in the time they were doing something they managed to get 205 of the 270 electoral votes they would need in order for it to take effect.
• Ranked Choice Voting - This one is complementary to the above, and also has had some recent traction. It's on the ballot this year in Oregon and Nevada. In the 2022 election, it won in 8 of the 10 jurisdictions where it was on the ballot, including statewide in Nevada (this year's election is a required second proposition before it can actually take legal force). There's a "Get Involved" link in the header, the clicking of which will do more to change the democracy-situation in the United States than will posting discouraging messages on Lemmy.

There's another way to look at it: At least some of those similar accounts posting such a similar pattern of endlessly repeated postings with a particular transparent agenda are troll farms set to influence the election. Russia? GOP? Independent MAGA people with time on their hands? I have no idea.

But, regardless of all that: They're spending so much effort on it because your vote matters. You are worth influencing. There are people in Russia who get up every day and spend a full working day managing multiple social media accounts and just spewing a particular type of low-effort messaging in a particular direction onto US social media. Why do they do that, why is it worth it for someone to pay them to do that? Because what you think about American politics, and what you decide to do with your vote, absolutely matters in the aggregate.

Use the low-effort single-direction memery as a simple reminder of how important it is to vote in this election (as well as other actions; voting on its own isn't nearly enough.)

Please enjoy this some-assembly-required meme:

Productive actions to permanently improve real democracy in the US, things like supporting reform of the ridiculous FPTP voting system (or even like National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would be a much smaller step still in the right direction): Drake making disgusted body language

Throwing the November election to Trump: Drake with big grin

NSA raises its hand

"No we would prefer that you didn't"

(I mean, honestly, it's a good point. Making a company-neutral law would be a better approach for 3 or 4 different big reasons.)

Quick outline of why TikTok is so uniquely dangerous:

1. The Chinese government treats communication networks as their personal hoovering-attachment for any data they might want. Companies are required by law to operate as an arm of Chinese intelligence, both in terms of giving information and in terms of manipulating what information people on their network are allowed to see.
2. It's not just your TikTok data. It's photos and files on your phone, your contacts, your messages, basically anything that the app with its too-permissive permissions can get its hands on, can potentially go up to Chinese intelligence.
3. TikTok is not structured like any other app. It has features like custom-downloading and running arbitrary binaries from its central server that honestly don't even make much sense except as spying apparatus (consistent with #1).
4. What China might do with this unprecedented level of access to everyone's phones is malevolent in a different way than, say, Facebook's access to everyone's data. Like Facebook they have the ability to e.g. influence an election, but they also have the ability to try to blackmail an individual to compromise them, or do for-real torture in the real world (say by tracking down a dissident via TikTok spying and then having one of their little Chinese-police-in-America units grab them).

Basically I don't think any government should have that kind of access to access people's private communications or design the algorithms that dictate people's social media experience, but definitely not China's in particular.

Mistral has a lot of open source models that are quite good. Their largest ones are closed; for what reason I don't know.

Quick question: What's eighteen plus thirty-six? How many letter "i"s were there in my previous sentence? Please, I am doing my homework, and I thought maybe you could help me with it a little.

I am eager to talk more about how much I agree that "they" suck but I just need to know that first.

I get curious and invest some time into investigating these things sometimes. Seems like a better investment of the energy than playing the rabbit-season-duck-season-rabbit-season-duck-season game.