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.

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?

What about that pyramid with an eyeball on there? US money is weird as fuck and everyone is just all “yup these are completely normal things to have on our currency.”

It must be quieter than the sound of a leaf hitting the ground!

The point of trademarks is to avoid market confusion.

MTV didn’t instantly eliminate all of it’s programming and created new programming overnight. They had reality TV shows playing alongside music videos in the 90s. There are some people that might like a reality show that was on MTV when they were playing music videos, then suddenly the name of the company changes because they don’t play music and those people can’t find the show they like? Even though it’s still on, still being made by the same company, but under a different name because curmudgeons don’t think it’s appropriate that a company with the letter M in it’s name isn’t focused on music?

Trademarks are about people being able to know which company they’re buying from. The name of the company is relatively arbitrary. You could start a company making computers and give it an arbitrary name like I don’t know “Apple”. then people will associate the quality of the computers with that arbitrary name “Apple”. Well you could if someone didn’t do exactly that already. It’s not so much the name it’s the consistency that matters most.

And many names we just kind of forget their origins because they’re irrelevant to what the company now does. Does Motorolla have to change it’s name because they no longer make record players for cars? Does DC have to rebrand because very few of their comics are about detectives? KFC can’t call themselves that because a vast majority of their restaurants aren’t in Kentucky?

I’d actually go the other way if anything. Make it illegal for a company to change it’s name. Facebook promotes eating disorders to teenagers? Sorry you aren’t changing your name to Meta, you can’t do bad shit and erase that negative brand association by re-branding. You want your brand to be considered good? Then do better.

I like this. It’s stupid that LA has the Lakers… because LA is known for it’s lakes? They also have the Dodgers… yeah because people are always dodging streetcars in LA?

The MTV thing though… I think they’ve already made it so the M doesn’t stand for anything now. They removed the “Music Television” part off of their logo anyway.

I would go with: Remove expiration dates entirely. Because it’s not an expiration date, it’s a “best before” date. Which when you think about it, it’s true that food is “best before” literally any future date you put on the label.

Most of the factors that will cause food to spoil are things not under the control of the companies that package the food. How cold do you keep your fridge at? How long did it take for you to transport the food from the store to your fridge? What was the temperature that day? How long did you have it before you break the seal and start using it? How long was the food outside of your fridge? etc. etc.

Those things are just invented by a marketing department to encourage people to throw out food so they have to buy more. There are no regulations on it, they just put whatever date they think will maximize their profits.

You buy fresh fruit and vegetables (the things that will spoil faster than anything else you buy) there is no expiration date. How do you manage? Look at it, and maybe give it a smell test. The same applies for all food really.

“Best before” dates are a scam that results in food being thrown out prematurely. Grocery prices are too high, we shouldn’t allow these kinds of shenanigans to drive prices higher.

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.

“both sides both side both sides”

How about we demand that Hamas leave their underground lairs and battle the IDF a safe distance away from the civilian population?

I’m sure the IDF would agree to those terms, but do you honestly believe Hamas would?