I agree, though I am super disdainful of any argument that is sort of reskinning “other people are really stupid”.

I don’t consider ignorance and susceptible to sophisticated influence campaigns to mean “really stupid”.

Perhaps I’m just using nicer language to say the same thing (or otherwise, ultimately, hold myself to be superior). That’s fair I suppose - but I’m aware of the circumstances and privilege that helped me achieve my perspective. I’m of the belief that, if given similar benefits, most would be just as “superior”.

Now that I’ve demonstrated I’m superior, and humble, I still feel like this could have been avoided if people in the district voted instead of just ignoring the campaign or assuming, like I did, that people in the district would do better.

To anyone reading this, if you are a resident in the district and didn’t vote for Bowman… do better next time for everyone’s sake.

This also assumes voters are informed and engaged, and that political campaigns are honest.

As I understand it, mailers trashing Bowman were like 80% of the mail you received in that district and their ads showed up constantly on Tv. It is possible to manufacture a perceived reality when you have enough money.

Admittedly, I was foolishly hopeful that residents of his district would recognize a racist, conservative piece of shit and vote for Bowman even if they didn’t agree with his stance on Gaza so shame on me.

You can abuse your position as a holdout and potentially fuck everything up in either chamber. Bills require passage in both chambers… but I’m sure you knew that.

I just hope there are enough gains in the house to make his ass irrelevant.

I am just destroyed by this. I genuinely had a little faith in humanity that people wouldn’t fall for this bullshit but I guess I sorely was mistaken.

Laitmer is a conservative, racist piece of shit who is going to take over Manchin’s job of fucking things up for progressives. Fucking hell this sucks.

To top it off, Israel just successfully dropped a political nuke on a critic and will likely have everyone running scared in the future.

I agree they’ve been trying to mitigate this but as I understand it things are quite precarious regardless. It’s not always possible to mitigate a disaster you see coming even if you try your best to prepare for it.

There has been more talk of it since then - that article just was the only concrete & most reputable source I could think of at the time and I didn’t want to turn a post into a research project.

Anyway, while there is more awareness of the issue it is, more or less, the same shady greed-driven risky behavior and nonsense that happened with home mortgages except its commercial mortgages and they’ve seen it coming.

It actually kind of is The Bigger Short

Some folks have been calling this for a while. The Bigger Short

I’m not a huge Cash fan but dude had some rough times with addiction. Alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates…

It likely cost him his first marriage and he struggled with it his entire life. The movie “Walk the Line”, about Cash, features his substance abuse quite prominently.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Cash#Personal_life

Throughout their marriage, June attempted to keep Cash off amphetamines, often taking his drugs and flushing them down the toilet. June remained with him even throughout his multiple admissions for rehabilitation treatment and decades of drug addiction.

Dude also died less than a year after filming the music video, shortly after his (second) wife, June.

Reznor and Cash both struggled with addiction and guilt for the damage their addiction caused to those they cared about.

Not only is it ridiculous and likely unnecessary, but also consider they’ll need to budget maintenance costs for this.

Totally random, but reading your comment reminded me that there is an Israeli competition climber named Nimrod.

It’s not “tries to assassinate” it’s “tries to have assassinated”. Something tells me Trump couldn’t assassinate a stuff deer.

Seriously though, I used to think they were doing good work. Now I am more or less assuming that, in states where they actually need to do this sort of thing, the courts will just shrug and say “Ehhh…nah. Christian chaplains 👍, others 👎. K, bye.”

https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx

Honestly, if it was transparent enough, I’d be fine with a service you could turn on that would listen to the first x seconds/minutes of a phone call to try and detect an AI generated voice. I have family that would 100% wire thousands of dollars if someone with their kid’s voice asked them to.

As someone who is trying to teach themselves a few new things this year by diving to projects using them… I seriously, seriously feel you. It honestly makes me question whether I should just abandon each project I start, both professional and personal.

All the relevant hits are from years and/or 2+ versions of whatever ago or forum posts with dead links to an alleged solution.

I feel like in the past I could just dive into something and search my way through it. Now I feel like that era is over and I question whether it’s me, my niche project idea, the disappearing community, or just the search engines.

Sadly, old Google doesn’t work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.

The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren’t to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They’ll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.

That’s why Google’s new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the “visit other websites” step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.

Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed… you monster.

Honestly, this is what I consider to be the clear danger of generative “AI”. We’ve basically gone several steps backward toward a world where we can’t prove something happened because recording technology doesn’t exist because it can be faked well enough and easily enough to cast doubt on any recording.

Sure, experts can analyze it and deem it legit or not legit but for the average person its becoming harder and harder to tell. Word spreads fast, and it’s been demonstrated that lies spread faster than their corrections by orders of magnitude. All it takes is for something to “go viral” or someone with authority to lazily confirm or deny that something is real/fake and the public at large loses touch with reality.

This plus the insane misinformation campaigns and those that cry “fake news” whenever the news contains information they don’t like… I feel like truth and reality are becoming unfashionable.

AAA devs publishers are spending too much money making games people don’t like and then making devs design them to get every penny out of customers that they can, then fire the devs if the project doesn’t turn into a fire hose of infinite money. If it does, the sequel better earn infinite^2 money because unlimited growth is the only acceptable success.

USA here. They’d likely consider this to be extremely patronizing, but I consider most conservative voters to be unaware of what it is they are actually preaching. It’s crazy but the more extreme their views get, the more I’m convinced they’re misinformed and misled. Some folks at the top of their pyramid I legitimately hate - I have no doubt they know exactly what they are doing.

So many of conservative beliefs just fly in the face of reality. I hate that they’re perpetuating the harm that the beliefs and resulting policies cause, but seeing as how they are mostly based on clear and obvious lies, I have to assume that most of the supporters just don’t realize they are being lied to and have invested emotionally in an identity that actively harms their own interests.

This isn’t just math. The language can be interpreted multiple ways.

I’d also argue that affiliated doesn’t mean student.

The Palestinians are already on the verge of famine.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/05/middleeast/gaza-famine-world-food-programme-intl-hnk/index.html

Northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine” which is rapidly spreading across the strip…the World Food Programme warned

Gaza is not that big. The situation is already horrific and it’s about to get so much worse.