UPS is being UPS here.
They’re abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn’t pay.
The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the ‘debt’, or the new packages that keep showing up.
Very much so.
If this coin’s math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor … it’ll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that’s explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.
I think maybe some of that is on me; I’ve been using “in power” somewhat colloquially and to me there’s a gap between ‘gaining power’ in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.
It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine.
Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they’ve held power long enough I don’t really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.
The neo-fascists’ I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn’t support their “real” goals directly.
Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.
Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.
Reading history … that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it’s ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism’s gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the ‘common’ population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.
The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it’s very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers’ seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.
So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.
So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there’s a crisis in the ‘main’ one.
I think it’s worth addressing that “the right people” are very often going out of their way to be absolutely unreachable by the average joe and are completely impossible for mere poors to meaningfully bother directly. Protest will always inconvenience average people first, because the little people are always affected more than the rich in any action, especially any that would manage to rattle the powerful in any way.
The powerful have managed to structure society and laws alike to make effectively all actions that would target them directly and spare the average joe from any collateral overspill either impractical - or significantly more illegal than protest actions that cast a broader net. The idea from the powerful is to ensure that protest must affect other citizens in order to reach them, and can’t just target them directly. Targeting them, alone, is harassment, or trespass on private property, or … etc.
They can already access the data, it’s all federated and it’s all publically available effectively by definition, they don’t need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don’t think that’s really why they chose to federate.
But…
What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.
Facebook & Instagram’s primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don’t tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren’t joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.
If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren’t necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there’s already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there’s already content to consume and people to interact with.
I don’t think so; it won’t hurt ‘us’ anymore than we were hurt yesterday, when Threads hadn’t launched yet.
Exactly this. Like, I have favourites - but I’d wind up hating them if that was the only thing I could ever engage with from then forward.
I’ve found especially with games, there comes a point where if you get deep enough with a game for long enough - there are issues apparent at those levels of detail that are inevitable, and are going to drive you nuts.
No game is going to survive full-time play for a year, or ten years, and you come out the far side still loving it completely.
Aw lawd hold me back; I’ve been battling that temptation for months now while it was at normal retail pricing - a discount is added temptation I absolutely did not need.
Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it’s bulletproof.
Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.
Sure does seem from recent statements like he’s seeing writing on the wall regarding the war in Ukraine and is trying to ensure he’s got his ass covered in the event Putin isn’t around to protect him.
Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.
How is that supposed to work, though?
Like, say I’m wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don’t say shit. Big Gargamel doesn’t say shit. How would the “undeclared funding” bar know?
But also a vastly different array of hobbies, and that for some included gaming. This meant care homes having to upgrade internet/wifi, and many other adaptions.
I remember my grandpa being furious that the seniors-only complex they moved into had shit internet, maybe a decade ago. The whole complex was running off a single residential line - like they bought a good package, but still - and that was fine for residents checking email and stuff, but it meant he was stuck taking a day or two to download each Flight Sim update.
I don’t think there “must” be an age cutoff where people are supposed to stop playing - instead, there’s an age cutoff for where people didn’t grow up with or have access to computers or gaming.
I was born right on the cusp of video games moving from niche nerd shit and becoming relatively mainstream. I can see that there’s a clear gap between friends who game and friends who don’t that nearly directly ties to whether or not they played games as a kid. A lot of the time for my generation, that’s a socioeconomic division more than anything else. Computers were expensive as a kid, so most of my friends who grew up poor found other interests in childhood and grew up to be adults who don’t really play games. The kids I grew up around whose families were more well-off have continued gaming as adults. Maybe less, maybe different games; but in many ways it’s like asking what age someone is supposed to outgrow “having hobbies”.
The older someone is today the less likely it is they had access to games and gaming, and often the more intimidating they find learning about computers and gaming - and the more time they’ve had to find some other hobby that they find compelling.
There definitely is a thing in the dating market where some people can be particularly judgmental about gaming. Personally, I’ve found that is loudest and largest for some of the more … “serial” daters I know, who have found themselves in relationships with lots of different people and have found that gaming, or identifying as a “gamer” tends to correlate with other bigger issues. There’s also the side concern when something that’s big in your life isn’t something they can relate to - a little like the ultra-fan Sports Dudes where all of every game day will always be booked off for watching the games with the boys.
I think in regards to the dating market, it’s less that anyone needs to “grow out of” gaming, and more that adults are more expected to have a mature relationship with their hobbies, gaming included. And given that there are negative connotations about degenerate adult gamers not really grown up, that may be something to keep in mind regarding how you present that hobby and how you talk about your relationship with it.
That or lost connection/battery.
The only wireless controller I ever owned would continue any repeating input active when connection dropped, if batteries or wifi died; they could just be cruising at max speed off in whatever direction they were facing, until the motor batteries run dry.
You’d like to think they’d carry backup interface, or even just use a wired controller, but this whole op sounds pretty McGuyver top to bottom.
I think that the Pao plot arc always planned on bringing Spez back.
Reddit - especially then - had a sort of reverence for the OG founders and discussion would often model them as the “real” redditors and people who really understood the community, changes since they sold were blamed on corporate interests and people were forever complaining that “shit like this wouldn’t happen if …” various founders or original staff were still around. I think it was always misplaced, but it was the culture at the time.
So Pao was brought in as a scapegoat - she was going to make wildly unpopular changes, take the heat, take a dive, and be replaced. She’d get a fat bag, an absolutely glowing reference on her CV, and a huge jump in her career - then Reddit would bring in the popular original founder that redditors liked and respected, and everyone would feel optimistic again. The changes would remain, the community would feel like they’d got their pound of flesh, that they had been appeased, and the site could get back on track.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s been a hack all along, he’s been willing to sell his values to the highest bidder pretty much all along.
And now Spez is playing the same role. He’s taking the face position and eating the heat over a bunch of shitty corporate boardroom decisions - that he definitely was party to - in order to inflate the IPO valuation and his cut of the cash. They’re going to try and make it look profitable enough and healthy enough that someone else takes the hot potato and then make for the goddamn hills once they’re not bagholding anymore.
In spez’s interview with the Verge, he hyperfocused on the fact that locked communities whose “we’re locking” posts were comment-disabled would have had a lot of dissent in the comments if the mods had been brave enough to leave them enabled. Completely ignoring, of course, the fact that the upvote ratios told a story of massively overwhelming support.
I think what was even more infuriating was his insistence on validating even the smallest dissent against sub locking as justifying overruling the mods and community, while the entire mess was caused by his refusal to engage in good faith with dissent against his company’s decision.
Dissent against mods he also disagrees with is sacred and needs protecting. Dissent against himself and Reddit Inc is meaningless noise that he both doesn’t care about and is actively working to silence and prohibit.
I normally hate turning to Youtube when there’s a text resource available, but I’ve definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.