This was my thought, retirement being placed out of reach is kind of a defining characteristic of the Millenial generation. We had to start building tiny houses and subsistence gardening lol.
I did this during an international trip last year coming back into the country. The guy mostly seemed confused and kind of suspicious, but it was nbd.
They will potentially take you out of line to a side room to hand you off to someone else. It seemed to be an area where they deal with any oddball kind of things. There was a lady ahead of me who was more raucus and upset about some issue with her ID. The guy who checked mine mainly seemed kind of bemused, like it was unusual.
Be prepared for “We have the biometric data from your photo already, why do you care?”
You’re not obligated to give them a super detailed justification. Just remain polite and unconfrontational, and explain that you prefer not use the system as long as the right remains afforded to you to opt out.
(Note, this right only extends to US citizens)
It doesn’t have to do with just the US, it’s a very similar pattern wherever fascism rises. People’s dissatisfaction with their corrupt and inept government is leveraged by fascist groups. It’s what happened in Germany in the 20th century, in China, in Hungary etc.
What are you confused about exactly? Fascism always start on the fringe and it works its way into society because the “moderates” become complacent, fat, and greedy. In the US bribery is legal, and Democrats have become more concerned with protecting their corporate bribe scheme than protecting our democracy and stamping down fascism.
That’s how it works every time – corruption renders institutions unable to combat fascism, which is why when the take over actually happens it doesn’t take a ton of force to push things over, they just push the door open and walk in.
It depends on the instance, a lot of the old tankie and russian troll mods from Reddit have tried to setup shop on Lemmy, yes, but it’s difficult for them to have the same outsized influence since they can’t just back channel to the admins to get people banned, like on reddit. Their power ends where their instance ends, sometimes even just their community.
Also, there’s a mod log here which is cool, and the ability to block whole communities or instances. It’s more difficult to hide trends in censorious behaviour in any given community.
Actually, chronic, systemic incompetence is one of the main factors preceding fascism. It doesn’t have to be deliberate to be the manifestation of any given stage of conservatism.
The mechanism of why Republicans and conservative dems work together to degrade our institutions is quite simple; greed. It doesn’t take much more than that really, and they get so caught up taking turns spraying money from the corporate money hose up eachothers asses that they can’t mount any meaningful resistance when the far-right metastasizes into full blown fascism.
Clinton is super pro-corporate, what are you on about? She was unelectable and never should’ve run, she’s directly responsible for Trump.
Until then we’ve included a complimentary hammer with each Tesla.
AI has a bad name because it is being pursued incredibly recklessly and any and all criticism is being waved away by its cult-like supporters.
Fascists taking up use of AI is one of the biggest threats it presents and people are even trying to shrugg that off. It’s insanity the way people simply will not acknowledge the massive pitfalls that AI represents.
Yup, American manufacturers are still treating EVs as if they’re this exotic new toy for upper-middle class people or silicon valley douche bros, rather than getting onboard with the concept of them just being a utilitarian thing that needs to be marketed to normal people.
Give me the EV equivalent of the Geo Metro and I’ll buy it in a heart beat. I’m not taking out a second mortgage for a car that tries to drive itself and whatever dumb gimmicks they come up with, but I will 100% buy an affordable, practical EV designed with efficiency and economy in mind.
Totalitarianism is always when the other guy does it
No…totalitarianism is an actual distinct system of governance when the state controls every aspect of daily life, communication and economic activity. It’s an actual word with meaning.
It’s got an anti-war infestation that’s regularly accused of being tankies for failing to clap for the correct set of tanks.
Ok, I’m not sure if we’re talking through a translator app or something, but I didn’t get banned from lemmy.ml for being “pro-war” I got banned for mentioning a historical fact about the Great Leap Forward and acknowledging other atrocities like the genocide occurring in Xinjiang.
If someone is anti-war they would be against those types of things as well. Tankies instead deny that those events occurred/are occurring, that’s why they’re so easy to spot and how people know they’re on Lemmy – they literally can’t condemn the CCP for any of the things they purport to be against when it comes to other countries, since it’s counter-productive to their true goals to criticize the CCP.
By contrast an honestly anti-war progressive type of person would be just as clear-eyed about their own government as they are the CCP. That’s being anti-war, you can’t be selective or try to ignore degrees of difference just because it’s politically uncomfortable, that’s just being a mouth-piece for a specific flavor of authoritarianism.
Calmly explaining this to my US Postal Service and my Tennessee Valley Authority
Again, running public services is not the same as the state owning and controlling all businness and industry. If the Post Office was used to control speech, that would be totalitarian use of a public service.
I think you’re just being obtuse at this point. You might be down for totalitarianism and the abolishment of individual freedoms, most people are not. Since, you know, having no rights kind of suck ass.
I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia
Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.
Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships that approach anywhere near the all-encompassing control of the CCP. Hungary maybe I guess, which isn’t a country I’d recommend taking tech from either.
Ireland is not comparable to China though, that’s an extreme reach. We’re not talking about right-wing groups seeking power within democracies, we’re talking about uni-party state control.
I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.
Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation already. I got banned from lemmy.ml for discussing Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Pointing out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions of deaths was labeled “cia misinformation” by the mods. It’s a throughly compromised instance.
Lemmy users are not immune to tankie and Rusdian trolls, and thinking that they are is actually a weakness that gets exploited by those bad actors.
Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.
Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business and using that control as part of a coercive campaign to suppress human rights, dissent and individual freedoms.
Whatever authoritarianism is festering in other countries, China is still on an entirely different level, it’s not really a question.
European countries aren’t totalitarian states. This isn’t a question of culture, it’s an issue regarding the one and only state power that’s making decisions.
This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country. Yes, there are long histories in China and are (vanishing) diverse cultures in China but that’s irrelevant when talking about the actions of the state, which is all encompassing and overrules culture and diversity every time.
It’s the state that owns and controls these companies, it’s the state that dictates their policy and usage, and since the state is fascist and actively seeking to undermine democracy across the global, it is wise to treat the products of that state as a threat.
I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.
It’s theft of labor without any compensation, aimed at cheapening the very value of that labor.
A human artist can, and often does, train simply by looking at the real world. The art they then produce is a result of that knowledge being interpreted and stylized by their own brain and perception. The decision making on how to represent a given subject, what details to add and leave out to achieve an effect, is done by the artist themselves. It’s a product of their internal mental laboring.
By contrast, if you trained an AI on photos alone it would never, ever produce anything that looks like a drawing or a piece of art, it would never create a stylized piece of art or make a creative decision of its own.
In order to produce art the AI must be fueled with human created art, that humans labored to produce. The human artists are not being compensated for the use of that labor, and even worse the AI is leveraging that to make the human labor worth less. And what’s more, that AI’s ability will stagnate without further theft of newer, more novel art and concepts.
Without that keystone of human labor the AI simply can’t function.
Ripping off so many people at once and so chaotically that you can’t distinguish exactly how any given individual is being exploited doesn’t mean those people aren’t still being ripped off. The machine that the tech bros created could not exist without the stolen labor of the artists.
Oh, perhaps not. I may’ve just understood how you’re using the search. /s is just a straight search if the directory, I don’t know that it can be used to generate dynamic results like that. Go figure.
You can do a commandline “dir /s *.log” to search an entire directory it works better than the normal file search generally. Unless I misunderstand what you’re asking.
I don’t think it’s really that simple from many trans peoples’ perspective, as it places an obligation on them to out themselves before they even talk to a person. Many trans people’s goal with transition is not to live as “trans” it’s to live as their target gender, not some “other”. Being trans is not a sexuality.
A better solution would be to have people who don’t want to have the possibility of ever dating any trans person put that as part of their profile.
If people have an issue with doing that then it kind of reveals the truth of the issue for what it is.
Not just dicks, but dicks mixed with other art so it just completely pollutes the training data and the AI has no idea how to draw anything without it kind of looking like a dick. Dicks with human and animal faces, boats shaped like dicks, dick buildings and landscapes etc.
It would take an immense amount of bad data to actually work, but it would be funny.
Bipartisan is a really bad sign. My money says this is not going to be aimed at actually addressing the underlying profit motive that drives big tech to purposefully promote misery through their algorithm designs, instead it will be further restriction on users freedoms and privacy.