FriendOfDeSoto

I think fucking up society is just an often unregulated byproduct of trying to amass more power and wealth.

Trump’s tremendous social media platform truth dot barf runs on Activity Pub, they just don’t federate with anyone by default. It’s like they don’t want dissenting views on there. Weird.

I was a child and had enough time to devote to learning this.

For me it’s my middle finger hitting the cushion below the thumb that makes the noise.

Then you haven’t been to China. It’s a shorthand gesture there. The character for ten is 十 so I’m not sure if the gesture informed the character or the other way around. What is noteworthy is just that both cultures ended up with a cross to denote ten.

You’re right, you used to be able to do that but it’s been a while since it stopped.

https://www.lifewire.com/view-instagram-without-account-5271416

Just as an aside and in addition to the other comments here:

There is a phenomenon called regulatory capture. It can take many different forms but the short version is that agencies and policies get perverted to only benefit one group. When the intention should be society at large.

There is a process where the big players, say OpenAI, call for regulation of their industry, not because they feel it needs regulating but because the regulatory hurdles will keep competitors at bay. Meta pulled a stunt like that as well with social networks. So big hype company calling for regulation in their field is a red flag, accompanied by a loud alarm bell.

You’re trying to apply conventional logic to this. Stop. They only want more power and money and they would say anything to get it.

I think for answering that question we would need a baseline to compare with.

Lacking that, with kindness and empathy in conversations. And with resoluteness in the face of injustice.

If you want to know where it is going in the short-term, have a look at Orban’s Hungary. Rightwing populist voted in and then got to work at dismantling the state. Control judges appointments, curb the power of the judicial branch, silence critical media, pick a group to scapegoat, buddy of Putin. The list goes on. Democracy only works if people defend it and from my outside POV there aren’t enough people doing that just yet. It’s worse in Trump 2.0 because this time he came prepared.

There are already horror stories about people being caught up wrongly in the deportation efforts. That’s using very mild language for very traumatic events here. It’s come to a point where erstwhile allies of the US are advising their citizens not to travel to the US. Because they have lost faith in the rule of law there. Take a minute to let that sink in.

If you’re a US citizen, resist. The free state is under threat. If you’re an immigrant, be careful.

Not being asked a version of this question every other day or so.

You’re trying to apply conventional logic to the orange one. That doesn’t work. Stop doing that. It’s all about his frail ego, flooding the zone with bs, denying everything and never giving in, and blaming everybody else for stuff he’s done.

And just to give the poor, battered, beleaguered, ever-so-stable leader a break, there are sea lanes and flight routes available to the cartels as well. They didn’t have to go through the US (but probably did).

The most famous fountain for coin tossing/wish making is Trevi in Rome (and I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole concept came from there). You are legally forbidden from taking money back out of it there. The moment the coin sinks into the water, it belongs to the municipality, so taking it back out constitutes theft. The municipality is allowed (and indeed forced) to clear the coins from the fountain (otherwise there would be no water left after a while) and AFAIK they donate the cash for a good cause.

Just for some German context: the Nazi salute is not covered by any freedom of expression or opinion in a political context. What Elon did on stage would have landed him in a German court. Similar restrictions apply to displaying certain symbols, e.g. the swastika. German cops are legally required to intervene when they see them in public.

I don’t know the video in question, I don’t know if the cops overreacted - a reaction was required though.

I don’t think you can codify it more than “they do it by gut.” I think it’s pretty rare that a song goes unaltered from the spark in somebody’s head to mastered recording without many changes. It’s a collaborative effort that involves the producers and friends as well.

I think the more somebody is knowledgeable in musical theory, can read and write notes, and maybe even has perfect pitch, the more fully formed an idea will be when it gets to the early stages of recording. But musicians are not all Mozarts.

I dabbled in making electronic music for a while as a hobby. There was only me, I don’t remember anything from musical theory class in school, can barely read notation - in short: I’m not even mediocre. But even I felt occasionally that I needed to speed a track up or down. It’s a gut feeling.

I know from a drummer friend of mine that performing live is hard. You’re either very good at keeping time, like, you have an unshakable metronome in your head, or the tempo naturally speeds up. That’s why during production a lot of musicians get the metronome via a click track in their ears to make sure they don’t deviate too far from what BPM they wanted to hit. During live concerts I think a lot of drummers, as the metronomes of the band, get a click track in their ears as well. And there may be concerts where a song is sped up compared to the recording on purpose, but is still played with a click track because it sounds better live when it’s faster, maybe because it’s missing a lot of stuff from the production that filled gaps at the lower speed. So you can say everything has a tendency to speed up live but sometimes tracks that are performed faster are an artistic choice.

I don’t think they know for sure where it will end up but no matter what it will be, it will be brilliant, it will be the greatest, and it will have been the plan all along.

Rich people like to keep their money. So the only objective right now is to dismantle the oversight within government. It’s not government efficiency they’re after but removal of impediments to big business interests. That’s the Melon side of the plan. It’s his ROI. It’s also is MO. Tabula Rasa everything and then build anew. It didn’t work for Twitter. I don’t think it will work for a federal government. We’ve already seen lots of unintended side effects. Oops, we fired the guys who look after the nukes. Lives will be lost here and there but, cynically, not enough to mobilize the masses.

It is of course worrying that Trump said as much as wanting to enlarge the US again. I’m not sure yet if that’s just a dead cat he’s thrown on table to distract us from Melon or if that’s really the plan. It worried the US NATO ally Denmark enough to massively increase their defense budget over Greenland. Trump likes to be contrarian. He feeds off the stir he causes. He never built the wall, Mexico never paid for it. But he reveled in the reactions. Greenland could be a similar thing but I’m not sure yet.

It’s worrying me the amount of sh!t the lgbtq+ community is getting, especially the T. There is danger there. I don’t think Trump cares an awful lot about this issue, he just likes it as a way to unite the sleepy, the anti-woke behind him. But there are people behind him and with power now that do care, that do want to please their leader. And that creates a maelstrom of zealous a-holes trying to one-up each other with cruelty to score browny points with the boss. When I think this through, I fear citizen liberty is most under threat here.

I don’t believe a world war with nukes is what they’re after. You cannot really prosper as a corporation if the planet is barely habitable due to the radiation and the nuclear winter. It would be bad for Wall Street. But they wouldn’t mind a few conflicts comparable to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. While nukes have been threatened, they haven’t been used. So it’s a conventional war and that’s good for arms manufacturers.

In simple terms, Trump’s cozying up to Vlad actually decreases the threat of a world war III, at least in the short term. It reduces the number of trouble hotspots. There were big ones between the US and Russia (until January 25) and between the US and China. Trump parroting Kremlin talking points and showing the rest of NATO the middle finger reduces hotspots with Russia. Russia is on relatively friendly terms with China and could probably meditate issues between China and the US. At least in the short term, that’s not a bad thing. But it isn’t stable. It remains to be seen if Europe plus Canada plus X can fill the vacuum and that would reignite hotspots with Russia again.

I do agree that climate change poses a threat. I don’t think the billionaires worry so much about it beyond buying New Zealand and blanketing it with villas with bunkers. But it is a threat to maintaining order when the people get hit with more severe tornados, droughts, etc. Best way to maintain order is an authoritarian government.