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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Seems overly cautious, or lemmy.world is trying to find excuses to cut off content they don’t like. Legal trouble for allowing access to those communities, which aren’t even based on lemmy.world, would be so much of an overstep, they’d probably be able to get free legal counsel from the EFF or a similar organization.

    Anyways, this will be my last post on this server. Even though I don’t use any of those communities, I don’t want to have to constantly monitor what has been banned to see what I may miss out on.

    Apparently, lemmy.world also removed c/shrooms, which I didn’t even know about. And again, risk of legal trouble for that would be extremely low.


  • Pesticides are becoming less effective; pests are becoming resistant to them resulting in reduced yields across the world. Many conventional farms are now starting to use integrated pest management which involves biological pest control (which involves using and creating habitats for beneficial organisms to control pests).

    IDK, maybe civilization can figure out a way to survive during massive ecological collapses, but it would be hard, and we don’t have to.



  • Not many U.S. cities have a subway. I think the only substantial subway system is in NYC. The city I live in has a very short commuter rail line that doesn’t go to/from anywhere people want to go. Buses are gridlocked in traffic like everyone else, and have to make frequent stops, so it can take something like 2 hours to travel 10 miles. The low-wage workers I know without vehicles just spend $40/day on Uber to commute to work and back (which is a significant percentage of their pay).




  • Every species is a food, resource, predator, or competitor for resources for another species, so a decline of one species can have ripple effects on many other species. I guess one example is that parasitic wasps keep caterpillars and aphid populations in check (caterpillars and aphids can cause huge crop losses).



  • I don’t think DeSantis is charismatic or likable enough to beat Biden. His poll numbers go down as the public gets more exposure to him. He’s starting to shift his messaging from anti-woke to (neo-fascist) populist rhetoric, which may change things. IDK, there’s so many things that could happen between now and the election. I think Trump could beat DeSantis in the primary from prison. A major crisis like a recession would hand the election to the Reps. The Reps could intentionally cause a crisis, by forcing an extended government shutdown or something.




  • Rep voters =/= Rep politicians. I would say the ~27% of people that identify as Republican support fascist-like policies, even if they don’t think of them as fascist. The Rep party itself is definitely neo-fascist. They even use the same rhetoric as the Nazis and white nationalists (focusing on degeneracy, cultural marxism, great replacement theory, etc). Just this time, LBGT people and hispanic immigrants are the first scapegoats. The current 2nd favored Republican presidential candidate, behind Trump, is most definitely a neo-fascist by just looking at the policies he’s been implementing in Florida; not to mention his campaign sharing a video ad featuring DeSantis in the middle of a sonnegrad.




  • 80085@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world100, here I cum
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    1 year ago

    Most people still work manual labor jobs. Cognitive ability also declines with age. Age discrimination during hiring/recruiting is fairly common (witnessed it at nearly every job I’ve ever had, even though it’s illegal, and I’ve had a lot of jobs). There aren’t enough “bullshit jobs” like Walmart greeter for everybody. Aging population can be solved by permissible immigration (which are comparably younger populations), but there are too many racists and politicians worried about demographic shifts.


  • Yeah, they do seem like bots. It would had to have been custom trained to get them to spew out that kind of hateful nonsense though, so it looks like a fairly sophisticated operation. A year or so ago a ML researcher created GPT4chan (as a silly test/joke), but it wasn’t as good as these bots.

    My guess is it’s a U.S. LE honeypot. I guess it could also be a state actor trying to do stochastic terrorism in the U.S., but I would think they’d stay on popular sites for the greater impact. Or, it could really be an underground site for q-anoners.


  • The Supreme Court is heavily in favor of “states rights” now, so state politicians know they can cater to special interest groups (for donations of course) with impunity. States are heavily gerrymandered, so they have little risk of losing their position. In some cases, such as book, education, voting, and immigration laws, the goal is to further ensure the states remain Republican in the future (prevent children from growing up “woke,” and prevent immigrants from living there, which tend to vote Dem). Democracy in the U.S. is pretty broken, and is slowly being dismantled further.


  • Some fascist-like groups do directly use violence (proud boys, patriot prayer, etc). Other groups rely on systemic violence implemented through law and stochastic terrorism to achieve their goals. Memes aside, it’s not very smart or helpful to engage in violence when it can’t be defended in court as self-defense. Violence does not change people’s minds; if anything, it probably cements their beliefs further.



  • Yeah, mastodon definitely needs a better algorithm. Algorithms can be designed to promote whatever the maker wants. It doesn’t have to be designed to maximize engagement or the specific kind of engagement that tends to promote crazy conspiracy theories or fascist rhetoric. The algorithm could just be simple collaborative filtering with some randomness thrown in to pop “information bubbles,” which would be much better than what they have now.