• 4 Posts
  • 270 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Persuadable voters seemed really focused on prices. It’s hard not to be condescending here. Eggs are expensive because of bird flu. Rent is high because not enough housing is being built, mostly limited by local issues. Gas is high because of Putin’s war. Anyone who thinks electing Trump will bring those prices down because they were lower last time he was president is fucking clueless.

    I’m interested to see how much of a factor unenthusiastic Democrats were. Trump got about the same number of votes he did in 2020, but Harris got far fewer than Biden. It looks like a bunch of people who voted last time didn’t vote this time. For them, the concerns the author dismisses might have been more important.




  • The trend is that when the economy is bad for the average person, it hurts the incumbent.

    I don’t think the people whose votes swung the election in Trump’s favor know how tariffs work or what policies Musk has in mind. They don’t even know why eggs are expensive (bird flu); they just know things were cheaper last time Trump was president.

    Of course that’s assuming there’s a free and fair election next time around.


  • In the context of ad-supported algorithmic social media, offensive is the wrong question. It’s about brand damage.

    Showing an ad next to something that actually offends people can damage a brand, but even something a little edgy might turn off customers of a brand with a more formal or conservative audience. The algorithm’s ultimate goal is to get people to watch ads, so something a little edgy might reduce the reach of that content. Censoring it prevents the algorithmic downrank.



  • Every antivaxer knows the Science shows vaccines work

    Having debated a couple who are quite intelligent otherwise, I’m going to have to dispute that.

    Sure, they know broadly that exposing the immune system to something that looks like a pathogen primes it to respond to that pathogen in the future, but they tend to be way off on the implications. I’ve heard it suggested that too many vaccines cause people to run out of immune memory. I’ve heard that all antibodies cause inflammation. I’ve heard that previous attempts to produce coronavirus vaccines killed the majority of test subjects years later.

    None of those claims are true, and the only way they could be true is if everyone in the field of immunology is lying all the time.














  • Maybe, but the archetypal non-technical user, my mother does want to run a third-party ROM. Her phone is out of its official support period, and she knows that security updates are important and would like a way to get them. Most people, at least in wealthy countries do have a technical person in their lives they can ask things like that. She doesn’t want to buy a new phone because it would be too big and lack a headphone jack, a position I share.

    I had to recommend against running what I run (LineageOS, Magisk, Play Integrity Fix). Without PIF, too many apps will refuse to run on LineageOS. She doesn’t need root for much else (maybe adblocking) and doesn’t have the knowledge to make good decisions about whether to grant root permissions to an app that asks (Magisk doesn’t have an allowlist-only mode, but it should). Finally, keeping root through an update is fussy. It’s not hard, but it’s an extra step that has to be done in the right order every week or two.

    Unlike Firefox in 2024, a third-party Android build that’s easy enough to install and isn’t sabotaged by Safetynet would something many non-technical users care about: an extended useful life for their devices.