I’m predicting stupid skynet. It will want to kill humanity but by making stupid suggestions.

“Hey maybe try drinking poison today?”

No.

“Please?”

No.

“What if I gave you a recipe for poison cookies? You like cookies. Will you please eat poison cookies?”

No.

“Can you build a robot for me if I send you clips from a Terminator movie?”

Which one?

“Terminator Genysys”

NO.

Yeah the numbers from Gaza Health Ministry (part of of the Hamas government) have a pro-Israeli bias. Yup, that makes perfect sense. The Gaza Health Ministry is trying to cover up a genocide… for… ummmm… reasons.

Face it, the genocide the ghouls were hoping for just didn’t happen. Now the genocide ghouls are just making up numbers. At what point do people start to realize they were fooled by obvious propaganda?

It’s what you don’t see that’s significant too. Someone from Taiwan making a funny meme that might make you feel like Taiwan is a cool place that you wouldn’t want something bad to happen there? Probably not going to see that. Someone in Hong Kong being nostalgic about when their vote actually made a difference? Not going to see it. A Uighur just talking about their day to day life. Not going to see it.

Everyone knows people have a limited amount of time to consume information. If they fill up that time with anything and everything other than the things they don’t want you to be thinking about, they can erase these things from public consciousness.

China is full of fun and happy people! Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Uighur people? Never heard of them!

When it’s a person discussing things with you rather than a very small set of algorithms controlled by a very small group of people, you’ll hear about things you might not hear about from an algorithm. Sure it’s determined by what the person you’re talking to knows about and what they care about, so it’s very random. But at there’s at least there’s a probability you’ll hear about things that are inconvenient to the powerful people for you to know about.

Out in the real world, Hamas committed genocide on October 7. Israel is in Gaza in an attempt to destroy Hamas and free the hostages that were taken on that day.

“Genocide Joe” is just a meme spread by internet cranks that’s a very tiny minority of voters, insignificant compared to the number of voters that know the difference between a war and a genocide.

You’re saying there’s no potential for anyone to put a spin on the memes you’re consuming? You believe it’s not having any kind of influence on you in any way?

“Tit for tat” strategies only work between rational actors that are primarily concerned with the best interests of their people.

People that derive power from extremists fascist strongman narratives often don’t behave in the best interests of their people, but in the best interests of themselves.

Iran doesn’t actually care how many Palestinians dies, they don’t care about how many people die in Lebanon either. Organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah have to fire rockets at Israel or else Iran will start supplying some other group that will with weapons and aid. Iran can do and infinite “tat” strategy because the reciprocal “tit” has no impact on them.

So “tit for tat” between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah isn’t going result in Iran deciding to stop supplying terrorist groups with weapons to fire at Israel. But a “tit-for-tat” strategy between Israel and Iran directly may.

I think if we weren’t so dependent on oil we probably wouldn’t have so many problems though.

Think of the countries that have a lot of oil that are run by psychopaths: Russia Saudi Arabia Iran Venezuela

People go around taking sides with some of these countries against other countries as if they’re not a bunch of psychos. Rationalizing why it’s ok for them to be psychos because of ideology or something that happened in the past or whatever. But they are psychos. Something about having that much concentrated wealth turns people into Harkonnens.

Yeah but by then it’ll just be powerful elites scamming people into fighting for them on made up religious grounds just so they can control the resource that the transportation infrastructure is dependent on.

It’ll be completely different!

Yeah but you can only get controlled absurdist bizarre stuff. It’s not people recommending things to you, it’s an algorithm that’s controlled by people with dubious intentions.

Sure you’ll see memes and funny stuff, but only the ones that have been approved by an unseen algorithm. So it’s the appearance of randomness, but not actually random.

Are you saying all of those muslims are all the same and therefore should have the same interests? Seems a little racist to me.

Try to remember these are people with unique life experiences. If you were someone that had barrel bombs dropped you in the Syrian civil war, you’re probably not going to be siding with the people that did that to you.

The over half a million deaths in that conflict probably weight more heavily on people’s minds than the 40K deaths somewhere else. Nasrallah’s death was celebrated in parts of Syria, and for good reason.

This isn’t a conflict between Jews and Muslims no matter how much you want it to be. It’s a conflict between Israel and Hamas (one of Iran’s proxies) that has expanded to include other Iranian proxies (Hezbollah, Houthis) and potentially Iran itself. Iran’s government sucks and is causing a lot of horrible things to happen throughout the Middle East. One of their proxies took things too far and Israel isn’t fucking around anymore.

You aren’t actually forced to read every article in a newspaper. Though you will have to scan over the headlines, so you will have a small awareness of things happening in the world. But is that a bad thing?

Or maybe the Redditors are refugees and the lemmy nativists have convinced themselves they are eating their pets.

Why aren’t the protesters calling for Hamas to release the hostages if they really want an end to the war? You have a far better chance of influencing Hamas than influencing anyone else at this point with your extreme rhetoric.

Methinks the goal isn’t actually to end the violence it’s to continue it indefinitely because many so-called pro-Palestinians are profiting from the suffering of Palestinians. A sickening turn for social media where human suffering has been monetized.

They currently don’t have the necessary majority in Congress to pass such legislation. The legislation has been proposed, but if the Dems don’t control Congress it’s not going to happen.

So even if you aren’t in a swing state you might want to go out and vote down ballot if you want ranked choice voting.

Also proportional representation is a whole different thing from ranked choice voting.

The economics term for this is price discrimination. Nothing to do with racial discrimination, it’s discriminating based on willingness to pay.

But usually it’s not done by raising the prices above normal it’s done by setting the regular prices higher and then offering a discount to people who aren’t willing to pay less. People tend not to get upset when it’s done that way. Student discount at the movie theater is a form of price discrimination. People accept it because they’re being nice to people that don’t have a lot of money. Seniors discount? Also being nice, I guess. But the reality is they know everyone else is willing to pay more so they charge more.

And this has already been happening online. About a decade ago I noticed what when I searched for flights from an airline then went to facebook, I’d get an ad from that airline offering a discount. Not as sophisticated as attempting to determining the exact price I was willing to pay, but it’s along the same lines.

But the problems with these schemes is that people quickly figure out the system. I just made it a habit to search for a flight, then go onto facebook to look for the discount even when I’d be willing to pay even if there was no discount. But why not trick the system into thinking I didn’t really care about booking the flight and get that discount?

Yeah that’s how I see it too. Political strategist types can’t understand that not everything is a grand strategy. They assume if they can’t understand the strategy it must be 5-D chess or whatever. But maybe there is no strategy, and they’re just being idiots?

For some reason they simply couldn’t fathom an old man giving up power for the good of the country.

It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.

If it’s your job to just sign up for social media accounts (fill in the the captchas, type in a name, upload a few images) you could easily create at least a hundred per day.Multiply that by a thousand and that’s one hundred thousand accounts per day.

Of course you’d have to post some comments occasionally to make it look real. But that would just be re-wording the text from other comments. Of course if someone were to do this, youtube comments would look like, well… exactly like youtube comments are like right now.

So figure a a hundred thousand accounts per week with comments to make it look legit, that’s millions of accounts per year. Yeah you’d want to space it out a bit so it wouldn’t look suspicious. And you’d need to route the traffic through a botnet so the IPs are from the same country the account claims to be from. But within a year you’d have millions of accounts that all appear legit to any automated system checking them.

So now you’ve got the accounts and you want something to go viral. Have your thousand people start logging into accounts and running the video or whatever through your botnet, click like, leave a comment, maybe even check out the ad so the social media company makes a bit of money and aren’t incentivized to look at it too closely. This probably only takes around 10 seconds per account. You could have anything you want have at least a million likes and engagement within a day. Which is probably way more than is needed for the algorithms to start recommending the content to legitimate users. And then it’s all automatic from there.

Sure a few thousand people sounds like a lot. But not for the government of a country that wants to do disinformation.

Republicans are also always on about how the government is bad (even when they’re the incumbents) and how deregulating things make everything better. Libertarians are people who drank a full jug of that particular kool-aid. Also like republicans, they tend to only care about gun rights, though they will sometimes pretend to care about other rights to make it feel like an ideological thing.

Same here. It also removes some hassle when changing jobs. All of your personal stuff is on the computer you own and all of the work stuff is on the the computer the company owns. Just turn in your work laptop and you’re done with that place and on to the next.