Jewish Federation Los Angeles meanwhile blamed the university's chancellor for allowing "an environment to be created over many months that has made students feel unsafe".

The group demanded that the encampment be cleared and that UCLA meet leaders of the Jewish community.

Fucking hell, this is such a callous response. In any other situation, the group representing the side that just had masked vigilantes attack peaceful demonstrators would make amends. "These people don't represent our movement. We disavow them and what they stand for." And so on.

I see they're taking a page from Israel's book: refuse to apologize, defend unprovoked violence, and blame the victims on top of everything else.

It's funny, the US Marshalls interviewed for this are extremely forthright in explaining their methods, but clam up and say they "can't explain these methods" as soon as they have any leads relating to cell phones. Probably because they're using the US's vast warrantless surveillance system to pull any possible info they can on her.

For example, they "track[ed] down the phone number for an American businessman they believed had connected with Armstrong at some point," and are cagey about how they got that number. I'd bet that they pulled her phone records and started cold calling everyone she's ever contacted through her cell phone until they got someone who could give them a lead.

Later, they set up the fake yoga instructor ad, and mention that they're tracking the phone location of the person who answered the ad to make sure they're at the sting location.

It's crazy that even with all those "methods the Marshalls won't go into," they almost gave up on finding her.

Many beekeepers want to lessen the chance of "swarming," where the bees decide to move their hive somewhere else, by clipping the queen bee's wings. So instead of protection money, it's more like the bees got their kneecaps busted in after a visit from Big Tony.

I find it odd that they changed their tagline from "the front page of the Internet" to "the heart of the Internet." Reddit is certainly a massive hub for discussion, but "compassionate" is not the first association I have with Reddit conversations. Smug condescension, certainly. Frothing mob mentality, often. But compassion? Rare, at best.

I suppose that Reddit may be trying to simply manifest their hopes for the platform into a reality, but I don't think it's that easy. The Reddit welcome banner reads, "Come for the cats, stay for the empathy," but most people probably know Reddit for the Boston Bombing debacle, r/theDonald trolls, and other nasty news items. It's hard to believe the cushy corporate messaging when Reddit has so consistently allowed horrible shit on their site until the media fervor gets so intense that they can't ignore it anymore

CORRECTION: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Nikki Haley’s first name.

Oh man, the CNN reporter just assumed Trump spelled it correctly and wrote the whole article while using a misspelled version of her name. As embarrassing as that should be for Trump, it's almost on brand for him at this point. The reporter could have at least pulled up her Wikipedia article to double check the spelling, like come on.

TikTok has always been on the extreme end of tracking and surveilling its users. For example, research found that the app had the ability to record all keystrokes made by users in the in-app browser (i.e. keylogging). This kind of tracking is way beyond what other social media companies do and borders on malware.That's one reason why the US, Canada, and others banned the use of TikTok on government devices.

A former TikTok employee also alleges in a sworn statement that TikTok stores its user data in China, that the CCP has full access to this data, and that the CCP used this data to spy on protestors in Hong Kong.

So their tracking goes way beyond what other companies do, and China uses that data for expressly political goals rather than simply selling ads to users.

To be fair, my understanding of delegates is that they are basically a political "cookie" that the party hands out as a reward to certain people. Their job is just to cast the official elector votes for the presidential election, and their hands are usually tied into voting to reflect the popular state vote tallies (ignoring Trump's recent fake electors scheme, of course). So their duties are really symbolic more than anything.

Accepting this position does insert himself into politics, though. No one can say "leave Baron out of it" after this

It's always crazy to come into threads like these and see people say "I would murder as many elites as possible" without batting an eye, and in the same comment say "I could never give up hamburgers." It's some kind of insane self-soothing to throw all of the responsibility for a global issue onto a few scapegoats. It also shows that people have no intention of doing fuck all about climate change beyond typing up snarky comments on the internet.

People can misquote all kinds of studies they half remember to pretend that they have no responsibility for making changes, but that doesn't make it true. Just as one example, first world countries' per-capita rate of meat consumption alone is enough to push the world over our 1.5C warming target. But because it's an inconvenience to make any changes to my life, I'm going to pretend I would personally kill scores of people rather than make a new recipe for dinner. We're fucked

Literally the next day:

Biden on Tuesday reiterated his “ironclad” commitment to Israel

Very cool for the Biden admin to just make shit up to try and court "the youth"

Ok but remember when Republicans made up that Biden was going to "outlaw burgers" with the Green New Deal? And how even the made up idea that the govt would stop subsidizing meat caused half the nation to flip their shit, while the other half went "no don't be silly, we would never ever touch your precious tendies."

Appealing to individuals is important because without shifting the public's perception of meat as it relates to climate change, the government will be too terrified to enact those kind of changes for fear of getting voted out by the angry, barbecue-loving mobs.

Until flexitarians, vegetarians, and vegans (I'm vegan btw, just need everyone to know that) become a sizable enough percentage of the voting population, these systemic changes are never going to even be considered by our leaders. So we should keep pressing the importance of these changes to collectively move ourselves closer to that tipping point.

The Covid episode made me bail on the reboot altogether. It was the worst offender in every way that the season was bad, including the pacing of the episode.

All the episodes in the newest season resolve the plot in the last like thirty seconds of the episode. It's like the writers kept writing until they ran out of runway, then just yelled, "oh crap!" and wrapped everything up as fast as they possibly could. Which is bizarre because the episodes are so full of tepid puns and "phone bad" boomer humor you would think the writers were starved for ideas.

In my fundamentalist upbringing, people would bring up the "divine mystery" of the Trinity as a kind of proof of the truth of Christianity. As in, the fact that the Trinity cannot be explained must mean that it is beyond our human comprehension, and if it's beyond our comprehension, it must be divine.

But like, it's very easy to see how humans could create the idea of the Trinity, since it's simply asserting that multiple contradictory things are all true at the same time. Is God the Father separate from Jesus His son, or one and the same? Both, actually!

Plus, zealots in the church loved "uhm akshully"ing anyone who tried to use a metaphor to explain the Trinity. "The Trinity is like... water, and how you can find water as ice, water, and water vapor in different places." "UMM actually that's Modalism, and that's heresy!"

Basically the church just assigns an "-ism" for every conventional way to understand or know the Trinity, then insists that it is Unknowable.

The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”

There's a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app's browser is much worse than measuring a true or false "did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted."

Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.

But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.

When people claim that leaks "get people killed," they're referring to when undercover agents are identified while they're in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.

The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.

You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that's really tenuous. It also assumes that the CIA isn't constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.

The idea is that generative AI will enable Samsung products to get a better understanding of how consumers use the products – for example, an oven recognizing what is being cooked in it or a fridge recognizing what ingredients are inside. This could allow appliances to understand users’ needs and respond accordingly.

"Understand users' needs" being a euphemism for "spy on users' habits and sell that info to advertisers."

We've gone full circle: from having a manual for your new appliance, to having a LLM confidently make up some incorrect info about how to use your new appliance.

Clinton is reportedly set to host a Broadway-themed fundraiser with “Hamilton” star Lin-Manuel Miranda on Wednesday.

Another sign that Hillary is forever stuck in 2016 lol. Will corporate Dems ever move on from milking Hamilton dry?

Politifact | No, 100 corporations do not produce 70% of total greenhouse gas emissions

I've been around these arguments enough times to see the discussion inevitably get to this point. We dance around the idea of "is it worth it to go vegan or not?" long enough, until eventually someone concedes that "yes it is better to do, but it's not practical to ask everyone to do it/you can't get everyone to go vegan/it won't solve the problem if we go vegan and do nothing else/etc."

Convenient that any time an environmental initiative requires even tiny changes to our day to day lives, suddenly we need to look for the solutions vaguely "elsewhere." I guess let's ignore the fact that emissions from food alone are enough to push the planet over the 1.5C degree warming threshold for the planet, and that the average US consumer eats an order of magnitude more red meat than could ever be sustainable.

If you truly think that it's worth doing, either do it, or admit that you selfishly don't want to. Don't try and pretend the climate science backs up your opinions though.

As an aside, this is basically my goodbye letter to Lemmy, so so probably not going to follow up on this thread. The platform is so small that people can't help but creep into communities that show up in the overall feed. Say what you will about Reddit, but at least there, spaces created specifically for in-groups (like a space called "vegancirclejerk") didn't constantly get commenters from the wider world knocking on the door and starting flame wars in the comments. Like, can there be no space for vegans to just fuck around and post memes in peace?

Maybe finally I'll get some peace by logging off and touching some grass. And then eating the grass, bc I'm vegan btw

That's a common misconception that's been passed around the Internet so long that it's become common knowledge. There's a great (now deleted, but archived) writeup showing that the Wachowskis always intended humans to be batteries. The actual source of the "processors" idea came from a Neil Gaiman short story written to promote the movie at its release

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