Musk also has his hands on a fair amount of data through X and Tesla. But yeah… Copyright expansion seems like an odd place to start breaking the constitution.

You’re right about the regulation but I’m not so sure about the copyright exemptions. All in all, you’d think he’s more likely to side with property owners - especially the heirs of media empires - over progress.

The insistence on electoral districts.

You get that across the English-speaking world, though. The really weird thing is that even people who see the problem want to keep the districts and argue for non-solutions like ranked-choice voting.

Centuries ago, it made sense. Communities chose one of their own to argue for their interests in front of the king. Which communities had the privilege? Obviously that’s up to the king to decide. Before modern communication tech, it also made sense that communities would be defined by geography.

Little of that makes sense anymore. When their candidate loses, people don’t feel like the 2nd best guy is representing them. They feel disenfranchised.

It used to be, in the US, that minorities - specifically African Americans - were denied representation. Today, census data is used to draw districts dominated by minority ethnic groups so that they can send one of their own to congress. This might not be a good thing, because candidates elsewhere do not have to appeal to these minorities or take their interests into account. Minorities that are not geographically concentrated - eg LGBTQ - cannot gain representation that way.

The process is entirely top-down and undemocratic. Of course, it is gamed.

Aside from that, the mere fact that representation is geography based influences which issues dominate. The more likely you are to move before the next election, the less your interests matter. That goes for both parties. But you can also see a pronounced urban/rural divide in party preference. Rural vs urban determines interests and opinions in very basic ways. Say, guns: High-population density makes them a dangerous threat and not much else. In the country, they are a tool for hunting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU8VPQsTqFU

Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.

But we have also run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying on ship’s peanut.

So in order to obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and…er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.

Well, maybe it wouldn’t if it was gluten-free. Have you thought of that? No, you didn’t, you only think of yourself.

Ich sehe öfters lebende Igel in der Stadt, weil ich öfters nachts unterwegs bin. Wahrscheinlich immer dieselben 1-2 Tiere. Die sind kaum scheu, aber eben nachtaktiv, wie Ratten und Mäuse. Die einzigen anderen Wildtiere, die ich sehe, sind Marder, aber das sind absolute Ninjas.

FDP-KI macht Schluss mit Bürgergeld. Zum Glück funktioniert das nicht so.

Oh. Someone did notice. How? You use your own font?

Obviously we’d all die but I wonder how exactly. This would make a good question for Randall Munroe.

What are you doing, step stool?

Masking was an issue during the Flue Pandemic 1918-1920. The date suggested by @Rolando@lemmy.world is more plausible.

Huh. What a weird coincidence. Out of all the many communities in Canada, it just happens to be the indigenous ones that have to make do without clean water because of military spending. What are the odds?

How did I not know that until now?

Unironically, I’d like to know. Not having a go at you. There seem to be lots of people who don’t know that. But without that bit of knowledge, the holocaust doesn’t make sense.

The nazis defined anyone with jewish grandparents to be part of a jewish race, by law. That even included a few christian priests. Of course, the nazis didn’t invent the idea. People never liked converts much. When you prosecute someone, you want to get the loot. It’s never about selflessly helping people go to heaven.

Historically, it’s a truism that a race is a result of racism. First, a group is hated or subjugated. Then membership - and supposed negative traits - become defined as unalterable, heritable facts.

It sounded kinda like: Let’s make people sell the properties they rent out so that wealthy people can buy vacation homes.

The idea is guaranteed to make homelessness worse, so it seems natural that someone might mock it.

I can’t tell if you’re joking.

After a quick skim, seems like the article has lots of errors. Molmo is trained on top of Qwen. The smallest ones are trained on something by the same company as Molmo.

The fighter pilots ramming bombers were expected to bail out. There were survivors.

The pilots of the Leonidas squadron were expected to “self-sacrifice” in their attacks on bridges. They faced rather less social pressure than Japanese pilots, though.