Sorry, did you post in response to the wrong comment? I didn’t say the US was anti-left (though a lot of it is). I said the US was anti-vegan, which is not the same thing at all.
(I think veganism should be apolitical - eating healthy food, saving money, animal rights, self-sufficiency, public health, and so on, are not inherently leftist political issues. They’re common fucking sense. But that’s another rant.)
One thing you have to always remember about Donald Trump is: he’s incredibly insecure. His fragile little ego is desperate for approval. It’s why he constantly shitposts on a social media site he owns - so he can get that constant dopamine rush of upvotes and fawning comments and “megadittoes, Mr. President”. And it’s why he’s desperate for the approval of people he considers strong leaders - Putin and Xi and Milei and so on. And when somebody he respects flatters him, he becomes putty in their hands.
Mamdani won decisively in New York. Mamdani proved himself a strong leader. And then, after taking everything Trump could throw at him and coming out on top, Mamdani went to Trump and basically said “I talk a lot of shit about you, you talk a lot of shit about me, but we both know that’s how the game is played and not to take it personally. You do good work and I respect you. We both believe New York is the greatest city in the world so let’s work together to make it great again.”
And Mamdani certainly didn’t have to ask for a meeting with Trump. It probably hurt him with some of his base to talk to Trump at all. So you have this strong man, this leader, this winner, who decisively proved himself the leader of the Democratic Party in New York, with incredible momentum behind him - and he goes to Trump to kiss his ring and ask for his support.
And when a strong man gives Trump the manly validation he craves, he melts like a teenage girl at a David Bowie concert.
Because you also have to remember, Donald Trump has no actual political positions. He doesn’t care about anything except winning - and he loves winners. And whatever Mamdani is, he’s a winner.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/discrimination-against-vegans
A shockingly high number of people have a negative view of vegans. And, separately but relatedly, veganism is (unfairly) associated with the far left in the United States. So a lot of conservative and moderate readers will see the word “vegan” and automatically think “this must be irrational leftist bullshit”.
Even to some meat-eating liberals and leftists, “AI vegan” will read as “arrogant moral scolds who want to take away your chatbots and think they’re better than you because they don’t use AI.”
I can’t tell from the article whether “AI vegan” is a term people are calling themselves or something the media made up. But when mainstream media compares a movement to animal rights or veganism, it’s almost never meant to be a positive.
I think not violating people’s privacy with technological data collection is a technological issue, not a political one. Because you can have a society without capitalism or the state, you can have incredibly strong social norms governing privacy and the use of people’s data, but as long as that society is collecting and storing information about individual people, that information can still be leaked, stolen, or misused by whoever controls it.
(I mean, imagine somebody in smart city IT has some sort of personal issue or conflict with another citizen and decides to abuse their access to data collection to gather information about that citizen. Even in an anarchist utopia we’d still have stalkers, domestic violence, controlling partners, child custody disputes, and all the ways people in relationships hurt each other that come with humans being human.)
The only way to guarantee data collection doesn’t violate people’s privacy is to not collect data capable of violating people’s privacy - that is, don’t deploy systems that can collect that data at all.
And that restricts the type of data that can be collected so much that, I think, it rules out most of the benefits of a “smart city”.
Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it’s not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.
I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.
For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they’re already being used.
One aspect of a “smart city” is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city’s resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.
This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people’s privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.
Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.
So, you know, it depends on what benefit you’re talking about.
Well she fucking didn’t did she?
A child hitting another child isn’t a crime that requires an arrest, trial, and conviction. It’s a discipline issue that requires teachers to call the kids’ parents.
And honestly? A kid creating deepfake porn is a much more serious discipline issue, but it’s still a discipline issue, because a middle school boy is still a fucking child. That kid should have been expelled and sent to therapy, but not arrested, because, again, child.
Arresting a child for anything is insane - but private prisons profit off that insanity, and conservatives love the idea of black babies growing up to be prison labor, so the school-to-prison pipeline ruins more children’s lives every day.
God, some people out there would have parents call the cops whenever their kids get in a fight. I hate this century.
Webre added that he does not expect to criminally charge the young girl.
“Due to the totality of the circumstances, we chose not to pursue charges on the female student,” he said.
What the fuck. Why is this is a question. Why would it even be possible to criminally charge the victim. Why are you acting like you’re doing her a favor by not “pursuing charges”. WHAT fucking charges would you be fucking pursuing.
I don’t expect commenters to know the answers to this. I just want to emphasize how American cops hate women so fucking much that when they have a 13-year-old female victim of a sex crime they ask themselves what crimes they can charge her with.
And men wonder why women don’t report.
A really simplified explanation: the wind pushes the kite, which unreels the kite string, which spins the generator shaft to generate electricity.
When the kite string runs out, the kite folds up or changes its orientation so the wind isn’t pushing it anymore, and the generator reels in the kite string. This takes less power than the kite previously generated because the kite isn’t pushing against the wind while it’s being reeled in.
When the kite string is reeled in far enough, the kite catches the wind again, the kite string starts unreeling again, repeat as long as there’s wind.
It’s actually, I think, a really creative implementation of wind power.
Economics, as a science, has generally been used to measure and describe capitalist economies, since economics as a science has only existed as long as capitalism.
Which is fine.
Economics has had a bad habit of universalizing its descriptions of capitalist economies as if they were fundamental facts about human nature.
Which is not fine.
So, for example, economists talk about the “tragedy of the commons”, as if it was a law of nature that publicly owned resources are necessarily used to destruction by selfish individuals, and only private ownership enforced by law can prevent this destruction. When, in fact, publicly owned resources have been maintained by societies ever since society was a thing, the commons in England existed for thousands of years before capitalism was a gleam in Adam Smith’s eye, and the term itself was popularized by Garrett Hardin in 1968 as a justification for abolishing welfare and letting poor people starve.
But hey, our colonial ancestors took millions and millions of acres of “unowned” land from native peoples, auctioned it off to private landowners, and turned the native people into slave labor to farm it, and isn’t it nice to tell ourselves that we’re using that land more efficiently and protecting it from overuse and mismanagement by privatizing it?
I mean, look, if I said to you “making profit is the highest good, and it is morally right for me to use every legal method at my disposal to make as much profit as I can from you”, you’d say I was evil or insane.
But if I said to you “making profit is the most important goal of my business, and it is morally right for me to use every legal method to make as much money as I can from customers” you’d probably nod and smile and agree.
And that’s the corrupting influence of economics, which has confused efficiency and morality so greatly that it’s convinced us that capitalism is the most moral form of social organization because a capitalist economy is the most efficient form of economic organization. Neither of which is true.
And this ties into fascism, and dictatorships, and Belgians in the Congo, and all sorts of monstrous human rights violations in the name of profit, because monstrous human rights violations naturally occur when you reduce human beings to commodities and tell yourself the highest form of morality lies in using those commodities as efficiently and profitably as you can.
Economics is not exclusively used for fascism, sure, but it’s done more to promote fascism than any other single science I can think of.
But people already have a public place to appeal. This sub, the sub you linked, pretty much any other instance that has a meta discussion community. But posting here, or there, isn’t an actual appeal process - it’s just publicly complaining about administrators.
And that was the answer to OP’s question: that there’s no single fediverse-wide place to appeal a ban, you have to follow instance specific appeal procedures, if they exist, and/or contact the instance’s administrators directly.
Which is a good thing, because it helps keep the verse decentralized.
I think, if there was a single location where the fediverse started telling people “if you get banned, post here to appeal”, users would expect some sort of formal response to their post, and get upset when people tell them posting there doesn’t actually do anything. Which would be bad. And if that location could do anything to encourage administrators to reverse ban decisions, via peer pressure or otherwise, that would also be bad, because it would compromise the independence of instances. That is to say, a fediverse wide appeal community would be at best useless and at worst harmful to the fediverse.
So I think the only appropriate response to “I was banned, what can I do” is “that’s between you and the people who banned you”.
I think any sort of fediverse-wide appeal community, or process, would risk compromising the whole point of the fediverse, ie, decentralization. The fact that admins have the final say on their own instances is part of what keeps the largest instances from controlling smaller ones and keeps the fediverse free of centralized control.
I mean, can you imagine a coalition of the largest instances coming together and telling a small instance “the appeal community agreed this user was banned unfairly, unban them or we’ll all defederate you”? Because I can imagine that sequence of events, if an appeal community got any kind of formal backing from the big instances, and that would pretty much end decentralization.
Yeah, and how does that Tamil farmer fact check their black box audio interface when it tells them to spray Roundup on their potatoes, or warns them to buy bottled water because their Hindu-hating Muslim neighbors have poisoned their well, or any other garbage it’s been deliberately or accidentally poisoned with?
One of the huge weaknesses of AI as a user interface is that you have to go outside the interface to verify what it tells you. If I search for information about a disease using a search engine, and I find an .edu website discussing the results of double blind scientific studies of treatments for a disease, and a site full of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and supplement ads telling me about THE SECRET CURE DOCTORS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW, I can compare the credibility of those two sources. If I ask ChatGPT for information about a disease, and it recommends a particular treatment protocol, I don’t know where it’s getting its information or how reliable it is. Even if it gives me some citations, I have to check its citations anyway, because I don’t know whether they’re reliable sources, unreliable sources, or hallucinations that don’t exist at all.
And people who trust their LLM and don’t check its sources end up poisoning themselves when it tells them to mix bleach and vinegar to clean their bathrooms.
If LLMS were being implemented as a new interface to gather information - as a tool to enhance human cognition rather than supplant, monitor, and control it - I would have a lot fewer problems with them.
Enshittification squared. Create a service that customers come to rely on. Then turn the service into shit to squeeze more profit out of it. Then create a new service that replicates the functionality of the old service customers relied on. Then enshittify that. And so on.
AI is a parasite. It can’t come up with anything a human didn’t create first. It eats our thoughts and regurgitates them.
We kill AI by limiting our use of the Internet, renouncing social media in particular (and yes, I recognize the hypocrisy), and communicating with actual human beings through encrypted messenger apps that AI can’t scrape for new training material.
Think of AI like an online troll. Don’t feed it, don’t engage with it, and it will be irrelevant to you until it finally gives up and dies.
But the social media machine wants you not to talk to actual human beings, it wants you to be lonely and isolated, so you’ll consume its product - and AI is just a part of that machine, making you lonely and then providing you with the illusion of a real person to talk to.
Gardening is a great way to fight that, especially community gardening, because you literally have to be out there in person with your hands in the dirt talking to other gardeners.
So I agree with this post and strongly recommend anybody who doesn’t have space to garden go looking for a community garden, or volunteer at a food bank (which often have ties to community gardens and can point you at opportunities), or help at a Food Not Bombs event, or otherwise get yourself involved in the real live in-person work of feeding human beings, and reclaim your brain from the social media algorithm feeding you AI slop.
I don’t know who the people around you are. I won’t tell you you’re wrong to be afraid of interacting with them.
But I do know that social media is designed to make you feel that way.
Social media algorithms find the angriest, the most hateful, the most radical, content on all sides and feed it to you. So you’re going to see people on your side saying the other side wants to kill you, and you’re going to see people on the other side saying they want to kill you, and you’re not going to see the vast majority of people who don’t actually want to kill you.
Because the more afraid you are of your actual human neighbors, the more time you’ll spend on social media watching ads and being force-fed algorithmic slop. And that slop makes you even more afraid of your neighbors, so you spend even more time online, and so on and so forth.
So I’d ask you to ask yourself: if you believe people in your community want to kill trans people and enslave blacks, how much of that belief comes from what people in your community have actually said and done, and how much of that belief comes from stuff you’ve heard online?
I think “we” (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it’s terribly tempting to steal other people’s beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.
And though I’m sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.
Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn’t create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the “third places” of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?
People need something to believe in, and we told them “do your jobs and vote blue, but it won’t matter anyway because the environment is fucked”.
The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.
I have a serious question. Who thought Reddit Answers was a good idea? What’s the actual benefit to the company? Did they get a ton of venture capital funding to build it, or are they trying to jump on the AI hype, or what? Does anyone actually know?
One of the biggest reasons, I think, for Reddit’s popularity in the 2010s was that its comment threads often had advice and information and product recommendations from real people - as opposed to, say, Amazon reviews, which were full of bots even back then. A ton of people still search for topics on Google using the site:reddit.com modifier, because searching Reddit bypasses all the SEO and AI-created spam sites that dominate Google results, and Reddit is still one of the biggest open source databases of actual human advice and conversation.
And Reddit has decided to dilute its most valuable contribution to the internet with AI spambots?
It’s some sort of stage 3 enshittification, obviously - cannibalizing its core use case for short term profit - but I’m morbidly curious who thought this was a good idea and why.
To be fair, it’s strongly suspected that Trump had extensive ties to the New York Mafia.
I mean, Jesus Christ, he was a real estate developer in New York in the '70s and '80s. There’s no possible way he wasn’t in bed with the mob.
Say what you will about Trump, he’s probably closer to gangster than like 99% of us.