AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Even assisted living facilities don’t always have people around the clock to come help you with little things like that. Most facilities don’t offer much beyond health-specific care, and intermittent cleanings. You don’t get tech support.

Hakeem will describe vague notions of problems to be fixed with ultimate solutions that end up being “give health insurers more money”.

Let’s look at what Jeffries has said about healthcare in this country!

• “we’ve established working groups [on] […] healthcare”
• “We’re going to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits”
• “we’re going to lower costs and we’re going to save healthcare”

This shit means exactly what it does when he says we need to “reform ICE”. Incremental improvements, no actual solution to the underlying problem.

Plus, if not officially released and confirmed to be accurate via the normal legal processes, it’s very hard for any journalists to report on the new findings without being sued for defamation by those accused claiming it was “doctored” or “fake”.

I still don’t think it’s useful to look at total spend to each “party” vs the spread of spend from each source and what they are targeting.

Party represents what they are targeting, because party lines are how much of our legislation is defined. For example, low taxes on wealth is associated more with Republicans, and less restriction on abortion rights is associated with Democrats. Even if they may sometimes mix across party lines, they tend to have extremely strong correlations between party and policy, so donating to a given party is effectively donating for the policies they tend to represent.

The largest donors donate vastly more to Republicans than they do to democrats.

If you want individual policy, it lines up.

Big-tech PACs donated 2-to-1 toward Republicans and Republican-aligned ad and influence campaigns in favor of data center construction: https://www.industrialinfo.com/news/article/money-votes-and-data-centers-will-political-spending-overcome-rising-public-opposition-to-data-cente--359789

Billionaires have outspent on ads to fight a one-time billionaire’s tax in California 250-to-1 https://www.commondreams.org/news/wealth-tax-opponents-spending

Law enforcement PACs spend lots of money on Democrats… https://readsludge.com/2020/06/24/law-enforcement-pacs-give-millions-to-the-politicians-who-set-their-budgets/ …and Democrats shift to being more pro-police. https://truthout.org/articles/in-2024-platform-democrats-lurch-right-on-policing-and-immigration/

Again, it’s not that these issues don’t sometimes mix across party lines, the police spending is a good example of that, but generally speaking when a party receives donations, it’s because the donors believe they are supporting that party’s political positions.

I think the problem here is that you’re addressing an entirely different question.

The question of if someone should report someone who raped them is entirely separate from the potential chance for false allegations.

If someone is raped, they should report it. If someone isn’t raped but wants to make a false allegation, real cases of rape being reported won’t change that person’s decision to file a fake claim.

The entire point here is just “if you are raped, you should report it, even if that could ruin the rapist’s life in some way, because they raped you, so they deserve consequences”. It doesn’t make a judgement call on how we can combat false allegations.

And being willing to physically leave behind every single person you know and love that doesn’t want to move to the exact same area in the exact same different country as you!

Seems like the original was actually created with that exact image, at least according to KnowYourMeme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fight-like-youre-the-third-monkey-on-the-ramp-to-noahs-ark-and-brother-its-startin-to-rain

The original post is from 2026 though so that version could have very well been AI generated, but to me it gives off less AI generated vibes and more “some dude photobashing some art he found together”

God I hate how literally every single AI-generated comic (or at least the ones made by OpenAI’s models given how damn universal its style is) have the EXACT same facial expressions. Every surprised or scared character has the exact same sort-of-horrified-but-no-light-behind-the-eyes look, any moment of true excitement, being proud, happy, etc has the same smiling-while-vaguely-staring-into-the-distance look to it, etc.

Over a third of adults say that if they had a $400 expense (i.e. sudden medical bill), they’d either simply go broke, or have to go into debt and put it on their credit card while carrying the balance month-to-month because they had no other means of paying it.

Nearly half of Gen Z has resorted to using buy now pay later services to buy groceries, and more than one in ten people you meet are in poverty.

49% of households with credit cards consider carrying a balance because they can’t pay it off in full “normal” to them. And remember, essentially all of these statistics have to do with people that have essentially no savings, and no real income left after expenses at that point. They’re not even truly enjoying themselves after spending so much of their time on labor, they’re just making enough to live at bare minimum and that’s it.

Most Americans are absolutely struggling.

Yeah. Honestly, I don’t really have a problem if a developer is just able to… not spend a bunch of money on a ton of furniture that’ll get shuttled between different properties, not accidentally bang up a wall, etc, and just make a good looking listing image that accurately represents the space.

All the better if it can maybe lead at least some of the more mom & pop landlords to not charge more because they’re looking to recoup staging costs.

Hell, I’d love it if I could look at a listing, and maybe get like 5 or 6 different options for how the space could look in very different styles, rather than the same, bland, generic palette of furniture and colors just because that’s the only truly cost-effective option.

But of course, we can’t have AI do anything good, that’d be ridiculous. It has to move the windows around and make the space look twice as big for no reason!

Unfortunately most people just… don’t give a fuck about anything until it affects them.

It’s written by humans, for humans!

…

Just like the THIRTEEN other issues in their “Tech Guides” series… that are ONLY about LLMs, and mostly include AI-generated imagery.

And get this: they’re even “the world’s first publisher to produce a magazine dedicated to ChatGPT”! Great.

I’m sure the… one person on their team that writes for the Tech topics of their magazines (while also writing about ADHD) definitely made every single one of these issues on their own.

That’s really no different than saying, “You can’t expect billionaires to stop being evil when it would significantly impact their income.”

Not really, I don’t consider bands to be as parasitic as billionaires, because they at least do something to earn their money. If you’re a billionaire, you can just hire someone to take your place, leave, and profit forever, but if all the members of a band step aside to let a whole different crew of people take over, that band probably isn’t gonna have anywhere near the same following or quality as it did before.

Still, I do kind of understand the point.

The network effect works both ways. See Myspace and Friendster.

MySpace is actually a great example of this, because Facebook found a way to remove switching costs for users moving to Facebook, which is why Facebook succeeded.

Facebook made a bot that would automatically scrape all your MySpace activity from friends, and forward it to Facebook.

Moving to Facebook meant not having to leave anyone behind, because you could still see everything from them and respond to them, but you got a better experience, so that’s what many people did. Eventually, the people they were getting forwarded messages from on MySpace just switched to Facebook too.

Leaving Facebook now does not carry these same benefits. There is no other app that allows you to do this without Facebook cracking down on it and severing your access. Hence, switching costs are very high.

Facebook opened the door to themselves, and then locked the door shut, leaving you only the fire escape as an exit.

That’s fair. Still, I do think it’s a tad unreasonable to expect of people, when it can significantly impact their popularity and thus their income, when the actual effect of them leaving is usually that… essentially nothing happens to the company they’re leaving from.

Unfortunately, Facebook and its users likely won’t care much if someone leaves the platform, as long as they can keep scrolling. It’s gotta be on a very large scale, with a lot of people giving up portions of their audience before more people start genuinely moving to alternatives.

If you can’t spend a minute and a half reading, you don’t have any ground to stand on in calling my point “fascist apologia”.

Either be willing to actually assess what I’m saying on its merits, or keep just going with your gut instinct and instantly responding to anything that’s even remotely contradictory to your opinion by calling it fascist, but that doesn’t change the point being made.

If you don’t care to even read my point in the first place, I don’t care to respond further, since you’re clearly not interested in anything other than feeling self-righteous without thinking about it.

I’d hardly call explaining the network effect and collective action problem fascist apologia, but you do you.

All I’m saying is you can’t expect someone to leave behind most of their audience’s primary way of communicating with them scot-free. There are always consequences.

Let’s say they stop posting on Instagram. Out of those 2.7 million followers, only a fraction will find them on another platform, and thus they simply lose their ability to message to all the people they left behind. That hurts them.

You can still think it’s a net good for society for them to leave, or that it would meaningfully hurt Facebook (it wouldn’t unless most people also left, but again, collective action problem), but you can’t act like they don’t face consequences by doing it. It’s not “fascist bootlicker apologia” to say that leaving some of your audience behind on a platform reduces your audience.

They chose to advertise themselves on the “Grandma’s Racist Rants And Old White Guys With Sunglasses Who Hate Poor People” platform.

While true, they also advertised themselves on a platform most Americans use.

Say what you want about someone’s ability to not use a social media platform in the first place, but if you’re a band that depends on… people, it’s hard to just decide not to put yourself out there on a platform where so many people are.

The network effect is real. It’s where people’s friends, family, celebrities, bands, etc all are. Leaving means leaving people who are important to you.

A lot of people find it easier to leave platforms like Twitter now, because the platform is such a shell of its former self that it doesn’t even provide what many people originally came there for, but if you’re on Instagram, Facebook, etc, it still often provides people with easy communication to/from family and friends, and organizations like bands with access to an audience, promotion, visibility, etc.

Leaving the platform means leaving fans, and giving up visibility. I wish everyone could just quit Meta’s platforms and crush the company, but there’s a very simple collective action problem at play here that makes it very difficult, don’t discount that.

If his life was on the line, you’d see him change his tune real quick, but it’s not, so he’ll sacrifice 114,000 people for the sake of his donors’ stock portfolios. Fuck you, Jeffries.

Some patterns can. This one won’t.

Adversarial patterns/noise can confuse cameras, but that’s usually done not by tricking it into thinking, for example, that this one van is actually a hundred mini vans crammed into the same space, but by tricking it into thinking there’s not a car there because the pattern just confuses it and it recognizes it as any random sequence of random objects and things simultaneously.

Just slapping a bunch of car photos won’t make it think it’s a car, because the little photos are tiny, don’t move like a car, are still visually distinct from the background, and are on a much larger car-shaped object. If your car has patterns that makes it look like the general concept of an asphalt road, road signs, lamp posts, etc, then it might be enough to confuse the camera into thinking the odd blob shapes are something else, because cars on the road are also always passing on top, in front of, and by asphalt, road signs, lamp posts, etc.

The cameras don’t have depth perception, so if your car looks close enough to the road and objects around it, it’ll blend right in, to the camera.

I love how the only arguments people have against them is “they’re ugly” and “they’ll take away parking spots” as if piles of trash bags look better, and NYC doesn’t already have an expansive public transit network with plans to increase bus service.