So I’m thinking out loud here and this is probably going to be controversial … But what if Harris took on a comedian (or an oaf) as communications director, to purposely do gaffes and create controversies, so maybe the for profit media might like her more. Basically a modern court jester.
I always thought things like Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes were very funny. A bit embarrassing for sure, but also pretty funny.
Apart from that 1 diner, she is also openly supportive of several talking points of Russia, such as saying that … nato expansion is to blame for Russia invading countries; the USA shouldn’t support Ukraine; after the euromaidan revolution neo-nazis came to power in Ukraine …
And she also has geopolitical goals of Russia that she thinks are good ideas, which she basically shares with Trump: supporting Brexit, disbanding NATO and saying that the USA should abandon smaller nations to Russian and Chinese aggression for appeasement. Worded differently of course, but that’s what it comes down too.
And she must also know that Russian agencies have massively promoted and aided her in the past. She’s more than a useful idiot for Russia imo.
Nowadays Finland is the go to example on misinformation education: https://osis.bg/?p=4450&lang=en
An article with some examples and explanation from Finnish teachers: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/world/europe/finland-misinformation-classes.html
“All this comic does is bend history into absolute knots to try and sell an image of what a democratic revolution would look like, but the tone and telling it represents is blatantly revisionist to a fucking maddening degree.”
I’d say that’s what they’re talking about.
And I agree with them, imo this comic is absolutely not working for getting the intended message across.
Edit for clarification: i realized during first reading that the devil’s advocate in the comic was meant to represent USA republicans, but I still think that the comic doesn’t work.
What happens when the bias checker is biased?
The mbfc site should not be used for anything. It’s just the subjective opinions of the site owner (who is misleadingly talking about “we” and “our” in his methodology page), aided by a few unknown volunteers who do some of the “checking”. The site claims to be objective, but there’s been enough examples to show that it isn’t (fe, it says that Fox News is as trustworthy as The Guardian or that CNN is somehow center left).
The so called methodology that is used, is just a lot of words that boil down to “several facets were checked by a human and that human gave a subjective rating to each facet, we then count up those subjective ratings and claim to be objective because we use a point system”.
For checking the trustworthiness of a source, I’d say that the mbfc site is about as useful as using CPU Userbenchmark for chosing a CPU. Yes, it’s easy to read and more convenient to use than other sources, but it’s also a load of horseshit and unless you drill down into the underlying “data”, you’re just going to draw the wrong conclusions because of how misleading the site is.
In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that’s one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.
To me it looks better without fog, but the fog doesn’t look bad at all, I just like it slightly more without fog. Imo best would be if both states where in the game, if performance allows it. Sometimes (more) foggy, sometimes not, depending on time of day or in game events.
In the fog picture there is also some dark sky between trees (along the upper edge, about 40% from the left) that suddenly jumps out, I don’t think that patch should be that dark if the player is standing inside a cloud.
Completely. Calling NBC news center left is a real head scratcher, that bot is apparently living in an alternative facts reality.
The statewide efficiency gap is when you look at wasted votes across all districts of that state, it is not applicable to any single district. It is not correct to state that aoc was elected despite a state efficiency gap, because that gap is not applicable to the single district that she was elected in.
I’m not with the tankies, but I do think you have a misunderstanding of how gerrymandering works, so I wanted to try explaining it.
Part of gerrymandering is packing:
The committee packs as many voters of the party they want to discriminate against, in as few districts as possible. This creates a lot of wasted votes in those packed (now safe) districts, which will benefit the other party in other more contested districts. So yes, the gerrymandering benefits the republican party when looking at ALL districts, but democrats within the packed districts have very safe general elections.
AOC is elected in one of those safe packed districts, so in that way she “benefitted” from the gerrymandering. I’m not going to hold that against her though, she didn’t make the map and the fpp voting system isn’t her fault either.
This picture shows it best imo: in one of the disproportiate examples there’s a majority of blue voters, but thanks to 2 packed blue districts, there are more yellow representatives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#/media/File%3ADifferingApportionment.svg
Currently this post sits at 5 down votes, so it’s not just that some people are unable to learn from the past, it’s people who are unwilling to learn from the past.
If you’re presented with evidence that what you want to do, will not work and will have negative consequences and you still want it to go ahead, then I have to ask: Why?
Why insist on doing something again which has failed in the past and which will undoubtedly fail again in the future? What is this meant to accomplish?
Some people are unable to learn from the past. And the last time this happened isn’t even that long ago.
In 2012 then candidate president Hollande did a surprise announcement of a 75% tax on earners of 1m+. And it was such a surprise that even the fiscal expert on his team was surprised.
Before Hollande was even elected, rich people started responding by changing their domicile to outside France, often also actually (part time) emigrating.
After getting elected Hollande then tasked his government with implementing such a tax. And that whole lengthy process was a political disaster, ending with the implementation of a heavily watered down temporary tax.
The chronology: https://www.lesechos.fr/2015/01/chronologie-de-la-taxe-a-75-sur-les-tres-hauts-revenus-avant-disparition-197994
After implementation the tax failed to bring in the projected money, because well, people react to what they perceive as overtaxation + the overall economy wasn’t doing so great due to this and other policies of Hollande: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/france-s-75-percent-tax-rate-offers-lesson-revenue-estimating/
Half an article with a graph of the effect on wages, the rest is behind a paywall: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/06/28/quand-la-taxe-a-75-a-ete-supprimee-le-nombre-de-contribuables-declarant-plus-de-1-million-d-euros-par-an-a-augmente_5482849_3232.html
In 2017 Hollande was the most unpopular french president in history and he did not run for reelection. Not solely because of this tax, but it certainly didn’t help.
And that was 75%. So a 90% tax on the rich is just incredibly dumb populism.
I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.
If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.
I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.
USA aid is very important to Ukraine, but even without it they would continue fighting. Ukraine has been without USA material aid for months already in the past, when the republican party was blocking it. And as it turned out, Ukraine sustained higher casualties and had less offensive power than with USA aid, but they were never close to folding.
Ukrainians + their supporting neighbours are very motivated to not be occupied by Russia, so they’re not going to just give up if Putin’s stooges come to power in the USA.
I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.
And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.
About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.
Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.
Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.
Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.
I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D
And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…
This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
The quotes are there because it’s a common misconception that as soon you have any kind of 4g signal, you have access to a fast connection, which is not the case. So in many countries at some point they proclaim that “xx%” of the population now has access to “4g”, which will be technically true, but the actual % that has access to fast 4g will be substantially lower.
Or the policy where they separated children from their parents and then didn’t keep track of who was family of whom, so that it was very hard and sometimes even impossible to reunite the family again in the future. Pure evil.