deal with illegals

You mean be the one putting them in cages? Running the concentration camps immigrant detention centers? Using their legal status as leverage for the modern equivalent of indentured servitude?

It turns out people aren’t very nice when they’re being abused.

champagne communists

So let’s stop speaking in euphemisms. When you say “illegals” that is explicitly genocidal language, little different than the usual ‘insects’, ‘vermin’, etc.

So why don’t we just kill them all? Just set up a militarized zone on the border and shoot anything that moves?

Same, you have a said a lot of words while mostly refusing to seriously engage with anything I’ve said. If I may though; some parting thoughts:

please stop wasting people’s time with obviously false arguments like “trump and harris are the same”. not only is it wrong, it’s painfully simplistic and reductive. no nuance, just black and white thinking so that you never have to think critically.

They are not the same, they are 2 sides to the same coin. I fail to see how that heads/tails isn’t the “black and white, no nuance” mindset.

I have noticed that you threw my “parroting” and “idealism” criticisms back at me

Yeah, because I was hoping it would be a moment for you to stop and do some self-reflection because I actually listened to what you had to say warts and all.

trump will send my trans ass to a camp

No he will send our asses to a prison the same ones black, Hispanic, indigenous, poor, marganalized etc. people are currently in. The same ones Harris is repeatedly saying she wants to expand and build more of, the same ones Biden has been building out for the last 4 years.

No. It was a shortcut I took to shortcircuit your argument that Biden is fascist. Not all dictators are fascists, but all fascists are dictators.

Then provide your definition of the term “fascist” because it clearly differs from the dictionary definition.

The U.S. government is set up in a way that makes it extremely resistant to change, both good and bad. This means that the Democrats, who at least make a token effort towards progress, face an uphill battle. Republicans, on the other hand, just want to stymie progress and roll back everything they can, and it’s always a lot easier to tear things down than build things up.

Many of the things that we see are not “stymied progress” or “roll back everything”. The modern US government today is in many ways very different than it was even 20 years ago. Republicans and Democrats have been building and modifying how the US government operates and they are making changes that directly change the form and function of government. The supreme Court and presidency did not have as much power as they do now. If you read the “Project 2025 agenda” it is not rolling things back, it is a plan for building a new thing.

If that is your argument then why don’t the Democrats simply roll back many of the extensions that have been made? If it’s easier to tear down, then the citizen’s united case should be easy to destroy? We could revert to 1960s federal tax rates? Repeal the homeland security act? That argument requires an extremely ahistorical understanding, but one you seem to share with the “make America great again” crowd.

Our system is inherently dysfunctional, with many of the advances in progress that we’ve made lately have been due to Supreme Court decisions, and, well, the Republicans seized control of it and are now using it to roll back those advances. In fact, now that they’re obviously in the bag for Trump, they’re making nonsensical and unconstitutional decisions that will hand Trump a lot of power that will make things a lot worse for all of us.

If only we could’ve elected a democratic president in between Trump’s first and second term…

your weak grasp on how the American government works

You have a good grasp on how the de jure government works, but seem to be rather ignorant (seemingly intentionally) of how the de facto government works. That ignorance is what I’m trying to highlight and why you keep ending up in disagreements. You can keep repeating what you read in your AP US history book but you should really be paying more attention to when it doesn’t match the present material conditions.

I do know that we need to do something actionable, and not throw our hands up and go “we’ve tried everything and we’re all out of ideas”. Your idealism clouds your mind to the point where you’re actively working against what you’re professing to believe

Funny, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Your idealism surrounding what the Democratic party is, and it’s purpose, has you actively working and arguing against your beliefs.

compare and contrast Harris’s proposed policy agenda and Trump’s Agenda 47/Project 2025 and tell me that they’re the same.

I don’t care what they say, I care what they do and they will both do the same thing.

if you somehow view even Trump and Romney as the same

They are not, but the messaging surrounding them at the time was. Similiarly going from the first black president to Jim Crow Joe is quite the difference on the Democratic side as well.

I don’t think that leftist organizing will face quite that amount of pushback.

Then you live under a rock.

the man sent goons in unmarked vans to harass, detain, and intimidate BLM protesters in Portland.

Using presidential powers created under Bush and expanded under Obama. It was a more brazen use of those powers than usual, but not too out of the ordinary if you’ve paid attention to events in Ferguson, standing rock, etc.

you can’t discern the painfully obvious difference between the mediocre status quo Harris and the absolutely fascist Donald Trump

The “mediocre status quo” is absolutely fascist.

You are engaging with a different comment thread, if you would like to engage with that thread and not be dismissive and condescending then go over there. (Lol, seriously why did you feel it necessary to post a screenshot of the og ‘Charlie Brown had hoes’ tweet?! 🤣)

Would you like to take a pass at answering the above rhetorical questions?

Then who has the power to fix anything?

To be clear your dividing line between “fascism” and not is “dictatorship”? You have no problem calling the USSR and PRC dictatorships (assuming due to the functionally 1 party systems).

A 2 party system where one gets to dictate what the other can/cannot do is a dictatorship is it not? Or else what do you mean by the Democrats can’t do anything because the “system is kinda rigged against them”? My argument is actually that “corporatism” is the 1 party dictatorship in the US which I believe is a stronger argument but also requires a deeper dive…

The word choice of “fascist” is deliberate so that you take the current state of things seriously because your belief that others disagree with you because they ‘just don’t understand how government works’ is a very unserious one.

I would be curious to know what the “effective difference” between, historically, Trump and Biden is because the functional difference has been negligible. I’m also old enough to recall the Obama vs Romney and old enough to recall they were also marketed as polar opposites. The only major difference between then and now is the faces and increased normalization.

We’ll still be able to organize under Harris, and that won’t be the case with a Trump regime.

Have you not been paying attention to the attempts at organizing under the current Biden administration?

We’re fighting against a century of antisocialist propaganda, and that’s going to take a long time to undo

As well as nationalistic propaganda which I am desperately trying to help you see past. The actual workings of the us government are significantly different than what was taught in your AP high school history class and I need you to have more intellectual curiosity and less parroting.

if you actually think Harris will purge trans people

Yes, the only difference is that Trump will actively encourage vigilantism while being largely ineffective whereas Harris will do the ‘I promise we are doing everything in our power to prevent these gross mischarges of justice!!! But we need to build more prisons in order to effectively combat attacks against our democracy.’ song and dance. See the “kids in cages”, Roe v Wade, war on the homeless, Iran escalation etc. comparing Trump Vs. Biden.

if you think that voting third party accomplishes anything at all

It’s at least not a vote for dictatorship. I agree it’s functionally useless but I’m hoping to help you understand how it’s not any less useless than a vote for Harris. My goal isn’t to convince you to vote third party, my goal is to help you understand other viewpoints instead of actively belittling those with different perspectives.

So the only ones who have the power to fix the system are Republicans? If that’s the case why isn’t the strategy then to vote Republican and change their hearts and minds instead?

Or if you legitimately believe the only way to accrue enough political power is to become indistinguishable from that which you’re trying to replace, does it matter if it gets replaced at all?

(Mostly rhetorical questions, I just strongly believe that you have an incorrect analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it and am hoping to provide other perspectives because you are not getting it…)

Chiming in because you seem to be glossing over the fact that kamala harris is promising a fascist dictatorship as well. Did you listen to her acceptance speech? She is also promising to purge us. What do you think that “most lethal military” is for?

The truly insane thing is that donald trump functions as a good enough boogeyman that it has normally reasonable, intelligent people like you on the verge of chanting “build that wall!” because you’d rather your genociders be polite and civil while they send you to your internment camps.

It takes an extremely privileged position to demand others “vote blue no matter who” when ‘the blues’ are engaged in actively purging them right now. You can be as much of an apologist as you want but if you insist on voting as a mechanism for change, the only change that can come from that is at least voting third party.

Removed by mod

Now look at labor participation rate.

Except that’s not even how most bus systems work because most of them are majority funded by taxes with fares originally meant to serve as a stopgap but then slowly converted into a profit engine (usually after privitization). Fares are a way to gatekeep a service which your taxes already pay for, which I would argue, is by itself a form of theft.

As an example check out the latest MTA report only 26% of funding comes from fares, and that ones a bit in the higher end from what I’ve seen (NYC public transit, picked as the example a it’s recently been in the news for issues with fare evasion)

All that aside, it’s also worth noting that fare increases are extremely unpopular and it’s not that easy to increase them without potential serious backlash (ie the mass protests in Chile a few years back that were in part set off by the fare hikes.)

You could’ve made an argument that the “fuck” part of “fascist fuck” was name calling and uncalled for… But your doubling down on the “fascist” part isn’t “be(e)-ing nice”, it is using a bully pulpit to push your own views and opinions.

This is a classic case of “tech journalism”… If you follow the sources the source of the data and it’s methodology uses the CBECI which the latest update lists a range of 75-384 TWh. (Note that the “2%” listed in the parent article is the global power consumption of the Bitcoin network compared to the US electrical network, aka a bad faith comparison). It explicitly states:

The upper-bound estimate corresponds to the absolute maximum power demand of the Bitcoin network. While useful for providing a quantifiable maximum, it is a purely hypothetical value that is non-viable for various reasons…

Which of course is the estimate that the journalists use for this peice.

There’s also a bunch of likely issues within the methodology as it’s estimate is largely based on the number of ASICs produced; the assumption that “mining nodes (‘miners’) are rational economic agents that only use profitable hardware.” and that any amount profit is sufficient to keep a mining operation ongoing; and many others. It actually does a pretty good job of disclosing a lot of the methodology flaws within the link above.

My goal is just to call out bad/lazy journalism and what I assume is oil/gas distractionary tactics. Electricity is ~38% of US energy consumption and even that maximum bound of 2% when comparing it to the global Bitcoin network is practically negligible when contextualized.

If you build a base on/near a bunch of ore nodes and dedicate it entirely to mining your pals will mine it for you and it respawns daily (passive ore generation ftw!!!)

So… Just like probation?

I can’t tell if sarcasm… If not why?

No, that’s the current legal precedent within the US.

Kelly v. Arriba Soft

The court opinion:

“The Court finds two of the four factors weigh in favor of fair use, and two weigh against it. The first and fourth factors (character of use and lack of market harm) weigh in favor of a fair use finding because of the established importance of search engines and the “transformative” nature of using reduced versions of images to organize and provide access to them. The second and third factors (creative nature of the work and amount or substantiality of copying) weigh against fair use.”

That “compression is transformative” principle has been pretty solidly enshrined as precedence at this point (IE Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.) however with no real guidelines as to what amount is required to be considered transformative

The major argument as to whether the sort of LLM training in the parent article still constitutes fair use or not depends on whether there exists “market harm” or the “substantiality of copying” is especially egregious (note that these are the two fronts that the NYT is taking.) There is precedence for copying of style not being fair use Dr. Seuss Enters., L.P. v. Penguin Books USA, Inc. which I suspect is why NYT is approaching it the way that they are…

Now, all that being said, my personal opinion is fuck the US legal system and fuck copyright. There is no solution to the core issues surrounding this topic that isn’t inherently contradictory and/or just a corporate power grab. However, the “techbro idiots” are “right” and you’re not, but it’s because they are idiots who are largely detached from any sort of material reality and see no problem with subjecting the rest of us to their insanity.

You should think a bit more about that “ladder” concept. In the same way that advocating for manumission doesn’t fix any of the issues with slavery a “path to the rights of the group above” doesn’t fix any of the issues with an apartheid state.

Unless you’re fine with a little genocide, any apartheid state is not a solution.

Fingers crossed this stuff galvanizes people to realize that voting is, at best, a temporary stopgap and they will need to be a bit more active in the whole political process. What happened to the riots that were promised if Roe vs. Wade was overturned? When the Democrats fall in lockstep with the far right extremists how will you hold them accountable?

Though this’d also likely lead to far right extremists ramping up their violence as they feel themselves losing power.

That is what overturning Roe vs. Wade is about. The parent article is a story of far right extremists ramping up their violence as American empire loses power. Is your plan to vote that away? It hasn’t worked for the last 40+ years.

It’s not, the underlying data is still just as biased. Taking a bunch of white people and saying they are “ethnically ambiguous” is just statistical blackface.