BraveSirZaphod

If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it’s important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you’re currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we’re probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

That is not at all what right to work means.

I get the frustration, but if you’re going to criticize a thing, it’s a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

Who is ‘they’?

You’re acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who’ve focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.

How do you know that these parents haven’t also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?

Well, on the plus side, now you know to actually read contracts before you choose to sign them.

In the meantime, enjoy your iPhone.

If the cost of not voluntarily choosing to get myself into bad contracts is being a smug asshole, so be it.

If the phone costs $500, they simply increase your monthly bill by $500 / 24 months = $20 a month.

It’s a bit more complicated than this, and they’ll likely have some interest built in as well, but functionally, it’s no different than being given a loan to buy the phone and then paying the loan off over the two years. That’s why carriers often require a credit check before doing this.

I’ve personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don’t really have any regrets there. I’ve seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I’d never have known about otherwise.

I can’t imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.

So Verizon gave you a phone for no upfront cost, and they’re shitty for making you pay for it if you decide to dash away early?

Fascinating threshold for shitty behavior you have.

Meta will probably be pretty cautious and strict about what inbound content is allowed, since they have a global quagmire of laws and regulations to comply with and cannot just open up the firehose without significant legal risk. I’d imagine they’d only accept content from vetted instances that agree to some amount of common policy.

In which case you essentially return to the status quo right now, where the Fediverse is a small group of somewhat-ideological tech enthusiasts.

To compare forced labor camps where the alternative is being murdered to people making the active choice to volunteer to serve as moderators is a comparison so lacking in perspective that I’d expect to only find it on Reddit, but I guess Lemmy has managed to foster the same kind of behavior.

Are you going to compare Reddit killing the API to the Holocaust next?

This is just exposing that you don’t actually read the New York Times.

Here’s an article on the plight of Gazans in Rafah in the face of a potential Israeli invasion.

Here’s an overview on the gang situation in Haiti as the government is functionally collapsing.

And here’s an article discussing the increasingly common practice of restaurants charging significant cancellation fees.

Meanwhile, the NY Post has such great stories as:

• Kate Middleton officially hits rock bottom
• Rudy Giuliani’s ex engaged to Palm Beach energy exec after six months of dating in ‘whirlwind romance’ (Exclusive!)
• Unions want full control of schools and our kids — we can’t let Albany allow it
• Activists lobbying to ‘morally’ allow trans kids to change their bodies are only doing more harm

I’m gonna take a wild guess that most Lemmy people use Android, and the suggestion that someone might prefer an iPhone is triggering to someone whose sense of superiority comes from their choice of operating system for some reason.

If the people in charge have the ability to end democracy, how can democracy be claimed to exist in the first place? Democracy is supposed to be our capability as individual citizens to regulate the people in power, but if they can turn that switch on or off, we don’t actually have that capability except as they choose to allow us to.

The simple answer to your question is by the people taking a person who very overtly says that he has no desire to preserve democracy and in fact has already sought to overturn it once before and then proceeding to return that person to office in order to do just that.

We do have the ability to regulate the people in power by not voting for them in the first place. If we take the ability and use it to give power to someone who wants to do away with democracy, that’s pretty much on us.

Ultimately, any frustration with Biden - and I acknowledge that valid ones absolutely do exist - must be squared against the fact that we have to put a candidate up against Trump. Whether Biden is the person with the best odds against him is an objective and empirical one, though also one that’s hard to accurately study and answer. Disapproval polls are certainly one source of info, but they do not necessarily mean that any other potential alternative would do better. It is very possible for large amounts of people to disapprove of Biden but ultimately disapprove of Trump even more. We can’t actually personify “broadly generic and popular Democrat” into a real human, and even if we could, that’s basically Biden, so unless there exists an actual specific person who is both broadly popular and with more political clout than Biden who’s also interested in running, the practical choice is Biden against Trump, no matter how much ink people want to spill on the matter.

Edit: On a more pragmatic matter, I absolutely agree that telling progressives to shut up, stop complaining, and vote for Biden is not a particularly effective style of messaging.

Everybody said they’d cancel Netflix over it

What’s probably more likely is that the “everybody” that you heard from was an incredibly unrepresentative sample of people from a bubble of nerdy tech enthusiasts.

“just make them do X” carries an implication that the relevant party actually has the ability to do the thing.

It’s like taking the legal cases against Trump and simplifying them to “just put him in prison lol”

Gonna take it you didn’t read the article, because this literally is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Under the proposal, banks could continue to charge fees when a customer’s account falls below zero, but either at a price in line with the bank’s actual costs to administer the overdraft or at an established benchmark created by the new rule.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed potential fees of $3, $6, $7 or $14 and is seeking feedback from banks and the public on what would be appropriate. Current overdraft fees often push $30 or more, taking a significant bite out of low-income accounts.

You’re vastly overestimating the powers of the executive branch.

I’m speaking solely to the facts on the ground.

Regardless of anyone’s thoughts on the matter, Israel does hold all the guns here. Rights and privileges mean as much as the paper they’re printed on. In a perfect world, Israel and Palestine would exist side by side as peaceful partners, each with fully fledged institutions and militaries and all that jazz. But unless Israel is confident that a Palestinian military won’t have its destruction as its primary goal, it will not allow that to happen, no matter how much pontificating about rights and narratives and double standards anyone does. I’m not trying to talk about who’s “right”, whatever that even means. I’m talking about the actual situation and what will actually happen, regardless of anyone’s opinions on the matter.

When a country has such a consistent history, it’s rational to believe that they will continue annexing Palestinian lands

And an Israeli would say that Palestinians have a consistent history of attempting to murder Israeli civilians and so it is rational to never allow them to build up any military power, and thus the circus goes round. My point is that no amount of moral superiority means very much if you don’t have actual power to go along with it, and Palestinians simply do not. If the goal is actually to develop a real peace rather than avenge any sins of the past, both sides will have to give up on prior grievances and decide that they care more about the lives of their children than their own pride. It’s hard to imagine the situation being much worse than it already is (though I’m sure it’ll find a way)

it’s not impossible that Jordan, Egypt, and neighboring countries would gang up on Israel.

This has literally already happened. Israel beat them all in six days.