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Trump's Border Czar Says “No One’s Off the Table” When It Comes to Mass Deportations
  • A few things.

    1. Fear of the "other," with the "other" being people who don't look like they do (with them usually being insulated within their non ethnically diverse social groups) and the fact that they've repeatedly seen these "other" people associated with traits that are undesirable through media.
    2. False history, primarily a belief that stems from the prior point, with the assumption that white people are more "moral" or "civilized," and that the nation was better before things like racial integration, something that they've repeatedly been made to believe through, again, heavily biased media, and inaccurate historical portrayals of different cultures.
    3. Misdirected blame for negative factors in our society, primarily by right wing media and talking heads like Trump, that casts blame for issues specifically on certain racial groups. (i.e. it's not that we don't fund our welfare programs enough, it's that "they are taking welfare payments and being lazy!")
    4. "Efficiency," in the sense that they believe having less of these "freeloaders" will allow us to broadly spend more of our money/time/resources on what "matters" (white people) without understanding things like, y'know, the fact immigrants provide more in taxes than the average American overall since they don't receive the same amount of benefits back from things like our welfare system.
    5. Race-based nationalism that leads them to believe that they are the only people that are "supposed" to live here in America, or the only ones that "deserve" it. If you look at how they often classify immigration, or even black people simply moving in to traditionally white areas as an "invasion," you can see how they don't exactly view these people as members of their own nation, but rather, some outside group.
  • Trump says he plans to enact 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and add to existing tariffs on China on his first day in office
  • I think the issue is that there would simply be too many different possible buckets, that it wouldn't exactly be very helpful to you.

    It's easier to check and see that x% went to your federal taxes, than to see that 0.000001% went to this government program, and 0.0000126% went to this program, and...

  • It's not gay...
  • I've had some odd experiences with TSA.

    One agent did a full body X-Ray, then pulled my bag to the side and searched through it because I had the gall to opt-out of the facial recognition (where he then accidentally took five photos of other people before figuring out how to hit the "no" button) He yelled at me and my family, then made someone else take over his spot specifically so he could handle every step of my extra screening that he solely decided to do himself. A different agent saw and just came to have a chat with me though. Hard to believe they had to work together.

    Another time, 3 TSA agents had to give me a randomly assigned screening on my boarding pass, and they started gambling real money with each other on what my age was. (all of them were wrong)

  • DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly
  • Selling user data, selling ad placement, subscriptions for paid services, enterprise-grade support contracts, and the like.

    They could also take an approach similar to Google, branching back out from being just a browser into a suite of related tools that Chrome can then convince users to switch to (similar to how Chrome gets users to not just use Google search, but also services like Gmail too.)

  • DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly
  • This is an order to sell, not break up.

    Currently, it's still recommended actions to the court. Nothing has actually been finalized in terms of what they're going to actually end up trying to make Google do.

    Google must not remain in control of Chrome.

    While divestiture is likely, they could also spin-off, split-off, or carve-out, which carry completely different implications for Google, but are still an option if they are unable to convince the court to make Google do their original preferred choice.

    A split-off could prevent Google from retaining shares in the new company without sacrificing shares in Google itself, and a carve-out could still allow them to "sell" it, but via shares sold in an IPO instead of having to get any actual buyout from another corporation.

  • Owning a home has rarely been this much more expensive than renting
  • But having a mortgage does put you on the path to becoming one.

    Have a mortgage you pay for long enough, and you'll end up with ever decreasing payments, then no mortgage, and a house.

    Have rent you pay for long enough, and you'll have ever increasing payments, and never own a cent of the property when you quit.

  • Android will soon instantly log you in to your apps on new devices
  • They definitely will, since they don't even support any of Google's standard restore features by default.

    They use Seedvault instead, which doesn't have the capability to restore app logins. I have a feeling Seedvault may end up adding that as a feature in the future, though.

  • Hacker is said to have gained access to file with damaging testimony about Gaetz
  • Exactly.

    If the attacker stole the file with the intent to publish information against Gaetz in order to harm him, they'd need to redact anything that could allow for attacks against those testifying before releasing it.

  • US Senate to vote on Bernie Sanders-led effort to stop arms sales to Israel
  • Because funding the nation (Israel) actively genociding a population of innocent civilians is toooootally congruent with funding another nation (Ukraine) that's actively being genocided to try and help them resist their oppressors (Russia).

  • "Conservatives aren't racist"
  • Wanting to deport someone for the color of their skin is fundamentally racist, because immigration, broadly, is a victimless crime.

    What is "illegal" is not necessarily always immoral, and with the evidence we have available to us surrounding the effects of immigration, they create more jobs, spend more in the economy, produce more tax revenue, do less crime, and take less benefits.

    Deporting "illegals" harms the economy, breaks apart communities, and punishes people for a victimless crime, all because some people are afraid that their neighbor might have a little more pigment in their skin, or use different words sometimes.

  • Trump said to lift all military restrictions on Israel on 1st day in office according to reports
  • My wishful hope is that because some of the effects (i.e. prices after blanket tariffs) will be so demonstrably bad for their wellbeing, and will appear much quicker, rather than being delayed (i.e. inflation) that they will actually notice that their own side did something bad, and maybe the more moderate, single-issue voters (primarily those on the economy) will wise up and vote against them in 2028.

    If we even have an election in 2028, that is.

  • AI Expert Warns Crash Is Imminent As AI Improvements Hit Brick Wall
  • I’m excited for the future, but not as excited for the transition period.

    I have similar feelings.

    I discovered LLMs before the hype ever began (used GPT-2 well before ChatGPT even existed) and the same with image generation models barely before the hype really took off. (I was an early closed beta tester of DALL-E)

    And as my initial fascination grew, along with the interest of my peers, the hype began to take off, and suddenly, instead of being an interesting technology with some novel use cases, it became yet another technology for companies to show to investors (after slapping it in a product in a way no user would ever enjoy) to increase stock prices.

    Just as you mentioned with the dotcom bubble, I think this will definitely do a lot of good. LLMs have been great for asking specialized questions about things where I need a better explanation, or rewording/reformatting my notes, but I've never once felt the need to have my email client generate every email for me, as Google seems to think I'd want.

    If we can just get all the over-hyped corporate garbage out, and replace it with more common-sense development, maybe we'll actually see it being used in a way that's beneficial for us.

  • Gen Z Won’t Save Us
  • Sure, I agree, but enabling or tolerating assholes is different than, as the original poster mentioned, "like seeing the pain they cause." That's all I was disagreeing with. I still believe their beliefs and who they support are wrong, but I don't think most of them think they're causing pain, or like it if they do.

  • Gen Z Won’t Save Us
  • I understand that, but at the same time, I still don't think that's the majority of the voter base for Trump.

    I could be wrong here, but with things like the "hang mike pence" (done by a fraction of the, relatively to the nation, small Jan 6th rioters) to the "your body my choice" messaging (primarily from figureheads, and likely being repeated by many young men that are moreso hopping on a bandwagon than actually assessing the phrase's meaning and going "yeah, I actually do think raping women is okay") I don't see any evidence it's a widespread phenomenon affecting anywhere near the majority of the actual people in these groups, nor that (in the latter case) people are saying it with an understood intent to cause harm.

    If you have any statistics showing otherwise, I'd love to see them, but I haven't seen anything that demonstrably shows the majority of Trump's voters, either overall or within the smaller Gen Z cohort, are psychopathic individuals that enjoy causing pain.

  • Gen Z Won’t Save Us
  • and some of them certainly enjoy inflicting pain (especially those walking around puppeting rape threats)

    Oh, definitely. There are always going to be some people that enjoy causing pain, and I'm not ignorant of their existence. I just believe that, broadly speaking, the majority of people in most groups, young Gen Z men included, don't actually enjoy causing harm, or even necessarily believe they're causing harm in the first place.

    Right-wing grifters have a very easy time convincing people of arbitrary divides to cause conflict, and when young men are in a situation just like the rest of their female Gen Z peers, but don't see the same issues happening to those women because of their media bubble, to them, the world just looks like it's leaving them behind.

    To them, they don't see themselves as causing pain, only as trying to gain back what they've "lost."

    Essentially, while I do believe their beliefs are often wrong and misguided, I don't think that most of them believe they're even causing harm in the first place, let alone enjoy doing so.

  • Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group - A Database of Bread Clip Research

    www.horg.com Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group

    This site contains ongoing research in the classification of occlupanids.

    This site is less useful, more... strange.

    Anything you never wanted to know about bread bag clips can be found on HORG.

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    www.404media.co ‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine

    Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses.

    ‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine

    Sharing because I found this very interesting.

    The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a DIY design for a home lab you can set up to reproduce expensive medication for dirt cheap, producing medication like that used to cure Hepatitis C, along with software they developed that can be used to create chemical compounds out of common household materials.

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    Is investing in real estate immoral if you use it to buy your first home?

    I'm someone who believes landlording (and investing in property outside of just the one you live in) is immoral, because it makes it harder for other people to afford a home, and takes what should be a human right, and turns it into an investment.

    At the same time, It's highly unlikely that I'll ever be able to own a home without investing my money.

    And just investing in stocks means I won't have a diversified portfolio that could resist a financial crash as much as real estate can.

    If I were to invest fractionally in real estate, say, through REITs, would it not be as immoral as landlording if I were to later sell all my shares of the REIT in order to buy my own home?

    I personally think investing in general is usually immoral to some degree, since it relies on the exploitation of other's labour, but at the same time, it feels more like I'm buying back my own lost labour value, rather than solely exploiting others.

    I'm curious how any of you might see this as it applies to real estate, so feel free to discuss :)

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