We (Western world, the USA in particular) do it to MANY other countries, Russia would be depriving itself of a very effective solution if they did not do likewise.
The responsibility to protect ourselves against outside aggression was on us, who spends so much money on making billionaires in the Military Industrial Complex richer, yet neglected this most basic of intrusion methods: disinformation.
The thing is, much of the time they are aware, but they agree that “this is how it should be”. Hence the phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Like, Musk has more (money) b/c he deserves more, whereas Biden had more (votes) b/c… well, don’t think about that!:-P Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, especially when fueled from religious extremism that replaces critical thinking (which the Judeo-Christian Bible itself in numerous places commands to be done, but again don’t think about that either) with knowledge from authority.
But I was also trying to convey: even if the poor person absolutely knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is no possible way that they will ever in their lifetime or any alternative reality ever become rich - even then, they still would vote for the right of the wealthy to pay less taxes than they themselves do, both in relative and even in absolute terms.
They think the resulting system is more “fair” - like Bezos made Amazon, and that is “good”, right?, whereas what does poor little old me offer to society at large… and anyway surely they give a lot to charity and basically it’s better for me and mine to put all the money into their hands than to put it into mine own, bc they know better how it should be managed for the good of us all™.
Yeah, the people who flunked economics in college, or far more likely never went to college and never took an economics class in high school either, act to block literal PhD professors who have spent decades studying the thing, plus also were involved in making them in the first place, like Robert Reich the former United States Secretary of Labor under Clinton’s administration and who also served under Ford and Carter, founded the Economic Policy Institute, and teaches at Berkeley. But on the one hand you have people like him, while on the other you have the disgraced Bill O’Reilly, the disgraced Tucker Carlson, who was “just asking questions”, the disgraced Roger Ailes, and nowadays the likes of Joe Rogan. I forget, what degree does he have?
When brown-nosing, Don’t Look Up (the movie title). You might not like what you see.:-D
The show was started with a pair of guys - I forget if they were brothers but they were at least reputedly friends - who had a vision of what they wanted to do. They broke apart as the show was renewed after the first seasons though, hence that immediate drop in quality from this magical wonderland to “grrr, watch beast go smash into goo”.
From what I read, they told themselves they would have (at least) two rules: (1) never use CGI - only puppets - for the purity of what seeing them, and more importantly not seeing them, conveys; and (2) do not “sell out” the show merely for reasons of profit. Money is fine but don’t continue it unless there is a real story that wants to be told.
After the financial success of the first season, one of the co-creators left, and the second season was literally a different show, yet Netflix lied to us all and heavily pushed it as if it were the same as the first, for profits. It backfired, and revealed all the more how Shitflix just pushes forward purely for profits at the expense of offering much that is actually worth watching.
But if it got better after that, I might push through, one day. :-|
Really? I recalled reading an article about season 2, when I tried to look up wtf happened bc season 2 was just so shockingly bad, and incongruously so seeing at how great season 1 was. Their relationship must have just been strained but not broken, or the article could have been making shit up, or perhaps over time I’ve misremembered things. But I definitely recalled how one or more likely both of them wanted to use puppets (in season 1) but then had to make that mess of a CGI crap monster in season 2 - as you say for the sake of the deadline (aka profits over the integrity of the storytelling process, if they could have taken the time to have done it right).
Ah, Idiocracy - that shining beacon of hope, where somehow the USA survives what was clearly a nation-ending process whereby nobody else around the world got dumber (e.g. in Russa or China), only us, but humans somehow gave the people in power (corporations) something valuable enough to allow to continue existence and subsistence.
Over a hundred years ago (30 years before the term “science fiction” was coined) H.G. Wells Time Machine portrayed a similar slant on the populace of the future.
The reality is that with Climate Change and automation happening as they are, even those nightmare visions seem increasingly unlikely, as the planet cannot sustain us all and robots replace the need for a worker class of humans anyway. Instead we might end up more like Half-Life where populace decrease becomes more desirable.
Travelers (2016) is an excellent TV show to watch btw - too bad we are unlikely to develop time travel to save us all.
The “Golden Era” of sci-fi in the 30s - a delay from the roaring 20s perhaps? - has a lot of stuff along the general lines of “Englishman (never Englishwoman mind you), often from some minor noble heritage, through mysterious means unknown ends up in an area of savages, but through the power of their greater Intelligence, becomes stronger, faster, and outer-smartier than all of those that they outsmart b/c they are smart I tell you, so smart!”
Idiocracy - and Marching Morons I see, and Time Machine as well from 1895 - is thus very much in line with the norm, with the twist that the savage lands are the future from now; the implication being that humanity has not only “reached its peak over all those that came before”, but also “peaked, then declined, so that we - here, now - are the pinnacle of all civilization that ever was or ever will be”.:-P Which there is a large degree of truth to that - e.g. antibiotic resistance and the enshittification of the internet and the state of ThE eCoNoMy ThO all reveal that we now have less than we ourselves did 10-20 years ago, even if for some that refers more to potential than actual.
In March 2023, a recruiter for Arthur Grand Technologies posted a job advertisement looking for ‘US Born Citizens [white] who are local within 60 miles from Dallas, TX [Don’t share with candidates]’...
Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the “reduces” tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.
In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.
The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.
About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?
I should add that I respect some people’s decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn’t even record or reveal downvotes - that’s fine bc it’s their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).
Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough… then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.
Not “clearly” at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all…:-D).
Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won’t be able to continue to do so in that case.
Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren’t even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.
Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don’t know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?
The only thing “clear” here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.
If each request simply came from the same IP address then yeah, all the recipient has to do is block that one and the whole attack is over.
But what if piracy websites were trying to stream content directly from the internet archive rather than make a copy of it first, and messed up to cause this attack. So intentional to cause the traffic but unintentional to cause this amount of it. Or even if those websites first opened the door, and then someone tried to DDoS them, which propagated onwards to the internet archive, whether knowingly or otherwise.
Anyway, I was just postulating that it was theoretically possible… and odder things have and continue to happen all the time so who knows?:-P
I’ve been super fortunate with my previous purchases, so most definitely will keep that going for as long as I can to avoid spending more money. Ikr, so practical… - maybe I should consider taking a walk on the wild side! :-P
Why grocery bills feel so high, even though food inflation is technically low (www.axios.com)
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Pure light being (lemmy.world)
Putin loves the division (lemmy.world)
Exploration (mander.xyz)
A beginner's guide to nationalism (lemmy.world)
It's terrifying... (lemmy.world)
There was very little wind in the 80s/90s as a result (lemmy.world)
New Doomsday Clock just dropped (lemmy.world)
Tech company fined by DOJ over ‘whites only’ job posting (www.independent.co.uk)
In March 2023, a recruiter for Arthur Grand Technologies posted a job advertisement looking for ‘US Born Citizens [white] who are local within 60 miles from Dallas, TX [Don’t share with candidates]’...
The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack (bsky.app)
Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.
They almost convinced me with this one (lemmy.world)
No elaboration needed (lemmy.world)
Freud (mander.xyz)
When I grow up, I'm going to be an astronaut (mander.xyz)