SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago

So this means its open Trump hunting season for Biden, right? It is totally legal and cool for him to assassinate Trump, right??

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Of course we all know they intend for this argument to only apply to Trump.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

authorized the FBI to confiscate dozens of items from the raided homes

Oh you mean the same FBI that was ignoring an insurrection as it happened and has taken its sweet fucking time rounding up insurrectionists?

They don’t have time for that shit, but they’ve got time for this.

ACAB.

Anyone who thinks any police in the USA are on the side of good and democracy are naive fucking idiots.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago

I remember reading about this in an architectural monthly like 10 years ago or more:

It didn’t matter how “high-end” the building they were constructing was, they were always using the cheapest building materials available and long-term viability of the structure was a sincere afterthought.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago

It means they were privileged enough to “escape” as if the spectre of the worlds largest military in the hands of tyrannical fascists won’t affect other places, too.

Further, it’s a real “I got out, you just need to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” bullshit vibe that judges the weakest for being unable to escape.

The privileged will be happy to escape and leave the rest of us to suffer while preaching about how they saw it all coming and so should have we, as if we didn’t see it coming instead of simply not having the privilege to escape.

SnotFlickerman, 5 months ago

News articles like this speak loudly about who this kind of news is written for.

The article headline makes it sound “dangerous” and “bad” for the “lenders.” Billions on the line!

It’s never “billions on the line for consumers!”

Profits for corporations are always treated by news media as a given and anything interrupting them, including people’s real lives, are less important.

SnotFlickerman, 5 months ago

To the further shock of absolutely no one.

“We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing. No, you can’t see the evidence, only we’re allowed to see it.”

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I’m advocating that if we’re going to have copyright laws (or laws in general) that they’re applied consistently and not just siding with who has the most money.

When it’s small artists needing their copyright to be defended? They’re crushed, ignored, and lose their copyright.

Even when Sony was suing individuals for music piracy in the early 2000’s, artists had to Those lawsuits were ostensibly brought by Sony for the artists, because the artists were being stolen from. Interesting that none of that money made it to artists without the artists having to sue Sony.

Sony was also behind the rootkit disaster and has been sued many times for using unlicensed music in their films.

It is well documented that copyright owners copyright to make money, and because they have so much fucking money, it’s easy for them to just weather the lawsuits. (“If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes.”)

We literally brought US courtroom tactics to a foreign country and bought one of their judges to get The Pirate Bay case out the fucking door. It was corruption through and through.

We prosecute people who can’t afford to defend themselves, and we just let those who have tons of money do whatever the fuck they want.

The entire legal system is a joke of “who has the most money wins” and this is just one of many symptoms of it.

It certainly feels like the laws don’t matter. We’re willing to put down people just trying to share information, but people trying to profit off of it insanely, nah that’s fine.

I’m just asking for things to be applied evenly and realistically. Because right now corporations just make up their own fucking rules as they go along, stealing from the commons and claiming it was always theirs. While individuals just trying to share are treated like fucking villains.

Look at how they treat Meta versus how they treat Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub exists only to promote and improve science by giving people access to scientific data. The entire copyright world is trying to fucking destroy them, and take them offline. But Facebook pirating to make money? Totes fucking okay! If it’s selfish, it’s fine, if it’s selfless, sue the fuck out of them!

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

“To the extent a response is deemed required, Meta denies that its use of copyrighted works to train Llama required consent, credit, or compensation,” Meta writes.

The authors further stated that, as far as their books appear in the Books3 database, they are referred to as “infringed works”. This prompted Meta to respond with yet another denial. “Meta denies that it infringed Plaintiffs’ alleged copyrights,” the company writes.

When you compare the attitudes on this and compare them to how people treated The Pirate Bay, it becomes pretty fucking clear that we live in a society with an entirely different set of rules for established corporations.

The main reason they were able to prosecute TPB admins was the claim they were making money. Arguably, they made very little, but the copyright cabal tried to prove that they were making just oodles of money off of piracy.

Meta knew that these files were pirated. Everyone did. The page where you could download Books3 literally referenced Bibliotik, the private torrent tracker where they were all downloaded. Bibliotik also provides tools to strip DRM from ebooks, something that is a DMCA violation.

This dataset contains all of bibliotik in plain .txt form, aka 197,000 books processed in exactly the same way as did for bookcorpusopen (a.k.a. books1)

They knew full well the provenance of this data, and they didn’t give a flying fuck. They are making money off of what they’ve done with the data. How are we so willing to let Meta get away with this while we were literally willing to let US lawyers turn Swedish law upside-down to prosecute a bunch of fucking nerds with hardly any money? Probably because money.

Trump wasn’t wrong, when you’re famous enough, they let you do it.

Fuck this sick broken fucking system.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago

krausefx.com/…/announcing-inappbrowsercom-see-wha…

Kraus makes very clear that while Meta apps are also injecting javascript, that he only has evidence of TikTok doing “keylogging” type activities. Both Gizmodo and ProtonMail are wrong in that regard.

It’s like nobody has real media literacy anymore, even media organizations.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago

No wonder we have so many Bad Christians when the good ones are punished for their deeds.

This is what the gospel of Jesus meant that the life of a true Christian was the hardest.

The people who actually follow the gospel are generally vilified by the majority of Christians for making the rest of them look bad or something.

SnotFlickerman, 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Finding sources about Bush and Cheney fuckery from 2000-2008 is getting increasingly difficult. Their crimes are getting memory-holed.

EDIT: Specifically, does anyone else remember the specific act that Bush wanted to hit Quakers with terrorism charges over? I remember it being a bunch of Quakers in kayaks doing a blockade of a naval ship, preventing it from leaving port to go to Iraq. I can’t find a fucking word on it anymore, and I can barely even find sources on Bush wanting to hit Quakers with terrorism charges other than some broken links at the ACLU. Quakers, as a reminder, are the only religious group in the USA that are default conscientious objectors because violence is 100% antithetical to their religion. These are the kind of people they wanted to use “terrorism” charges against.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Shockingly, history shows us that when the people entrusted with upholding and enforcing the law themselves become lawless, you generally end up with society “taking matters into their own hands.”

Considering elected officials and unelected officials blatantly getting away with wrongdoing has been happening since before I was born and I am officially a fucking old person, the idea that this is just about Trump and not about a legal system that is so broken that it has turned into the early Legalism phase of Fascism just reeks of missing the point, the historical examples, and how long this has been happening.

We let war criminals off the hook less than twenty years ago, and that’s not even the half of it, going all the way back to Nixon, at the very least.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that the chance to fix things “within the system” flew the coop decades ago. Clarence Thomas and Gini Thomas are proof enough alone of that, let alone the three Justices who served on the legal team that helped get George W. Bush (cough War Criminal cough) get elected who all somehow ended up on the Supreme Court.

I will say, the parts that do have to do with Trump are pretty damning, though, too. Merrick Garland’s hand was practically forced to bring charges against Trump. It literally took the classified documents case and Trump being so belligerently stupid with classified information that they could no longer look the other way. Why did he wait so long? To “not look political?” All it did was make him look political. A guy hiding behind politics so he wouldn’t have to hold the political hot potato of indicting a former President. Ended up having to anyway because this guy in particular is so criminally insane.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago

When self-checkouts were first rolled out, my friends and I loved them.

As twenty-something introverted nerds, it helped a lot when buying “embarrassing” things like condoms.

You didn’t have to have the checkout person giving you the stink-eye because they’re ultra religious or something.

Now, twenty-some years on, they’ve been abused to the point that some places they’re all that’s ever open, Target and Walmart seem to be the biggest offenders there. When there’s a line down three different aisles because the self-checked is so backed up, it’s defeated the purpose of creating “efficiency.”

However, I’ve noticed that about a lot of business practices lately. We’ve rounded the bend and they’re still doing things that aren’t actually producing efficiency anymore. Like staffing with nothing but a skeleton crew, so anytime someone calls out sick, everything falls apart because you’re short a person. Personal opinion, but if one person missing work wrecks everything, that’s not an efficient way to schedule people.

It’s proof that these MBA business school chucklefucks are just repeating the shit they tell each other ad nauseum, because when it comes to real-world results the results are abysmal and inefficient.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Oh no, did your attempt to cut labor costs and make shoppers do more of the labor that checkers used to do end up increasing shrink?

Oh no, how awful for you that you aren’t able to properly afford more *checks notes… Stock Buybacks.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/_BIfNDiEmNQAAAAd/crying-wiping-tears-with-money.gif

This is how I imagine retailers complaining about this.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago

Remember when Reddit had a daily donation goal to cover “site maintenance costs?”

They already monetized their fucking users, they’ve had users straight handing them money for fucking years now (sometimes for basically nothing in return!), but that’s never enough for these god damned vampires.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago

“Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”

They literally can’t help themselves. They’ve gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn’t perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they’re fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren’t exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an “investment,” in the employee. Nevermind the employee can’t afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)

You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?

Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.

“You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more,” is what they are saying to themselves.

SnotFlickerman, 9 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/0538bb5d-4c2a-4a93-9e0a-b6516870ee69.png

Literally a Romney voter in 2012.

SnotFlickerman, 9 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Evidence it sent racists into a tailspin of racism:

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1. Assertion that he was not actually American citizen, born in Kenya.
2. Assertion that Michele Obama is actually trans and their daughters are adopted. Joan Rivers just made it worse. Treating black women as “masculine” has been a long and well-worn racist trope.
3. Tan suit. Don’t have to say much more about this one. Tons of people have worn tan suits without being hassled about it. I wonder why they hassled Obama specifically about it?
4. In early July 2010, the North Iowa Tea Party (NITP) posted a billboard showing a photo of Adolf Hitler with the heading “National Socialism”, one of Barack Obama with the heading “Democrat Socialism”, and one of Vladimir Lenin with the heading “Marxist Socialism”, all three marked with the word “change” and the statement “Radical leaders prey on the fearful and naive”.
5. Google is doing a pretty damn good job of throwing these ones down the memory hole, but there were a massive number of photoshops of Obama as a monkey. I also remember conservatives acting like it wasn’t a big deal because there had been a photoshop of George W. Bush as a monkey floating around since around 2004.

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This was when he was running for President and while he was President. Those are just examples off the top of my head.

I don’t even like Obama. He let war criminals off the hook and then legalized and codified the worst excesses of the War on Terror under Bush.

But it’s clear as hell that his mere existence made conservatives lose their fucking minds and they’ve never come back from it.

Also, at least two of these examples have full fucking wikipedia pages for the controversy alone. It sent conservatives into such a tailspin that we have to have encyclopedia entries about these events.

EDIT: Only somewhat related, but after 4 years of Obama, the racists were fucking furious at a film like Django Unchained. So many who were like “I like Quentin Tarantino, but I’m not watching some shit that is racist against white people!” Yeah, they only like Tarantino films filled with white people dropping the N-bomb repeatedly.

SnotFlickerman, 4 months ago

The company said this did not represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.

We’re not taking back what we said about how we wouldn’t kick Nazis off the platform… but we’re kicking Nazis off the platform.

What a fucking laugh. Fuck Substack.

SnotFlickerman, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

EDIT: RE: Valve and Darwinia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software#Finan…

Darwinia was eventually released in March 2005, but despite a strong opening weekend, sales soon slipped too low to sustain the company. Within six months, the developers were back on UK government benefits until November, when they contacted Valve “on a whim”[10] to try to set up a digital distribution deal on their Steam platform. Valve responded enthusiastically and, following a 14 December 2005 online launch, digital sales, which exposed the game to a new, global audience, kept the company going through to the release of their third game, DEFCON.

Valve didn’t reach out to Introversion to make demands, they actually saved the company. For a game basically no one had ever heard of and abysmal sales for were about to make the company go bankrupt. Valve didn’t pay for this exclusivity. It is however true that 18 years ago, they had an exclusive game.

This is a big difference compared to Epic paying 2K for exclusive access to Borderlands 3 so they can secure the profits of a huge franchise. Epic pays big companies big money to secure early profits to exclusive titles. Valve may have technically had an exclusive game, but Epic’s business model is literally paying for exclusive access to the biggest games they can get, so they can get the biggest cut of the sales at the highest price point, before discounts.

Only one of these two companies is trying to “Pay 2 Win.”

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There really isn’t. This is personal opinion.

Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.

No private company is really “good.”

But the argument with Epic is things like:

• They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
• In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
• People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
• During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.

Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.

One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.

Of course, I also encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Valve offers a better product, better user experience, and treats their employees with more respect, but it doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t made their own share of anti-consumer decisions.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It’s funny, but it’s also dark as living fuck.

It shows right out in the open exactly what will happen with all this nonsense about gendered bathrooms.

These people cannot tell someones gender simply based on outward looks alone.

This will hurt countless cisgender women who will be abused for not being “feminine enough” to be in a “women’s bathroom.” There will be demands to show genitals, and fights, and so on. It’s fucking horrible.

Trans-men will mostly continue to get ignored in bathrooms, but some will not and will be just as abused, if not moreso by violent cismen ganging up on them.

Finally, the vast majority of toilets in the USA are already gender neutral. The bathroom in your home or apartment? Gender neutral. The bathroom at your crappy job at a Domino’s in a strip mall? One gender neutral bathroom.

The only places that have large, separated bathrooms are giant buildings which house government or corporations. Most buildings just have one or two gender neutral bathrooms for everyone to share, and somehow, it’s never been a problem. Until now.

EDIT: I realized I left out transwomen because in my mind it’s a given that they’ll be the receiving end of the majority of the abuse from all this. I just want to make sure no one thinks I care more about how this will affect cisgender women. Nope, this issue affects transwomen first and most of all, but this example shows how it will hurt ciswomen as well.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

No third place and not enough room to hang out in our studio apartments that we share with our domestic partners/roommates.

It matters because its ruining the social fabric of the country and making people more polarized.

Saved you a click.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

They have wanted a recession so they can shitcan half the country to make workers “respect” the system again, and it has been so blatantly transparent ever since COVID started.

They know people got a taste of a world where things could be different, and they fucking hate it. They want to grind us under their boots and make us grovel like they did 2008-2010.

That’s why you see articles like this every few months since 2020.

EDIT: Also, chunks of the stock market have been ridiculously overvalued (cough Tesla cough) and have been for a long ass time. The stock market has been a proverbial casino disconnected from reality for a while. The idea that a market correction isn’t coming eventually is foolish, of course this house of cards will collapse at some point. However, it seems like they’ve perfected kicking the proverbial can at the moment.