Primaries are not for down-the-ticket party voters. I didn't bother to vote in the primaries because I don't really care about the subtle shades of blue or red, I only care about are you any kind of blue or red. Each politician is either for what I want or against it. I will be showing up for November, that's when my vote will matter.
ICE is damn close to an organisation of brownshirts. If they fuck with the elections in November, that's an organised effort to use violence to overthrow our Constitutional order. That would be treason.
We're not at the point of treason. But we have leaders credibly threatening to commit it. (I'd say Stephen Miller has commited treason. As in try-him-and-hang-him treason.
And when it happens, you will advocate to bring them to court to judge on their actions a year after it happened? Would be to late then and nobody will effectively be sentenced.
Oh. that's the red line. OK. Good to know there is one.
Weird that it wasn't when Trump supporters were kidnapping people and making bomb threats prior to the election or when they stormed the Capitol to try to kill Pence and force the result.
Or even when ICE was being sent out into the streets and kidnapping people and shooting them dead in the street to begin with, and being sent out with National Guard troops to indimidate blue state voters.
Or when DOGE ransacked the government and exfiltrated Americans' data to Palantir, which will make interfering with the elections much easier.
Or when Trump refused to release the Epstein files. Which has nothing to do with election fraud but I feel like the sitting President being a serial rapist and pedophile defying the DOJ to protect himself and a network of pedophiles within the government should be a bigger deal than it is.
If they mess with elections again (because they already tried mind you) then Americans will do something. OK. Good to know.
Yeah I don’t live in the places where that was/is happening. A small benefit of rural small town living. My rep and senator are both blue and acting it. The red line moves up the easier it is to do something about it.
Pretty sure that's not the case. Interfering with the voting process won't happen in your town, or even in most towns, only in carefully selected areas. To, you know, make sure everything is in order and nothing illegal is going on. When it got the news, interference by ICE will be denied, it's all about law and order.
Will you then travel 200 miles to fight law enforcement?
People won't.
At the time of general election there will also be militia (still not in your town), they will be identified after the fact, dragged to court and pardoned by whatever puppet is in power then.
Afterwards, voter turnout will drop significantly and then magically go up again, with quite implausible results.
You will still go voting in your town without any trouble.
Good benchmarks are costly to build even for mid-large corporations. And once the benchmark is used on models you really can’t tell if the problems would be scrapped for training
I have a feeling everyone with understanding of the situation or even a vague malaise opening a news article and being bombarded with popups that intercept their attention knows why ad blockers are needed, and any perceived "discourse" to the contrary is one sided, from the ad agencies and media platforms that largely and subversively direct the narrative.
It's getting harder by the day to tell sentiment apart from narrative.
"You will be annoyed" and "you will be served malware" are two different classes of need. The first is enough to get me running Firefox/uBlock Origin on my own devices. The second is what got me to run it at work.
I do not recall ever hearing of an organized effort to ban ads. These days, good luck getting bipartisan agreement, especially with all the dark money in politics being legalized and normalized.
That said... The modern internet is built off many free services paid for by people who buy stuff from ads. It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Hosting costs money.
I could see a dystopia without ads where a government provides free hosting for citizens. That quickly becomes "thought police" when an authoritarian leading head of state comes in. If we pretend like that will not happen, I think we would have a much more wonderful internet.
> It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear.
Don't you see the problem with that statement? Ads are profitable, and we are paying for them, indirectly, through buying products and services. Adtech takes a chunk of that profit. Therefore, we pay more than we should!
So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit.
You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because there is no price you 'should' be paying. Further I'm not sure how you imagine this working? The retailer gets to decide prices or not? They get to decide if they advertise or not? The advertiser's have competition? The retailers? Retailers are presumably choosing to advertise because they think it's worth it, thus it is? You are free to choose to buy those products, that will feed into their decision whether and how to advertise.
I'm saying that all businesses aim to make money, so the fact that this one is doesn't make it morally wrong.
Further you've ascribed some price we 'should' be paying. There's no such thing, and you can't even say that prices would be lower without it. Tobacco companies haven't lowered prices in countries where advertising is banned.
>To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption
A. Surely the consumer would have bought something else? Although gambling advertising is popular...
B. You are now contradicting yourself. You made the claim that advertising was essentially an economic dead weight. Now you're saying it contributes to over consumption. If advertising only puts up prices, that means we can buy less things than we would be able to.
C. This is assuming only bad things are advertised.
In summary. You're trying to make a quasi economic argument against advertising that isn't really correct. I have my own issues with advertising, so I'm not particularly defending it. But that doesn't excuse making up an argument that doesn't make much sense.
The entire problem is that you're looking at it from an economic perspective. From within that framework your reasoning might make sense, but that doesn't mean that with a different starting point it is still valid.
> A + B
No, because you can save money. And when you buy things not on a whim you might actually buy something that has lasting value as opposed to all the tons of cheap fashion people buy.
> C. This is assuming only bad things are advertised.
For good things, go to the yellow pages. I'm not against advertising. Just the forms where it is shoved in my face randomly instead of brought up when I am actively looking for something and want to be informed about products, and of course the forms that have user tracking.
The point of ads is generally to tempt you to make purchases where the alternative is having nothing. So the comparison I think is more like grocery stores putting junk food right in the checkout to try and have you buy some on impulse?
I'm pushing back against the argument that the advertiser make money, ergo we are paying more than we 'should'.
That's how businesses work. The shop makes money when you buy things, so surely the same argument should apply. Except it doesn't, because that is an acceptable business, so the argument isn't really an argument.
I don't care. It was better before there were ads. It will be better after there are ads. Most actual useful content isn't monetised, and most monetised content is slop. There is a spectrum between the two endpoints, of course.
