This is a foundational restriction with how federation works and was discussed back during the exodus from reddit when they cut off their API. Votes can’t be federated without identity attached, or you’d end up with a single vote multiplied by however many instances federated it to yours.

This is the price of the fediverse being uncensorable. Everything you do on it is oublic, and norhing can be reliably deleted from the entire fediverse.

There was some efforts to obsfucate voting by one of the m/kbin lemmy alternatives, to have each account have an associated hidden account with a randomly generated name that would technically be the account used for voting, so only the admin of your own instance could connect between your public account identity and your voting identity, but that could also just be defeated by basic pattern identification.

As far as instance admins are concerned, this has been known from the start, and is completely outside of their control. That said, it could definitely use some more signposting for awareness. It’s shocking how often this entire discussion gets repeated by people who apparently never thought to look into how federation actually works.

If you think rural Georgia is such a shithole, why in the hell would it make sense to build a datacenter there? Just keep your shit out of their shit if you hate them so damn much.

So… in more readable English, they patented how you can send a Pokemon out to run around with you, and if you throw it directly at an enemy it can start a standard battle where you control your Pokemon, otherwise it automatically paths to the enemy for an autobattle.

That’s a little more specific than just summoning characters, but still absolutely bullshit to be able to patent. I’m sure there’s prior work that should disqualify this, they just couched it in such overly technical terms they can act like it’s novel.

Whatever you were going to do, don’t.

Arguably if the speed was increased it might get results, but I think it’d just be more likely that they’d burn some of their stupid amounts of money on more security and stuff like popemobile booths.

At the end of the day the US populace can’t provide meaningful resistance to the full might of our military industrial complex, if things were to ever get that far. And I don’t think that our currenr administration would have any issues misusing our military for protection of these assholes.

So we have to organize. If we truly want to overwhelm the military, we’d need to overwhelm them with literal piles of bodies.

If we want to attempt less bloodshed and lives lost, which I would hope most people would want, than we still need to organize and put up a strong front while turning their “allies on the ground” to our side. That means that yes, we need to start doing more concentrated effort to turn our asshole republican neighbors instead of just shunning them. Start sharing techniques and talking points for slowly turning folks, build up your tolerance so you can spend time in their presence slowly dropping the seeds because changing people’s minds takes time.

On the other end, start pulling normal people currently just voting Democrat into more action like showing up to city council votes, into community service and support organizations, and make sure that we’re broadcasting these public goods well and with good branding. Increase engagement across the board.

Do like the “best” Christian groups do and just do unimpeachable good loudly while quietly wearing the affiliation on your sleeve to draw people in, then turn them when they already see you as a good person doing good things.

None of these techniques are new, especially in the Christian church. We just need to fight the feelings of hopelessness, isolation, and the “well your idea of better isn’t my exact idea of better” purity test bullshit you see from people online who for example won’t be satisfied until the end of capitalism entirely… so that we present a united front as a force for general good.

You think the issues with your health insurance is Obamacare? Whatever brother we’re here to help. Eventually down the line we’ll start steering you right once we’ve built that relationship. You’re homeschooling your kids to avoid the woke, but need assistance in a subject you can’t teach them? We’re here to help. Eventually we’ll start steering you right.

It’s exhausting, time consuming work. But it does work for changing hearts and minds.

Organize. Lone vigilantes carrying out incredibly sporadic assassinations against poor target choices isn’t going to make things better.

The Nepalese didn’t overthrow their government by a couple of folks shooting a couple of folks spread out over months.

He cancelled one event? Holy shit the world is healed!

You aren’t wrong that these people are cowards.

But Luigi didn’t change health insurance. It pushed one bad move from a former United Healthcare exec back but didn’t stop it, and now there’s proposed kickbacks for AI companies whenever their AI denies medicare or medicaid coverage.

There is so damn much broken and I understand the sheer desperation, but lone vigilantes carrying out sporadic and infrequent assassinations with poor target choices are not going to cause long term positive change.

I significantly doubt killing Charlie Kirk of all people is going to effect change. At least, it’s not going to be positive change.

The right is emboldened greatly by every situation like this. Yes, they’ve just been looking for an excuse and would be horrible anyway, but this accelerates things by giving them more definitive cover.

They’re already making shit up about evidence of “trans and leftist stuff” carved into the bullets or casings (tabloids and the WSJ have run with this) when there’s no actual proof.

Turning Point USA will stumble for a bit while they find a new talking head capable of carrying their bullshit platform, but there’s a glut of right wing influencers (and people willing to play one for money) that will fill the gap.

Also, he was shot in front of his kids. They’re already fucked up enough having him as a dad without seeing him catch a bullet in front of them and die.

Look, I’ve got no tears to shed for this balloon headed ass. But this is not a victory. Even if you support the idea of using violence to achieve change, this was a piss poor target.

This company has illegally installed their cameras in more than one town, then tried to sell the local police force on them.

They have lawyers on staff that they use to coach local politicians on how to hold the votes to establish contracts with them in ways that aren’t technically illegal, but ensure that no community opposition has a way to have their voices heard.

You can find a lot of these sprts of stories by searching online. In local subreddits, ones dedicated to talking about flock, and local news.

Benn Jordan has a good 40 minute video giving an overview of these systems, how they work, what they track, and why they are a problem. He highlights some cases where families were held at gunpoint by police due to failures of these systems. He also experiments with defeating the AI that reads plates.

Louis Rossman is currently leading a campaign against their installation where he lives in Austin, Texas right now. Has a number of videos on it.

Overview before the Austin City Council vote: https://youtu.be/4RM09nKczVs

Call for people to show up at the Austin City Council session to discuss the potential contract with Flock, and showing how difficult it is to find this sort of stuff and be involved with your local government: https://youtu.be/g4vL1ERdZ9Y

Call to action 2: https://youtu.be/hDOmYqlwxD4

Austin City Council reschedules the vote (in a questionably illegal fashion) with less than 24 hours notice when they realize they kicked the hornet’s nest: https://youtu.be/iscDYp6dtl8

Minor followup during the wait for the revised time, at two of the three parks with 90% of reported car break ins these cameras are meant to deter: https://youtu.be/2QbtDWrlPpc

Look man, I get it. The world is heading to hell in a hand basket, and in a lot of ways accelerating towards it.

But there’s a difference between awareness and… I guess feeling the “doom” of all of it constantly. Existing with that weight constantly pushing down on you. At least part of that is a choice.

Letting the weight of all of this impact you constantly is not a virtue. Do what you can to push back the oncoming waves where you can. Don’t beat yourself up for not being able to hold back everything. And enjoy the joy and beauty where you can find them.

Living your life bent out of shape about things you can’t do anything about is just wasting what little time you have, and wasting time while things are comparatively better than they’re likely to be later.

And I get the need to speak out about all of it. But it doesn’t help. What helps is getting involved with stuff locally, being active in local politics (to a degree, the rot and shitty lying politicians exist on local scales too). Doing what you can. Trying to discard the worry and upset about what you can’t. Try to influence those close to you to do the same.

Slap a fur shader on it and ship it!

They can’t leave, they can’t opt-out.

If you’re going to be this pessimistic about simply existing as a human being, it’s worth noting that this is absolutely false. There are plenty of ways to opt-out permanently, and some of them are even peaceful.

Less darkly, there are communes and mutual aid communities and the like. Some even arguably self-sufficient.

Beyond that, if you truly feel existence is that fucking bleak, do you really think it helps to spread this shit to people who might otherwise be happily ignorant to it? Or are you content just making the collective experience of existence worse by putting this out into the world? Explicitly desiring to bring others down with you into the pit because you haven’t grown enough to find life worth living and enjoying anyway.

My wife and I had a daughter with her at 45 and myself at 31. We had to use IVF, and in the end, donor eggs. So it is possible, despite the age. You’re probably in a better situation biologically with him being the older one.

That said: don’t have a kid if you just think it might be nice.

Kids aren’t some sort of casual addition to the existing patterns of your life. They disrupt almost all of them. They are hard work, take up more time than anyone without could imagine. You can’t just put them to the side and deal with them later when it’s convenient for you. They need you when you’re sick, when you’re having a bad day, when you’re grieving the death of a loved one, when you haven’t had your coffee and are still waking up, when you’re just trying to get some sleep, when you’re hung over, when you’re trying to cook, when you’re trying to clean, when you’re trying to get five minutes to yourself to take a shit, when the last thing you want to do is deal with a kid.

They are 100% reliant on you for years. They need to be taught everything, and I mean everything. Basic stuff like “don’t bite people because you wouldn’t like being bit” isn’t intuitive. They will fight against you trying to get them to do something they enjoy. They will break things that are important to you. They will push boundaries intentionally and unintentionally.

And you need to handle all of your shit and all of their shit, and still have energy to handle them with kindness, near infinite patience, understanding, and with an eye for their learning and growth. You at least need to strive for this outcome, and hit it the overwhelming majority of the time. No one is perfect, but you have to strive to be for them, especially early on.

It’s exhausting. It is one of the most gratifying things in the world. Just don’t do it unless you’re 100% sure you want to sign yourself up for it.

But look, at the end of the day, there are people having kids older than you two, and grandparents having to take sole guardianship over kids as well. You can do this, if it’s something you both want.

Not much of a metal head, but the whole Nonagon Infinity album by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is great. Also their album PetroDragonic Apocalypse.

What got me even slightly into metal, and stays mainstays on my playlists, are the albums Black Hole Space Wizard Parts 1 and 2 by Howling Giant. Cannot reccomend those enough. Also, their album The Space Between Worlds is great too, but isn’t like one long story.

I think part of the issue is that after winning on the platform of “change”, Democrats veered hard into “establishment status quo”. They won so hard that most people don’t even recall the few bad parts of the Obama presidency at all (the point of my last comment, that it wasn’t all sunshine and roses), and then threw that lead in the trash.

They had a chance with Sanders, but threw away an absurd amount of public goodwill by very openly pushing him out of the running in favor of Clinton. That effectively left Trump as the only candidate carrying the “change” flag, and a lot of people were too dumb to see he was full of shit.

When Democrats had a chance again, they went with another “establishment safe” choice and only won with Biden due to an immense outcry against Trump. Then they lost again because they wouldn’t platform someone people were willing to get out to vote for.

If we get out of this shitshow, I’ll be very interested in what history says about the last few presidential races.

Check the communities on lemmy.sdf.org, there’s some for gopher and gemini.

You may not have been paying close attention. Obama was astoundingly better than Trump, but invasive spying on citizens was allpwed to remain legal under his watch, and he extended what was allowed. Drone striking questionable targets started under him as well. There’s more, but those two are the highlights usually brought up.

Fractal Prolapse

Guess what? They’re trying to find a way to ban trans folks from owning firearms.

St. Jude, the research hospital that made this discovery, is in the US.