I have read that this is actually a bad idea because the post office people know which addresses are vacant and know that it’s likely an illegal package because lots of people have that idea.

clever to put it somewhere it can’t be cropped out

What a helpful cow

It’s more like a separate consideration than a part of the same spectrum, because these are just priorities that happen to contradict each other. In theory you could be both pro-choice and pro-life and try to optimize for both, making some degree of legal allowances for people to choose abortions but propagandizing against actually doing so and doing things like promoting sex education, the use of birth control, and poverty reduction that would decrease the rate of abortions. Or have a Zardoz esque ideology and be against both.

Of course most of the time pro-life seems to just be a euphemism, since people who are against the right to an abortion tend to not otherwise be concerned with things that make people more likely to want to choose abortions. They mostly just don’t want women to have an out for what they see as the rightful consequences of having sex.

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Michigan’s bill would charge internet service providers with detecting and blocking VPN use, as well as banning the sale of VPNs in the state.

Sounds like they are basically planning to tell ISPs to just figure it out, and suing VPN companies that don’t block people from their state.

Yeah, I think we should probably allow the technology that will prevent people being born with these diseases first, and then worry about how we’re going to deal with the other stuff. This technology isn’t going to be possible to hold back indefinitely anyway.

I think that kind of thing is more cultural than anything. Probably she doesn’t care very much whether it’s actually true or not, and feels she’d be losing face by being anything but confident about it.

Imo it’s more important that people learn that being wrong can be empowering, and how to have conversations where someone is wrong but not being put down for it, than just learning that they can be wrong.

How are being smart and being intelligent not synonyms?

Relevant CGP Grey video

Basically it is a structural problem that ensures corrupt behavior. A dictator has to direct resources to the people most relevant to their continued power to buy their loyalty, and away from everyone else whose support is irrelevant. Not being a scumbag in that position could get you killed.

This was what should have been a private conversation though, not public.

Well why not just have recording off by default, and let people decide for themselves whether to break the law?

If it’s your phone it makes sense you should be able to record calls on it.

I’ve blocked a bunch of people, who may be replying to me with harassing comments, but that isn’t influencing what I do. It might influence the overall conversation, and that could be a problem, but I think the way that problem is dealt with should be public, because the problem is public, it’s not something that’s exclusively my problem. I don’t think I should have the authority to act to police any arbitrary community like that, especially without anyone being able to know that I’m doing it.

I do think it would be less bad if it only prevented direct comment replies, and not replies to top level posts or replies to other comments by other people further down the thread.

I don’t understand what you mean by it still occurs in the other direction though. Nobody can prevent people from commenting except moderators and admins, which is how it should be. Mute style blocking isn’t moderation because it doesn’t affect anyone’s ability to comment, it’s effectively the same as a client level filter.

Because the alternative is easily abused, see all the issues Reddit has with this type of block mechanism.

The core of the problem as I see it is, this gives every user limited moderation powers in every sub, the extent of that power is determined mainly just by how much they post and comment (blocked users can’t comment under their posts, and can’t reply to any comment in a chain started by the blocker), and the extent to which it is happening is invisible to most users. People advocating for this seem to assume it will be used mostly defensively, to prevent harassment, but the feature has way more utility offensively, and it’s totally unaccountable. If there is something someone is saying (not even necessarily to you) that you don’t like for whatever reason, whether or not it’s against the rules and regardless of what anyone else thinks about it, you can partially silence them by blocking and then working to get engagement in the same spaces they comment in. Think about if this was implemented on Lemmy, lots of communities have only one or a few people making all the posts, if one or more of them blocked you that’s almost the same as a ban. It doesn’t make it better that the people making those posts are often also moderators, because it would be a way to pseudo ban people without it showing up in the mod log.

Moderation of online discussion spaces should be transparent and accountable, it shouldn’t be a covert arms race between users.

Shit, it’s broken again, where’s the reset button?

Why can’t a judge say “I denounce the Supreme courts authority for their failing to uphold the spirit of the law and now I shall follow this other courts rulings”?

The constitution clearly says they can’t, so if their notion of the law is claiming to be based in the constitution such a declaration would be obviously bullshit. If their notion of the law is not based on the constitution, that’s an attempt to dissolve our government.

So what’s with everyone trying to lossify Saddam Husein all of a sudden?

Don’t count out gambling. NFTs are a gambling game, where you win if you aren’t the last one holding the bag. There’s no hard guarantee that the traffic for a given NFT is real or not, but if its origin is something scarce and noteworthy (like being minted by the subject of a popular meme) then that can be a Schelling point for gamblers to converge on and reasonably conclude that other gamblers will be trying for the same NFT.

At some point the game ends when sources of new players are exhausted and everyone stops playing, but at one point I believe people were playing. Of course at the time people tried to describe why someone might buy a NFT as being some vague other buzzword laden reason, probably because the game ends sooner if everyone knows everyone else is also just hoping to flip it for a profit.