A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I’m not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it’s been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.

Basically, especially right now it’s clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it’s really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.

Can you give any specific examples

The police believe that the motive behind this hacking was to reduce network-related costs, as torrent transfers can be costly for internet service providers. KT, however, claims that it was merely trying to manage traffic on its network to ensure a smooth user experience.

Sounds like they admit it but object to the negative tone lol

I think maybe rather than trying to gather biometric data, the choice of this form of authentication is related to the intimidation factor of implying they might be.

I can agree it’s a little bit racist and wrong to tell the story using that sort of slur, and honestly I kind of think likely the entire story is very racist due to being fake and made up to get a laugh at the expense of Indian people, but if it’s real it seems worse to be knowingly bringing harassment down on your coworkers by intentionally antagonizing people for a laugh when you’re supposed to be doing your job, I think that probably does more actual harm.

The data collected by ID.me has nothing to do with the processing of a FOIA request.”

So why collect it? If the data is irrelevant to the request it shouldn’t be asked for. What is the IRS even trying to say here?

Also I want to say I’ve had to use this system to do my taxes and it’s creepy as hell.

As long as they aren’t putting ridiculous terms on model usage like SD3 and the weights are provided I’m happy with it

This often happens to me on Windows with the Index so it might not even be a Linux specific issue

It’s good to be skeptical of institutions, just don’t go dismissing or accepting science based on ideological/class association, that’s how you get shit like Lysenkoism

It’s possible to absorb more or less from your food, for instance someone who is lactose intolerant is not going to gain as much weight from eating the same amount of cheese as someone who is not

cryptocurrency is applied cryptography, no reason you can’t like both.

more limited risk

Doubt

Well my point is that Satan is kind of awful too anyways. He is not exactly in opposition to the terrible things God is doing in the Bible and in fact eggs him on so it doesn’t make much sense to be pro-Satan if you are anti-God.

Story of Job is basically

Satan: bet that guy wouldn’t worship you anymore if you ruined his life

God: Totally would, watch me kill his whole family

They are both on team asshole

I want to do stuff

Total water absorption doesn’t matter that much because the significant thing is surface texture. If you’re going to dry them anyway you might as well instead wash them without directly pouring water on them.

This assumes you’re going to fry them. If you want raw mushrooms in a salad, it’s going to be a lot more noticeable.

Running mushrooms under water makes them soggy, that’s just reality. You can get them just as clean wiping them with a slightly damp paper towel or cloth without that happening.

“We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

"The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”

…

I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn’t stop to think or do any research.