georgie01

rob53 said:

The sad thing about members of Congress is that there's no requirement for having a functioning brain. If you're elected, you serve. 

Actually, I would say fundamentally that’s a good thing. The US government is supposed to be run by ‘the people’, ordinary people.

Though there’s still ignorance. The implication here is that Apple’s devices and ecosystem are essentially a public service by itself. To me this is ignorance because there are competitors with equal and unhindered access to the overall market (i.e. Samsung’s phone division isn’t stifled by Apple not allowing side-loading, and any Apple user can switch to a Samsung device without hinderance).

The issue with government now is most politicians live in a different world—remember Pelosi early in the lockdowns talking about having to stock up on her expensive boutique ice cream kept in her multi-thousand dollar freezers while the population are standing in food bank lines? Most politicians are disconnected from the lives of ‘the people’.

The tactic here is obvious:

‘Entity A’ expresses grave concerns about how ‘Entity B’ is doing something bad so that it will distract from the fact that ‘Entity A’ is doing exactly what they’re criticising ‘Entity B’ of doing.

The democrats have mastered this technique with their increasing desire for an authoritarian state. ‘In the public’s interest’, because the population are babies and need protection from the evil coronavirus and the evil Trump and the evil misinformation, and they want the population to suckle at the government’s teat. And the population is happy to submit out of fear.

seanj said:

Biggest issue with Facebook is that it is slow to react against people spreading anti-vaccine disinformation. This literally causes deaths due to people actually believing this nonsense.

It shouldn’t be difficult to preemptively spot these either. A significant proportion of anti-vaxx lies is generated by the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, Russia, working for Putin.

Why is Facebook’s responsibility to ‘stop’ vaccine misinformation by moderating the discourse of mass quantities of people?

Are you going to vote next to disallow vaccine misinformation from being texted? And then to disallow it from being spoken about in person in federal buildings? Etc. Etc.

People like you don’t really understand what you’re saying. Our founders knew that we can’t always tell who is doing good, even ourselves. That’s the entire reason for separation of powers and free speech, and it is absolutely worth dying for. Don’t be short sighted, or else you will be serving the next ‘benevolent’ dictator willingly so that you can feel safe from the scary world. 

Power must be diluted. Not given into the hands of a few ‘trustworthy’ people who more than likely are just good at lying. 

I very much like some elements of open source and I’ve used various open source projects and applications over the last 20+ years, but I’ve always seen the purist form of the ‘movement’ as silly.

Besides projects here and there, an open source world is even less practical and realistic than the message of communism—sounds great in theory, but in real life it will eventually ruin everything.

So I’m never gagging to praise anyone for open source efforts simply because they’re open source. If those open source efforts directly lead to definable and practical betterment then I’ll praise those aspects, but I’d praise those aspects regardless of whether they came from open source or not.

Or Apple could have looked at the bigger picture rather than their own growth. Helping the Chinese Communist Party is not in the world’s interest.

It always amazes me how complacent people in the US have become. We’ve had such tremendous success that we believe it’ll just keep being this good, and that we’ll always know who the bad people are because they have orange skin. That we can ignore the founders’ vision and ideals because we know so much better than they did even though we’ve had relatively zero hardships (in terms of tyrants and oppressive governments).

At least more people are waking up to the reality of the threat from China (not the Chinese people necessarily, but the CCP).