Ahh, very true. Luckily I’m in America and everything is great here…wait…FUCK
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One piece of good news Marc Elias law firm won a case in the Supreme Court and mail in voting has been saved for now (we know someone is going to try again).
5-4 though! 5-4. That is horrifying. Such a fundamental right for so many people (not to mention voting and election having always been a state power) and it was so close to being taken away. It shouldn’t have even been taken to courts. A state shouldn’t be being attacked for how it conducts its voting procedures. Some states have grace periods, others don’t. I’m glad this didn’t pass but they’ll just keep trying to lay on more and more restrictions or have the federal government intervene for voting “protections”. If Republicans really think (and they probably do) mail in voting restrictions would mainly affect younger and minority voters then woof. That’s some class A disenfranchisement going on. I read history books in elementary school about this. And God even after the administration change this Supreme Court will remain 
.
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I find it hilarious that Europe is far, far more atheist than the USA, but we generally have better safety nets, universal provisions for healthcare and lower rates of violence and murder.
It’s almost like the right wing church-going lot in the USA skipped the parts about “love thy neighbour” and instead jumped straight to the shyster’s “prosperity gospel” where the rich have more money because they’re good people and it’s fine to hate others and only look after you and yours
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Some good news, birth right citizenship is still a thing in the US, but like with mail in voting someone is likely to try again.
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Hilarious to you. Just sad to me. I think the USA is the best country in the world for all its diversity and it baffles me how much we let the elite manipulate us into fighting each other over nonsense just so they can line their pockets while making things worse for everyone and taking away more and more power to do anything about it. It’s gotten sickening in America and all this while we approach the big 250th.
You’re honestly probably not off about the church though. A lot of American history came from seeking religious freedom during the colonialism days but groups like the puritians quickly turned their religion on one another. The Witch hunts were awful because people were just making up BS and persecuting each other to steal their land. People used religion to justify slavery and manifest destiny (to kick other humans off of the land they’ve cultivated for ages). “F*** you I get mine.” is a legit disease in America that’s plagued us for generations.
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That was one of the big ones. Can we go ahead and declare all of Trump’s executive orders illegal now? The USA doesn’t have an official language. Give me that at least. It was baffling to me how Trump got away with so many blantly illegal executive orders at the start. Executive orders aren’t laws. They can’t replace laws or even change how a law is interpreted. They’re legally basically nothing. Just the president saying they want XYZ. They’re more like an initiative, bus shouldn’t be used to the extent Trump has been.
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They are, but unfortunately all 9 justices vaguely (this is me hoping the 3 picked by democrats are just saying sure to move this along before a decision needs to be made) agree with his discrimination on trans people.
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Yep I mean hilarious in a purely sarcastic way - I’m British, sarcasm is practically our default.
The USA at times has seemed like it genuinely wanted to make things better - the New Deal, the Civil Rights era etc - but yep too often it seems it chose the path that hurts others in service of making the rich richer
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Most people genuinely want things to get better, but it unfortunately only takes the few and they’re very good at manipulating people into fighting each other. It goes as far back as the colonial days. Generational slavery has its origins in the Virginia colonial leadership (wealthy plantation owners) being scared of the lower class, so they split them up. As recent as post WW2 this has continued. Real-estate companies exploited people’s fears of different groups (races) to Jack up prices in the white flight and rise of suburbs. Just generations of basic human flaws being exploited over and over again for short term gain. It’s painful because I learned this in school (as early as middle school) and I have to watch it keep happening.
I’m personally scared because a country can’t be built of manipulating anger and pushing ignorance like this. Something like the Capitol Hill riots when the candidate someone likes doesn’t win should never happen. I’m very concerned for when the pot boils over and we all get burnt all so the richer could get richer.
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Yep it’s the whole higher order thinking vs base animal instincts, which populists are very willing to exploit.
Basically, our lower order emotions, like fear, anger and the “fight or flight” instinct developed first in order to keep humans alive in the dangers of the wilds, while empathy and other higher order emotions developed later to allow us to develop civilisation and live together, getting along.
Unfortunately, it means lower order emotions can override the more reasoned and practical higher order ones - hence why fear works so well as a campaign tactic as if you’re scared for yourself and your family it’ll override any compassion you may have.
It requires education or strong empathy to spot such manipulation and ignore it, which is why populists often attack centres of learning.
It’s horrifying as we’ve seen it play out in the UK for the last decade too, highlighting any crimes by non-white people while ignoring those that don’t fit their narrative (or blaming it on the government “leaving the white working class behind”).
Then when riots break out and are put down by police, the populists claim innocence in causing them but say it shows “two tier” policing, where somehow instead of minorities being over represented in the criminal justice system (a fact) due to inequality and structural bias, actually the opposite is supposedly true (as facts don’t matter anymore, it’s all based on how people “feel”).
All this just to make people frightened and angry so they vote for people who know it’s all bullshit but don’t care, they’ll just do anything for power.
It does make it frustrating being on the left or centre as we’re generally supposed to “go high” and play fair, but when the other side is stacking the deck it feels like we need to do whatever it takes (legally) to gain power too
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Following the supreme courts decision on mail in voting, R-CA Rep Darrell Issa dropped their lawsuit against California.
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Some talk on how the current AI trend is bring back people that they tried to replace with AI, some talk on the economy of it and other talks on things that are connected.
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Windows Central article covering Ed Zitron’s comments on Microsoft’s(everyones) AI business.
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I agree with much of it (I do think it’ll become more of a corporate add on subscription like it already is, while consumer usage will mostly be limited to search and assistants) and that it’ll have a crash then many years later we may finally reach AGI - possibly a long, long way away - but probably not based on today’s stuff at all.
I do have one contention point though - I’m unsure if he just means AI data centres aren’t being built by Microsoft, but I know of two huge expansions to their South and West UK data centres due to finish in the next few months plus a likely new North one probably coming online next year or so.
But yes that does appear to be much more related to Azure demand, as there’s just not enough capacity for it in the UK at the moment
AI Data centers a popping up in different areas across the US, but most of them are just empty lots or buildings promising a data center(also people have been pushing back against them).
So they’re being build at a much slower pace than the AI companies want as the demand for the compute just isn’t there.
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Yep in the UK we thankfully don’t have as many, and the priority seems to be corporate cloud usage rather than AI, which at least has some benefit (by moving stuff from older, more power hungry servers in every company’s buildings to a centralised efficient data centre) unlike AI which just destroys the planet for little value.
And I say that as someone who did much prefer our in-house servers lol, it probably wasn’t as efficient
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Crazy to me that this needs to be said.
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I feel like this fits better here. I started reading for the Xbox part, but everyone in this task force to asses new policies regarding AI taking jobs all have deep ties to AI companies. Like what? This feels like a major conflict of interest.
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It’s one of the few good things the current FTC has done.
Edit: just wanted to add everything else it has done or tried to do is just bad.