Because it turns turns billions in public funds into billions in private profits.
The fact that those profits come at the expense of children's lives doesn't worry the oil and gas industries, so why would it worry weapons manufacturers?
Because it turns turns billions in public funds into billions in private profits.
The fact that those profits come at the expense of children's lives doesn't worry the oil and gas industries, so why would it worry weapons manufacturers?
But if we start punishing rich people for crimes, what's next? Punishing other rich people for their crimes?
In a shocking plot twist, Gamers have no sympathy for an abused and/or manipulated woman.
That's only when they're on duty. Off duty, they gravitate more towards punching their wives.
Apparently it's how you kill people that matters.
Gunning down innocent people (including children)? Unacceptable and genocide justifying.
Exploding innocent people (including children) from a distance using bombs manufactured and sold for profit? No problem, carry on, we won't even report it.
I guess the real crime was "not spending enough money" and not all the murder.
They didn't "review" subs when there was one using images of children as child pornography, without the subjects knowledge or consent.
They didn't "review" subs when mask-off, far-right extremists moved in and started trading slurs and writing murder fantasies.
They didn't "review" subs when reactionaries were spreading dangerous and clearly false medical misinformation in the middle of a pandemic.
But they'll review subs when those subs might be a threat to their revenue.
If we're throwing out Wikipedia links, here are the actual laws in Switzerland, many of which the pro-gun community in America staunchly oppose adopting, including the mandatory military service that would actually qualify gun owners to be part of a "well regulated militia".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Switzerland
It doesn't seep in, it's cultivated by far-right groups that intentionally target children and openly groom them for extremism.
You're already projecting compassion he doesn't have by assuming he'd wait for them to turn 18. If he thought it would work, he'd march 5 year olds in bomb vests over the border then have Elon announce that Ukraine kills children.
They were 100% aware they were hosting a "not technically child pornography but we're going to use it as child pornography" sub, but there's no subreddit degenerate enough that they'll ban it while it's profitable.
The most direct and effective strategy to inspire reform in their practices is to stop using of their platforms.
The whole "the free market could fix it" is just neoliberal bullshit. The most hated companies in the world continue to bring in record profits and its not because people prefer their chocolate is harvested by child slaves.
They're fully aware that it never works, but they just keep suggesting it over and over again, growing richer with successive failure, all the while blaming consumers for not preventing them doing sleazy, greedy things.
The actual most direct and effective strategy is regulations. That's why they hate them and why there are so many of them in politics.
That was always the point. This all started because he was trying to use his influence to shame Twitter into platforming the far-right and then accidentally ended up comitting to buy it.
Everything he has done since has either been to benefit far-right racists and reactionaries or try and mitigate the massive loss he is going to take with the purchase.
The year of Sandy Hook, the gun lobby increased their "donations" to Republicans from $8 million to $16 million per year, where it remains to this day.
Also, be wary of saying "assault weapons" as it's vague and used by the pro-gun crowd to undermine discussion -- semi-automatic guns are the weapon of choice for criminals, terrorists and domestic abusers and are not necessary for hunting nor hobby shooting.
It's why they're strictly controlled in most countries.
Although they were allegedly not treated according to laws, these animals suffered so future human trials can be conducted safely, not because of Musks ego.
What a noble sacrifice they were physically forced to make, locked away in cages and hidden from the public eye. /s.
While we don't know exactly what goes on in the minds of animals, we don't need some fucked up, transhumanist vanity project to see that animals have pain, fear, trauma and self-preservation responses that are comparable to ours.
It's no more ethical to torture animals in the name of bullshit luxury items then it is to torture children, but it's just as easy to hand wave away that cruelty by claiming "oh their emotions aren't as complex as ours and maybe all that screaming and crying and clawing at their face is just how they let other children know they're having a good time".
If you're casually convinced it's all worth it, you can fucking volunteer. Maybe there's valuable discoveries to be made by testing what happens when apologism and "allegedly" is forces sideways down someone's piss hole.
Pisses me off that CEOs never get fired for their bullshit and get to "retire" or "resign" like they didn't just make the most boneheaded decision that severely hurt the company.
They're rich people and it's not considered acceptable to hold rich people accountable in even the most trivial way.
And are these "progressives" in the room now? No, they're clearly not. Nobody is attacking him and he's not even being downvoted.
He wrote the wall of text because he has the self awareness to know that the comment he is writing is functionally identical to what a far-right reactionary "hiding their power level" would write.
Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.
Well, eventually.
When Steam was first released, the running joke was "steaming pile of shit". It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of "always online" games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.
It's not exactly unassailable now either. It's my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.
It's ahead of the rest but I think "good will, good prices and good features" might be an overly romantic take on "it's where all my games already are".
Did you just read the headline and get outraged without pausing for even a second to think "2.5 years for murder and mutilation can't be right, I better read the article"?
He's just repackaging the usual "hiring quotas" idiocy where they pretend that there's people in board rooms saying "well this man has every degree that Harvard offers but unfortunately we need to hire a woman so we're giving the job to this high school drop out that was visibly drunk in the interview".
The reality is that any job opening ends up with a pool of candidates, all of which are qualified for the job and it won't be any different here.
But they can't say the truth, so they say shit like this instead.
If he had a speck of integrity he'd be a completely different person.
Not to even mention the timing. It's all a little too convenient.
The "timing" is "while everybody is discussing the issues within LTT". That's a completely reasonable time for an ex-employee to contribute their views.
If you're presenting "how conversations work" as suspicious, I don't think that skepticism is healthy at all.
Even if we pandered to your every preference, I doubt it would satiate the greed of someone who'd rather see children punished than contribute fractions of a penny to prevent it.
So why make society worse if it won't even make you better?
It's not hard to imagine how someone within the conservative cesspit would end up with a worldview that's a complete mess.
It takes education that not everybody has access to to see through the junk science of neoliberalism, transphobia, climate denial and anti-vax. It takes context that not everybody is exposed to to realise that friends and family who have always been good to you, may not actually be good people.
I have a small amount of sympathy for him. His life and feelings were being used to push a far-right agenda that he's clearly not comfortable with, making him the latest target of abuse. He's got more in common with the LGBT community than he might want to admit.
But my sympathy dries up quickly. He holds views that are deeply damaging to society and didn't seem to have a problem when it was other people on the receiving end.
If he can learn from this and shake off his other shitty views, I'd have some respect for him but until then the enemy of my enemy isn't inherently my friend.
He has the kind of mental health problems that the far-right prey on.
As far as neoliberals are concerned, the only immoral act is standing in the way of profits.
So slice by slice, they pared a wage that would have once been enough to buy a family home into a wage that barely lasts to the next one.
They pocketed the difference, but it still wasn't enough.
So they moved the jobs overseas where they could pay people even less, happily working with brutal authoritarian regimes.
They pocketed the difference, but it still wasn't enough.
So they drew in "illegals", exploiting their vulnerability like an abusive partner so they could pay them below minimum wage.
They pocketed the difference, but it still wasn't enough.
So now they want to use children, so they can exploit people who are even more vulnerable by paying them even less money.
They'll pocket the difference and it still won't be enough.
So they'll start eyeing up slavery, astro-turfing for fascists so they can pay their workers in bread and water.
And with nothing left to take from them, it still won't be enough.
But the dirty secret is that this isn't cutting edge of exploitation, this is the middle of the road.
The trailblazers are already there and have been for a decade. Nestlé uses child slaves, distant and brown enough to be swept under the rug. Walmart and Wendy's use prison labor, paying less than a dollar an hour.
The claims of "the free market will solve it" were bullshit. For-profit media companies don't cover it because the unspoken rule is that you can push and shove for market share but you never, ever attack neoliberalism itself.
But even if we do hear of it, it won't do us any good. Ethically produced goods are a luxury that few people can afford because their first move was suppressing wages.
Need a kitchen knife? A good one that will last forever is $300 dollars you don't have. A slave made one that will be landfill in a year is $3 that you do have. Two years from now the ethical company will be buried beside it for refusing to play the game.
Regulations did (and still could) solve it, so they groomed their own children for politics, capturing both sides of the aisle and building an illusion of choice, letting us decide if we want to be slammed into a wall at 100mph in a red car or 98mph in a blue one.
But it's also the only way back out of this hole, so vote better I guess. Progressive politicians are the only solution and if you can't find one, as disgusting as they might have made the job, you might have to become one.
I haven't even gotten to ask what anti-drone measures they have.
The answer will be "none" because unless they're ex-military, their entire contribution to any militia is usually "gun".
Most of them wouldn't pass fitness requirements nor take orders. Few of them have other skills such as first aid, communication tech or drone piloting.
Even when contributing their gun, you can't assume they know how to safely and usefully handle a weapon, or that they're mentally fit for combat, because none of that is a requirement for buying a gun.
It's a hero fantasy they've literally never thought critically about, but it's supposed to make all the mass shootings worth it.
Palin is encouraging bad people to be worse and she almost certainly knows it.
They know exactly what they're doing.
They've been collecting metrics for months and plugging them into spreadsheets to figure out exactly how profitable this will be, just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.
They knew it would be incredibly unpopular. They knew it would likely kill the company one day.
But the spreadsheet doesn't care about any of that so neither do they. They sold off stocks then made the announcement.
When the changes go live, they'll squeeze everything they can out of successful projects, who will be left in a position of "losing 50% to Unity is better than losing 100% from pulling the game".
They'll stuff their pockets with us much of that money as they can and when the spreadsheet tells them to, they'll pull the plug and strip the company for parts.
It was the best thing for them and that was all that mattered.
"Liberty is when you never have to show basic tolerance towards things you haven't personally approved the existence of"
They welcome the evasion since they don't actually want their number of ad impressions going down. They were just letting you know that under no circumstances were you to show anyone what's behind the curtain.
They don't need to put incriminating "if Firefox" statements in their code -- the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.
Repeatedly debunked
Largely, the problem is that the far-right shows up.
No matter how tiny the power grab, they'll have someone there to grab it, often unopposed.
That spreadsheet is how they make all their decisions, including things like "should we platform dangerous misinformation during a pandemic?" or "how many domestic terrorists do we allow per reactionary sub?"
When actual morality is cast aside in order to maximise profits, issues like "disappointing users" don't stand a chance.
But the article has a pretty shallow definition of "won", meaning "they put an end to the protests". Given they have complete control over the platform, that was always going to be the most likely outcome.
The cost of putting down that protest is harder to see from the outside though.
Would they have "won" if they lost half their users in the process? Would they have "won" if the protest wiped millions off their value before their IPO? Have they "won" because they added another straw and the camel is still standing?
But ultimately, who cares what Gizmodos take is? They're a for-profit media company publishing media that looks out for their own interests, which in this case is "it's futile to try and hurt a company's profits", no different to any other neoliberal media empire.
There is still plenty of the misogynistic bullshit.
It's a great idea but unfortunately it has some significant flaws.
First, I imagine quite a lot of the Christianity in American politics is performative. The politicians could just hand wave away the passages and say "That's not what Jesus meant, he personally told me so".
The fundamentalists suckers would believe them and vote for them even harder and the ones that are drawn to religion for the excuse to abuse people won't care as long as their abusive itches get scratched.
The other problem is that if it did work, it's comes across as more than a little Christofascist.
The far-right and religious "in it for abuse" crowds would take to it like flies to dog shit and the bible has some horrific stuff in it that you'd definitely never want becoming law.
Better to just pry fundamentalists and neoliberals from power so all they can do is seethe while progressives pass these kinds of laws. With genuine end times just around the corner, time is a factor.
It's never justified.
It won't bring the babies back. It won't stop her killing more babies any better than prison will. It won't discourage other people from killing babies.
All it does is turn "murder is wrong" into "murder is wrong (unless I think you deserve it)"... and guess which of those most murderers believe?
You forgot "children being taught evolution", that was a pretty big one. Also birth control pills, which many of them are still fuming over.
You can also keep going back to when they were insisting radio would rot children's brains or even further back to when they opposed electrification.
But at least electricity can kill you. Modern reactionaries take entitled whining to a whole new level, growing physically violent because there's people out there who are unhappy with the genitals they were born with.
I guess we'll never understand the horror of having an extra checkbox in a character creator that they have to look at (but not click, since it's already what they want by default).
Anyway, fuck em. They can either accept that society is going to treat minorities with basic human decency or they can stare at the wall for 8 hours a day waiting for new far-right approved content. It's their live to piss away.
A lot of the anti-nuclear sentiment comes from the 80s when the concerns were a lot more valid (and likely before half the pro-nuclear people in this thread were born).
But blaming people on social media for blocking progress on it is a stretch. They're multi-billion dollar projects. Have any major governments or businesses actually proposed building more but then buckled to public pressure?
Anyway, I'm glad this conversation has made it to Lemmy because I've long suspected the conspicuous popularly and regularity of posts like this on Reddit was the work of a mining lobby that can't deny climate change anymore, but won't tolerate profits falling.
I guess if you lash out at absolutely everybody, eventually one of them will do something to deserve it.