I just wish Mr. Buttigieg wasn't confined to such a low-stakes role in the administration. It's great that he gets the occasional moments like this, but he's not exactly being set up for a run at the Presidency in 2028.

I believe the last two listed ('Thou shalt not covet...') are considered to be the same commandment, although they appear as two separate verses in the Bible.

Odd that they put "Toyota-owned automaker" in the headline instead of Daihatsu. Or something like, :"Daihatsu, owned by Toyota".

Whether the problems go "up the chain" to the parent company is TBD, I guess.

That headline is... incredibly inaccurate. They've pledged to each other to avoid porn, and have software that throws an alarm (visible to each other) if they view it.

"Monitor Each Other's Porn Intake" implies that they are seeking out porn and sharing it with each other, which is not what is happening here.

I think there are plenty of legitimate concerns here, but father and son sharing porn links is not one of them.

Also, I imagine young Mr. Johnson has at least 1 Android tablet or other burner device that is unknown to Dad.

This is going to seem minor, but it was a shock to me.

I grew up in Texas. I lived in very metropolitan places -- near downtown Dallas, and near the Houston medical center. So I never thought that I was culturally isolated or anything.

When I finally left the state for a job, I went to Los Angeles, circa 2007. In my first week there, a lady pulled up next to me on the street and asked me where the courthouse was. I had a vague idea, but explained that I was new to the area so my advice should be taken with a grain of salt. People familiar with the LAX area will know that the nearby courthouse is a tall building with something resembling a crown or halo, I pointed her toward that.

It wasn't until a couple of minutes later I realized what seemed strange about the encounter. The lady was of African-American descent.

I thought back on 3 decades of living in Texas, and I cannot once remember being approached by a black stranger and asked a question. Not one single time. Houston has a large homeless population, I had many encounters with panhandlers. I couldn't remember one single black person.

In fact, as I thought about it, a HUGE difference between Texas and California was that black folks on the street behaved very differently. In California, they looked you in the eye, they said "hello", etc. In Texas -- at least, up until I left in 2007 -- black folks were strictly "heads down, eyes on your own business". Even thinking back on some black friends and co-workers, I realized that they behaved very differently in public than my white friends did.

The whole thing made me sad for my black friends back in Texas. And now that we know how police treat black folks, I guess I can see why they behaved the way they did.

Where did he get a squirrel-sized spider costume?

Did Squirrel Girl make it for him? DID SHE ALREADY HAVE ONE JUST IN CASE?

Did we need Fauci to tell us that? Trump went on record to the press, several times, claiming that COVID would fade away in a few months. He was wrong, of course, and winter 2020-21 was one of the deadliest periods.

I was ready to dismiss this as hyperbole -- after all, there are INNUMERABLE ways that US equipment could make its way to Russian factories.

Then I read the words of the chairman of their board:

Hans Naumann (through interpreter):

I think that Trump, unlike many European politicians, has recognized that the white population must stand together. Americans, Europeans, Australians, they're roughly 1.5 billion people, but Asians come to six billion.

In my opinion, the world's demographics compel the two nuclear powers, that's America and Russia, to stand together.

It turns out they shipped equipment directly from their German facilities to Russian military companies, potentially in violation of the 2014 sanctions.

They're referring to the "halo effect" of Apple accepting the claim of antisemitism.

Truthful or not, Apple is sort of an "influencer" when it comes to ethics, with one of the few openly gay CEOs in big tech and a history of doing, or at least claiming to do, the right thing when any negative labor practices are revealed.

I think there is a sense that if Apple is willing to walk away, it's a signal to other companies that the problem is real.

long hours for lower pay. They can’t keep American workers b/c they just say no and work for the competition

Whenever a company says "lack of skilled workers" or "labor shortage", just assume that it's corporate newspeak for "we are entirely unwilling to pay what the market demands for those skills".

many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice

Not so much a dog whistle, as a dog fog horn.

It's exactly the same as their regular accents except every third sentence is, "Jesus Tapdancing Christ it is fucking cold in here, somebody turn up the heat!"

Some of the abuse was well-known at the time. The mistreatment of women and children in Church-run Irish schools and workhouses throughout the 19th and 20th centuries was increasingly well documented by the 1990s. Mass graves were discovered in the 1970s, although in the 1990s the church was still publicly denying any responsibility. Hence Ms. O'Connor's protest.

I don't know what Ms. O'Connor knew about the ongoing abuse of children by priests and the church coverup efforts. But I'm sure she wasn't surprised, as she was well-acquainted with the Church's perfidy.

"Decline in overall quality" is a subjective metric, though. Does defederation reduce participation? Certainly.

But ya know, there's a reason people defederate certain instances -- usually because those instances have attracted people who are disruptive to discussion on other instances.

It's really been no problem at all for me to keep a foot in lemmy.world, kbin.social, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org. And a few other instances that appeal to more niche audiences.

And if I really feel like discussion on an instance is offering something and I'm missing out, I can always get an account there.

Not that I'm arguing against better moderation tools, of course. By all means, lemmy devs should prioritize those as soon as scaling/stability issues are dealt with.

OK, it is addressed in the article...

He's specifically talking about the use of AI in finance, and that an algorithm that runs amok in a particular sector:

in the after action reports people will say 'Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model . . . we've relied on.' Maybe it's in the mortgage market. Maybe it's in some sector of the equity market

I'll throw out a microeconomic example. About a year into the pandemic, the price of used cars started going up... a LOT... in a short time. One of the reasons for the sudden changes in used car prices was that major used car resellers were using algorithms to set buying and selling prices for cars. While supply chain pressure on the new car market was unprecedented, and it trickled down to used cars, a facilitating cause is that the used car price-setting algorithms didn't really have any humans in the chain checking to see if the numbers they were kicking out made a lick of sense.

So you had companies like Carmax and Carvana buying used cars for $X, and then a month later 5X, then a month later 10X, because they were programmed to just up the offering price until they reached target stock levels. Sometimes they were buying 3+ year old used cars for more than the current price of NEW cars of similar trim level. Carvana's numbers got so whacked that it nearly sunk the company.

Now imagine that kind of a runaway algorithm in stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. It's 2008 all over again.

we’re trying to sort of figure that out

Well that inspires confidence.

Interesting. I doubt the source material is copyrightable, but I also doubt the consortium is under any legal obligation to provide copies, unless signed some previous agreement to that effect.

"We wouldn't have to kill so many civilians if the criminals would stop committing crimes."

This is America.

FYI, the comma comes from the old Hayes modem command language.

ATDTnumber,,option,option

ATtention Dial Tone number pause pause option pause option

Each comma was about a 2 second pause. You can use multiple commas for longer pauses.

The claims against the Bidens haven't really evolved since Giuliani and Bobulinski made them in 2020.

Not sure what impact they expect these claims to have, again, more than 1 year before the next election. Whatever shot they are trying to take, it's going to be long forgotten by autumn 2024.

This seems highly suspicious.

Bumble laid off 37% of their workforce just 2 weeks ago:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/bumble-to-cut-37-of-jobs-plans-app-overhaul-to-revive-growth

If you read the article, Ms. Monteleone says:

We — since SB 8 — have seen a reduction in our Texas workforce by about a third. Those employees are choosing to move elsewhere,” she told the audience at the event. “There are a variety of laws in Texas that I think many people find incompatible with living a healthy life and being their authentic self,” added Monteleone, suggesting that not all the departures may be tied directly to this specific piece of legislation, but possibly to several other Texas laws or proposed laws that don’t sit well with Bumble’s employees.

Not a word about their decision to cut their own workforce -- some of them are surely part of that "reduction in our Texas workforce" (note how she doesn't say they transferred to other locations, or left the company of their own free will). I guess their huge layoff happened "since SB 8"? cough

It sounds like they are trying to do damage control, by spinning their layoffs into a narrative about TX reproductive medicine laws.

Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to see big companies like Toyota, JP Morgan, and USAA give the finger to Texas. But I don't think Bumble is being honest about this, and I don't think they constitute a blip on the radar of the TX economy.

He's got radioactive nuts.

Sigh. I guess it's time to go download FLAC copies of everything I have on Bandcamp.

Goddamnit, Internet. Get your shit together.

I wonder how selling the car impacts the data stream? If you could show that the automaker and LexisNexis aren't properly handling the transition of the car's owner from one to another -- effectively penalizing the original owner for the actions of a subsequent owner -- there might be a legal angle of attack to assert damages.

I guess I never used Twitter as "intended". I always just cultivated my follow list and watched the people I was following, and looked at the ppl they were replying to & retweeting to identify new people to follow.

For me, Mastodon has been much the same.

The text of the article also says that Max Hightower identifies as a transgender male. His parents refer to him with male pronouns.

I’m legitimately asking this question

Are you? Because it seems like you're wilfully ignoring the explicit statements in the article.

Click the Win11 search bar...

I just... do these people somehow think they won't be targets, once all the trans people have fled to safer states?

We lost Roe v Wade, how long before we lose Lawrence v Texas and 14 southern states immediately start to arrest and imprison openly gay people?

Well, the voters are very much Trump voters, and the candidates know that. Whoever hopes to win the nomination has to win over Trump's voters.

By and large, those voters don't give a flying crap about the GOP or how it's run. They either want a bully who will stick it to brown people and LGBTQ and women, or they are thrill voters who will vote for anybody that will cause a ruckus while singing "America, Fuck Yeah!"

I've been limiting Google Chrome for about 5 years now.

The Most Famous Game in History!

Tetris would like a word.

I don't like Worried Al. I want Weird Al back.

The purpose of hard age limits isn't just to restrict the autonomy of minors.

It's also to allow adults to know where they stand, with respect to the law, and eliminate ambiguities that could be used for selective enforcement.

As an adult, I can't decide whether to sell alcohol to a minor, or have sex with a minor, etc. based on some concept of "real world maturity". And if you give prosecutors flexibility in charging adults with crimes based on some mushy concept of maturity, you can probably guess who will get the shaft: poor folks, and black & brown & red folks.

I don't know that hard age limits are "fair" to minors, I suppose I would probably agree that they are not. But we have to consider what is fair to the person who might be accused of a crime.

I suppose the only thing I disagree with is that the law can do anything about it. Obviously, you can go after sites that have money and/or a real business presence, a la Pornhub. But the rest? It's the wild west.

I saw "Pictrs Migration" and I thought was about to open a map porn post regarding the movement of ancient Scots.

Ah yes, the old "you have little choice but to participate in the system, therefore you can never criticize the system" position.

What once was a product, now is a service

We charge your debit, so you can serve us

EDIT: Inspired by The Stupendium

Things were clearly different after the vaccines, though. It's a much different disease to those who have been vaccinated and boosted.

I told Latvian cousin to buy store brand potato. He laugh, I laugh. There is no store.