Came here to say being high and watching “I think you should leave” is some of the hardest I’ve ever laughed. One of my favorites https://youtu.be/7xS9Y_mjTjc?si=sZcDJlrb_wMuBN-k

Maybe we need a strong progressive president who will hold Isreal accountable, like Ronald Reagan

In addition to not vetoing UN resolutions, Reagan took several actions that many in Israel and the United States perceived as anti-Israel. For example, on June 7, 1981, less than six months after Reagan took office, Israel launched a surprise bombing raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, and, in so doing, violated the airspace of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Reagan not only supported UNSC Resolution 487, which condemned the attack, but he also criticized the raid publicly and suspended the delivery of advanced F-16 fighter jets to Israel. Moreover, over the strident objections of Israel and the pro-Israel U.S. lobby groups, Reagan approved the sale of advanced reconnaissance aircraft (AWACS ) to Saudi Arabia, which Israel then viewed as a hostile state.

A year later, in August 1982, when Israeli forces advanced beyond southern Lebanon and began shelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut, Reagan responded with an angry call to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, demanding a halt to the operation.

In addition, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Reagan intervened directly when Israel threatened to blow up the Commodore Hotel in downtown Beirut, which housed more than 100 western reporters. As David Ottaway, who was then the Washington Post Middle East correspondent and was in the building, pointed out, the Israeli defense minister did not like the media coverage the invasion was getting and wanted to close down the media center.

Biden, on the other hand, even though he had an hour’s notice, failed to intervene to stop Netanyahu from bombing and collapsing the 12-story building that housed the offices of Al Jazeera and the Associated Press in Gaza during the recent bombing campaign. He also failed to publicly condemn the attack, let alone challenge Israel’s contention that the building sheltered Hamas military intelligence assets, despite AP’s insistence that its staff had no evidence that such assets were or ever had been present.

In addition to allowing the UN resolutions to pass and suspending the F-16 delivery, Reagan also restricted aid and military assistance to Israel to help force its withdrawal of troops from Beirut and central Lebanon.

Therefore, if in the future some members of the Biden administration or Congress want to join the international community in condemning Israel’s behavior, or in conditioning U.S. assistance or arms transfers and face resistance from Republicans, they need only point to the precedents established by President Reagan in the first instance.

Your right, let me just pull up the White House press release where Biden sympathizes with the protectors cause:

…

Hmm, not finding one. Wait, I’m sure there is an official Whitehouse press statement condemning the anti-free speech crackdowns like in Austin:

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Oh shit, looks like Biden said dickall about that too. So what did Biden say?

Over the weekend, the president put out a statement in which he condemned the campus protests for fostering antisemitism. That followed a far harsher statement from a White House aide calling out the protestors for harassing Jewish students. Both statements led anti-Israel protesters and anti-war activists to accuse the White House of being too quick to reprimand just one side of the debate.

One Columbia student who has been involved in the protests told POLITICO that she and her friends have less faith in Biden “every single day.”

“I was excited to vote for Biden. I was excited to vote out a fascist from government. And in hindsight, I guess I see that, I was just putting someone who’s a little bit less evil, but evil nonetheless,” said the student, who was granted anonymity because of fear of retribution.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/23/biden-camp-political-fallout-campus-protests-00154000

The reason is pretty straightforward : Biden is a zionist who doesn’t give an actual fuck about Gaza. He is worried though that it’s hurting him in Michigan. But according to the Biden campaign, young people don’t actually care about the genocide in Gaza so he’s free to ignore it because they’ll still vote for him either way.

“What is happening in Gaza is not the top issue for [young voters]. It’s not going to be for the vast majority of young voters the thing that’s going to determine whether they vote or how they vote,” said a campaign official working on youth engagement who was granted anonymity to speak about internal thinking. “The reality is that the folks that are organizing, the goal of that organizing is to make it seem that way and to bring that attention to it.”

Barack Obama rode a wave of backlash to the Iraq War to the dem nomination and then the Whitehouse, largely powered by anti-war college students who not only votes for him, but did the hard work of organizing and volunteering. I know, I was there on the ground. Today’s young people grew up with politicians doing dick all about school shootings they had to live with, doing shit about climate change that they will have to deal with, and now they have genocide being committed in their names. They are pissed. Maybe they mostly will still vote for Biden out of fear of Trump, but your not going to see them organizing and pounding the pavement for Biden. Especially after Biden just dismissed their legitimate concerns and labeled them all antisemetic.

I don’t feel like looking it up, but I’ve heard statistics like the Breaking Bad finale had half the viewers of the average episode of CSI Miami. The general lesson is don’t underestimate the average person’s appetite for garbage.

Facebook is the closest thing to the Chinese concept of an everything app that the US has.

This feels like it’s meant to be a joke, but it’s not.

Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says the provision of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza endangers Israeli soldiers and must stop after more than 100 Palestinians were reported killed while trying to get aid in Gaza City.

“Today it was proven that the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza is not only madness while our hostages are held in the Strip … but also endangers IDF soldiers,” Ben-Gvir said, calling the deliveries “oxygen to Hamas”.

The incident is “another clear reason why we must stop transferring this aid”, he wrote on X.

Ben-Gvir also said Israel must “provide complete support to our heroic fighters operating in Gaza, who acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them”.

I don’t know why he’s associated with socialism and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.

There are no red flag laws in Maine. There was no legal way to take his guns even if they thought that was necessary. Also, the christofacist supreme court is set to strike down laws that prevent people convicted domestic violence from owning guns, which will chip away at the legality of red flag laws everywhere. Happy Thursday everyone!

Without ice cream, there are only screams.

I just want you to know you just gave me my new life moto

I think this is right. I’ve been thinking about this a bit as I watch who in my office starts using LLMs and more importantly how they are using them. The folks in their 40s or 50s have largely ignored it, I remember a gen xer sending an email around in may talking about this neat new ChatGPT her middle school kid showed her. I know one xer in my office whose straight up afraid to even try it. Those closer to gen z will use it, but in a very basic way - just asking straight questions seeking information, get frustrated when it can’t handle complex questions or they get lied to, then quit. Millennials seem to be better about using it for what it’s good at, generating ideas, startingn places for documents, editing/proofreading, etc. Maybe it’s because millennials were in that sweet spot between the older folks who didn’t grow up with tech and the younger folks who are used to apps that just work without having to think through how to make the thing do what you want. Maybe millennials are more interested in tech generally since we saw it change so rapidly in our lifetimes. Maybe it’s just my small sample size of a 40ish person office.

And now I’m nostalgic for r/youtubehiaku

This is a really interesting idea, I’m definitely considering it. I’m already giving on lemmy.world patreon more than your plans cost. I have two questions. First, just from a business perspective, how do you think about differentiating yourself from the donation based servers? Is there something of extra value that people get from your instance and service that they can’t get elsewhere?

I’m also interested in your moderation and federation policies. I think a potential barrier here is paying upfront for a year only to disagree with a federation decision down the line. Maybe you could have different instances with different policies? Like one that is federated with threads, one that isn’t, one that’s federated with hexbear one that isn’t. Maybe that’s overly complicated once you start adding up all the different combinations that people come up with (personally I’m fine with threads, meh on hexbear, and a no on explodingheads).

That’s hilarious, but more than likely that’s exactly what happened. I listened to someone explain the process on a podcast recently, can’t remember which one maybe the Vergecast or vox today explained. But the example they used is you go to a country club you hang out with a friend who just bought a Porsche or whatever. They use your phones location to know you are always going to this location and sticking within a few feet of this other phone, the owner of which has the new Porsche. Well they figure that’s your friend and he’s probably talking up his porche, and your in the right demographic to buy a Porsche and you haven’t bought a new car in x years, so guess what now you get Porsche ads. So what you described perfectly fits that example, they figured you’d all be suckers for some totes.

Yes! I was going to mention that, I heard about that years ago, so things have to be way more sophisticated now. Just looked it up the story was from 2012, and target was just tracking credit card numbers and noticing when women started buying things like unscented lotion. So this is waaay less sophisticated then the information companies are sucking up in present day.

> As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy. > > One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=75e6dd266668 The story I found was a girl who got a target mailer for pregnancy stuff and her dad was pissed, only to find out later that his daughter was im fact pregnant. Target changed tactics, instead of sending mailers with just baby stuff, they start sending personalized mailers with some baby stuff mixed in, increasing as the due date approaches. And again this was 11 years ago and just used credit card information and target purchase data. It’s wild to think of what they can do now.

Here’s the fun part, they don’t need to listen to you. You are far more predictable than you realize. They already know everything about you, what you search, what apps you use, what kinds of exercise you do and when, what you eat, what articles you read, movies and podcasts you consume, music you listen to, what you buy, where you go, who you hang out with, and everything about the people you hang out with. Every minute of your life is meticulously tracked and analyzed and compared to the hundred thousand people who are just like you in terms of interests and patterns. They can predict to a scary degree what your thinking before you might even realize it yourself. They know you better than you know yourself. Why waste the resources sifting through hours of recordings when they already know everything going on in your head from the million data points you voluntarily transmit to them everyday?

The other part of this to keep in mind is that you are bombarded with ads all day most of which you ignore. It’s just that those few times where they manage to hit a straight bullseye, showing you an add for something you were just talking about or even just thinking about, those are the ones that will stick in your memory.

Investors care about the potential for future growth and thus future increased profits. They don’t give a shit about what a company is doing today, except to the extent it is predictive of the future. Investors look at this and see lots of activity of users who actively hate the company, that’s not future growth.

To take an unfortunate example, imagine if Bud Light had a bump in sales because a bunch of right wing lunatics were buying extra just so they could make videos of them throwing away, shooting, blowing up, or otherwise destroying the beer while vowing never to drink it again. Does an investor look at that bump in sales and say “oh neat, look how well Bud Light is doing, I should invest!” or do they say “A lot of Bud Light’s core consumer base is pissed as hell and probably not going to be buying this product in the future, there is limited potential for future growth, I’m out”?