ofcourse

Would it be possible to create a webapp version of this? With ICE and CBP freely able to search phones now, I am worried about retaliation if they find this app on the phone.

I agree that she should run, but as an independent candidate because the DNC will never give her a honest shot in the primaries.

Americans however are unlikely to elect her especially due to electoral college as there are plenty racist and misogynistic voters in the swing states.

But if she’s able to raise money in the process to give her a real shot, US will finally have a viable third party candidate. If it looks like she’ll only split the Dem vote without winning, the raised money can be used to support progressive candidates in local elections.

Either way, I think US needs a progressive liberals party and soon because there’s a lot of House and Senate seat elections coming up and as we have seen from the GOP playbook, local elections are as relevant and influential as the national ones.

American Capitalism, with its abundance of neoliberalism, works on the premise that given no external involvement, the market will take care of itself. Companies will make products that people like, or will be out competed.

The American dream extends from that idea that workers can work wherever they want and have completely free movement. So if someone is smart or a hard worker, they have plenty of opportunities and will eventually be successful.

In reality, neither of the above are true. Markets are not capable of taking care of themselves, e.g., because there is inertia, inelasticity, and barrier to entry for many high-capital businesses. Government has propped up most “desirable” large industries through heavy subsidies and tax breaks, like oil, farming, telecom, and tech. Workers do not have free movement, some from self inertia to want to stay close to roots, family, friends, but mostly from the same neoliberal policies that remove social safety nets and fail to provide everyone the basic necessities.

Add to that the fact that a solely money based capitalist system has no ability to measure environmental degradation, wealth inequality, or population satisfaction. And the government is more than happy to step in when it’s businesses being hurt vs people - think too big to fail or propping up businesses during covid/after natural disasters.

Even if a true capitalist system were allowed to exist, it is ultimately anti-competitive. A business in a segment that’s doing well will slowly acquire other businesses in the segment to become a monopoly. Eventually the monopoly will keep growing and acquire the largest businesses in other segments. Besides regulations, technology disruptions can break this cycle but those are fairly rare, and are mostly a recent and likely short lived phenomenon.

Finally, capitalism requires economy and population to keep growing, in the absence of which, there is complete stagnation of movement and the system will collapse into feudalism, like what happened during the Dark Ages.

Anyway, I think you are both right and wrong. Capitalism as people imagine it to be feeds into the ideal of the American Dream. But both true capitalism and its reality actively thwart it, by closely interlinking the economic system with the political.

This is awful. Now the Democrats will have to set up internal meetings over the next few weeks to figure out the most appropriate language to condemn this, after which they will forget this happened.

The silence and inaction of the Democratic leadership since Trump took office is a major contributor to the Republicans and the police state to keep escalating project 2025 agenda without impunity.

I wouldn’t combine NYT and NPR in the same category. NPR has been broadcasting a lot of stories about Israeli attacks on Gaza civilians in both their news and long form podcasts.

Censoring is model dependent so you can select one of the models without the guardrails.

Until Republican lawmakers change their voting patterns, these articles mean nothing and IMO are poor journalism. Lawmakers can say anything about their reelection worries and polls almost always show swings in the opposite direction after elections.

The human elements are being stripped away along with consumer protections. So services are becoming more and more like the tech sector (like YouTube, WhatsApp blocking) where for a long time, the situation has been that decisions get made by an algorithm and there is literally no one to appeal to about them.

Take banking as an example - with brick and mortar locations shrinking, it’s already so hard to get simple things done unless you download their app, agree to an unnecessarily long list of terms and conditions which can be changed unilaterally at any time, and your rights to sue are waived in favor of arbitration.

We as consumers are doing more of the work that was previously being done by employees and without getting paid for it. Think self checkouts - when it started, I was very happy that I didn’t have to talk to a person if I didn’t feel like it, but now I am essentially forced to use it because there are few to no cashiers. And I’m not getting paid to do the work for which an employee was previously getting paid, nor am I paying less for my groceries as a result of doing the work myself.

I don’t buy the smaller platforms being hurt more argument.

It’s not hard to prevent undue burden on smaller platforms by adding in the bill that it only applies to platforms with more than $1B in revenue.

We need to get rid of 230 because it has given way too much immunity to the biggest internet companies and they have been simply shrugging away all their responsibilities. Let’s work out how to make this bill work for the people instead of shutting it out.

The Democratic Party’s sole strategy looks like maximizing their big donor and independent votes. So they keep moving toward center-right.

1. That strategy has failed 2/3 last times so may be try changing it Sherlock.
2. The big donors don’t care about anything besides their own personal gain. The only difference is that “Democratic” big donors also pretend they care about the people. May be get on the ground and talk to your constituents instead.
3. Even if you get the independent votes, your main base is completely alienated and does not trust you. So all you will get are the independent votes losing you the election.

This Democratic Party is like the monsters in Scooby Doo - the villain wearing the mask of the common person so they can get closer to you before stabbing in the back.

Why is Bhutan one of the most weird countries? Oh, WIRED.

Sounds like talking points of someone paid off by social media to sow division about the bill.

1. I don’t see why it’s an issue that this would apply to moderation of all user generated content on very large online platforms. That’s the point. The platforms are pushing false and controversial content to drive engagement and have not implemented the necessary guardrails to verify correctness and minimize harm (like, when a post/blog is inciting violence).
2. That’s a definite possibility in the current regime that the bill will be used to silence dissent. But from what it looks, the White House doesn’t need bills to silence dissent. Everything in the country is being done by and fought between the executive and the judiciary with 0 public involvement. At least with a bill, there are >500 people involved in passing/blocking it so a larger surface for people to influence the decision.

I would be more concerned about this bill never seeing the light of day because I don’t think the US Congress of this decade is capable of passing any major laws.