ragebutt

I’ve posted it before but the way to get “media attention” is to be controversial and a bit shameless

Republicans are great at this. “Ban immigrants”, “all weapons should be permanently legal for everyone”, “ban abortion in all cases”, “ban gays”, these extreme messages are embraced by the party. Algorithms pick up on content that is engaged upon. People engage on this content regardless of their viewpoint. Even if you hate these views you are more likely to click and view out of rage, to comment your disbelief and to say “fuck this stupid bullshit”

Democrats are terrible at this. They abhor the controversial messaging from the left. They embrace weak messaging that sinks like “maybe some mild economic reform”. They embrace weak counter messaging like “gay people are actually valid”, “abortion should be left alone”, “maybe regulate guns a little” and then it gets trampled by right wing commenters and voices.

They need to embrace the right wing formula, frankly. “90% tax bracket for income over 10 million dollars”, “state funded abortion mills”, “ban all guns”, “mandatory lgbt education in public schools”, “death penalty for oligarchs”, etc. stop softening the message because you’re worried about alienating 4% of old white voters. It’s clearly not working

States with stop and identify laws Alabama: Police may demand identification Delaware: Police may demand identification Florida: Police may demand identification Illinois: Police may demand identification Kansas: Police may demand identification Missouri: Police may demand identification Nebraska: Police may demand identification New Hampshire: Police may demand identification New York: Police may demand identification North Dakota: Police may demand identification Rhode Island: Police may demand identification Utah: Police may demand identification Wisconsin: Police may demand identification

There has to be “reasonable suspicion” of a crime for this but again, all this potentially means is a crime occurred “nearby” and you “match the description (eg are black). Guaranteed the cop will be shielded in court 90% of the time

Further, other states cops can demand you identify yourself under the same circumstances although they can’t demand ID

This is sometimes factually incorrect. You are legally obligated to identify yourself in certain situations and refusal to do so will get you arrested. If a cop “suspects you of having committed a crime” in a state with a statute for stop and identify you legally have to do so. 23 states have these statutes. The statues vary a bit and generally require probable cause but the bar for that can be quite low (eg are you black and outside? Probable cause!)

And of course if you are operating a motor vehicle you are required to identify yourself when stopped

Blanket statements like yours are misleading and confusing. They lead to people getting seriously injured or even killed because they then believe that they truly can legally say absolutely nothing to cops ever with legal impunity, which is often not the case. Cops don’t respond well to people not following the rules correctly. The rules are confusing, likely intentionally

The headphone cable is excellent for sure and I will never ever buy another set of wireless headphones again.

I have one set of wireless earbuds (Sony XM3) for when bigger headphones are impractical and for the price the battery life is shit. After roughly 2ish years of moderate use the battery life is cut noticeably and after 3 they barely last 30 minutes. Thankfully changing the battery is fairly simple (go sony!) although the battery used is a weird proprietary cell that cannot be purchased through legitimate channels and is fairly expensive (boo sony). But whatever, $30 on batteries is better than tossing earbuds that cost $250-300 a few years ago.

That said I have moved on from phones with headphone jacks. I still have a few sets of proper ass headphones that are pretty nice. If I want to use them with my phone I don’t fuck with dongles, I have a Qudelix 5K DAC/AMP. This allows me to use my wired headphones with any Bluetooth thing really. The only thing that could improve it is a user replaceable battery, and they made that: the Qudelix T71 although I haven’t tried that. And frankly I’m pretty sure I can figure out swapping the battery on this whenever it croaks. I’ve sourced and changed a lot of batteries in my time.

It’s not as nice as my proper setup for listening to flac or vinyl but it’s pretty indistinguishable aurally for the most part when listening to flac on my phone (vs flac on my home server via my better dac/amp which again is pretty aurally indistinguishable unless you’re a buttsniffing audiophile type. And if you are I dare you to double blind test it)

My father in law, who is otherwise a very nice person, overuses ellipses in his informal written communication and it bothers the hell out of me

The crazy thing is he is extremely well educated. He was a professor at a super classy university, had a very distinguished career, etc. dude can write. But hand him an iphone and all of a sudden he can’t end a sentence definitively…

to be fair to this person finding out someone you love paid for 4chan pass would be absolutely devastating

In my state the letter is optional but the court order is mandatory. The take away for anyone reading is that there is going to be red tape and you should get on this asap if it is important to you.

Regardless of what state you live in there is probably, almost certainly, an org in said state that at a minimum has a website with all of the relevant info and likely will assist you through this as well.

And means you no longer get support

Do these companies put their fingers on the scale? Almost certainly

But it’s exactly what he said that’s what brought us here. They have not particularly given a shit about politics (aside from no taxes and let me do whatever I want all the time). However, the algorithms will consistently reward engagement. Engagement doesn’t care about “good” or “bad”, it just cares about eyes on it, clicks, comments. And who wins that? Controversial bullshit. Joe Rogan getting elon to smoke weed. Someone talking about trans people playing sports. Etc

This is a natural extension of human behavior. Human behavior occurs because of a function. I do x because of a function, function being achieving reinforcement. Attention, access to something, escaping, or automatic.

Attention maintained behaviors are tricky because people are shitty at removing attention and attention is a powerful reinforcer. You tell everyone involved “this person feeds off of your attention, ignore them”. Everyone agrees. The problematic person pulls their bullshit and then someone goes “stop it”. They call it negative reinforcement (this is not negative reinforcement. it’s probably positive reinforcement. It’s maybe positive punishment, arguably, because it’s questionable how aversive it is).

You get people to finally shut up and they still make eye contact, or non verbal gestures, or whatever. Attention is attention is attention. The problematic person continues to be reinforced and the behavior stays. You finally get everyone to truly ignore it and then someone new enters the mix who doesn’t get what’s going on.

This is the complexity behind all of this. This is the complexity behind “don’t feed the trolls”. You can teach every single person on Lemmy or reddit or whoever to simply block a malicious user but tomorrow a dozen or more new and naive people will register who will fuck it all up

The complexity behind the algorithms is similar. The algorithms aren’t people but they work in a similar way. If bad behavior is given attention the content is weighted and given more importance. The more we, as a society, can’t resist commenting, clicking, and sharing trump, rogan, peterson, transphobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc content the more the algorithms will weight this as “meaningful”

This of course doesn’t mean these companies are without fault. This is where content moderation comes into play. This is where the many studies that found social media lead to higher irritability, more passive aggressive behavior and lower empathetization could potentially have led us to regulate these monsters to do something to protect their users against the negative effects of their products

If we survive and move forward in 100 years social media will likely be seen in the way we look at tobacco now. An absolutely dangerous thing that was absurd to allowed to exist in a completely unregulated state with 0 transparency as to its inner workings

Yes birth certificates are a state thing

Do it asap imo if it’s important to you. Social security cards and passports are likely suspended for the next four years at least, unfortunately. While I hope most states will resist this bullshit, who knows what the fuck will happen, thus asap

Minnesota is one of the pain in the ass states. You need either a physicians letter saying you’ve received appropriate clinical treatment or a court order to get a marker change

OutFront Minnesota can give you assistance or at least more info

We had to wear goggles that simulated being drunk like that one episode of the Simpsons and then try to do basic tasks like walk from one point to another or whatever so they could show how it impaired your motor skills. But it backfired because they just really exaggerate the visual impairment you get from drinking, they’re basically putting on a really too strong pair of glasses. But we did several rounds and eventually got somewhat used to it, it was a big game of who could seem the least impaired, the message was completely lost on us, etc

Fuck your car, the cops aren’t gonna find it. They’re there to write a police report so you can get an insurance claim.

The only way they recover your stolen car is if the person who stole it joyrides it and abandons it. Your neighbors testimony isn’t helpful in this scenario

If your car was desirable and actually stolen for parts or to be resold it’s long gone and the cops will do absolutely nothing

Similarly if your home was burglarized. Look at the statistics of solve rates for these crimes in your city. If they’re anything like mine they are shockingly low and the only reason they aren’t 0 is because of literal happenstance like the above scenario and not actual “detective work”

However, your neighbor opening their door for the cops does create a host of potential issues for your neighbor. Perhaps they have drug paraphernalia in plain sight in their living room? Now the cops have probable cause to search their home without a warrant because you think those noble officers are going to search high and low for your shitty car (they aren’t). Or they’re an illegal immigrant, the cops are racist, and see an in to send ins later that day. Or your neighbor is rude and standoffish, escalates things with the cop (who are known for their expert de escalation skills) and then ends up getting arrested for “obstruction”