aquafunk

shoutout to USAA banking app that detected my root, but just showed a warning and allowed me to continue. that's how it ahould be imho

"don't feed the trolls" is all that comes to mind

because workers don't collectively own the means of production.

not to be like that, but once some new hotness graduates from 2 people in a garage, the controlling interest is never the workers who have a vested interest in products, daily work (and a brand) they can be proud of, but investors with only short term profit on their mind. innovators- and inventors-turned-C suite executives jump ship when bought out, leaving the real meat and potatoes, the real work behind the brand, to be offshored, profit prioritized and picked clean.

buy from worker-owned co-ops. buy from local crafters and people deserving of the label 'artisan'. flat out refuse to buy from brands that are a sad, hollowed out husk of their former selves. more importantly - most importantly - do what you can to keep your retirement investments away from quartly-profit mills who couldnt care less about workers or customers beyond raw sales numbers. and definitely, definitely never agree to work for them.

an extra updoot for the unix surrealism shout out. ngl I look forward to a new one every time I check lemmy

The DEA's administrative law judge already said it shouldn't be Schedule I, after a lengthy review, and (surprise!) the DEA administrator ignored them. What a genius system; leave it up to the person wielding power to be the one making the final decision to wield less power 🤦

D.A. and sheriff have argued their positions provide them immumity from civil lawsuits.

No! No, no, nonono, NO! FUCK YOU. "I'm just doing my job" is not a "get out of jail free" card, and certainly doesn't excuse you from defending your actions. You use the courts to ruin other people's lives when you deem it appropriate? You'd better damn well believe your conduct while doing so is subject to the same processes- criminal and civil. Forget the sheer arrogance of thinking differently -

if you'd think about it for half a second, you supposed justice system experts -

the whole damn thing doesn't work otherwise! Who is going to bother listening to you, holier than thou police officers, when you say the rules don't apply to you!? Are you somehow fucking stumped why people just mysteriously don't like cops? THIS KIND OF BULLSHIT IS A BIG REASON WHY. When you plainly act like the expectactions we hold for each other don't apply to you, you sound like you think you're above the law. You're not royalty, you're not nobility; you are citizens, just like us.

these were choices y'all made. choices have consequences. own your shit. we DO NOT pay you to be mindless law enforcing robots- exercise better judgement next time. you want respect for the difficult job you do? rationally defend your actions OR as you've somewhat tried to do, apologize, and then show you've learned from your mistakes. this "I can't deal with/the system can't deal with the idea that people make bad choices so lets just act like everyone is infallable" is ruining, just RUINING any hope we have of continuing to be a functioning society pulls hair out in frustration

one of my absolute favs. it's a co-op where one player is randomly, secretly a cylon, sabotaging the groups efforts.

you can toss people in the brig. theyll protest "Im not the cylon!!!" and if youre wrong (youre often wrong), the group suffers by losing the jailed character's special ability, while trying to fight off an attack until managing to jump.

best part? half way through, you draw new loyalty cards. sleeper cylon activated!!!

its genuinely hard not to run out of food, or water, or just get overrun by a boarding party. some of the best fun losing Ive ever had

welp, it was a good run! definitely my favorite of everything since DS9 and voyager by a mile. hopefully itll go out with a bang

OOTL- what happened to Lower Decks?

remember, it's not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it's about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.

then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data

it'd be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that's before any income from rental

This is similar to to how the two major US political parties fail at effectively creating constant, essential evolution of laws in the name of representing ideals.

Candidates that can not, by the very foundational nature of their stated goals and beliefs, form coalitions with other candidates in order to ensure constant progress, create disfunctional governments that fail their citizens. Systems of choice should tend towards the choices that best represent the most widely agreed upon ideas. If those systems are in place, citizens who willingly choose extreme idelogical candidates that denounce compromise and coalitions are getting exactly what they voted for- a government that is doomed to fail.

We need moderate candidates focused on representing the majority of their constituents, and we need voting systems in place that favor moderate candidates. Any system that favors moderate candidates - say candidates that, while maybe not any majority's first choice, but the second choice of a majority of the same people - is favorable to first-past-the-post, which has allowed exteremism and obstructionism to thrive in our legislative bodies.

The question becomes, do the citizens have that system in place, a system where moderate voices can thrive? If they do, are there those in positions of extreme wealth and power who would benefit from convincing the rest of us that voting for extreme, obstructionist candidates is best? Are those people possibly exploiting the system to create disfuntional governments that protect their wealth and power?

That's whats happening in the US. Regulatory capture and mass media control, for example, are tools used to convince citizens the war is between us, distracting us from their benefitting from our disfunctional government. These few push the idea that obstructionism and extremism is our only choice, lest you be seen as the enemy. The true enemy is clearly those that care more about themselves and/or their espoused ideals than society at large, a society doomed without a constantly evolving goverment keeping corruption and consolodation of wealth and power in check.

can't labels and artists pay for some kind of premium placement in discover weekly, release radar, and playlist recs?

ok, after some research, found this:

In some cases, commercial considerations, such as the cost of content or whether we can monetize it, may influence our recommendations. For example, Discovery Mode gives artists and labels the opportunity to identify songs that are a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithms that determine the content of personalized listening sessions. When an artist or label turns on Discovery Mode for a song, Spotify charges a commission on streams of that song in areas of the platform where Discovery Mode is active (Discovery Mode is not active in our editorial playlists). This signal increases the likelihood of the selected songs being recommended, but does not guarantee it.

so, at the very least, the recs you get are definitely not organic, and favor major labels, rich folks, and if Spotify can make any money off streaming the track in the first place

not saying the algorithm doesn't get it right most of the time (they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if it was all sponsored), but if it's favoring big labels and drowning out everyone else in the name of revenue for Spotify, I prefer to choose other ways to find new stuff. if Spotify needs more money to pay the bills, imho they should plainly be asking the consumers up front