240 tons of TNT is 0.24 kT, not 2.4 kT.

They don’t care. If the advertisers pay for that spot then they make money! This has been the story with TV ads for decades.

Holy cow! Formerly gifted, burned out, rain, books, injustice.

Checks all the boxes for me. Why these specific things? Eery!

It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

They campaigned on the left and have been a minority government working in a coalition with the socialist NDP for the past several years.

I’m in Canada so I have the opposite reaction re: the military. Our military is a joke and if the US ever walked away from NATO we would be totally screwed.

Our government has been run by the Liberals since 2015. All they’ve done is destroyed the jobs market and put housing out of reach for ordinary people. Not a fan!

I think if you want to be a socialist you need to acknowledge that sometimes the government will be grossly incompetent and/or corrupt. Frankly, this experience is what has pulled me to the right. I simply don’t have trust in unaccountable institutions anymore.

Having said that, I think most of the damage to our society has been done by incompetent municipal governments which aren’t part of our party system anyway. They’ve squandered billions of dollars, been grifted by scam artist developers, and destroyed our communities with idiotic urban planning ideas that make livable neighbourhoods illegal.

People change. The old stereotype is that people tend to be very liberal in high school and college but become very conservative with a mortgage and a couple of kids. I don’t know how often that actually plays out but it makes sense.

When you don’t have anything it’s easy to demand a lot of things from the government. When you have money you want to do everything you can to hold onto it and that means not paying taxes. It flips around again when people are super rich though: then they don’t mind paying taxes (because their effective tax rate is very low). It’s the middle class who get screwed the most.

The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.

How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.

Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.

Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.

What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…

No it’s actually way faster. You can swipe whole words in less than a second. It’s like writing with pen and paper but each letter is actually a whole word.

He’s the devil! He can throw the pie with a horseshoe bend into the face from the other side! Demonic powers FTW

You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!

The key word you used is “betrayed.” Utopian ideologies can be betrayed. Capitalism is not utopian because it cannot be betrayed: it assumes competition by default and accepts that some ventures will survive while others will not.

I use the word utopian because it makes assumptions about people that aren’t true. Utopian systems can’t survive staunch and organized opposition.

This is a basic requirement for any system to survive. Look at the human body: the immune system is constantly fighting off threats. A person without an immune system (full blown AIDS) has a very difficult time surviving for very long.

I’m of the mind that all of the forms of anarchism are utopian. They assume people will behave in certain ways which are contrary to reality. When people don’t behave in those expected ways the whole system breaks.

Game theory helps, as does training in computer security for similar reasons. Basically the idea is that you need to always assume people will try to break the system somehow if they think they can benefit from it.

AnCaps are among the most extreme libertarians. Lots of more moderate libertarians think of them as kooks, similar to how leftists think of tankies.

I myself believe in altruism, mutual aid, but also smaller and more effective government. I view large governments and large corporations with skepticism: concentrations of unchecked power are prone to abuse.

I just think humans work better in smaller groups overall. That’s where empathy and personal relationships actually work. When everything turns into statistics we lose our humanity.