Do you have long-term statistics on this, or is it based on social media influencers' gut instincts and feelings?

I simply make a habit of reading what the intelligent people on both sides (and also on other, less known sides) say.

If one goes by the short, oversimplified slogans the angry masses from all sides loudly shout during protests, without looking at what the high-level sources that got oversimplified said, one's definitely going to misunderstand a lot of what's being actually argued for or against.

a) "Defunding the police" is something right-wing media and social channels love to misrepresent. It doesn't mean removing law enforcement, but changing how it's enforced.

Here's an analogy. Imagine a scenario in which there's a single unified public force that's responsible for dealing with violent criminals with military-grade force, and for helping small children walk safely to school, and for putting out fires on houses and buildings. Its official are responsible for all that, but 95% of their training is in dealing with violent criminals with military-grade force. Would you want to have them arrive, in full SWAT gear, to put out a fire on your house, and to talk to your daughter so she enters the schoolyard without incidents?

The concept of "defunding the police" is to remove from police responsibilities they don't deal with well, and to transfer those responsibilities to agencies that deal better with them. Continuing with the analogy, to split a firefighting force from the unified police force, so firefighter are strongly trained in putting out fires, rather than on putting out violent criminals, which involves, evidently, removing from the unified force the money necessary to fund the new firefighting force.

In the "defund the police" world police continues existing, but it focuses only on dealing with violent criminals. Their funding is reduced proportionately, and the difference is transferred to the other forces focused on solving all the stuff policed is called upon nowadays despite having little to no training in dealing with those things.

b) "the pronoun police"

You do know this is just annoying people on Twitter and on comments sections of sites, not an actual enforcement of anything under threat of State sanctioned violence, right?

c) "mandatory (...)"

Nothing in that has ever been mandatory.

Now, one caveat: if someone benefits from and builds atop public services paid for by citizens' taxes, it's simply fair those same beneficies cannot in turn deny said citizens who paid for it all with their taxes from enjoying access to such buildings on the equal footing with all other citizens. If you disagree, are you willing to refund them the taxes they paid, covering the costs in their place?

Just switch to lemmy already! Yes, there is only a small fraction of the users, but the same was true of reddit at its beginnings. There is still enough content to have a laugh and, luckily, not enough to scroll for the whole day.

He's opposed to human engineers reviewing AI-generated code. He seems to believe, truly believe, it suffices for engineers to prompt the AI to review and fix the code itself. And then for the AI itself to evaluate the fixes made and simply report to the engineers whether the fixes it made to the problems it detected were successful. And so on, and so forth.

The idea that we are ruled by lizard people makes more and more sense to me every day.

https://x.com/charise_lee/stat...

The AI industry calling for regulation is a better sham still. They know the regulation will be toothless, there is nothing for them to fear. But if the "regulation" materializes, they can deflect any liability for the sizable damage they cause by pointing out they follow regulation.

Related are the calls to get public oversight in the form of part government ownership. Which is a ploy to sell their inflated stock to taxpayer suckers, to get the government on the leash to pave the way for them with all of their problems, and to get a guarantee of government bailout if things get sour.

Beautiful in it's own right, but oh so cynical and evil. Get with the times, I guess.

In fact, there is a lot wrong with Democrats. If there was nothing wrong with them, no one would be voting Trump over Democrats.

Leaving aside bipartisan issues like corruption, lies, and incompetence... Where Democrats fall behind Republicans these days is that Democrats consider party discipline more important than election results, or even any results at all. Republicans took note that Trump was making waves, understood that the wind was changing, and they remade the Party in his image to get ahead. Democrats on the other hand cut the head off of anyone who threatens the status quo of power in the party, and are then left wondering where they should get themselves a Democrat Musk or Rogan... you already had those, but you could not forgive them they had a few of their own ideas about things too, and you threw them away and turned them against you!

This is why Democrats are left fielding unelectable mediocrity like Clinton and Harris, and of course Biden, who only won the first time because Trump had made such a joke of himself. By enforcing rightthink in the party lines without exception, everything that can draw and keep voter attention is bred out of the Democrat bloodline. Bernie, betrayed. AOC, of borg by now. Mamdani, in progress. Platner, destroyed. By the time anyone can get nominated, they have already for years had the charisma of drying paint, and vision to match. The bloodline by now is of late stage Habsburg quality, with results to show for it. Came Trump second time, even the joke that he is was still beat the joke that was the Democrat campaign. Not only that, Democrats have lost the ability to govern and are basically imploding by now, only making half-hearted noise about issues, but folding every hand without any actual fight. Pity.

Next he will be renaming the United States of America to America of America. Or maybe straight to Trump America.

It's turtles all the way down.

Bill Gates is building a pharma, biotech, and gmo IP empire. Whatever his argumentation is, the general topic means he is 100% pushing for his own interests.

This describes pretty much all news though...

In general, all code is always pushed upstream, barring legal reasons. Because by pushing it upstream you also push maintenance costs upstream; by not pushing upstream, you set yourself up to forever maintain a fork and to forever merge your changes again and again into a forever changing and diverging upstream code base. Which is a drag.

I don't accept that premise. If there were, methods would have been open to discussion by the community and one of the actually privacy-preserving alternatives would have been chosen, such as having every website declare the age bracket in the HTTP header, legal determination it cannot be informed incorrectly, parenting tools within devices coming enabled by default and, if not opted-out, which only the adult buyer would be able to do after showing proof of purchase (no identity required), and browsers and the like only allowing connections to online services that matched the enabled configuration.

The way it's being implemented is the reverse of that and gives the government access to deanonimizable tracking. We know it's almost certainly deanonimizable because Snowden's files have shown how intelligence agencies deliberately include very subtle weaknesses in government-mandated cryptographic standards, protocols and methods, so any such must be assumed to contain one or more backdoors irrespective of them being seemingly impossible, as there's no feasible way to prove they don't other than blind trust.

The rule of thumb is that every single time politicians claim "think of the children!" without including in the proposed law objective measurable metrics the law is presumed to improve, plus requirements that if the improvement doesn't happen within a specific period of time the proposal must be cancelled, isn't about children, but it's rather levying popular emotional reactions to induce layers of false consciousness.