Wait.. you think vehicles with taller hood heights have more gadgets than ones that don't? What an interesting reality you live in!

If you want a good middle class job, the solution is easy. Simply don't tell prospective employers you are a citizen. You can do that, right?

You were buying that specific copy of the game, actually, just like movies and music.

Na, these are professional lobbyists. They love superpacs.

Can someone tell me what "grassroots" means? Just because grassroots funding is one way you try to get money, does that make your whole thing "grassroots"? I just googled the founders and I guess it says right in the summary, they are not an everyday tech worker. They are political operatives. I thought grassroots meant it was organized by the people in the trenches, so in this case, that would mean it was organized by everyday tech workers. If they are going to gaslight me about the group's origins, I have to wonder what else they are gaslighting me about. Maybe its not their fault, maybe TechCrunch is bad.... Either way, this sounds like astroturf to me. I'd be curious where they got $5 million dollars already, and how much of that goes to PAC administrative costs.

Sure, but this whole line of reasoning is irrelevant to what I'm saying. The problem isn't that China is influencing us. Just look at TFA itself. Its obviously part of an influence campaign to discredit objectors at local government zoning hearings by dismissing them as chinese sympathizers. If you think that influencing people so that they form opinions that are counter to their interests is bad, you shouldn't worry about ten thousand dollars worth of social media posts. You should worry about the US based company that makes 50 billion dollars a year doing it.

Whats more is that fundamentally it is reasonable for people to be influenced by ideas counter to their interests and without it society would cease to function.

I don't buy some things I see ads for, so yes, there are ads that don't affect me.

Do you buy everything you see an ad for?

Being able to entertain a thought without believing it is one of the things that separates us from the animals.

Controlling an entry in the blockchain ledger is not the same thing as controlling a banknote in physical reality. The control of the blockchain entry relies on others attesting that I have control over it, but for a physical banknote, I merely need to physically control it and don't need any 3rd party attestations. Note that this does not rely on any kind of mumbo jumbo about the economic value of either one represents.

Its not a currency. At best, its a title to nothing.

Can you at least make an internally consistent post? White people made California the shithole that it is today.

Does XBOX pay Azure market rate for cloud services? If so, maybe they should shop around. The economics of streaming games is never going to make sense at market rate cloud costs.

Who cares? Google is out here trying to influence my opinion on literally everything under the sun. If Google makes me believe I need a new swiffer mop, or that I should care about soccer, or that I should care about whatever interesectional identity is the current flavor of the month: the opinions they helped me get are real opinions. Similarly, just because China influences people's opinions, that doesn't invalidate the very real opinions that they have.

Arguing that people's opinions are irrelevant is a uhhhh.. interesting hot take for people to have who say they believe in democracy. Then again, who published this story again? Maybe they don't.

Interesting idea, but what does the science say?