There’s certainly discussion, mostly in academic circles, around if the current administration could be called “fascist”, vs fascism being too specific of a label to properly define or encompass the actions of this administration, but by most measures, this administration is a fascist one.

You could argue that maybe he’s too stupid to hold an actual coherent ideology, so he’s not a fascist, but his actions are just similar, or that because we still have the rule of law, he doesn’t have the same unilateral powers that fascists throughout history have held, but at the end of the day it’s more semantics than it is actually getting to a good definition that makes the most sense.

He tried to overturn a free and fair election, he regularly pins people’s problems on marginalized outgroups to deflect blame from his administration and its wealthy supporters, he’s drastically expanding the surveillance state and cracking down on free speech, he’s consolidating executive power with the goal of becoming a dictator, he’s filling the streets with armed thugs to carry out his will against innocent people, actively suppressing both individual AND collective rights for the supposed good of the country, and is actively putting people in camps.

Maybe there aren’t camps that are explicitly “you go here and we exterminate you” yet, maybe he hasn’t been capable of fully jailing every single person who even slightly disagrees with him, and maybe he hasn’t ethnically cleansed an entire population yet, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a fascist, especially when he continually moves further and further in that direction every day.

He’s fundamentally against democracy, wants to be a dictator, punishes those who oppose him with militaristic force and government surveillance, and continues to contribute towards the displacement and spread of violent rhetoric towards ethnic groups, all while destroying the lives of everyday people for the benefit of his wealthy allies. That is a fascist.

Oh yeah, I’ve never heard of a credit builder loan with an ongoing date and cap. That’s definitely not a credit builder loan 😭

yet i can be charged an interest and be punished if i don’t lend them money on time?

Yes, that’s one of the reasons they work so well at quickly building up credit history for people with really bad credit to begin with. The credit bureaus see an actual loan, with actual interest, and actual required payments. If they didn’t ding you for missing payments, then the credit bureaus wouldn’t count it as a loan in the first place. There has to be some kind of pressure, consequence, and real-world stakes to missing payments to actually make it valid in their eyes, otherwise it’s no different than a regular savings account you put money into whenever.

The entire point of it is to measure if you can be trusted to responsibly borrow or pay back money, they have to give conditions closer to actual loans to actually be considered in your credit score.

The trade is pretty simple, you give them some of your money, your credit score goes up. It might not be a good deal if you already have the ability to earn off a credit card, but these are mostly targeted at people who get rejected for any card they apply for. They’re so low-risk for the company and so guaranteed that it’s why they can offer them to basically anyone regardless of credit.

That said, I still would say secured cards are a better option, as nowadays there are cards where instead of it being like “give us a $200 payment and we’ll give you a $400 credit limit with chances for increases later”, it’s “give us a $200 payment regardless of your credit score, and you can spend up to exactly $200, and maybe if your score goes up enough we’ll give you the real deal”.

The main problem with secured cards is that the way your credit score is calculated also calculates the % of your credit utilized. Higher is generally worse. So if you get a secured card, and the company offering it only allows you to start with $200, if you spend all $200, you’ll actually get a smaller boost to your score than if you’d spent $50 out of the $200 and no more over the entire month, or spent $200 on credit builder loan payments, which counts as a full, outstanding debt, just one that you’re regularly making payments on.

Again, this is why they are marketed to people looking to increase their score faster. You might spend more overall in interest, but you get a larger impact on your score than other options that factor in utilization, and they also tend to result in much larger increases over the same period for people that don’t already have a line of credit, which is obviously good for… people who don’t have access to credit and want to increase their score fast to get that access.

I wouldn’t personally choose one, it makes no sense for my situation, but they are a good option if you are, generally speaking, unable to get other lines of credit, will spend close to the limit of a secured card, and/or need a higher score faster than you could otherwise slowly build it up.

People and organizations that:

• Are known to use a variety of numbers (e.g. her bank uses different numbers for fraud alerts, customer service, specific front helpdesk phones, etc, and her medical providers all use different numbers and platforms to send out information)
• She doesn’t know how to add manually even if she’s told the details for

That’s why I’m saying it isn’t for everyone. Sure, maybe you can find someone that does have a bank, medical providers, insurance providers, etc, that uses only one number for all phone-based communication and uses no third-parties, but that’s not the norm, so for her, that would result in constantly missing bills, follow-up texts, fraud alerts, customer service callbacks, etc.

The upside of letting random people call anybody isn’t that large

That really does depend on the person. My grandma can barely use email and doesn’t know the difference between her Contacts app and Gmail, nor does she even understand how to add a contact. She’d just accidentally isolate herself from people without realizing, and would also never get any of the phone calls she gets from her bank, charities and organizations she works for, etc.

I asked her how she thought that would work and she said she didn’t know.

Fun fact, this is actually a real thing you can do, and the real ones aren’t scams. (unless you consider paying a fee in exchange for quickly building solid credit history without spending money on goods a scam)

They’re called Credit Builder Loans.

Essentially, you’re not technically “putting money in an account”, you’re being given a loan at a future date, after you’ve made your payments. (basically just a reversed loan schedule) If you miss a payment due date, it hurts your credit just like missing a regular loan payment for money they already gave you.

Some charge interest (basically any given by for-profit companies/banks), some don’t (mostly just the occasional credit union). They do exactly what the credit system is supposed to indicate, which is show that you can make payments consistently and on-time, regardless of if you got the money upfront or after.

Personally, I almost always would say secured credit cards and credit-building “debit” cards are a better option. (e.g. the Chime’s and Step’s of the world where your card limit is always your current balance and never more, except for overdrafts) If you look at a big credit builder loan provider like Self, you can see their plans result in you paying pretty large fees overall just to boost your credit score, like paying $600 in and getting $511 back on their cheapest plan. Ideally, you’d have a credit union that wouldn’t charge a fee, but might just offer a low or no interest rate compared to investing it in a CD in exchange for them having to effectively hold that money for you instead of being able to offer it out for loans. (and even then, the term is fixed, so they can still loan it out as long as they know they’ll get it paid back by the time your term ends)

It’s not really a “you need to bypass TCP” and more of a “TCP traffic could be censored”… just like UDP, DNS, or really any other kind of networked traffic.

Reticulum isn’t necessarily immune to this, it just supports a variety of protocols as a mesh network, so TCP isn’t something who’s failure would make the network impossible to use (but good luck accessing any traditional website without TCP).

For example, you might be able to communicate from your Android phone running a Reticulum-compatible app to a separate nearby device over Bluetooth, then that device broadcasts a signal over LoRa, which hits someone else’s LoRa-compatible radio, which then connects over a USB-C cable to their laptop, which is plugged into their router, which can then send the traffic over TCP, where it’s picked up by someone elsewhere using the internet. If TCP traffic is blocked, say, by their local government, maybe their LoRa radio just broadcasts to another LoRa radio, and another, and another, etc, until enough of them chained together is able to reach the recipient. Hence, TCP wouldn’t strictly be required, thus preventing censorship of Reticulum through blocking TCP connections. (though this would still reduce how many ways you could theoretically get to people, as if that person ONLY has access to TCP as the start of their connection to the mesh, they’d be cut off)

Of course, the government could also try jamming radio signals, then making LoRa useless, but if they do that and don’t block TCP traffic, then you still have options.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t call Reticulum an internet replacement, nor do I think it could ever be without still relying on the kind of large-scale, high-throughput infrastructure we have for the internet today. It just doesn’t have enough bandwidth, and it’s difficult to run anything requiring low latency if every connection requires hopping through a thousand peers to get to someone on the other side of the planet who, say, wants to play the same online game as you.

If writers use AI to do the writing for them, they’re not writers, they’re prompters that want credit for “writing” what the AI model they’re using is producing.

In the same way, someone who has a piano programmed to play a song can’t be proud of having played it themselves, because it wasn’t their work that made the piano play.

That’s not “black-and-white-only thinking”, it’s just a reasonable analogy for what a writer “writing” with AI actually is, which isn’t a writer.

If we don’t call film directors “actors” because their actions partially result in the film being made the way it is, and we don’t call people pressing the “play x song” button on an electric piano musicians just for having caused the piano to play with that button, why should we call someone who tells an AI model to write a book for them a writer? These are fundamentally different roles, so we call them what they are. If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer, you’re an AI user. Seems entirely reasonable to me.

Works the same on DuckDuckGo for those who don’t have a Kagi subscription!

Yup.

Pull some strings to keep stories out of traditional print media about it? The stuff on social media has already been clipped and reposted a billion times.

Buried the plaintiff’s legal team in paperwork? Here’s another video on your obviously scummy tactics that clearly indicate to most average people you’re not acting in good faith and probably have something to hide/defend that’s unjust, making even less people trust your company going forward.

Know you won’t get sued for that much because it’s just one claimaint? A ton of people who watched the videos now want to sign on to a class action.

The only solution if they’re truly in the wrong is to fix the problem, or pay up in court.

…

Or hope it blows over because people’s memories are notoriously short so that sometimes works too 💀

If you don’t understand your tools, you should be even more careful with it.

In this case, the “tools” are a settings menu in your phone. Should I and every other person (who are likely much less tech literate) have to deeply investigate the exact inner workings of every single setting just to use it?

Should I have to check when I turn dark mode on that there’s not an LLM under the hood rewriting code for apps that don’t support dark mode to make them dark anyways just because that’s a theoretical possibility for them to have done? After all, a simple button that just says “Fix x passwords” is no different from “Enable Dark Mode” in most people’s eyes. You tap it, it does what it says it does. That’s how people see it. If I hit the dark mode button on my phone, I don’t expect it to turn my apps yellow, and most people aren’t expecting that kind of possible variation from any setting on their phone.

Especially if one has learned that those tools are prone to malfunction.

As mentioned previously, not only does this feature not clearly display that it uses an AI model under the hood at all, but many people also assume that a tool implemented by a company like Apple directly into the operating system would probably be reliable if it handles sensitive data. Could that be considered foolish? Maybe. But I don’t believe people are stupid for assuming the multi trillion dollar company that didn’t even indicate the system used AI wouldn’t implement a system to change their passwords if it could easily fuck up and lock them out.

I don’t blame people for it, honestly. If this massive company is telling them that this tool will work as advertised, and clearly believes in it because it’s being widely rolled out across their devices, most people who simply don’t understand the intricacies will believe they’re not being lied to, or at least deceived as to how capable the feature really could be against adversarial attacks or unfavorable circumstances.

People aren’t necessarily stupid per se, they just aren’t constantly skeptical of every single possible claim, and familiar enough with the underlying subjects to understand it in the first place.

In this case, it’s genuinely just “hit the big blue ‘Fix x passwords’ button” and it’s done. Most users won’t even realize it uses an AI model under the hood, and will just assume it’s something to do with how the internet works. And honestly, can we really blame people for that when it’s designed in such a simplistic manner?

I love it. Does more than just a lawsuit on its own since it simultaneously does public awareness and advocacy work, plus it’s kinda just entertaining to see people have beef with corpos

They’re also on Nebula (paid though)

“Sex-testing” children in schools sounds like something you’d find in a niche pervert hentai drooled over by 4chan /pol/ board weirdos

You’re telling me the party that actively wants to destroy women’s rights while supporting a pedophile in office would… try to do things that pedophiles and rapists would like? Say it ain’t so! /s

Who would have guessed that if you outsource your information gathering abilities to a computer, people will just optimize their content so it gets picked up more by the computer regardless of its validity? Who could have seen this coming?!?!?!??!?

It is monopolistic. If I start a brand new company and try to pull that, nobody will respect my pricing scheme. The only way you can enforce such a pricing scheme (if you don’t have regulatory power) is to be large enough that ignoring you loses more revenue than it gains, whether or not people want you to be in that position of power.

If Steam charges 30%, then just like Amazon, they don’t have to restrict your ability to sell elsewhere for it to be bad for both the studio and the consumer.

If my game is $100, and $30 goes to Valve, and I want to make $100 in profit, I have to raise my game’s price to around $143. Even if another storefront offered 0% fees, I would have to sell there for $143 if I wanted to not be delisted from Steam.

Everyone pays a higher price, even if they don’t use Steam. Either that, or developers make less overall by keeping prices the same and losing Valve’s cut, which means less money for developers, servers, etc.

This is monopolistic because if someone tries to price their game lower elsewhere, making the same profit while paying less fees, and giving their players a cheaper price, instead of that just being regular 'ol competition, Valve gets to remove their main buyer base entirely unless they keep giving Valve a cut of most of their sales.

Other storefronts might not be great, but you don’t even get the ability to make a good storefront if your competition can just say “I already have most of the users, if you try to compete with me on price, I’ll remove all of your games from my platform and take away most of the market.”

New one seems fine to me, haven’t had any issues with it, haven’t been privy to any malicious behavior or past actions that the developers might have done, so personally I find it pretty trustworthy.

it was never as simple as “pick file, send file”.

Not really what Syncthing’s for. Localsend is definitely much better suited for that. (though there is the option on the unofficial Syncthing Android app to use the Android share feature to “save to Syncthing”, then pick which folder you want Syncthing to save it to before syncing it to whatever devices that folder is synced with, though again, not really made for that as a core feature, Localsend is better for that)

Syncthing is more for if you just want a folder on one device to be replicated to another device. For example, my Camera folder on my phone syncs to my PC so I always have a second copy of all my photos by default.

That if something is marketed with health-based language or claims, it must be true. (or that things that are healthy offset other unhealthy activities/behaviors/consumption, i.e. “I might have eaten a ton of ice cream today, but I had a lot of protein so that’ll make up for it”)

Way too many people buy into “healthy” products, especially the very expensive ones, without doing so much as a single search regarding if it’s even necessary for them, or if that particular product is even healthy in the way it appears.

People think anything with protein is inherently healthy, and the more the better, even if their body can’t use all the protein they consume, so they’ll eat multiple protein bars, have meat with every meal, and drink a protein shake every day.

Someone on social media says eating all raw meat and drinking raw milk is healthy, and they don’t even look up how much more likely you are to get a disease from consuming them. (not to mention the impact on their wallet)

A drink will be advertised as a “wellness shot” and is just some fruit juice with ginger, but people will pay 8 bucks for it every day assuming it’ll revolutionize their health, then drink a bunch of beer later that night and wonder why they feel awful later.

Hell, people will even take multivitamins or supplement powders that have 100’s of %'s of their recommended daily intake, and just assume that if they get 500% of their recommended vitamin B, they’ll magically become “healthy” by doing so, instead of “only” getting 100%.