75 million people decided they wanted this, a bit less than that decided they didn’t, and the remainder decided they did not care enough about their country to give their opinion either way

Taking wagers on how long it will last before Trump’s FTC revokes it

(Bets are only accepted in the form of biscuits 🍪)

An xkcd becomes a classic when people use it a lot.

In most cases, destroying evidence will result in an adverse inference being drawn against the accused. It means that the court will assume that the evidence was incriminating which is why you destroyed it.

I don’t think anyone has been able to recreate his experiment. He’s accused of manipulating it to fit his narrative. He denies these accusations, of course.

Did he do anything besides the Stanford Prison Experiment that I just don’t know of? Because if that’s all, I’d be more inclined to say that he’s just stubbornly wrong rather than evil. But maybe you know something I don’t

I remember some popular YouTuber ran an experiment trying to re-create the conclusions that Zimbardo had come to. The results contradicted his conclusions and they confronted him. He continued to defend his experiment. He seemed like a rather stubborn man.

The police can engage in rubber-hose cryptanalysis. In many countries, it’s legal to keep a suspect in prison indefinitely until they comply with a warrant requiring them to divulge encryption keys. And that’s not to mention the countries where they’ll do more than keep you in a decently-clean cell with three meals a day to, ahem, encourage you to divulge the password.

Law enforcement shouldn’t be able to get into someone’s mobile phone without a warrant anyway. All this change does is frustrate attempts by police to evade going through the proper legal procedures and abridging the rights of the accused.

The UK is a small country that doesn’t have nearly the geopolitical sway that the US does. If the UK withdraws to itself, that sucks for Britons but the rest of the world will carry on. If the US withdraws to itself, it will suck for the rest of the world but the Americans will carry on.

I want to be clear here that this is dangerous messaging. While any individual vote likely has little effect on the outcome of an election, it’s people’s collective vote that does ultimately decide the outcome. And when the electorate is disengaged, disinterested, and apathetic, that is the environment in which fascism and authoritarianism thrives. Voting is not and should not be the end of a citizen’s political participation, but it is still vitally important. Voting should only be the foundation of citizen political participation. It’s also important to campaign, to discuss important political issues with others, and to protest and take direct action against the injustice of the political class. But if you don’t vote and spread the idea that voting is meaningless, your efforts will change nothing.

This line in particular comes a lot of young people, and it is an absolutely understandable and reasonable conclusion for them to come from seeing as they are the most politically neglected group, and politicians almost never pay more than lip service to the concerns of the young. Youth turnout in elections is historically rubbish, so why would any rational politician pay heed to the demands of a voting bloc that won’t influence the outcome of an election? Politicians who pander to youth voters will lose to politicians who pander to old voters simply because youth voters will stay home while old voters will show up at the polls and vote their guy into office.

It costs almost nothing to vote and to encourage others to vote as well. So do it. It is irresponsible to spread the idea that voting is meaningless without also attaching the context that if you don’t vote, you have no power at all.

This is a proceeding in federal court, but the president’s pardon power doesn’t extend to civil cases anyway. Or at least until the Supreme Court rules that it does.

I have to agree with you there. I think the Democratic Party was scared of inviting infighting with a primary contest which Harris would probably win anyway, but you’re right—Harris had no mandate from the party membership and even a lightning-round primary conducted online would have been better.

I think I phrased my comment wrong on this. It doesn’t ban the act of gerrymandering, it bans the results of gerrymandering. Gerrymandered maps would need to be redrawn had the bill been enacted.

This bill was no slouch. It directly abridged several states’ voter suppression laws. Had the bill passed, the next phase would have been people being able to use the federal courts to strike back against these incompatible laws.

That being said, if you were the leader of the Democratic Party, what would you have done? Not intended as rhetorical snark, I’m just curious as to what other ideas there are.

The first bill filed in the House of Representatives and Senate after the 2020 election which resulted in the Democratic Party gaining nominal control of Congress and the White House was a bill to ban partisan gerrymandering, require independent redistricting committees, forbid states from imposing onerous voter registration or identification regulations, limit the influence of rich donors and wealthy PACs in federal elections, and generally just make the process of voting better for Americans.

This bill was called the Freedom to Vote Bill and was numbered H.R. 1 and S. 1 for the House and Senate versions, respectively. It passed the House of Representatives in 3 March 2021 and received unanimous support among the 50 Democratic senators when the Senate held its vote on 22 June 2021. The bill was blocked from advancing due to a Republican filibuster.

On 3 January 2022, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced plans to abolish the filibuster for legislation in order to allow this bill to advance. President Joe Biden had previously indicated he would sign the bill. Schumer made his move on 19 January 2022, moving to change the filibuster rule to require continuous talking, i.e. in order to filibuster a bill, someone must make a speech and keep talking for the duration of the filibuster, with the filibuster ending when they finish talking. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, members of the Democratic Party representing Arizona and West Virginia, respectively, got squeamish and voted against the change. All Republican senators voted against the change. This doomed the bill’s passage through Congress as the filibuster could be maintained indefinitely by the Republicans.

The bill died when Congress was dissolved pending the November 2022 general election, in which Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives.

Manchin and Sinema’s terms with both expire when the new Congress is convened on 3 January 2025 following the November 2024 general election. Manchin did not seek re-election in yesterday’s election and will retire at the expiration of his term. Sinema was forced out of the Democratic Party and originally planned to stand as an independent before deciding against it. She will retire at the end of her term.

Due to the innate malapportionment of the Senate, it is exceedingly unlikely that the Democratic Party will ever regain majority control of the Senate.

So I point my finger at these two idiots for sinking American democracy as we know it.

It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.

Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.

You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.

Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.

Yeah, so It turns out fewer people care about and really want those things than you think…

Because the “US Government” is not a monolithic entity but rather, a large and complex democratic organisation that citizens can influence the composition of through political participation.

The only realistic way I see the situation being better here is if the United States imposes it. Nobody else has the power to do so and keep the peace. The United Nations is losing its credibility every passing day but maybe there is still enough time where Palestine being placed under UN trusteeship with the USA, Israel, and one Arab nation as joint trustees would be acceptable to the key stakeholders here. Eventually, once the situation stabilises, the goal would be to grant the Palestinian state independence from the Trusteeship Council.

The socialists of Lemmy will decry this solution. They’ll call it colonialism and an example of Israeli and American imperialism. And it is. But it’s better than whatever shit-show is happening now. Israelis today will not accept a sovereign Palestinian state and will devote all their resources to destroy it. Organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah will not accept an Israeli state and will similarly continue to expend their resources to destroy. These are resources that could otherwise be used to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank and to make reparations for those whose lives were destroyed in this decades-long conflict.

Israelis see the situation in reverse—if they don’t beat the Palestinians to a pulp every single time without mercy, organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah will overrun Israel and do the same thing to them. It’s kind of like the reason why Japanese troops in World War II wouldn’t surrender to the Americans; they thought the Americans would treat Japanese POWs like how the Japanese treated American POWs.

Terrorist groups are more likely to form in bad social, political, and economic circumstances. Astute observation.