spit_evil_olive_tips

joined 3 months ago
[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 1 points 14 minutes ago

me sowing (signing a bill into law and bragging about its bipartisan support): haha fuck yeah!

me reaping (hearing that the Supreme Court has ruled 9-0 to uphold the law that I signed): well this fucking sucks. what the fuck.

there's always fierce competition in the category of Dumbest Own-Goal by a Democrat...but here comes President "only mostly dead...still slightly alive" Biden with a last-minute buzzerbeater and....MUH GAWD HE'S DONE IT!

 

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Where the fridge cases were previously lined with simple glass doors, there were door-size computer screens instead. These “smart doors” obscured shoppers’ view of the fridges’ actual contents, replacing them with virtual rows of the Gatorades, Bagel Bites and other goods it promised were inside. The digital displays had a distinct advantage over regular glass, at least for the retailer: ads.

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These internet-connected fridge panels, developed by a Chicago startup called Cooler Screens Inc., frequently flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products. Every so often, they caught fire. But store managers were stuck with them. As part of a 10-year contract with Walgreens for a split of the ad revenue, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of US locations like this one. It planned to install 35,000 more.

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On Dec. 14, Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat, and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through one by one. Some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, “assorted sports drinks & coffee.”

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 2 points 8 hours ago

this is especially funny when juxtaposed against the TikTok ban and its supposed "data privacy" rationale.

if a Chinese company spies on you - we try to ban their app entirely, or force it to be sold to an American company.

if an American company spies on you - we tell them they have to wait 5 years before they can do it again. they don't even pay a fine.

also, GM sold this data to data brokers rather than directly to the insurance companies that supposedly wanted the data. these brokers are a completely unregulated industry, there are no limits on who they can sell the data to.

everyone is saying we need to ban TikTok because "what if the Chinese government gets data on US citizens". here's the fun part. if they want that data, all they need to do is set up a shell company and buy it from these data brokers. they don't need TikTok.

comprehensive data privacy legislation, along the lines of the GDPR, is the only thing that has any chance at being effective here.

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 38 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

tapping the "there are no good billionaires" sign

remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, slapped "Democracy dies in darkness" on the masthead, and a bunch of MSNBC-brained liberals thought it was going to be the newspaper that led the resistance against Trump?

I just woke up from a years-long coma. could someone tell me how that worked out?

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

And you think Xiaohongshu is run by the Chinese workers?

oh yes daddy, harder. shove those words right into my mouth.

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 2 points 1 day ago

And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this

well, sometimes...I linked in this comment to some statements made by the Republican congressman who sponsored the original bill. he was pretty clear that he wanted the ban because he thinks TikTok is pushing propaganda, not just from the Chinese, but the Chinese Communist Party (which has been a long-standing right-wing bogeyman - that congressman was even the chair of the "House Select Committee on the CCP")

I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

this is true, in the same way that Trump in his first campaign promised a "Muslim ban" and then when they tried to actually implement it they realized they needed to frame it as a "travel ban...applying to countries that happen to have a lot of Muslims...oh and also North Korea because look at us, we're definitely not discriminating against people based solely on religion"

everyone (except the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court) saw through the "travel ban" facade pretty easily. it's been disappointing to see how many people uncritically repeat "well, there's a data privacy angle to it too..." as if it's a legitimate justification and not just another facade.

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 20 points 2 days ago (9 children)

I've been very cynical about the TikTok ban, and assumed people would work around it by sideloading the APK on Android phones, after it was removed from the app stores (which, as I detailed in this comment, could theoretically get random users who share the APK with friends prosecuted by the federal government and charged with a $5000 per user fine)

but this is exceeding my wildest expectations

"oh, but it's full of Chinese propaganda!!!" people will whine. cool. don't care. Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda, no one seems to be falling over themselves to ban those apps from app stores.

if propaganda is the concern, have schools teach critical thinking and how to recognize propaganda techniques. they won't do that, of course, because they want people to be susceptible to American propaganda.

haha class solidarity go brrr. the average American worker has more in common with the average Chinese worker than they do with an American oligarch. all of the American propaganda about how Chinese people are inherently untrustworthy and nefarious is gonna fall apart as people interact with actual Chinese people and realize "oh they're pretty much just like me, other than the language barrier".

and TikTok-style shortform video is very nearly the ideal medium for surmounting that language barrier. it was already commonplace to have captions in TikTok videos. start captioning videos on RedNote in both English and Chinese and bang, language differences don't matter nearly as much anymore.

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

tapping the sign: Omar El Akkad, October 25th 2023

One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Apple announcing a new product would be news.

speculation that Apple might announce a new product...is not news.

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

“tiktok” does not appear to me to be a viewpoint

seriously? have you not paid attention to any of the arguments in favor of the ban that boil down to "it's pushing evil Chinese Communist propaganda into the minds of our precious children"?

here's the original bill - H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

it was introduced by Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin).

here's a tweet of his from March:

"This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users. America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States." - Rep. Gallagher

and from November 2023, in a Fox News appearance:

Rep. Gallagher on why it’s critical to ban or force a sale of TikTok:

“It would be national self-suicide to allow the dominant media platform in America to be controlled, or at least be influenced by, the Chinese Communist Party.”

the advocates for the ban have been very clear, from the start, that they believe TikTok has a viewpoint - specifically that it's controlled or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. and they want to discriminate against that viewpoint.

id say you have a stronger argument than viewpoint discrimination by saying it violates the first ammendment of the users of tiktok, personally, though the courts might disagree.

have you read the bill? the actual law, not news articles or summaries of it?

I linked it in this comment. go read it, it's short, and not terrible as far as legalese goes.

the gist of it is that the law makes it illegal to run an app store (or anything that looks like an app store) that offers downloads of the TikTok app.

so the two big obvious targets of the law are Apple and Google...but it applies equally to everyone. F-Droid could violate it, in theory, by hosting the APK for download through their servers.

or for example, say the ban took effect, and TikTok gets removed from app stores. some tech-savvy high school kid knows how to copy the APK from their Android phone before it gets deleted, and shows their friends how to sideload it onto their phones.

then a bunch of other people ask for it too, so this kid uploads it to some filesharing service, passes around the link, and eventually it gets around to 100 other classmates.

that high school kid has violated the TikTok ban. the federal government can levy a fine against them of half a million dollars ($5,000 per user who downloaded it)

does that satisfy your desire to have the ban infringe on the free speech of "real" people, and not just Apple and Google?

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use

but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.

do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?

or, since Musk has said he's starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?

beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda.

of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren't all 3 of them "poisoning our society with propaganda"?

why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?

does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the "ChiComs", if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?

because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to "sure, lots of apps do it...but it's uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people does it"

[–] spit_evil_olive_tips 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

you arent responding to their point about framing this as a 1st ammendment issue being problematic.

I've posted previously about why "the federal government can require Apple and Google to remove apps it doesn't like, and that has nothing to do with free speech" is a laughable position. I didn't feel like rehashing it here.

 

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DraftKings Sportsbook+ is likely an enticing proposition for those who want to make longshot bets even more lucrative. It’s also a nudge toward the types of bets that deliver the highest margins for sportsbooks. They offer the allure of large payouts, but with the requirement that every single leg be correct for the bet to cash.

 

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To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more.

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Virologists around the world said they were flabbergasted by how poorly the United States was tracking the situation. “You are surrounded by highly pathogenic viruses in the wild and in farm animals,” said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. “If three months from now we are at the start of the pandemic, it is nobody’s surprise.”

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As President-elect Donald Trump comes into office in January, farmworkers may be even less protected. Trump’s pledge of mass deportations will have repercussions whether they happen or not, said Tania Pacheco-Werner, director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute in California.

Many dairy and poultry workers are living in the U.S. without authorization or on temporary visas linked to their employers. Such precarity made people less willing to see doctors about covid symptoms or complain about unsafe working conditions in 2020. Pacheco-Werner said, “Mass deportation is an astronomical challenge for public health.”

 

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DFCS spends a minimum of $830 to $980 a month to house a child in foster care, according to the state’s published daily rates for foster parents. That’s roughly equivalent to the monthly fair market rate to rent a one-bedroom apartment in most of Georgia outside of metro Atlanta, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s estimates.

The cost for foster care can be significantly higher if a child has complex mental health or behavioral needs, as some of Wise’s kids do. Under the state’s current rates, specialized foster care for a single child in an institution or group home can reach $6,390 a month.

Josh Gupta-Kagan, who directs the Family Defense Clinic at Columbia Law School, said it’s baffling that DFCS would not provide housing assistance instead of removing children. “Why do we allow kids to be separated from their parents who we won’t help with housing — only to place them with strangers who we will help with housing?” he asked.

 

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In fact, it’s the uncertainty itself that contributes to the surveillance PTSD experienced today by aging Black activists like Silvers. Surveillance PTSD, also common among young men who’ve experienced multiple police stops, manifests as hypervigilance, anxiety, depression, and mistrust of formal institutions, including health clinics and banks. Sometimes it’s the very inability to know whether you’re really being watched, or you’re simply being paranoid, that is most unsettling of all.

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Rahim and Silvers are not outliers. The destabilization, the inability to know what’s real, to be haunted by uncertainty for decades—that’s the point. FBI briefs from 1971 describe their purpose as the inducement of “paranoia.” So COINTELPRO’s effects linger on, whether or not the program’s targets are still being actively surveilled by the state today.

 

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if you're not in Seattle, you probably haven't followed this incredibly stupid saga up until now:

May 2024: Adrian Diaz Out as Police Chief Amid Mounting Harassment and Discrimination Allegations

Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz has stepped down as chief after a series of scandals and lawsuits, many of them by women alleging discrimination and sexual harassment by Diaz and other officers in the department, multiple sources have confirmed.

Diaz will reportedly remain at the department in a special projects director instead of being fired—allowing him to retain a substantial six-figure salary without having to go back to his previous rank of lieutenant.

June 2024: Diaz Comes Out as Gay to Right-Wing Radio Host, Who Says this Proves His “Innocence”

Former police chief Adrian Diaz told conservative talk-radio host Jason Rantz that he is a “gay Latino man,” and suggested that his being gay undermines the claims of the women who have accused him of with sexual harassment, discrimination, and creating a hostile work environment toward women as well as Black officers.

July 2024: Former Police Chief Adrian Diaz Threatened PubliCola Over Post Describing His Coming-Out Interview

Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz, who was removed from his position earlier this year, threatened to sue PubliCola, and me personally, unless we removed a post describing the interview he did with conservative talk show host Jason Rantz.

so he gets accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, steps down as chief (but without getting fired, and retaining his salary)

then he tries to pull a Kevin Spacey by appearing on the radio show of a local two-bit Rush Limbaugh wannabe, and claiming to be gay, which means he obviously couldn't have harassed any women.

then he threatens to sue news outlets for reporting on that radio show appearance, because they reported on it skeptically rather than uncritically repeating "well, I guess he must be innocent then".

until finally an internal report into part of the harassment allegations is released (direct link to the 41-page PDF for my fellow primary source nerds)

the tl;dr of the investigation is that Diaz hired his girlfriend into a $200k/year job at the police department, where she reported directly to him. and that's too much even for our very pro-cop mayor, so he gets fired.

oh, and he bragged to other people at SPD about fucking his girlfriend, and showed them nude pics of her. which...uh...kinda lends some credence to those sexual harassment allegations.

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