independent has always meant the freedom to create whatever you want without input unwanted influence from anyone else.

Yes, and if a publisher is present, you cannot as a consumer ensure this is the case. No publisher actually makes their contracts with dev studios public for review, or allows people to review their internal communication.

No, this distinction prevents publishers from co-opting “indie” as a label, which people support because of that artistic discretion, and hiding it behind their opaque promises of such independence that no one can verify. You cannot trust a dev hasn’t been influenced by a publisher when they’re present, so the only way to ensure that is to not have a publisher present.

I don’t know that movie, but I do know actual indie devs who use e.g. Patreon for funding. It’s not about not having money, it’s about who your money comes from, and whether there can be hidden stipulations on it. With publishers, there always are.

I’m a big proponent of actually trying out a new configuration each week for the first month or so, for a living room. You’d be surprised how different it actually feels with furniture in different spots, but most people tend to just place it when they move in and leave it. Living rooms also tend to be fewer furniture pieces than a bedroom or office, so more feasible to re-arrange.

This will also really help identify where your tv should be placed, to minimize glare or reflections.

As someone with transphobic parents (including one who was actually fired for repeatedly and very pointedly dead-naming, we found out later) and a trans nephew, in their cases I there are 2 things I’ve seen:

1. the “it’s not real”/ “young people made it up” thing:

This is something my less ‘angry’ transphobic dad does, just writing it off as a ‘fake’ trend where young people do it because of either peer pressure or for attention (positive or negative). He continuously dead names my trans nephew when not in his presence because he doesn’t think it matters to anyone else, but will usually not do so to his face.

2. the “I don’t like it, and I’m personally offended by things I dislike, and they’re bad people for offending me” thing:

This is my mom, who was fired for continuously dead-naming a coworker and then loudly refusing to stop. She is very prudish, very conservative, and is just an all-around craven and bitter person.

She just pretends my nephew doesn’t exist, or if forced to talk about him, insists that he’s been brainwashed by his mom. She literally gets angry at the mere existence of trans people, because to her, being confronted with something she doesn’t like is literally a personal offense.

This is in line with her reaction to any criticism, and also her tendency to eventually hate anyone she has to interact with frequently enough, because no one perfectly agrees with you about everything. Not a joke, she used to change jobs every 1-2 years, and each new place she worked would follow the same progression: “I love my new coworkers, everyone’s so nice.” -> “The people here are so mean to me/ ignore me/ etc”. She lives alone, has basically no friends, and is miserable from what I can tell. She’s also super racist, but swears up and down otherwise, but that’s a story for another time.

tl;dr either 1) dismissive, or 2) have zero empathy and just want everyone to conform to their worldview.

Obviously individuals cannot personally fulfill all the things a government does, but that’s because the government is a large group of people. A similarly large group of people who are not employed by a government can still accomplish the same tasks; a weather forecaster for example doesn’t stop being one just because they’re not doing it for a government.

If critical functions that protect lives can be gutted and lost at the whims of a remote and sometimes hostile government we clearly have little control over, perhaps that’s the wrong structure to maintain those functions? After all, it’s not like Trump hasn’t floated enforcing different regulations or providing or not providing help based on location (i.e. excluding Blue states from federal aid) anyways, so even keeping the jobs and regulations in place doesn’t mean they’re actually going to be used to help us.

A lot of the functions like water quality monitoring are done at local levels anyways, even if regulations around them are federal.

Maybe a better lesson from this is that just one civically-engaged person can make a huge difference to a community.

This is great to see, and as long as it’s up to companies whether to do this we need to encourage that behavior… but it also shouldn’t be up to companies’ whims whether to do this or not. It should be legally required for end-of-support devices and software to release whatever source code or changes are necessary to either operate the device/software independent of a server, or run the server ourselves.

I don’t believe those actually resulted in rulings in Musk’s favor. GARM (the org he accused of being an anti-trust violation) shut down citing the legal costs of the case, and afaik the case against the constituent companies is still ongoing, but unlikely to end in his favor. It’s purely a SLAPP lawsuit.

Honestly, operating a private streaming site is much safer than pirate VHF/ UHF broadcasts, both in terms of what you’ll get charged with, and how long you’ll remain undetected. VHF and UHF broadcasts are literal homing beacons (and without something to bounce the signal off, very limited in what you’d reach).

Jellyfin on an offshore VPS, with invite-only accounts otoh…

I was commenting on a likely Democrat going to a convention 5 years into an airborne pandemic that targets whoever its spreaders deem “genetically weak” (via its immune system test) to kill or disable.

I’m going to need a whole lot of context that’s not in this post. If you think this post is calling out a specific Democrat, you have not conveyed that at all.

And Nazis denied that racism makes no sense. Denialism isn’t particularly what defines non-Nazis.

“Nazis denied that racism makes no sense”. Wait, so you think that 1) racism makes no sense, and 2) Nazis denied it/ claim otherwise (i.e. they claim racism makes sense)? I think you’re severely mis-stating whatever you’re trying to convey. Racism is a very real thing, and it’s usually Republicans and Nazis who claim it makes no sense as a concept, and claim it’s just a label created to attack them for political purposes.

“Being racist makes no sense” is a very different statement than “racism makes no sense”. I think you meant to say the former.

Nazis denied that their beliefs were rooted in racism, because racism was (even in the 1930s) understood as a cognitive and cultural bias, not beliefs rooted in science or fact. They didn’t deny their own disdain for non-white people, they just denied that it was racism. Eugenics as a pseudo-scientific framework was developed in order to legitimize racist beliefs so that racists could openly tout those beliefs without them being labeled racist. Racists (Nazis included) didn’t want to have to deny their racism.

Denialism is in fact contra-indicative to Nazism, who were very concerned with legitimizing their beliefs openly, so as not to have to hide/ deny them.

If being depressed made people stop needing food

Show me where you think I said this.

I’ll assume you have no actual rebuttal than, shall I?

dumb and not what I said

Hence the “like saying” part: it’s illustrative of the erasure of relationships that I’m talking about.

“Nazis support eugenics, so if you support eugenics, you’re a Nazi” = dumb but something I’ve been told by what I presume is your type of person before

Huh? I’m pretty sure I did literally the opposite of this when I said, “All Nazis are imperialist, but not all Imperialists are Nazis, for example.”

“Nazis support using mass murder for eugenics, so if you support using mass murder for eugenics, you’re a Nazi” = a fair way to read what I said

Sure, and do you think that Democrats support “using mass murder for eugenics”?

I despise Israel, for example, but I can also critically examine how we got to the level of support for them that we did as a country, including Democrats. Everything from the anti-Communist/ pro-Capitalist Red Scare propaganda, Islamophobia, racism, and a whole lot of moneyed interests, contribute to the US’s cultural support for Israel.

Eugenicists do not deny that moniker, it was literally created as a moniker by them for their pseudo-scientific framework to support genocide. Nazis very openly promoted that they were eugenicists. Israel on the other hand cloaks its eugenics in the language of/ mask of Securitization (which it learned/ inherited from America and Europe), which exists to give a veneer of deniability to it being a eugenicist State. Democrats who support Israel will deny that Israel is engaging in eugenics (another indicator that Democrats are in fact not Nazis).

Mass-incarceration is another case where eugenics is very relevant when examining its evolution from/ replacement of slavery, but is not the goal of Democrats.

If I’m incorrectly interpreting your meaning here, please tell me; I am not a Democrat, but I’m not going to label them “slow-moving Nazis” for rhetorical convenience/ expediency (nevermind that it’s counter-productive when trying to pull people away from identifying as Democrats).

Art doesn’t help much if you’re starving to death.

And being well-fed doesn’t help much if you’re contemplating suicide because your life has no joy in it. And art is not the only source of joy, but it is one of them (and one of the most common).

It’s definitely worth it to help the slow-pace Nazis overthrow the fast-pace Nazis, even if it vaguely “stabilizes” Nazi control.

This is a strange false-dichotomy. You shouldn’t be helping any Nazis.

If this is a “neolib centrists are also Nazis” take, you need to recalibrate your baselines: there are tons of groups out there in between wherever you (and those of us here on Beehaw) are on the ‘Left’ spectrum, and Nazis. Democrats are shitty, feckless, Capitalist, and even imperialist, but you can literally be all those things and not be a Nazi (debating whether Settler-Colonialism is worse than Nazism is a topic for another discussion- it’s still different, and Democrats aren’t pro-SetCol ideologically anyways).

You can’t invert or erase the hierarchical relationship between more general traits and systems with narrower group ideologies in order to make those traits or systems indicators of the group (like saying “Nazis eat food, so if you eat food, you’re a Nazi”). All Nazis are imperialist, but not all Imperialists are Nazis, for example.

I think this sort of irks me a lot because people need to be anti-Capitalist/ anti-neoliberal/ anti-imperialist for their own sake, not just because they’ve conflated them as being “Nazi things”, and thus inherited their opposition from an anti-Nazi stance by default. People need to understand why these things are bad.

You keep using the word “useful” in a way that suggests you’ve narrowly defined it in your head to exclude art. Life without art quickly results in a whole lot of death. Even the poorest humans throughout history have created music and art, because it’s a fundamental part of human life. Just because art is less critical to immediate survival in most cases than eating doesn’t make it any less necessary than it; shelter being more or less critical than food in a given situation (deadly sub-zero blizzard, more critical. Temperate area with no dangerous weather or predators, less critical) also doesn’t make it more or less necessary, it’s just a varying order of necessity. Being anti-Capitalist is important, but I feel like you’ve written off “professional” art as the domain of Capitalism rather than another victim of it (which food is as well, for that matter).

I mean… You can. You can train and run models yourself. Lots of people and orgs do.

something something WMDs in Iraq…

American == Fascistic == “Make America Great Again”/ Manifest Destiny == Settler Colonialist… viewpoints

Yes, and if there had been significant military resistance I think people would not be side-eyeing her so hard. Given how quickly they located and secured Maduro, however, and the extreme lack of military response to the attacks, it’s seeming pretty likely that Trump made a deal with her (as he’s claiming) to get Maduro.

immoral people existing is not the problem here

True. The profit motive is. People pushing harmful content are doing it because it makes them money, not because they’re twirling their moustaches as they relish their evil deeds. You remove the profit motive, you remove the motivation to harm people for profit.

the difference is that there isn’t an algorithm that acts as a vector for harmful bullshit

The algorithms boost engagement according to 1) what people engage with, and 2) what companies assess to be appealing. Facebook took the lead in having the social media platform own the engagement algorithms, but the companies and people pushing the content can and do also have their own algorithmic targeting. Just as Joe Camel existed before social media and still got to kids (and not just on TV), harmful actors will find and join discords. All that Facebook and Twitter did was handle the targeting for them, but it’s not like the targeting doesn’t exist without the platforms’ assistance.

Said bad actors do not exist in anywhere near the same capacity. Imo the harm of public chat rooms falls under the “parents can handle this” umbrella. Public rooms are still an issue, but from experience being a tween/teen on those platforms, it’s not even close to being as bad.

It wasn’t as bad on those… back when we were teens. It absolutely is now. If anything, you’ll usually find that a lot of the most harmful groups (red-pill/ manosphere, body-image- especially based around inducing EDs- influencers) actually operate their own discords that they steer/ capture kids into. They make contact elsewhere, then get them into a more insular space where they can be more extreme and forceful in pushing their products, out of public view.

If it was the case that it was just individual actors on the platform causing the harm and not the structure of the platforms incentivizing said harm, then we would see more of this type of thing in real life as well.

I’m not saying it’s all individuals, I’m saying the opposite; it’s companies. Just not social media companies. Social media companies are the convenient access vector for the companies actually selling and pushing the harmful products and corollary ideas that drive kids to them.

I struggle to think of a more complete solution to the harm caused by social media to children than just banning them.

Given that your immediate solution was to regulate kids instead of regulating companies, I don’t think you’re going to be interested in my solutions.