Just a friendly reminder, as sarcastic as it sounds with the "good job internet", this article is sincerely praising how people across the internet made many game studios and publishers reconsider and avoid using NFTs in games, comparing it to how internet buzz brought legislative attention to loot boxes in games.

Partly convenient geopolitical ally (the borders were carved of the region not long after WW2 with the enforcement of the Allied forces) and partly Dominionism where a certain subsection of Christianity, predominantly Evangelicals who are very politically motivated, believe that when Israel controls Jerusalem, the holy land, that is one of the portents of the predictions made in the Book of Revalations, ushering in God's kingdom on earth and the end of time.

I kinda see where you're coming from but junk fees are really something that affects everyone, especially those near the bottom of society. Stuff like cell phone fees inflating phone prices, online commerce fees making transactions more expensive, credit card/banking fees, overdraft fees a literal tax on being poor, convenience fees because they can, maintenance fees. It all adds up to tens of billions of dollars annually.

As how Marx outlined Communism as the evolution of Capitalism once it reaches a scale of production that everyone can have their needs met, resulting in a classless, stateless, moneyless society, then yes authoritarian communist is an oxymoron.

There's no way an 8 inch cable works for you. 8 inches wouldn't even span the distance from my car charger to a phone clamp or from my computer to my desk.

3 ft is barely tolerable for me. 6 feet gives me enough room to move my phone around.

Just like the rest of Trek, it takes a season to grow the beard and for everyone to get comfortable in their roles and for the writers to get comfortable.

However It's very different from the rest of Star Trek however, it's not about the exploration of the universe. Is much more of a look of what it is like on a starbase and the day to day operations on that starbase.

You can still write in his name on the ballot. Nobody is going to arrest you for that. Ridicule you, sure, but not arrest you.

Thats part of the point, It makes the upfront pricing more visible. Clear, easy to understand information means better purchasing decisions are made by consumers.

It's a lot harder to sell a $1500 phone than it is to sell a $1000 phone with $500 in extra fees tacked on at the time of purchase.

If you're purchasing a phone ABC phone company and XYZ phone company might both offer the latest iDroid model for $1000+tax and fees, but you have no idea what the specifics of those taxes and fees are until you actually get to the point of sale.

I'd say Nixon, without the Southern Strategy, the republican party wouldn't have been basically taken over by the subsumed Dixiecrats.

Right but how much of our daily existence is tied to the internet? Like all of our banking systems, our commerce, communications, infrastructure.

Going dark fulfills a whole bunch of objectives, filling up with trash is one of them, it's fewer eyes seeing ads because less content keeping people scrolling, people subbed to subreddits that went dark are getting a stream of messages saying the execs at reddit fucked up and are providing alternatives like discord and Lemmy, and anyone who even dabbled with fediverse relates stuff like mastodon are getting messages and emails capitalizing on the mass Exodus saying hey come to lemmy, we're like reddit but decentralized.

Yeah none of that politics stuff like how Jackie Robinson playing baseball definitely wasn't political, and the US vs Soviets 1980 Olympics definitely wasn't politically charged, and people definitely were expressing their dislike of the Soviets during the game or the entire point of the Olympics being a peaceful gathering of nation states for competition ia definitely not political, or all the taxpayer money that goes to building stadiums also isnt political, or that the owners of sports teams are politically active isnt... political. Oh... wait.

On Reddit, I always had fresh content, which I'm not really seeing here

Eh That comes with time, I'm sure there were people back during the Digg exodus that complained Reddit didn't have as much content. It's all user generated stuff, so more users, more content, best we can do is step up ourselves and get the content going.

Most likely Hivemind, could also be called, Gestalt Intelligence, group mind, group ego, or mind coalescence. It's very much a staple of sci-fi for decades.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_(science_fiction)

Once you get a hang of how the fediverse works in general, it's pretty good so far. Using mostly mobile atm, nice and clean, functional pretty similar experience to reddit. Aside from a few features missing like search, I'd imagine there is plenty of room for moderator tools too, and the occasional error codes, I'm loving it so far. No ads, just content, and while it's not the firehose that reddit is/was, if this keeps getting popular, I could forsee just as many communities popping up across instances as there are subreddits.

I'm sure with the influx of users from reddit, especially the more technically savvy mods we're going to see a lot of good tools made for the app and with it being open source, I imagine the devtimes are going to be even quicker than dealing with an ok API.

Eh I tend to find that nothing is truly apolitical. Everything that exists is affected by politics. If you start looking you can find how politics plays a role in everything.

Like this bottle of Coke I'm currently drinking. The corn syrup used in it is super cheap because the agriculture industry is heavily subsidized to grow corn, the logos and branding falls under trademark and copyright law, the plastic that makes up the bottle has regulations on the types of plastic used and can only use food safe plastics, and that plastic is a product of petroleum, so fossilr fuel lobbying isninvolved too, the water that Coca Cola uses could very well have come from a source that was plundered by a PMC (look up Nestle for that one) and stolen from locals. And then just because I throw the bottle into recycling, doesn't mean as soon as it leaves my hand that it's properly handled along the entire processing and doesn't just end up in a landfill anyway. And that's not talking about all the different lobbyists from all the various industries that play a role in making, shipping and disposing of a bubbly brown liquid in a bottle made of polymerization petroleum.

So First Past the Post and the electoral college aren't mutually exclusive.

The electoral college is voting logistics, a relic of a time when sending paper ballots in a sealed box from Vermont or Georgia to Washington was a months long horseback ride through dangerous territories. It was a clever solution to solve the logistics of running a democracy on the technology they had at the time.

First Past the Post is a simple voting system where each persong gets one vote with one name on it. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. The problem with it is it tends toward 2 parties through the spoiler effect. If there are 2 parties that run similar enough platforms, that splits the voting base, because either party will satisfy those issue needs, but the opposition to those issues would be one big voting bloc. Thus the 2 losing parties will siphon off voters from the other losing party until eventually one party remains.

It's why the Dems in this country range from vaguely progressive corporate neoliberals (think Biden or Pelosi) or to highly progressive further left wing* people (think Bernie or AOC. And Republicans range from conservative corporate neolibs (think Romney or McCain) to reactionaries and outright fascists (think Boebert and Marjorie Green).

*compared to the rest of our representatives in America

It does match one phenomenon. Survival. Noise is important for listening for predators, smell let's you know if potential food is rotted and our sense of taste helps us distinguish between calorie dense food (sweet), salts and micronutrients (salty), acidic foods (sour), poisons (bitter) and protein (umami).

I'm working on it! I just got here! Still learning the ropes and which communities are here or not.

The same way Texas did its abortion bounty scheme or Florida made it ok to run protestors over. Empower the chuds to enact violence, maybe lock one or two up for going too far and call it a day, while nothing is actually done to stop the violence.