Not from Canada but this sent me down a rabbit hole, So the Ontario government sold a monopoly on beer sales to a company and ford backed out early and now the government has to pay 200 million in damages to the company instead of letting the contract expire in a year?

It’s genuinely great that China offers that to the people they don’t imprison for asking for their rights and speaking out against the state.

I mean that’s the vast majority of the people, looks like they have a little under 10,000 political prisoners in a country of 1.4 billion, so 0.0007% of people. That’s not good and should be 0 but it’s not some orwellian police state with stazi on every corner checking if you said xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.

I’m no fan of Chinese authoritarianism and there human rights record but pretending there authoritarianism is the same as the totalitarianism of the 20th century is naive. It’s Definitely not an “open air prison” and does a disservice to people who live in actual open air prisons like Gaza or North Korea.

did you not get sent some fucked up videos

Oh yeah, all that shit, I wasn’t talking about porn and fetish stuff though cause my comment was getting long, was just talking about actual atrocities like war, famine genocide etc. I don’t think preteens have an interest in that stuff. They definitely do have an interest in porn / gross stuff but I’m not convinced that stuff is necessarily detrimental or traumatic. I’m open to being convinced but most of the arguments seem to be pearl clutching about them losing their innocence and anecdotally I know most of my friends watched porn / gross videos at that age and turned out fine and don’t mention it as some traumatic or life changing experience unless they tie it up with some religious guilt.

The video seems to mostly be nostalgia and her lamenting over the death of the consumerist mall based culture she grew up in and trying to naturalize it or imply it’s the right way to grow up, ie. Kids these days. Half the video seems to be about how companies aren’t marketing to preteens which I’m fine with and is pretty normal in even recent historical terms. The 90s-10s marketing specifically to preteens on cable is more an anomaly then anything natural. If you were 11 in the 70s no one was marketing to you and when you went to the department store there was a kids section and an adults section for you to look through, I’m sure people who grew up then had fond memories of first exploring the adult section just as much as the author does of going to Claire’s.

I did find it funny when she said the advertisements didn’t effect her. Those ads and media were selling you a vision of what a happy preteen lifestyle is and you bought it so much you made a whole video years later on how that vision is correct.

As for the atrocities I don’t think kids are watching that. As someone who grew up with full Internet access in my preteen years I could’ve looked up isis beheading videos or famines in Africa, but I didn’t because 11 year olds don’t care about that stuff. Even pre internet if a kid had access to cable they could watch CNN and see all the horrors of the world but they don’t because it’s boring.

None of this is to say that I think social media is fine for preteens, but the reasons I think it’s bad like decreased physical activity, unrealistic beauty standards, social isolation aren’t shown in this video, I’m sure she has others addressing it but the death of the preteen market doesn’t seem like the best reason to ban it for preteens.

They’ll also be exposed to other external views that are a bit more unsavory. For every kid that watches a video by an LGBT creator and learns being gay is okay, there’s another kid who watches some alpha douche Andrew Tate type that teach them women are objects. The internet is the definition of a mixed bag and should not be used to educate children

Which is why we shouldn’t be relying on social media for this stuff anyway, this should be done by schools. If a child is in an oppressive abusive house they probably won’t get social media anyway, but they will more likely have to go to school. Also teachers and counselors are professionals who know how to educate children and handle abusive situations way better then some stranger online.

You could tie it to your ticket like a punch card. When the bar does the standard Id check they’d also check your boarding pass and check if the name is the same then mark it / digitally update it. Even if they don’t do a limit at the airport it would still be good to let the attendants on the flight know “alright this guy’s already had 5 beers, don’t serve him anything on the flight”

You’ve got it reversed, the u.s. isn’t going to war with a super power over a country most people can’t point to on a map. It’s even a question how far sanctions would go if they invaded, if you look at the Russian example the sanctions are pretty half ass and Russian petroleum is still flowing to the west, maybe less but they’re still taking in money and there economy is doing way better then before the invasion. For all the talk westerners aren’t willing to go cold in the winter or pay more at the pump for Ukraine.

That’s for a country with a way smaller role in the global supply chain, fuck dying for Taiwan the real question is whether Americans could give up their cheap consumerist bullshit for Taiwan. China knows this too, it’s just whether they want to act on it and make themselves a pariah state.

1. Sapience is very ambiguous and hard to judge. Could definitely get away with saying chickens are less intelligent than a whale, a cow maybe, but a pig probably not.

2. The whales currently being hunted, the minke whale and byrdes whale, are not endangered. The fin whale which they’re currently considering in this article is vulnerable but not endangered. Probably shouldn’t be hunting if it’s vulnerable but there’s a bunch of other fish that are vulnerable that no one gives a shit about eating.

You don’t remember the incident where Israel double tapped an aid convoy with American citizens inside. Even Biden heard about it and thought it was fucked up.

It’s true Palestinian Americans will rarely get reported on due to media bias, but they’ll still report on incidence like these effecting international aid workers and journalists as they sympathize with them more, even the above article mentions 196 have been killed and that’s from months ago.

As for the state non-state definition the u.s. has gotten around that with calling them “state sponsors of terrorism” putting them on a list and imposing sanctions. The fact Cuba is on that list and Israel isn’t really shows the legitimacy of it.

There are also u.s. citizens being bombed in Gaza, is the person dropping the bomb or anyone on the chain of command up to Bibi being designated a terrorist?

Where is this reasoning that “Biden should withdraw” is a Russian talking point coming from besides the paranoid delusions of liberals who blame everything bad on Russia. Putin knows even less then us on whether Biden withdrawing would be good or bad for trump.

It’s not even like this is a fringe idea any more, members of the house are calling for him to step down and even pelosi thinks it’s a legitimate question, are they Russian trolls? We need to have a serious discussion on this and not dismiss the other side as a psyop like alex Jones, otherwise we’re gonna let inertia carry us to a loss like in 2016.

This isn’t 2020 though, at this point in 2020 Biden had a 8 point lead on Trump and even then he only won a narrow victory in the electoral college with Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin, now he’s down by 2 points overall and down even worse in those swing states. Then he was a relative unknown and people were willing to give him a shot against the known evil of trump . Now people have gotten to see him and they do not like what they see, his approval rating is worse then Trump’s was at the depths of the pandemic.

My guess is the fat part of the bell curve is 25-40 here, probably similar to Twitter, younger than Facebook, older than tik tok and maybe Instagram.

What’s your issue with big tech?

I know a lot of libertarians oppose corporatism because they say the corporations market power and monopolies derive from government, but for big tech they mostly come from economies of scale and network effects, neither of which I think right wing libertarians oppose.

If you oppose it because corporate power, even if gained through fair free market principles, is a barrier to liberty than I think your on the left for a libertarian. The recognition that corporate power can be just as tyrannical and coercive as state power is not an idea held by most libertarians in the u.s. who tend to focus solely on state power. Recognizing both puts you to the left of most of them, and on the far left you have Chomsky who identifies as a socialist libertarian and thinks corporate/capitalist power is so much more of a threat than state power that we should give the state more power to be able to reign in corporations.

Car prices haven’t gone up, the average purchase prices of cars has gone up but that’s because people are buying more expensive cars, Large trucks, SUVs, luxury sedans, higher trims etc.

If you look at lower end sedans there price hasn’t changed much and has even gone down. For example if you look at the Chevy Malibu the current base price is $25,100 , in 2014 the base price was $22,340 or $29,400 adjusted for inflation, in 2004 it was $18,700 or $31,067

Auto workers wages have gone down but they’ve steadied in recent years in 2004 hourly wage was $21.71 or $36.07 adjusted for inflation, in 2014 it was $21.38 or $28.17 adjusted for inflation now they are around $30.

So since 2004 the price for a car has gone down 24% and auto wages have also gone down 20%. The recent UAW contract wage increases with little to no increase in price shows there is some room for workers to get more out of that $25,000 cost pie, but there would be no room if that pie is shrunk to $10,000 to compete with Chinese manufacturers.

The average purchase price has gone up because people are buying more expensive cars, eg. Large trucks, SUVs, luxury sedans, high end trims etc. not because cars are getting more expensive.

If you look at lower end sedans there price hasn’t changed much. For example if you look at the Chevy Malibu the current base price is $25,100 , in 2014 the base price was $22,340 or $29,400 adjusted for inflation, in 2004 it was $18,700 or $31,067

None of those are close to the $10,000 cars coming out of China because you just can’t make a car for that cheap in a country with high labor costs like the u.s., or even Japan or Germany.

Lemmy:

Go UAW, fight for higher wages and better working conditions

Also Lemmy:

I demand the cheapest car possible, I don’t care if its built by slave labor in xinjiang. If western companies can’t compete with third world labor costs then they’re obviously inefficient and don’t deserve to exist.

Adam ragusea has some good video explaining both why we use volume and why we don’t use metric

Isn’t this normal for tech companies? The IPO is typically the pay day event for most employees paid in stock where you can finally cash in. Doesn’t matter where you think the companies going, most people would rather buy a house then stay on the tech stock roller coaster.

That’s the thing, you don’t need to get all those top engineers in a room to investigate something, a team of product managers can do that perfectly fine and tell you it’s not possible.