The purpose of an apostrophe is to warn people that there’s an S coming.

What you see on TikTok are the most entertaining videos. I have no idea if they have to cut out 2% of the videos because they’re not entertaining, or 50% or 98%.

Viola?

I’d really like to have 100 randomly chosen Trump voters in a room and interview them to find out how knowledgeable they are about Trump, about his policies, about his first term, about the criminal cases, etc.

My guess is that at least 90% of them are brainwashed. I’m sure there are some that are completely aware of his record and are either single issue voters who are voting only on abortion. Some may be multi-millionaires who are voting just for lower taxes and don’t care about anything else. But, anybody who voted for him because of inflation / the economy has no idea what they’re talking about. Inflation was a worldwide problem and Trump’s policies made / will make it worse. Anybody who voted for him because he’s going to “fix immigration” has no idea what they’re doing because his policies are incoherent and will never work. Anybody who voted for him because of Gaza is an absolute moron because he’s just going to encourage the genocide.

We both know the government is never going to split them up

The American government isn’t going to. But, I do hold out hope for the EU. The EU already doesn’t like the US tech giants, and they’re much more driven by lobbying by European-based businesses, almost none of them on good terms with the US tech giants.

We’ve already seen what effect the GDPR had on the web, and it affects Americans even if the law doesn’t apply in the US. We’ve seen how Apple has had to design all its devices to use USB-C because of new EU rules. I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that the EU might require Mastodon-type rules for social networks, that you can leave to an instance that communicates with your old one, and that your followers and followees change when you move. Facebook would hate it, but Google (whose social network efforts all failed) wouldn’t really be affected, so they might push for it just to spite Facebook. Some of the other big American tech companies might actually like it. Like, Netflix might like to be able to graft a social network onto their video watching platform so that people could watch and talk about videos together.

With the Biden administration going out and Trump going in, I think the FTC is going to go back to being a corporate cheerleader, but I still have some hope for the EU.

The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.

Before Facebook people weren’t locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.

Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn’t a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you’d be nuked from orbit.

Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can’t leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don’t want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can’t leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn’t owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.

Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don’t know how we back out of this shitty situation.

Voting booths are secret places where people can admit how they really feel without feeling judged. Trump won the popular vote because he appealed to a lot of people who didn’t wear MAGA hats, or walk around in garbage bags.

The sad thing is that this isn’t really a shock to the rest of the world. There’s a reason why, for decades, Americans going on backpacking trips have put Canadian flags on their gear.

The only saving grace here is that it might not be that most Americans are cruel, racist, sexist, classist, etc. It might just be that they’re incredibly dumb. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews of Trump supporters and the vast majority are idiots. They believe in crazy conspiracies. They say they love Trump’s policies then can’t name any of them. They can’t accept that he actually legitimately lost all his legal cases. They regurgitate things they’ve heard, but clearly haven’t even spent a second thinking about, because they go blank as soon as they’re asked to elaborate on anything.

And, if the problem is really that they’re morons, it may not be their fault. For some reason, the US obsession with free speech and free markets means that Internet companies can keep feeding people bullshit that makes them angry, which keeps them engaged, which keeps the ad dollars flowing. US TV networks can tell absurd lies under the guise of news, and they’re apparently immune from being sued for doing it. “Concerned parents” funded by lobbying groups can fuck up the education system so that kids never learn anything that might make them feel bad. The US is allowed to have a government funded state media network that delivers factual video, audio and written news and information around the world. But, most Americans have never heard of it because it’s not allowed to compete with the for-profit media in the country itself.

I dunno, maybe the world can save the US. The fact is, Europe does occasionally have strong influence in the US. Americans have to deal with cookie banners because of a GDPR law that doesn’t apply in the US. Maybe if the EU took on the US tech monopolies it would actually affect the way Americans are brainwashed. But, unfortunately, I have serious doubts about whether the US can dig itself out of the hole it’s in. Right now it looks like the hole is just getting deeper and deeper.

Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There’s no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.

Older people grew up on BBSes and later “Bulletin Boards”, which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a “celebrity” vs “fan” content model where it’s all geared around followers and likes. It’s all parasocial relationships from the “fan” side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.

I heard yesterday about how a lot of Imams in Michigan posed for selfies with him.

Everyone knows where he stands.

I strongly suspect that isn’t true. I think anti-Trump people know where he stands, but I bet a lot of pro-Trump people are about to be in for a big surprise.

Probably not real, but if real, the graphic designer was probably 20 years old.

Don’t forget that workers like tips because tips allow you to cheat on your taxes. I’ve never met anybody who worked in a tipped job who reported 100% of the tips they received.

Another issue is that everybody thinks they’re above average. Waiters / waitresses think that if there are no more tips, they (being above average) will lose out.

It’s not some kind of sneaky thing where if workers are paid with tips the customers pay more. When workers are paid in normal wages instead of tips, the prices are just higher.

The problem is that many tipped workers love tips because most of the time they can avoid reporting all of them, so they pay less in taxes. Employers like them because it can make their prices seem lower because the price on something like the menu isn’t actually the final price someone pays. The people who hate tips are the customers who can never be sure what the final bill will be, and who often have to “tip” a minimum of 10%, often in advance, for service that isn’t tip-worthy.

It’s ridiculous to pretend that businesses don’t have business models that support paying a living wage, or that without tips they’d go out of business. The only difference is that they can list lower prices knowing that the final bill will include a tip. If tips were eliminated they’d just have to list the items with a slightly higher price. The customers also know that that tip is going to be included. Other than European tourists, nobody goes into a restaurant and thinks that the final bill will merely be the cost of the food they ordered. They know they’ll be expected to pay a tip too. Getting rid of tipping would just mean that the tip would be $0, and the food would be a bit more expensive.

On one hand, bio power armor gives you an edge in mass and possibly strength. On the other hand, if the skeleton is moving, it’s animated by magic, and who knows what the limits of its magic are.

Also, while skin is “armor” of a sort, it’s pretty pathetic armor. What were some of the earliest knives used for? Cutting flesh, a.k.a. bio armor. What were some of those early knives made from? Bone.

And your bio armor: what is it protecting? Vulnerable blood vessels and organs inside the body. What vulnerabilities does a skeleton have? Probably none?

Then there’s tendons. Your knee bone’s connected to your thigh bone, as the song goes. How? Tendons. A skeleton lacks tendons, so theoretically it’s a lot easier to disconnect a skeleton’s bones from each-other. But, then again, magic.

True, it is bones.

Punches mostly hurt because of the mass of the fist and arm. If you’ve ever been punched by a kid you probably weren’t hurt. A skeleton weighs less than a 6-year-old, so there wouldn’t be much mass behind the punch.

But, then again, magic.

Hardly. Historically there has been a lot of cheating in elections. Look at Chicago up to the 1970s. Election fraud was common there.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1973/05/08/how-the-chicago-tribune-exposed-city-vote-fraud-in-1972-and-won-a-pulitzer-prize/

Nobody can prove that there’s less cheating in Chicago elections today than in the 1970s, but people trust that it’s more honest.

Can you prove that your vote was counted and that the number of votes for your candidate went up by one as a result? If you can’t prove it, then it’s based on trust.

Right, but no way to verify who you voted for.

And, you have to trust that the website is telling you the truth. You have no way of verifying that it always gives the same answer to everybody. I guess someone could test that there’s some connection to their real ballot by intentionally screwing up their ballot. But, that doesn’t mean that there’s any way to prove that when it’s counted that the actual tally for the person / people you voted for are going up not down.

First, I’m writing about a person who’s watching and doesn’t know if they can trust the system. My point is that there’s no alternative to trust in the system, the system is built on trust.

Second, if you’re inside the system, if you’re an election worker or a government authority, you can tell who voted. But, you can’t tell who that voter cast their votes for – at least in a functional democracy.

The authorities can, and should, have all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that all the votes are being handled safely and counted correctly. But, if the public doesn’t trust the authorities, there’s nothing that the authorities can realistically do to convince the public that everything is above board. You can’t “prove” that the system isn’t rigged.