I’m not going to defend the DNC, and I know the “fight from the inside” line gets eye rolls. But look at what Trump did. He took over the Republican party. He represented what the grassroots activists and voters in Republican primaries wanted. It was ugly and gross, but that’s what they wanted. And Trump transformed the Republican party in his image. Traditional Republicans became refugees, “never trumpers”. The Paul Ryan’s and Elizabeth Cheney’s who were willing to go along, without adopting the new maga Republican line, were forced out. Now the old Reagan, country club, fiscal discipline, free trade Republican party is dead. The survivors are exciled to places like the Bulwark, like it’s Taiwan and they’re just waiting for the opportunity to take their party back, an opportunity that will never come because the grassroots won’t let them.

I’m not saying this is a model. It happened in large part because fox news let Trump run wild because he was good for ratings, and by the time they went to quash him with Megan Kelly as hitman during a Fox News debate, it was too late, the base was with him and it was Kelly who was sacrificed as appeasement. It was overall a hostile takeover of the party based on the force of personality of one person, not a takeover based on differing policy ideas or a general vision for the party and country. I don’t think we can, or should want to, replicate that. But still I think there might be something there, some nugget we can replicate, for the grassroots to force change from the inside.

It’s a whole lot easier to take over a party than to build a new one.

Yeah, I hope that’s not the case but I worry about it. I think the most hopeful take is Trump isn’t running again, he’ll be like 86, so he’s not going to give a shit what comes next. Why bother to use the power of the state to help dipshit Vance? If anything, Vance losing just reinforces how special and unique Trump was, inflates his own ego. In terms of elections, I’m more concerned with the midterms. Trump has an incentive to prevent Congress flipping.

But also remember, W. Bush also had a conservative supreme court willing to let him get away with war crimes. Fuck, he “won” in 2020 only because SCOTUS stepped in to hand him the win. W. Bush was more illegitimate than Trump. But we survived, and we got Obama after. So there’s hope here too.

Progressive spaces do not accommodate those supportive of genocide, even if you try to frame the genocide as “self defence”. The “majority” of Jews you describe are not shut out of progressive spaces, they have chosen genocidal revenge as their policy and have thus turned their back on ideals like protecting the “the least of us”. Remember, it’s not just progressives who are against the genocide supporting zonists, it’s basically the whole world who has rejected you. You are welcome in conservative circles only because Jewish control of Israel is a necessary condition for the Christian cultists doomsday proficiencies. They don’t care about Jews, they dislike Jews generally, they just support Israel because 1) a lot like ethno states and want to replicate Israels model, and 2) Jews need to be there so Christ comes back or whatever.

Jews are more than welcome in progressive spaces, and many are there, just not the ones cheering on the mass murder and starvation of civilians. Maybe take a hard look at yourself and why your on whatever side your on.

The first ballot I was old enough to cast was for John Kerry in 2004. After Bush lied about WMDs and got us into a pointless war, a torture program, mass surveillance of Americans, let alone shit conservative social policies. 4 years of that, and Americans knowingly reelected him by a wider margin than his initial election. This time he won the popular vote, which he didn’t do in his initial election. Any of this sound familiar?

But we survived, and we paid attention, and we organized, and by 2008 we had a (by the standards of the time) progressive candidate at the top of the ticket, offering “radical socialist” policies ideas like universal healthcare and just a general vibe of inclusiveness rather than division. The Democratic party rejected the establishment options and nominated the bold candidate, the black guy with the middle name huessain. And we worked our asses off, I was mostly working on local campaigns but did some door knocking for Obama in a swing state.

And we won. The same country that four years ago shrugged off concerns about a guy who lied to get us into a war, turned around and voted for the (comparatively) progressive black guy the right painted as an out and out socialist by a landslide.

It’s not just that we defeated Trumpism in 2018, and 2020, and to some extent in 2022. Democrats turned a country that voted for a moron with little to no respect for democratic norms and the rule of law by wide margins, into a country that voted for a progressive in 2008.

We can do it again. We can organize and fight and convince the working class Americans who are so fed up with the status quo that they are so desperate for change that they voted for Trump, that real change that actually benefits working people is progressive. We can do that.

Two conditions though. First, we can’t let the DNC force another moderate center right candidate on us. Second, we have to make sure elections are still a thing that happens in America come 2026 and 2028. Both are tall orders, but we can do it.

Very real. We know that we have cancer, the question is whether it’s in remission and we’ve got a chance to finally rid our body of it, or has it spread and metastisized to the point that it’s terminal. Can’t wait to find out! I’m sure I’m going to have a very productive day at work with this hanging over my head!

Do pr people not know about the Barbara Streisand effect?! I was going to skip this decoder episode, except the title of the episode was “Intuit asked us to delete part of this episode”. That’s the only reason I listened, and then only just to the portion they wanted deleted. If it wasn’t for the pr genius at Intuit I wouldn’t have cared. Ffs guys.

Interesting, thank you for the response. I’ll give that book a read, and I appreciate the direct link!

Genuine question from someone socialism curious: my understanding of petite bourgeoisie was they were upper class but non capital owners, like doctors and lawyers, but i guess business owners and landlords fit too. But Trump’s support is largely non college educated white men. When I think of a Trump supporter I think a mechanic in Pennsylvania. I am thinking of the majority of teamsters based on their internal poll. To put a finer point on it, fascism under Trump seems to be driven by the proletariat. The petite bourgeoisie, if anything, is solidly in the Harris camp precisely because of its concern about fascism.

My guess is that scale and influence have a lot to do with

To break this down a little, first of all “my guess”. You are guessing because the government which is literally enacting a speech restriction hasn’t explained its rational for banning one potential source of disinformation vs actual sources of disinformation. So you are left in the position of guessing. To put a finer point on it, you are in the position of assuming the government is acting with good intentions and doing the labor of searching for a justification that fits with that assumption. Reminds me of the Iraq war when so many conversations I had with people had their default argument be “the government wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have a good reason”. I don’t like to be cynical, and I don’t want to be a “both sides, all politicians are corrupt” kind of guy, but I think it’s pretty clear in this case there is every reason to be cynical. This was just an unfortunate confluence of anti Chinese hate and fear, anti young people hate, and big tech donations that resulted in the government banning a platform used by millions of Americans to disseminate speech. But because Dems helped do it, so many people feel the need to reflexively defend it, even forcing them to “guess” and make up rationales.

As far as influence and reach, obviously that’s not in the bill. Influence is straight out, RT is highly influential in right wing spaces. In terms of numbers of users, that just goes to the profit potential that our good ol American firms are missing out on.

If the US was concerned with propaganda or whatever, they could just regulate the content available on all platforms. They could require all platforms to have transparency around algorithms for recommending content. They could require oversight of how all social media companies operate, much like they do with financial firms or are trying to do with big AI platforms.

But they didn’t. Because they are not attacking a specific problem, they are attacking a specific company.

Also RT has been removed from most broadcasters and App Stores in the US.

Broadcasters voluntarily dropped it after 2016, I think it’s still available on some including dish. As far as app stores, that’s just false, I just checked the Play store and it’s right there ready to download and fill my head with propaganda.

The US owns and regulates the frequencies TV and radio are broadcast on. The Internet is not the same. If the threat of foreign propaganda is the purpose, why can I download the official RT (Russia Today, government run propaganda outlet) app in the Play Store? If the US is worried about a foreign government spreading propaganda, why are they targeting the popular social media app that could theoretically (but no evidence it’s been done yet) be used for propaganda, instead of the actual Russian propaganda app? Hell I can download the south china morning post right from the Play store, straight Chinese propaganda! There are also dozens of Chinese and other foreign adversary run social media platforms, and other apps that could “micro target political messaging campaigns” available. So why did the US Congress single out one single app for punishment?

Money. The problem isn’t propaganda. The problem is money. The problem is tik Tok is or is on the course to be more popular than our American social media platforms. The problem is American firms are being outcompeted in the marketplace, and the government is stepping in to protect the American data mining market. The problem is young people are trading their data for tik toks, instead of giving that data over to be sold to us advertising networks in exchange for YouTube shorts and Instagram stories. If the problem was propaganda, the US would go after propaganda. If the problem is just a Chinese company offers a better product than US companies, then there’s no reason to draft nuanced legislation that goes after all potential foreign influence vectors, you just ban the one app that is hurting the share price of your donors.

While I appreciate the focus and mission, kind of I guess, your really going to set up shop in a country literally using AI to identify air strike targets and handing over to the Ai the decision making over whether the anticipated civilian casualties are proportionate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

And Isreal is pretty authorarian, given recent actions against their supreme court and banning journalists (Al jazera was outlawed, the associated press had cameras confiscated for sharing images with Al jazera, oh and the offices of both have been targeted in Gaza), you really think the right wing Israeli government isn’t going to coopt your “safe superai” for their own purposes?

Oh, then there is the whole genocide thing. Your claims about concerns for the safety of humanity ring a little more than hollow when you set up shop in a country actively committing genocide, or at the very least engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity as determined by like every NGO and international body that exists.

So Ilya is a shit head is my takeaway.

Saved me a click, thanks!

The Ai part comes in when you search. Your not just doing keyword searches. You can use natural language and the Ai models “understand” what your looking for and will retrieve it. Also you need the AI for image recognition (what was that website I was looking at with the children’s book with a dog on the cover?)

I look forward to reading everyone’s calm and measured reactions

We continue to recommend Wyze lighting, since we consider them lower-risk, lower-impact devices—a security breach of a light bulb, for instance, wouldn’t give someone a view of your living room.

Call me paranoid, but I don’t want a company I don’t trust plugged into my network at all.

During an earnings call on Tuesday, UPS CEO Carol Tomé said that by the end of its five-year contract with the Teamsters union, the average full-time UPS driver would make about $170,000 in annual pay and benefits, such as healthcare and pension benefits.

The headline is sensationalized for sure. But the article itself actually makes the point that the tech workers are misunderstanding that the $170k figure includes both salary and benefits.

“This is disappointing, how is possible that a driver makes much more than average Engineer in R&D?” a worker at the autonomous trucking company TuSimple wrote on Blind, an anonymous jop-posting site that verifies users’ employment using their company email. “To get a base salary of $170k you know you need to work hard as an Engineer, this sucks.”

It is important to note that the $170,000 figure represents the entire value of the UPS package, including benefits and does not represent the base salary. Currently, UPS drivers make an average of around $95,000 per year with an additional $50,000 in benefits, according to the company. The average median salary for an engineer in the US is $103,845 with a base pay of about $91,958, according to Glassdoor. And TuSimple research engineers can make between $161,000 to $250,000 in compensation, Glassdoor data shows.

On the whole though this is a useless article covering drama on Blind, wrapped up with a ragebait headline.