taxes

robbed

:-/ Libertarianism is the last refuge of scoundrels

refunds are going back to corporations

Furious Trump signs global 10% duty after supreme court issues tariff blow

Trump said he would immediately sign an order increasing tariffs globally by 10% under section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and will begin investigations of unfair trade practices allowing further tariffs. He asserted that he had the authority to impose additional tariffs under existing statutes without congressional approval.

…

Section 122 has never been used, and therefore courts have had no occasion to interpret its language. Some news reports have noted this provision appears to authorize the President to impose across-the-board tariffs on imports in some circumstances.”

I’m not seeing anything in here about when refunds are going out. Much the opposite.

Not personally. But Sanae Takaichi was Abe’s ideological successor. Now she’s right back in the PM with an enormous majority.

You can doohickey the man, but you can’t doohickey the movement.

Very frustrating to see people confuse Gun Ownership with Being Bulletproof.

As though you’re going to quick draw on the entire LASD, at which point they’ll all just tip their hats and proclaim “this person has constitutional rights, we will leave peacefully and not bother you again”.

Banning anything is easy. Enforcement is hard.

When you’re next door to Arizona - regularly in the top five more prodigious gun manufacturing states - it seems absurd to worry about weapons made out of extruded plastic. Ruger & Company is going to do a better job than anything a printer can churn out.

It’s very funny that people think they need a 3D printer to make a tube, a stock, and a trigger.

If you can make a rubber band gun, you’re 70% of the way to a working firearm. And it’ll be sturdier then extruded plastic.

Can a slide rule?

I’m not holding my breath.

We’ve been hearing about an AI crash practically since the hype train started.

https://archive.is/472mi

Flagship smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm is warning that companies will build fewer phones, period — and that remaining phones will be more expensive. CEO Cristiano Amon says a big dip in its smartphone business will be “100 percent” because of the memory shortage. Here are some choice quotes from Amon on the company’s February 4th earnings call:

“Unfortunately, I think that the whole sector is impacted by memory.”
“Industry-wide memory shortage and price increases are likely to define the overall scale of the handset industry through the fiscal year.”
“OEMs are very likely to prioritize premium and high-tier, how they have done in the past.”
“We just wish there was more memory.”
CFO Akash Palkhiwala also said: “We’ve seen several OEMs, especially in China, take actions to reduce their handset build plans and channel inventory.”

How much more might you pay? Hard to say, but IDC points out that memory represents 15–20 percent of the materials cost of a midrange phone, and about 10–15 percent of a high-end flagship phone.

10 Years After SCOTUS Gutted Voting Rights Act, Alabama Turnout Gap Is Worse

Apart from 2018, the white-Black turnout gap increased each year from 2012 through 2022. During last year’s election, the white-Black gap was 9 points — triple the size of the gap only a decade ago. Put differently, some 90,000 more Black voters would have participated in Alabama last year if Black turnout had reached parity with white turnout. The white-nonwhite turnout gap remained at 13 percentage points, the same as in 2020 — translating to roughly 150,000 ballots uncast by people of color.

I don’t believe you. Begin firing on my signal.

Hindenburg was a hiccup in history relative to the fallout from an AI bust.

We’re solving the Reddit bot problem the same way we solved the Twitter bot problem.

Is there any aspect of the police state that libs won’t support?

They seem pretty reticent about pursuing white collar crimes, particularly when they intersect with sex trafficking of under-aged girls.

Enjoy your “AI” biometrics!

There’s going to be many pictures of Sam Bridges in the Palantir biometrics catalog.

Liberalism enables fascism.

If you’d just stop scratching them…

compelled to use

I gotta say, a lot of the compulsion seems to be around “adult content” which is fairly easy to avoid in most cases.

I would be more interested in how these rules tend to target LGBTQ+ groups for censorship than how they slap a “teenagers” tag on anyone who isn’t feeding them biometric data. This feels like another edition of “straight is normal, gay is sex” Christian orthodoxy being codified into the digital landscape.

We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume

I’d be curious to meet someone who wasn’t.

300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:

How do you have a conversation about whether or not god exists and we are all subjects to his teaching? How do you debate with someone who shows up wearing the sin of misguided faith?

And the answer, largely, was “you don’t, you burn them as a heretic”.

Again, this takes us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. We don’t want a large movement of deeply religious reactionaries burning people at the stake. So we nip the impulse in the bud by censoring individuals and organizations that propagate hysterical beliefs about The End Times and Eternal Damnation of the Human Soul, as a means of goading them into enforcing a theocratic dictatorship.

In the same vein, we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) don’t like ICE banging down people’s doors and dragging them off to concentration camps. And I’d posit we wouldn’t be living in this moment if the anti-immigration firebrands had been isolated, muzzled, and neutered before they could propagate a bunch of reactionary misinformation to the general public.

The flip side of this is the Israeli censorship of Palestine, which we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) generally don’t like. Not because we have some contrarian attitude towards censorship generally speaking, but because we believe propagating information about the genocide is a primary means of changing the policies around our country’s support of it.

And then there’s the flip-flip side, where we (generic Lemmy Libs) are perfectly happy with censoring Chinese/Russian media, if we believe this media is somehow being weaponized to weaken the US or turn the population against itself.

300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now.

We fucking better be. The notion that modern public education, mass media, and online social discourse hasn’t granted us any new useful information is pretty bleak. Sort of raises the question of why human language exists at all, if it’s just white noise and nobody is gaining any kind of material benefit.

(Although, check out Peter Watts’s Blightsight if you want to chase that rabbit down the hole).

But part of the appeal of censorship is that you’re gating your social circle from regression. You’re not going back to re-litigate settled issues with any kind of seriousness. You certainly aren’t going to tolerate reactionary quarters of your population that try and reinstate them.

My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes.

I would argue that it is cruel to indoctrinate someone else with misinformation and a kindness to spare them from delusion. Similarly, bigotry can turn verbal harm into physical harm very quickly. Even benign communication can be weaponized if it is used to drown people out or deafen them.

So I’ve got three general categorizes of communication that it would be compassionate to spare them from.

See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology.

I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.

You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored.

Every system has its gray areas and decision points.

That said, I see a lot of anti-censorship absolutists who seem zealously in favor of open debate until… they get swamped by spam posts or drowned out by monied interests or sea-lioned by people who are just being annoying.

Hell, Charlie Kirk died with a debate on his lips. And TPUSA’s love of campus debates appears to have died with him.

How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.

Why can’t the boy ask his priest about his most serious doubts regarding god, and receive an honest answer back?

Why is the priest allowed to just make shit up with nothing more than a bronze aged poorly translated manuscript to back him up? The boy should be able to ask away. It’s the priest that should be censored.

There is so much fear, so much bias, so much identity tethered to ideology

Crazy factoid I learned recently. Children younger than 18 are prohibited from participating in religious activities and receiving religious education, even in schools run by religious organizations within China. If you’re too young to consent, you’re too young to be indoctrinated into a religious tradition.

And the event led to over 100,000 power outages in the region, most of which came back in a day or two. But that paled beside '21, which took out multiple major metro areas statewide.

Is this Krav Maga?