I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.

If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.

Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combusts

Just for clarities sake, there is one big sticking point here that I want to make clear. Pay, hours, etc cannot incentivize a fix to this system because it’s not about attracting good people or bad people or dumb people or smart people, it’s about the system. If cops made $120k starting with 5 weeks of vacation and only had to work 32 hour weeks, we would not see significantly different outcomes because it is simply the institution and systems and culture that are the problem. Honestly, that would probably only increase the problem since it just further removes police from the normal humans they’re policing. Probably also instead of attracting people that are mission driven, it attracts mercenaries, basically. This is how we get billionaires; they’re mostly not evil, just so far removed reality and doing one of the most human things possible – rationalizing our own behavior for our benefit.

The idea that there are purely good or purely bad people is mostly a myth. There are people that we could objectively define as purely good or purely evil, but they’re the outlier. Nazis for example. The truth is even scarier than the myth. In most of our depictions, nazis are homogenous blob of pure evil. While nazi’s certainly had some purely evil people, the truth is the vast majority were just average people exposed to a system that creates an evil outcome. Of course, there were also purely good people in that as well, but the system often led those people their graves, or they had to be the right combination of good/smart to resist and stay alive. But most people just participated or closed their eyes and went about their day.

The problem is not the people, it is the system and pay and benefits aren’t going to fix it.

Now all that said, the Uvalde cops clearly over-index on little tiny dick bitch ass cowards and kinda blow a hole in my thesis. I wouldn’t call them evil, but just speaking statistically you would think even one of them out of the scores of cops there would have had even an underdeveloped backbone. The cowardice shown here should be something that lives into myth and legend and the way people say “Benedict Arnold” to mean “traitor” they should say “Uvalde cop” to mean “coward.”

Indeed is reporting that the average starting salary is like $50k, and the average in the US is $60k. Policing also isn’t even in the top 25 most dangerous jobs. That link is also talking base salary, but even in the situation you’re describing, you’re talking overtime in the $20k+ range.

The problem with bad cops comes down to two main things:

• they’re not here for public safety or here to protect and serve, they’re here to protect capital.
• well, it’s really just the first one, but keeping that in mind, the system is setup in a way that the only outcome can be a corrupt police force. Legal civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, overly powered police unions (the only time I’ll complain about unions), deliberately low standards in hiring, deliberately not require the police to even know the law they’re supposed to enforce and probably a dozen things I’m forgetting. Police aren’t there for us, they’re there for capital.

Finally, police funding and increasing the number of cops has almost nothing to do with crime rates which is what calls to defund the police actually mean. Police are basically systematized violence where pretty much the only tools in their literal and metaphorical toolbelt are increasing levels of violence. The call to defund the police is more about funding the things that actually reduce crime – better education, economic outcomes, and people trained to deal with the types of issues that police are probably less qualified to deal with than the average retail worker like mental health crises. Advocates for defunding the police are instead advocating for spending to be allocated to people who are qualified to actually deal with these problems.

Anyway, tl;dr – if we offer cops better pay and better hours, we’re just going to be getting more expensive cops stealing our shit, incarcerating us at one of the highest rates in the world, and murdering people with less consequence than the cashier at Target gets for not upselling credit cards enough because while plenty of good people* become cops, policing as an institution in the US is corrupt.

* “Good” people and “bad” people are mostly a result of the systems and culture they exist in and very few are truly “good” or “bad.”

I really, really doubt that this is going to be a concern. First, while technically Mastodon can interact with Lemmy, in practice how often does it happen? It’s not zero, but it’s not a lot, either, and I doubt that Threads will change that much because while it’s a neat technical feature, link aggregators and micro-blogging platforms are pretty incompatible culturally.

And then we have to remember that we’re talking about Threads normies. Do we really think that a bunch of Swifties and Kardasholes and other influencers are going to look at the absolute zoo of Marxist/Anarchist/Linuxist users on Lemmy and be like “this is the type of content I’ve been waiting for, I need to interact more with that community”? This reminds me a lot of neckbeards saying they wouldn’t date Megan Fox because she has weird thumbs.

And then we have the whole thing with the actual fediverse and the tech behind it. There is still going to be no algorithm artificially inflating the popularity of what are thinly veiled ads. Meta has no mechanism for introducing ads into the Fedi. Lemmy is not suddenly going to be massively interested in the vast majority of content on threads and start upvoting to the moon.

And the dev team behind the fedi I would wager is going to prevent any sort of real technical takeover, so that means that at any point defederating is possible, and with basically no loss to the fedi.

Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.

I think it’s even slightly different in that Firefox has some dependence on Google (a scary level, actual, if Google ends that deal Mozilla is pretty much fucked) that the fediverse doesn’t - the people on the fediverse right now are enough to keep Fedi alive and moving, and I’d find it really, really hard to argue that they aren’t there deliberately to avoid being subject to the whims of Meta/Twitter/Reddit, etc. Like, in a lot of ways, it’s a sacrifice to be on these services because the bulk of content still exists in the proprietary silos. Because the actual protocols and main developers are also intrinsically motivated by the this separation, it’s hard to picture how they could even try to extend/extinguish here.

Like, if Threads fully federates, I’d guess that quite a lot of people block their instance just to keep their hands clean. Those that interact with Threads via Fedi probably fall into the boat that I would. I want some particular content or to follow some people, just not shoveled at me however Meta decides it should be, and not in a way that they can profit from showing me ads. If Meta pulls some bullshit, it’s likely the Fedi would more or less just block them entirely then give up and start a Threads account. And I have a hard time seeing a world where they go to Eugen or basically any of the other driving forces in the Fedi and are like “we need you to change Mastodon so we can [do some typical Facebook bullshit” and Eugen are like “yeah cool with me.”

I think its more likely that Threads users are eventually going to see fedi users dropping a long comment or some post that is about how it’s nice to have a clean ad-free feed and move clients if not over to the fedi in general. It won’t be enough to really matter for Meta other than to say “see we don’t have a monopoly!” and hey, if the fedi gets a little bigger it’s all good for the rest of us.

I get this every time someone says “both sides are the same!” Like, I’ve watched who’s started basically every major military conflict in my life, who keeps cutting taxes for the rich and who keeps gutting social programs that would benefit the poor, who keeps trying to remove rights and prevent others from getting the rights they’re owed, who’s tanked the deficit and brought this country to near financial collapse multiple times, etc.

It’s like accelerated around politics in general though. People will still foam at the mouth about how all of the accusations against Trump are just a psyop to bring down their one true god. Meanwhile, he’s standing there holding a selfie cam like “what’s up my true believers, I totally did every single thing they said and I’d do it again twice with your mother and Jesus himself watching.” People out there still saying Trump isn’t a rapist after not only a court of law found him to be one, and -literally everyone has heard a tape of him telling you exactly how to do sex crimes.- But it’s like that for everything. Republicans are just straight up saying shit right into the microphone, and then 30 seconds later pretending like it’s never happened.

I didn’t know that. Hmm, sounds like it’s decently likely this is a bit overblown then. I mean, I suppose there are a lot of lazy companies out there that will skip this, but that severely limits the functionality in a way that it’s going to force the secure method.

Sort of. If you’re receiving a notification from a remote server on iOS or standard android, they go through Apple or googles servers. That said, some apps rather than sending your device the actual notification (where this vulnerability comes from) will instead send a type of invisible notification that basically tells the app to check for a new message or whatever and then will display a local notification so the actual message stays on device and inside of the hosting services servers (like a self host.)

oh, absolutely. I’ve never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it’s still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80’s - 90’s) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.

I swear I probably spent like 2 solid weeks after school just running into walls in the Water Temple because I couldn’t figure it out. And I used to 100% like everything I played. You’d find out every secret, every cheat, and spend hours. Especially once things like GTA came out, just hours and hours of doing functionally nothing. Fuck even games I didn’t really even like I was an expert in. These days, I’m lucky to get a few hours a week on a game, and I rarely finish anything that’s not exactly the type of game I’m extremely into, and 100% is a thing that basically never happens anymore.

Dude, this is the thing that depresses the hell out of me. When I was kid there were skating rinks, arcades, malls, etc. Granted, those things cost money as well, but most of us could make a $5 last all day.

I’ve noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.

When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.

I’ll go even a step further, there is usually a correct answer. Like, objectively provably correct answer.

This “truth” hasn’t caught on because it’s complete bullshit. What set of liberties does left want to take?

Almost def. if it was Disneyland, it’s probably about 30 seconds before this person was fired because the mouse doesn’t play when it comes to shit like this.

My god. I mean, it’s probably a fair price to pay for no mass shootings and universal health care, but still wild.

I live in a small town in Oregon. A few years ago, it was $7. Now it’s $10.

I mean, it’s a bummer when the bougie burger places do this, but when the taco trucks and teriyaki shops near me started costing more than $2 a taco or $10 for a plate of yakisoba, I knew shit was getting hard out there.

I mean, it’s splitting hairs. While the proximity probably didn’t help, I doubt the companies deciding to pull ads weren’t like “sure, we don’t mind hanging out in a nazi bar, just make sure not to seat us next to any nazis.” I mean, some probably were, but there has been increasingly large amounts of pressure on these people and within like 24 hours of each other Elon endorses replacement theory and the MM story drops that Elon is running ads for nazis. There are only so many times you can make a dumb excuse. For lots of us, that was a long time ago. Even the capitalists are realizing now at least that he’s bad for business.