You don’t have to watch the videos.

You’re going to watch a man getting killed. That’s not good for your mental health. You can just take a pass here and not watch. Your watching the video is probably not going to help in any way, and it might hurt you. So, just think about your own needs before you traumatize yourself for no reason.

The problem is that the police tend to side with the fascists.

we need to get even more violent in retaliation.

That’s how you lose.

That’s what they want.

Right now two white people getting killed by ICE in broad daylight with dozens of cameras on them is slowly but surely destroying the GOP. There’s nothing that shifts public opinion more than a clear narrative of “good guys” and “bad guys”. When one side is armed and the other side is unarmed, and the armed people are killing unarmed people, there are clear good guys and bad guys. The white house is doing everything they can to spin the Minneapolis victims as “terrorists”, but when they’re unarmed it’s a matter of seconds to disprove what they’re saying.

As soon as the anti-ICE protesters start getting armed and start shooting back, the story gets complicated again. It becomes much easier to claim the protesters are violent if they’re shooting back. It’s dead easy to claim an ICE goon feared for his life if someone shot at him.

“They’re shooting at ICE” gives Trump the excuse he needs to send in the military and start having guys in APCs start shooting heavy weapons into a crowd. It’s also much more likely the soldiers are going to obey if they’re getting shot at. If they’re sent in against unarmed protesters and ordered to mow them down, it’s very likely they’ll refuse that order. And, refusing that order would be a big step in the end of the Trump regime.

Not shooting back is the main thing that the Minneapolis protesters have done right so far. It’s also the most difficult thing to do.

But hey, it’s America. America thinks guns solve problems. So, go solve that problem Americanely, while the rest of the world just watches the US tear itself apart and shakes their heads.

Taiwan is presumably red because if Taiwan was green China would be red. So, the WHO just sighs and goes “ok, Taiwan, would you mind accepting ‘observer status’ or something?”, and Taiwan’s rep just sighs too and says, “sure, we get it.”

I smell a heist movie.

Assuming there’s ever going to be another free and fair election in the US.

(ie, is this really a rupture or just a 4 year blip)

It’s a rupture. The Canada/US relationship has been shaky this entire millennium. Many people here are probably too young to remember, but the US got mad when Canada joined the US in Afghanistan, but refused to join the next adventure in Iraq. They might have heard of Freedom Fries, but forget how the US was encouraging Americans to boycott Canadian goods because “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrists!”

After Bush, Obama made things somewhat normal again, but after Obama, the US elected Trump, then it was Biden, then it was Trump again. If every second president the US elects is going to try to wreck Canada’s economy for not simply falling in line, the relationship is done for. Besides, any deal with the US would now be a suicide pact. The US is intent on destroying itself. You don’t want to tightly integrate your economy to that of a country that is poised to collapse.

Everything we buy from the US

Trump’s tariffs are on things Americans buy from Canada.

Marinading is for meats that are too tough to cook with minimal preparation. If your hunk of meat needs to be marinated before you eat it, it’s not a steak.

Not just dirty, but the fruit falls on the ground which attracts bugs, rats, etc. that eat the fallen fruit.

Couldn’t they just boycott the matches that take place in the US?

What about Canada and Mexico?

Mainly because if he even managed to collect 5% of the actual value of the jewels he stole, he’s now got generational wealth in Ecuador. Why bother?

It bans some versions of this, but it can’t ban all of it. The obvious way is fully banned and hard to get away with: pay someone to delete unflattering things about you on Wikipedia. But, you can do a much more costly, slower, but much more likely to be acceptable version: you can buy a newspaper and arrange for that newspaper to write flattering articles about you. Since those articles qualify as a primary source, you can then have someone update Wikipedia to include things from that article using the article as a primary source. That doesn’t delete the unflattering things, but it pushes them down the page and surrounds them by flattering things. If you’re a billionaire, you’ll find a way to get the articles edited in a way that is permitted by the Wikipedia rules.

there’s always at least one guy who’d hyperfocus on monitoring something like this

That’s the thing, there’s only about 3000 billionaires worldwide, but 8 billion other people. Let’s say out of those 8 billion, there are maybe 20 who really, really hate Bill Gates. All it takes to undermine all Bill Gates’ attempts to launder his reputation is for a few of those 20 to keep an eye on his Wikipedia page in their spare time, and challenge any changes that try to whitewash his reputation.

Trickle down economics doesn’t work well, but at least this causes a trickle down effect. Gates spends millions with PR firms to keep his reputation clean, including vandalizing Wikipedia. Those PR firm employees are unethical assholes, but they’re not billionaires. Gates (indirectly) pays their wages. These PR firm assholes then spend Gates’ money to buy BMWs and prostate massagers. That ends up trickling down to car mechanics and massager manufacturers.

So, every time you edit Wikipedia with unflattering but true information about billionaires and middle eastern oil states, you’re causing some wealth to leak out of the billionaires’ pockets as they fight to contain that information. And you can do this damage while just sitting on a toilet.

I don’t think anybody, other than maybe high-school kids, thought Wikipedia was some perfect site with no flaws. Even with these flaws, it’s really an amazing achievement and deserves massive amounts of praise.

Just compare it to what came before: Encyclopaedia Britannica and the like. Wikipedia is estimated to be about 95x bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica. So, it goes more in depth on almost everything, and has orders of magnitude more articles than Britannica had. And, do you think Britannica didn’t face pressure to not publish controversial or unflattering information on rich people? It was probably much, much easier for the rich to get things their way when it was a single, for-profit publisher, rather than a worldwide group of volunteers. And then there’s the issue with being factual or having a neutral point of view. That’s always going to be a challenge, but it’s much more likely there will be systemic bias for an American-owned for-profit company than it is for a volunteer-based non-profit with editors worldwide.

Also, the way Wikipedia works, it’s much harder for these PR firms to completely hide things they don’t like. Nearly all of Wikipedia’s edit history is easily visible just by clicking a link on the page you’re reading. If someone removed something unflattering, you can often find it just by going through the edits. It would be nice if the rich couldn’t adjust the main pages, but at least it’s extremely hard for them to make unflattering information completely disappear just due to how the editing process for Wikis works.

Finally, paid PR professionals can’t just edit whatever they like. Wikipedia editors are notoriously proud of what they do, and annoyed at seeing their site vandalized. Often edits will be rolled back, or pages will be locked. Eventually a billionaire might get what they want, but to get a fact changed on Wikipedia they’ll probably need to pay a reputable news site to make a counter claim, then have one of their paid PR flacks to use that news article as a primary source to allow it to be used on Wikipedia. That’s an expensive and fragile process. Do it too often and you damage the reputation of the news site so it can no longer be used for that kind of thing. And, all it takes to undo that is a good journalist doing their job and reporting the truth and a volunteer Wikipedia editor updating the page.

So, don’t lose hope, just think that billionaires are spending millions to try to launder their reputations, and often those attempts are being undone by some girl in sweatpants casually updating Wikipedia on her phone while she binges Critical Role.

On this subject, it really annoys me that many scientists seem to think that “data” is a plural noun. They say things like “these data support my findings” instead of “this data supports my findings”.

Data is a non-count noun. Nobody ever talks about “a datum”. If you have something that supports what you’re trying to show, you talk about “a piece of data” or “a bit of data”. Where do we see that way of talking about things? Non-count nouns. “A glass of water”, “a bit of dust”.

The cyberpunk future I wanted was one where you could jack off into the matrix, and fly around in a 3 dimensional representation of the world’s entire information ecosystem, using your whole mind and body to understand data, instead of just being tied to a 2-d screen. Instead we got this:

Most Cyberpunk stuff was written in the late 80s / early 90s, so it’s more based on the issues of that period, which is now about 40 years ago.

Teaching is not Teaching anymore, [its] … teaching them …