Oof. I want to cheer this project on as much as anybody, but there’s no two ways around it, those terms have every appearance of being extreme and expansive. Just to copy it here for others to see:

When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.

This license includes our use of your name, company name, and franchise name, as applicable, and any of the trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, and personal and commercial images you provide.

https://loops.video/legal/terms-of-service

I’ve just blocked one spammy russia apologist who is extremely prolific. Although I am disappointed that the community tolerates them. I feel Lemmy has an unresolved Russia apologist problem.

Understood, you are exactly right about that. What you’ve described filters out third parties. I think most conceptions of ranked choice voting by contrast would give them more of a chance, but granted that’s not how it works everywhere.

Low effort shitposts like this that ignore the point of the person you are responding to, that is what makes the internet a bad place.

But Firefox good…?

Yes! They are the most important alternative to major corporate backed browsers, helping sustain a diversified browser ecosystem so that no one company can monopolize the web, and push it toward standards that reinforce their monopoly. Google has tried to lock down the phone, app market, browsing experience that sustains their ad networks, and regularly pushes new standards that de-emphasize things like RSS, and that break ad blocking functionality to sustain their monopoly and invade privacy.

Firefox reverses or mitigates most of those and are explicitly driven by a mission of sustaining an open web with standards that don’t bend the web to corporate dominance. Google’s cheeky dont be evil mantra was in reference to exactly the things they are doing now, and it’s a little too on the nose to their actual behavior so it’s no longer a slogan of theirs, cheeky or otherwise.

huh? no one’s asking them to fix firefox, we’re asking that they just ship the latest version.

Huh to your huh? What’s significant about the latest version, other than that it includes requested fixes? This is 12 of one, a dozen of the other.

Or should I be looking somewhere other than F-Droid for Android Firefox?

FFUpdater, on F-Droid, manages updates for Firefox and other browsers. I counted nine variations of Firefox or forks of Firefox. As well as eight variations of Chromium based browsers that aren’t Chrome. So that’s 17 options.

That means that until and unless a 3rd party candidate manages to completely overshadow one of the major political parties, which is effectively never going to happen,

It could happen sometimes, although it’s admittedly rare. Maine has an independent senator, Nebraska has an independent senator who’s running a strikingly close race against the Republican. In Alaska a couple of years ago the same thing happened although the independent didn’t win. I think Jesse Ventura was an independent in Minnesota. But they are one-off cases and not a systematically viable across the whole system.

but for me all the downballot third party candidates are eliminated in the primaries.

What do you mean? A primary would be where Democrats narrow their choices to one nominee, and Republicans do, and third parties do and so on. You seem to be suggesting that primaries filter out third party candidates? Maybe I’m just missing something but my understanding would be that a primary would just be a way that a third party chooses a single nominee, same as the first two parties.

If states can override ballot measures regarding legal cannabis, and they have repeatedly, they can override this.

Has that happened? I’m not doubting you, but overall the trend has overwhelmingly been in the direction of adoption. It’s also just a bizarre example to choose since it seems to me like most of those initiatives have been successful and if anything have illustrated the connection between voting and noticeable change.

Which, come to think of it, it’s probably why trolls don’t use it anymore as an example of an issue pretend to care about when they search for reasons to tell people to disengage from democracy.

You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.

Not only did they literally not say that… actually no, let’s just pause on this. This is so confused it’s actually kind of amazing. Explaining how first past the post works is not saying don’t vote third party. You could still like a third party the most independent of electoral concerns. And explaining the strategic reasoning for choosing one of the two major parties isn’t the same as saying you “should” vote for them in a moral sense.

Voting to enact a ranked choice voting system isn’t the same as voting for a third part. You could want rank choice voting even if you favored one of the two major parties but don’t want them to lose narrow elections when they might be the winning coalition. You could hate the third party and still want rank choice voting. You can both support a third party and support rank choice voting and understand that they are two entirely separate things.

And I suppose the cherry on top is you referred to them as “you” like it was a single person in a comment chain where it’s three comments by three different people.

Truly a magnificent multi-layered piece of confusion, chefs kiss, five stars, two thumbs up, etc etc.

The great thing about this topic is this exact argument has already played out in a very recent historical example. You could, and many people did, make this exact argument in 2016, and it produced the very decisions we’re talking about. And now, evidently having not followed that thread of cause and effect at all, you’re back saying the same argument again.

It’s precisely because SCOTUS appointees lock in long term consequences that impact multiple future administrations that they are important, and a clear example of where differences in power lead to different outcomes.

This has always been the obvious weak spot in the “both sides are the same” argument. The only answer anybody has come up with is to constantly change the subject. Which is the tell.

Nope, not even close to what I said.

I genuinely do believe we’re going to look back this time as inexcusable. Right now, Netanyahu’s extreme right flank is now advocating for settlement of the parts of Gaza that have been ethnically cleansed. Specifically, they’re saying that as long as the army stays there for a permanent long-term occupation, that can be the first step to proceeding with settlements.

It’s so much worse than even the Iraq war. I’ve seen by some estimates that the Iraq war displaced 2 million people, and the deaths, before they stopped counting, were between 100,000 and a quarter million.

I think the deaths and displacements in Gaza probably are going to exceed those, and it’s concentrated in a much smaller area, and it’s horrifyingly closer to affecting the whole population.

Simply put there’s no excuse for this moral atrocity.

And here’s the but: I don’t see how a strategic attitude of indifference to who runs the State department brings it closer to an end. And I don’t see that that attitude is one of even pretending to try for an alternative. I do think supporting politicians especially in their Democratic primaries is a positive step. And I do think, as with the Iraq war, galvanizing a sea change and discrediting everyone who is associated with what happened in Gaza is necessary. I believe it is urgent to do something, and the actual channels of aid that can meaningfully do something right now exist entirely outside of party infrastructure of either party. But I also think, for how true that is, using that to lose sight a very real and very serious differences between the parties that also affect human welfare in numerous ways, would be to needlessly visit tragedy upon tragedy. I wouldn’t want to lose American democracy into the bargain, and I don’t think it’s nuanced to be in indifferent to that.

One of the most commonly repeated and least thought through statements in politics.

Unions stand a better chance of advocating before an NLRB board that has Democratic appointees. The FTC is going to do more to fight monopolies under a Democratic administration. The EPA is going to fight pfas and lithium mining.

And god almighty is it fucking frustrating to have to say this out loud in a serious conversation to adults, but Justice Elena Kagan makes meaningfully different decisions than Brett fuddrucking Kavanagh. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you can’t acknowledge things like this, I don’t know how to treat you like a serious person.

For instance, let’s just throw out everything other than the Supreme Court. To maintain the false equivalence, you have to say with a straight face that things like the Janus decision didn’t matter, or that overturning Roe vs Wade didn’t matter, or gutting the voting rights act didn’t matter, or getting rid of Chevron doesn’t matter. If you can make any of those arguments with a straight face, I won’t agree, but I’ll at least believe that you’ve actually thought this through.

Democrats: “Either you vote us or you are fucked

Dems tend to be in favor of ranked choice voting and often clear the way easy for independents to run when they have a better shot.

For instance, I live in Maine, and Independent senator Angus King caucuses with the Democrats. The Dems don’t say vote for us or you’re fucked, they get out of the way and let him run unopposed. (Technically there is a Dem candidate but he’s getting no institutional support.) They did that a couple years ago in an Alaska Senate race also, and are currently doing it in Nebraska.

I don’t think it helps anyone to reduce these things to cartoon caricatures and lose sight of real issues. I don’t think the internet is good for people’s brains and I think it’s good for your mental health to walk into your local state legislature and go to a committee meeting and hear the folks talk about, I don’t know, how to fund the water utilities, or emergency heating fuel deliveries in the winter, or needle exchange programs or something. Once you do, you don’t come out the other side talking like an internet poster with a fried brain.

The Van Gogh scene is amazing, and it made me think that I understand the purpose of the show

I don’t even think that’s true. In this context it’s just an informal turn of phrase, basically being used as an analogy or a metaphor, and we’re supposed to interpret these things charitably and in good faith.

With that in mind there’s no reason at all why it can’t be understood as similar, even to the point of directly invoking the idea of superpositions, given that it’s just an analogy. There’s nothing worth litigating or correcting here, and any supposed misunderstanding is something that can be cleared up just by choosing to exercise more charity in the interpretation.

What’s the issue if they’re ONLY using this info to improve my experience

Suppose they start out entirely benevolent. That commitment must be perpetually renegotiated in upheld over time. As the landscape changes, as the profit motive applies pressure, as new data and technologies become available, as new people on the next step of their careers get handed the reigns, the consistency of intention will drift over time.

The nature of data and privacy is such that it’s perpetually subjected to these dynamic processes. The fabric of any pact being made, is always being rewoven, first with little compromises and then with big ones.

SSRN is a kind of vast warehouse of academic papers, and one of the most excited cited and well-read ones is called “I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy.”

The essence of the idea is that privacy is about more than just hiding bad things. It’s about how imbalances in access to information can be used to manipulate you. Seemingly innocuous bits of information can be combined to reveal important things. And there are often subtle and invisible harms that are systematic in nature, enabling surveillance state institutions to use them to exercise greater amounts of control in anti-democratic ways, and it can create chilling effects on behavior and free speech.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565