There's a reason scam artists target the elderly. If a box on the computer screen says "put payment info here" then who are they to argue with the box?

Just as venture capitalism demands.

Gorilla. No doubt in my mind. It's a hell of a lot easier to keep track of where one gorilla is compared to 5 black snakes.

One gorilla will probably ignore me as long as I keep my distance. Keeping distance and even putting a wall or 3 between you and the gorilla is trivial in a place as large as a mall.

On the other hand, snakes might mostly ignore me, but since I don't know where the fuckers are, it's a lot easier to accidentally startle or threaten one.

My new best friend friend Coco isn't coming through pipes, air ducts, holes in walls, etc. Big strong boi isn't hiding in the corner of a closet waiting to bite me as I reach in to grab a snack.

I'd go to the food court, put out a cornucopia of food, make sure the gorilla sees me leave it there for them, bow respectfully and slink away, then spend the rest of the 24 hours clear on the opposite side of the mall.

This all assumes that the gorilla isn't enraged for any particular reason or starving. But even if so, I think gorilla is the safer answer, just the evasion technique changes.

They could also be limited to serving for say 10 years without the possibility of a second term. Effectively very similar to a lifetime appointment. There's no re-election so they don't have to rule on cases in a political manner. This doesn't solve the problem of approval rating being completely meaningless, but at least there's some limit on insanity.

Refusing to vote just lets people who do vote decide your fate. Refusing to vote for either major party candidate as a protest just means that you're okay with either one winning.

You might disagree philosophically, but I'm talking about the reality of what is going to happen. One of the two major party candidates is going to win. If your conscience tells you to vote third party, then sobeit. Just understand the potential consequences of that decision.

I always hate the "moving to Canada" thing. American hubris leads them to believe that they can just emigrate to whatever country they like without barriers. That's not how it works.

Just like the USA, Canada isn't going to grant citizenship to every rando who approaches their borders.

I will say this though, depending on where they're coming from in the US, and what they've experienced in terms of threats and persecution, I could see there being a case for requests for asylum for LGBT+ people trying to escape to Canada. And that's sad as hell for all of us.

They were always going to. As long as Xitter has a user base with money to spend, the large corporations do not care. Anything they do like withdrawing advertising is all for show.

And after all, are you going to cancel your Netflix subscription over this? I actually probably would personally but my partner uses it quite a lot, so we're sticking around. Some people will cancel no doubt but nowhere near a critical mass that will affect their bottom line and they know it.

No, you're right, you should be. We don't want to normalize this shit, it should continue to shock and offend.

These are the dark sides of modern technology. The kids working cobalt mines. The workers being paid pennies to categorize data so bad that it is traumatic to even read it. I can't imagine how the people who have to look at pictures can do it.

I feel like I could handle some dark text here or there, but if I had to do it for 40-50 hours a week? Hundreds of passages every day. That would warp me pretty quickly.

That's been apparent since about a month or two after the sale was final. One of the very first things he did was invite Trump back

"No"

"I heard 'activate'. Thank you! Your credit card will be charged $129 annually. To cancel, please log on to the website because there's no way we're letting you get out of this mess the same way we got you into it."

The other beautiful thing is that if you aren't satisfied with the behavior of mods and admin on one instance, there are literally hundreds of others to choose from. You aren't stuck dealing with bad actors if you want to participate. And if moderation of a particular community upsets the users, they are free to move to or create a similar community on a different instance.

The major downside of this is that it's going to create echo chambers, but that's unavoidable. It's not like this is a new problem. Communities that reject outside ideas outright have existed long before the internet.

From the first link:

Edit: This comment was written [in 2020] at a time when Lemmy the software was practically identical with the lemmy.ml instance. At that time we barely had any moderation tools, so it was an easy way to keep some groups of users off the instance. Now its different, there are good mod tools, and many different instances. So we removed the slur filter in Lemmy 0.14.0 (instance admins can optionally configure one, which lemmy.ml does).

So basically some developers working on a pet project took a shortcut at a time when other features were being prioritized. Let's not make this particular item out to be more than it is. I think it serves the conversation better to focus on what the post is about which is widespread bans on certain content.