deliriousdreams

The main issue with it is using it to further surveillance state ID laws for social media. Meta didn’t do “enough to protect children”, but the real story here is that they knew full well exactly what their algorithms and platforms were doing and embraces it because keeping kids (and adults) depressed and unhappy left them in a position to make boatloads of money off them.

The other issue I have with it is how little they have to pay per infraction.

In plenty of places (in the US) it’s the exact same companies doing both. Mack Towing is a pretty good example. The police where I live use them to tow vehicles that are illegal parked or considered abandoned. Those places charge a fee ($400 per day) to the person who owns the vehicle and the fee must be paid before the vehicle will be returned to the customer. They really don’t only deal in cash (although I can understand why they might not take credit card payments in this eventuality because of the risk of a chargeback).

What do you mean they’re cash only? I’ve paid by card (credit card even) to have my car towed when it just died while sitting in traffic, and again when I needed to move a tool box. What in the world?

Thanks.

Have you read the whistle blower’s book? Or even just the exerpts from it that have been floating around for ages?

I’m curious, because it’s clear to me that the C-Suit c-suite at Meta and companies like it absolutely do employ some really shitty people, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean you can paint the janitor with the same brush as the lean in woman who made her personal assistant but lingerie and model it in her home for her. Or tried to force another woman to cuddle with her while she was pregnant.

So what I’m saying is, I don’t agree with the sentiment that everyone who works there is a power mad executive intent on algorithmic domination of the internet, and for at least some of the programmers in question a job is a job.

I will say that is different if they know what’s going on and have the proper ability to make the decision to fight against such a thing.

But I question where your line of complicity starts and ends here.

I guess I’m also pointing out that part of what makes meta properties particularly attractive to pedophiles is the same thing that makes it attractive to other online criminals and it’s the encryption.

I think this might ignore something else video image generation is good for which is propaganda.

Fake or highly edited video of strikes in Iran, random video circulating online proporting that the Netanyahu hand videos, and random videos of Israeli strikes on Palestine (which I assume are to discredit actual video of the atrocities happening there), have been going viral for awhile now.

Advertising is probably one of the few industries that can use image generation and video generation via AI LLM in a way that would actually cut costs but the downside is people are increasingly militantly against ads and they are against AI generated content including ads, so this isn’t likely to become the reality any time soon.

If the McDonald’s ad and others like it had been better vetted for AI uncanny valley aspects and hallucinations that cause trucks to transform into short bus versions of themselves mid ad spot etc, the public might not have paid attention at all.

And lots of those same advertising firms are using AI to their benefit behind the scenes to purchase ad space. But using AI in ads in a public facing way is a dream out of reach for them for now because they bungled it so bad.

Are you suggesting that we should be able to criminally prosecute people who build end to end encryption software and tools? Or algorithms that find people you may know? Because that seems to be key to the Meta lawsuit as far as they are involved. That and the fact that Meta deliberately mislead the public about the safety of the website for kids. Because social media as it exists today isn’t really safe for children and a best the people responsible for that are the executives who made the decision to lie accountable.

But your average programmer isn’t designing tools for the purpose of making kids less safe. They aren’t designing tools for the purpose of being addictive. And they aren’t designing tools for predators. They happen to have designed tools used by predators because of the flaws in the design and the fact that their executives found those flaws to be advantageous to their bottom line so they played them up. Leaned in if you will.

It was literally part of the leak in 2021 that they had discovered that their algorithm had certain effects and the C-Suit literally went about making sure they could use that for monetary gain to keep people on the site and scrolling. Not just young users, but users of all ages.

The main thing is that it’s really easy to social engineer on a social media website where people are encouraged to give out all kinds of information that can be used against them in social engineering attacks. That, combined with the addiction fostered there and the encrypted chat methods owned by Meta and used by quite a bit of the world en masse is what created this situation.

Drive less. After doing a run on gas stations at any sign of a shortage. We have seen this before. At least twice in my lifetime.

I just want to point out one thing.

It’s pretty difficult to on one hand be like “we should all adopt electric cars” and on the other hand also be “against the state or private entities tracking the citizenry”. If you don’t know that all the new cars including the new electric vehicles are spying on their occupants you haven’t been paying attention.

On top of that a lot of Americans are realizing they can’t afford a vehicle at all. The subsidies for buying a new electric vehicle have gone up in smoke. So people who already can’t afford a vehicle aren’t gonna be able to buy an EV without the tax credits.

Combine the two problems and you’re just not going to get the results you want.

You might be able to sell me on a dumb electric vehicle. No manufacturer is selling that in the US, and even if they did try, the safety features required by law make it basically an impossibility.

This was basically my reaction to the headline when I saw it. This is two different countries that have an economy that is platformed on oil production and sale. They don’t call them oil barons for no reason.

I’m not sure what Israel expected, or what Iran expected, but even if the shoe was on the other foot and who attacked who was different, they share a lot of the same weaknesses and exploiting those weaknesses is a given.

I feel like you reacted to part of what I wrote without reading the whole thing.

I’m also going to point out that I’ve been carded while buying a game rated M on more than one occasion.

So. Regardless of what the ratings mean, in practice, there’s a lot of things that go into how people perceived them.

How does Steam or Valve market these games to children exactly? In order for me to buy Halflife 2 on disc I literally had to show ID.

My older brother had to buy the first game because I was too young. My parents knew about and did not care about the ratings. My father in particular played the games with us.

While these are the only two Valve titles I’ve played and they aren’t online competitive games, I really would love to hear why you think the games are marketed to kids.

The games aren’t marketed at children and I’m sorry but even though now that I understand the scope of how the loot boxes in these games work, I don’t think it’s really a good idea to lable this child gambling. If a kid is playing a game rated M, that’s not the fault of the company who sold it, it’s the fault of the parents who didn’t supervise their kids.

This is absolutely just a push for ID verification and the “think of the children” slant it’s using is disingenuous.

I want loot boxes to be outlawed (if they can be redeemed for monetary value), but this is just straight up authoritarian and extremely invasive.

Things may have changed but you used to be able to make complaints about a business regardless of whether they were a member. The main problem is that those complaints wouldn’t be public because the BBB wouldn’t post a profile for non-member businesses.

That may have changed because of legal pressure. I don’t know what their requirements for making a business a member are and I wonder if you could have registered the business and then made your complaint and walked away. If you can do that, that’s even more problematic but I don’t know that for sure. My parents and grandparents always swore by The BBB. But my experience with it is exactly that it’s basically a mob protection racket.

They basically have a glorified mob protection racket going.

Consumers make complaints about a business. That business then receives rating on their site. This rating puts that business on a list (either a list of businesses already paying them, or a list of businesses to extort for money in exchange for a better rating).

The businesses that are already paying them get a phone call or an email etc about how their rating has dipped and they can raise it by doing X or paying X. The businesses not already paying them only get the second offer. Pay X and we will raise your rating.

The rating has no legal standing. It doesn’t mean anything except in the court of public opinion.

Came here to say this. The BBB is not the good guy in this scenario. It’s basically extortion.

Florida man would like to beg your finest pardon.

… Buuuut he’s busy howling at the moon.

You don’t have to report back to me that you read more on the subject.

But if you are going to do that, please go back and more thoroughly read what I actually said in previous comments. It seems like you might have missed part of my point.

You should read more into this. The detrimental health effects aren’t linked to going permantly to DST, but from switching back and forth between DST and standard time.

Yeah, I also wasn’t alive (I know most of it from my parents and the internet, but I’ve also had this conversation on the other place before.

I get the reasons why people like one or the other. I wake up at 3 am for work 5 days a week and I work 10 hour days so my feelings on the matter will be skewed no matter what, but it always seems like a majority of people want to go to standard DST when it’s a hypothetical and there’s not a good general consensus for why they switch back if it is tried.

I believe Mexico (might be another South American country), did have it and they swapped back due to the “health benefits” but it seems like a lot of the studies around day lights savings time as a whole are relying on supposition and don’t have a long term study for the actual effects.

Some studies show more car accidents, some show less, some show nuance. some studies show better or more economical use of utilities like water and rlectro, some show the opposite, or that there is no change.

Some studies show health benefits but those studies assume we don’t change sleeping schedules and so on to accommodate/ take advantage of more light, and often the health detriments are based on swapping back and forth twice a year.

Most of this comment I made after reading more articles on it rather than going off memory from the last time I had this conversation, and so what I say here may not necessarily match up with what’s in the original comment.

If I remember I’ll try to go back up and change that comment to better reflect the new info.

Go into detail about what the problems were and why everyone hated it.

People with school aged children were upset that their children were leaving for school in the dark.

People had more accidents in the morning (but accidents in the afternoon and evening hours decreased, especially pedestrian fatalities.

They didn’t even try it out for a prolonged period of time and a lot of that had to do with the Watergate scandal and the Nixon presidency.

Also the health benefits of switching to Standard time and doing away with DST would work with permanent DST too. The major health problems that are caused by the current model have to do with altering the bodies internal clock, and you get the benefits of not having to change regardless of whether we choose permant Standard time or permanent DST.

For reference purposes, car accidents spike significantly after DST ends, not just when it starts.

I think the main issue with their attempt in the 70’s is that they didn’t try to change the hours of school and work to make things more workable. We didn’t do that because it would have forced major industries to shift things and that seemed like too much work.

This would make things safer in general and fix sleep deprevation and other sleep related maladies in the vast majority of people who aren’t morning people.

And having more natural light during the waking hours decreases the amount of electricity used, can decrease heating and cooling bills, etc.

People complain about the idea (either moving permanent to standard time or morning permanently to DST) literally based on vibes. Nobody seems to give it a chance with actual changes to make it work for any length of time.

I’m also going to point out that a lot of the problem full stop is that Americans just do not have significant amounts of free time.