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Barron Trump to step into the political arena as a Florida delegate at the Republican convention
  • To be fair, my understanding of delegates is that they are basically a political "cookie" that the party hands out as a reward to certain people. Their job is just to cast the official elector votes for the presidential election, and their hands are usually tied into voting to reflect the popular state vote tallies (ignoring Trump's recent fake electors scheme, of course). So their duties are really symbolic more than anything.

    Accepting this position does insert himself into politics, though. No one can say "leave Baron out of it" after this

  • This is an Actual Article Rule :(
  • Not OP. I think it's funny how you're accusing them of "bullying" when their comments aren't aggressive at all, just pointing out a practice they disagree with. But somehow your multi-paragraph, raging, sorry, uh... "laughing" comment filled with direct insults and patronizing dismissal, should NOT be considered "bullying."

    Like, I don't buy into the idea that anyone can bully someone else in an anonymous Internet forum, outside of doxxing or repeated harassment. But looking at this, one of you is clearly much more aggressive and bothered than the other here.

  • Why France is finding vegan croissants hard to stomach
  • confidently states that vegan butter can never replace traditional butter

    One comment later: "I haven't tried vegan butter."

    This is the same sentiment that people in the article expressed. They're believe this guy's vegan croissants must be worse without ever trying them to see for themselves.

  • 'Horrific' violence at UCLA after counter-protesters attack pro-Palestinian camp
  • Jewish Federation Los Angeles meanwhile blamed the university's chancellor for allowing "an environment to be created over many months that has made students feel unsafe".

    The group demanded that the encampment be cleared and that UCLA meet leaders of the Jewish community.

    Fucking hell, this is such a callous response. In any other situation, the group representing the side that just had masked vigilantes attack peaceful demonstrators would make amends. "These people don't represent our movement. We disavow them and what they stand for." And so on.

    I see they're taking a page from Israel's book: refuse to apologize, defend unprovoked violence, and blame the victims on top of everything else.

  • Hilarious or insane? You decide.
  • Not sure which post you're referring to, but from Our World in Data, pig farming generates more emissions than farming chickens. They are lower than beef, but that's not saying much, since beef is an order of magnitude worse than most other foods. Pig farming also generates four times more emissions than soy.

  • Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution
  • Less than half of that plastic litter had discernible branding that could be traced back to the company that produced the packaging; the rest could not be accounted for or taken responsibility for.

    The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just six companies.

    This seems to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course the biggest companies with the most easily identifiable packaging are going to be the ones identified in this study. The majority of the plastic, however, is not, and it's difficult to tell who produced it.

    The article addresses this as well, mentioning that this is the reason we need traceability, so we can get the true metrics on who is creating and thus responsible for the bulk of plastic waste.

    The big players like Coke and others are obviously very much responsible for a big part of the problem. I just didn't see people mentioning this part of the study in the comments, so I wanted to bring it up.

  • fossil fuels
  • This new report is the same story all over again. From the linked report:

    Applying this factor to the standardized production results in the emissions from the combustion of marketed products, comprising nearly 90% of total emissions tracked by the database. These are scope three category 11 emissions, corresponding to "use of sold products"

    The vast majority of emissions attributed to these companies, nearly 90%, are those emitted by the consumers who buy the crude oil/natural gas/etc. But news outlets are obscuring that fact in their headlines, which makes it seem like the gas companies themselves are wholly responsible.

  • Cognitive dissonance
  • In my fundamentalist upbringing, people would bring up the "divine mystery" of the Trinity as a kind of proof of the truth of Christianity. As in, the fact that the Trinity cannot be explained must mean that it is beyond our human comprehension, and if it's beyond our comprehension, it must be divine.

    But like, it's very easy to see how humans could create the idea of the Trinity, since it's simply asserting that multiple contradictory things are all true at the same time. Is God the Father separate from Jesus His son, or one and the same? Both, actually!

    Plus, zealots in the church loved "uhm akshully"ing anyone who tried to use a metaphor to explain the Trinity. "The Trinity is like... water, and how you can find water as ice, water, and water vapor in different places." "UMM actually that's Modalism, and that's heresy!"

    Basically the church just assigns an "-ism" for every conventional way to understand or know the Trinity, then insists that it is Unknowable.

  • Israel says its strike that killed aid workers was a mistake. Rights groups say it was no anomaly
  • Even the title of this article asserts that this latest "tragedy" is part of a larger systemic problem than just the incident itself.

    “There seems to be a consistent pattern of utterly reckless behavior,” said Cobb-Smith, who helped investigate the Doctors Without Borders shelling.

    The whole point of this is the lack of accountability for Israel's repeated "mistakes," which they have no intention of correcting. The indiscriminate violence is a feature for Israel, not a bug.

    To try and excuse or deflect from Israel's current missile strikes by bringing up the US's own missile strikes is an odd choice here. Like, the same people who are calling for Israel to stop its indiscriminate bombardment are largely the same people who were calling for the same when the US was doing it.

  • Fidelity and passwords via T9
  • I've seen past discussions on this question, but no definitive answers. We can only guess, as I'm sure Fidelity themselves wants to say as little as possible.

    I'm going to assume that Fidelity is storing a T9 string of your password as a kind of default "security question" prompt for phone calls. So Fidelity would be storing your password hash, and alongside it, storing your T9 string hash. If that is the case, I don't think it's necessarily a bad practice.

    Given that it's handled by the automated system, and not by a live service agent, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are hashing your keypad entry and comparing it against a properly salted+hashed T9 string of your password. This is unlikely to expose your credentials during transmission, since this isn't any worse than entering your password in a form field on the web.

    But what about if Fidelity gets breached, and attackers get the hashes of not only your password, but also the T9 hash? Then, attackers could start trying to crack everyone's T9 hashes, and using the T9, figure out the length and likely characters of your password. This would make cracking individual passwords faster.

    But if Fidelity had a large scale breach tomorrow, and put out a statement that all of their password hashes were leaked, wouldn't they already be fucked? Like, they would force a password reset on every account anyways. It's not like the fact that attackers can crack passwords faster or slower than normal would change how they should respond to a breach where password hashes are stolen. The cat's already out of the bag at that point.

    TL;DR: As long as they are storing this T9 string separately from your actual password hash, it's not likely IMO to make or break the security of your account

  • Hillary Clinton to voters upset over Biden-Trump choice: ‘Get over yourself’
  • Clinton is reportedly set to host a Broadway-themed fundraiser with “Hamilton” star Lin-Manuel Miranda on Wednesday.

    Another sign that Hillary is forever stuck in 2016 lol. Will corporate Dems ever move on from milking Hamilton dry?

  • Generative AI Is Coming To Your Home Appliances
  • The idea is that generative AI will enable Samsung products to get a better understanding of how consumers use the products – for example, an oven recognizing what is being cooked in it or a fridge recognizing what ingredients are inside. This could allow appliances to understand users’ needs and respond accordingly.

    "Understand users' needs" being a euphemism for "spy on users' habits and sell that info to advertisers."

    We've gone full circle: from having a manual for your new appliance, to having a LLM confidently make up some incorrect info about how to use your new appliance.

  • Plant-heavy ‘flexitarian’ diets could help limit global heating, study finds
  • Ok but remember when Republicans made up that Biden was going to "outlaw burgers" with the Green New Deal? And how even the made up idea that the govt would stop subsidizing meat caused half the nation to flip their shit, while the other half went "no don't be silly, we would never ever touch your precious tendies."

    Appealing to individuals is important because without shifting the public's perception of meat as it relates to climate change, the government will be too terrified to enact those kind of changes for fear of getting voted out by the angry, barbecue-loving mobs.

    Until flexitarians, vegetarians, and vegans (I'm vegan btw, just need everyone to know that) become a sizable enough percentage of the voting population, these systemic changes are never going to even be considered by our leaders. So we should keep pressing the importance of these changes to collectively move ourselves closer to that tipping point.

  • mo honey mo problems
  • Many beekeepers want to lessen the chance of "swarming," where the bees decide to move their hive somewhere else, by clipping the queen bee's wings. So instead of protection money, it's more like the bees got their kneecaps busted in after a visit from Big Tony.

  • Desperate TikTok lobbying effort backfires on Capitol Hill
  • The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”

    There's a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app's browser is much worse than measuring a true or false "did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted."

    Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.

    But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.

  • Desperate TikTok lobbying effort backfires on Capitol Hill
  • TikTok has always been on the extreme end of tracking and surveilling its users. For example, research found that the app had the ability to record all keystrokes made by users in the in-app browser (i.e. keylogging). This kind of tracking is way beyond what other social media companies do and borders on malware.That's one reason why the US, Canada, and others banned the use of TikTok on government devices.

    A former TikTok employee also alleges in a sworn statement that TikTok stores its user data in China, that the CCP has full access to this data, and that the CCP used this data to spy on protestors in Hong Kong.

    So their tracking goes way beyond what other companies do, and China uses that data for expressly political goals rather than simply selling ads to users.

  • Ex-CIA computer engineer gets 40 years in prison for giving spy agency hacking secrets to WikiLeaks
  • When people claim that leaks "get people killed," they're referring to when undercover agents are identified while they're in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.

    The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.

    You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that's really tenuous. It also assumes that the CIA isn't constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.

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