Yeah, everyone knows that if a moderate like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had won the election, they’d still be sending anyone who vaguely looks like an immigrant to a Salvadoran concentration camp, throwing dissidents in jail, crashing the economy by levying tariffs on every other country in the world, letting insurrectionists out of prison, turning federal law enforcement agencies into secret police, persecuting and calling for the extermination of LGBTQ people, accepting bribes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from authoritarian regimes, abandoning Ukraine and Gaza by cozying up to strongmen like Netanyahu and Putin, letting organised labour be crushed into oblivion by refusing to enforce federal labour law, appointing unqualified morons into Cabinet, and dismantling every consumer protection agency in the US.

Yeah, these are all things that Harris or Biden would have done.

While you can say that the ship of state, or more Americanly, the car of state, doesn’t tend to move forward when moderates or conservatives are in charge, the reason is because moderates don’t know how to release the handbrake or shift the car out of neutral while conservatives stole the catalytic converter, drained the engine oil, and insist that refueling the car is DEI.

Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.

Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.

The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.

If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.

It must be a coincidence that all of the things on that list would be to the minor detriment of the wealth of billionaires and trillion-dollar companies if they were implemented

There’s a difference between what parties call themselves and what they do. For example, if you ask the leader of the Christian Democratic Union in Germany (who is also currently the chancellor) whether he supports Germany to be solely Christian nation, declaring the Bible as the ultimate source of state morality and legal philosophy, and impose Christian religious law on the population, he will ask whether you’re out of your mind and what asylum you just escaped from. But ask the same to the leaders of the “secular” US Republican Party and you may receive a vastly different answer.

Sounds like a good idea though. I feel like there are a good number of crypto bros on here who would gladly donate more if crypto was an option. Plus it gives people from censored countries a way to anonymously donate

Is that an option? I would gladly do a crypto transfer but I didn’t notice it.

Apparently I’m not allowed to do that. Do I have to cancel my existing donation first? I don’t see a way to do that through Open Collective, I’m guessing I just cancel the direct debit through my bank?

I donate one euro a month to lemmy.world. It’s not a lot but I’m not rolling in cash and I feel like the service is worth paying something for, even if I can only contribute a nominal amount. But I feel like they should have an option to take an entire year’s worth of donations at once would be more efficient than a monthly withdrawal.

As it currently stands, a monthly bank transfer of 1 € is taken from my account and I feel like a significant portion of that is going to be taken by bank fees, whereas if they took a single annual transfer of 12 €, they would keep a much larger percentage of the money.

Yet another irreplaceable natural landmark destroyed by idiot hooliganism. There is nothing the courts can do that will ever bring that tree back.

Edit: Apparently the tree sprouted from its stump.

“Classmates warn Heimrich Himmler he risks enabling descent ‘into fascism’”

💪💪Zero Stasi agencies in Oregon

Proud of my state

In the US, number plates are in Highway Gothic which is designed to maximise legibility at a distance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Gothic?wprov=sfla1

Average Internet forum experience—saying something true but downvoted because it was said opposition to a popular view

Either half of this image would function as a standalone meme

I do not disagree with you on the reasons why women have fewer children. I think there is also a significant cultural shift in the number of children women were supposed to have. In pre-industrual Europe, women were expected to be quickly married and then have lots of children with their husband. Women today can enjoy long careers and fulfilling lives without marriage or a family while such options were not available to women of the past.

In the past, people had several children because most would die before adulthood. The 20th century population boom is because better sanitation and healthcare reduced child mortality but it takes at least one generation for women to adapt and have fewer children.

Yes, every US state sells vanity plates. In California it actually was a programme started by a certain actor who was governor at the time and later became one of the most well-known US presidents of the 20th century (Ronald Reagan).

Can’t say I agree. This is anecdotal but the council installed some camera-like devices on one of the main roads in my city and people got scared of them and slowed down as a result. I don’t think the cameras are actually turned on and issuing fines as I don’t know any people who have gotten a fine from them, but their presence scares people into safer driving.

Automated law enforcement in fields where guilt can be obviously and objectively determined (resist the urge to make a fallacious slippery slope argument) is, on average, a good thing. People’s tendency to bad behaviour is strictly because they think they won’t get caught. Telling people there’s a $500 fine for speeding means nothing because they know the chance of getting caught is in the neighbourhood of 1 in 10,000. Most people speed every day on every road they drive on but they get maybe 1 ticket every other year. But if they know that speeding on one particular road will result in a 90% chance of getting a $50 fine, they’re not going to speed on that road. That’s why the cameras are usually painted bright orange or white—to get people to see them and think “oh shit, I don’t want a ticket; I’d better slow down”.

As long as we have democratic control over our own local governments and strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used, I do not view misuse of automated number plate recognition systems as a serious threat. In fact, I think it’s probably a net bonus. There’s a show called Police Interceptors which follows British police and it’s absolutely shocking how many stolen cars they recover because someone drove it past an automated number plate recognition camera and it got flagged.

Random number plates are still likely to reduce the number of possibilities to just a few, likely visually distinct, cars.

That issue is not really the problem of the camera though. That’s like saying you don’t like running water because people have drowned in water before. If the cameras are being misused then that is a political issue.

In my city, the police department operates the cameras and they will send at least one warning before you get a fine unless the violation is very egregious (e.g. double the speed limit in a school zone)