Politicians take actions that poll well with the groups that elected them and engage in some attempts to convince people that some things are a good idea. They cannot sway public sentiment with ease and they certainly aren’t going to convince all the Catholics in Texas who recently voted for them that abortion access should be prioritized. If you take actions that poll poorly and lose power, all those actions will simply be reversed, winning the new holder of that office support and helping them stay in power.

The calls are encrypted with AES-256 so you’d have to have the phone decrypting the stream and then connecting to an Apple server for nudity verification without on-device detection. It’s entirely possible to verify/intercept what’s being communicated from a device even if it is closed source.

The guy who chartered the flight ran this company - https://retention.com/

All of the ACR “features” and the audio capture features are behind separate, optional EULAs that the TV will work fine without. The GN video about LG was behavior if you agree to every EULA as well. You can add on a pi-hole and a smart tv blocklist for added protection, e.g., https://github.com/hkamran80/blocklists/blob/main/smart-tv.txt

It’s very easy to setup Wireshark and capture the traffic coming off your devices as well if you want to be sure.

a region-specific convolutional neural network (an AI)

That parenthetical annoys the hell out of me.

Me and Ilhan Omar

Ilhan Omar and I

You won’t be seeing much in the way of “climate change” messaging this time around because it’s been rolled into “reducing energy costs” messaging. Since LCOEs for solar and wind have fallen below natural gas plants, which were previously the cheapest if you ignored the SCC, politicians have decided to rebrand. Campaigning on cutting energy costs polls much better when the economy is in poor shape so this is more effective.

It’s also worth noting that the last time that Democrats controlled the legislature and the executive they took substantial action;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Energy_and_climate_change

They cover this in the BBC documentary The Secret History of Writing, which is really worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxUuPq3mWaU

Vote-suppression micro-targeting is more effective and harder to differentiate than traditional negative or positive messaging around candidates. They particularly target minorities who they know are unlikely to be swayed to one side, so the most effective strategy is to convince them not to vote. They often rely on the idea that not voting will “send a message” to those in power. In reality, it just makes the targeted demographics appear unreachable.

A team led by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recruited more than 10,000 people across the United States — a group representative of the country’s voting population — to install an app that captured every ad they viewed for the six weeks leading up to the November election in 2016.

The study participants who saw the ads with vote-suppressing messages on Facebook were 1.9 percent less likely to actually vote in the election than people who did not see the ads…

“In fact, those minority users got the vote-suppression messages nearly 10 times more often than white people in white-majority counties in non-battleground states,” says Young Mie Kim, UW–Madison professor of journalism and mass communication and the lead author of the study…

While a 1.9 percent shift in the behavior of some voters is small, the researchers say, so were the margins of victory in many states in 2016. And, compared to white voters in white-majority counties in non-battleground states, nonwhites in nonwhite-majority counties in states with tight presidential races were about 14 percent less likely to vote. Extrapolated across the country for the 2016 election, the effect of the ads may have kept about 4.7 million people from voting.

Even a good politician whose goal is to help people can’t help people if they don’t have any power. That means winning elections. If one group votes at 2x the rate of another group, then enacting policy that pleases that group is 2x as effective at retaining the power needed to help all of the people when you can. That’s why the groups with the highest voting rates are held as sacred across parties. You can never enact policy changes that will negatively impact them because you will lose power.

reinstating Affordable Care Act tax breaks, reversing Republican Medicaid cuts, holding votes against the Iran war and undoing President Donald Trump’s tariff regime.

I just lost my job to AI after 20 years. Losing Affordable Care Act coverage would limit my ability to study for the exam I need to pass to get a better job in the same field. It sounds pretty damn good from here.

The data demonstrates that no one can stop the climate crisis from being addressed due to how cheap the solutions have become. Even in the US where the administration is waging all-out war against anything “green” ~90% of new grid additions this year are wind, solar, and battery.

Most of the world’s population is concentrated in regions with high insolation and those regions are building out solar at a tremendous pace. Most of the world also doesn’t get around by cars and that’s where you’re seeing very rapid adoption of two- and three-wheeled electric transportation. Very little of this is state-directed, it’s driven entirely by cost.

10/9 10:27 AM PT – The Cornell University disciplinary committee expelled Jonathan Newell because he had sex with her without her consent … Jane Doe’s lawyer tells TMZ.

Newell was the Chi Phi fraternity brother who sent the “free p***y” Snapchat message in the frat’s group chat.

Someone who reviewed the hearing panel’s decision told us the panel found Newell did NOT have “affirmative consent,” meaning there was NOT express consent to engage in sex with Doe. Title IX says “silence or lack of resistance in and of itself does not demonstrate consent.”

Jane Doe was in serious text mode 2 days after the alleged sexual assault, almost consoling one of the men she would later accuse of rape, saying there was nothing to be ashamed of.

TMZ obtained a text chain between Jonathan Newell and Jane Doe. On the evening of October 21, 2024, Jonathan apologizes to Jane and says, “You’re an amazing person and I genuinely hope ur not catching as much heat from this as we r. We’ve been shutting down any stories we’ve heard but again I’m so so sorry.”

Jane responds, “aw jonathan i really appreciate this text. my memories super clouded too. I think we were all way to f***ing drunk and high.”

She goes on … “i really liked being w u and matt. so anything anyone has to say about the gamgbang is out of their jurisdiction.”

After referencing the “gamgbang” … she says “i don’t think we should feel any shame for the part. our body our choice asf.”

Then there’s a reference to not just a three-way between Jonathan and Matthew Ingalls, but a 4th person … “also yes while it may have been nice for like only 4 people to have been around, yall were both super out of it and they should have taken it on themselves to leave. at the end of the day you, matt, and i were in your bed and they didn’t need to get up in that.”

And then Jane seems to say she previously hooked up with Matt and Jonathan together, saying, “i really do love u and matt and i promise i wont get quiet and weird w u like i did last time.”

Winning over one voter is much harder than convincing someone not to vote. It’s exactly the sort of strategy an effective political actor would engage in to win when faced with a deeply unpopular party.