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

Literally the next day:

Biden on Tuesday reiterated his “ironclad” commitment to Israel

Very cool for the Biden admin to just make shit up to try and court “the youth”

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.

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.

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?

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.

Politifact | No, 100 corporations do not produce 70% of total greenhouse gas emissions

Politifact | No, 100 corporations do not produce 70% of total greenhouse gas emissions

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s funny, the US Marshalls interviewed for this are extremely forthright in explaining their methods, but clam up and say they “can’t explain these methods” as soon as they have any leads relating to cell phones. Probably because they’re using the US’s vast warrantless surveillance system to pull any possible info they can on her.

For example, they “track[ed] down the phone number for an American businessman they believed had connected with Armstrong at some point,” and are cagey about how they got that number. I’d bet that they pulled her phone records and started cold calling everyone she’s ever contacted through her cell phone until they got someone who could give them a lead.

Later, they set up the fake yoga instructor ad, and mention that they’re tracking the phone location of the person who answered the ad to make sure they’re at the sting location.

It’s crazy that even with all those “methods the Marshalls won’t go into,” they almost gave up on finding her.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Nikki Haley’s first name.

Oh man, the CNN reporter just assumed Trump spelled it correctly and wrote the whole article while using a misspelled version of her name. As embarrassing as that should be for Trump, it’s almost on brand for him at this point. The reporter could have at least pulled up her Wikipedia article to double check the spelling, like come on.

It’s always crazy to come into threads like these and see people say “I would murder as many elites as possible” without batting an eye, and in the same comment say “I could never give up hamburgers.” It’s some kind of insane self-soothing to throw all of the responsibility for a global issue onto a few scapegoats. It also shows that people have no intention of doing fuck all about climate change beyond typing up snarky comments on the internet.

People can misquote all kinds of studies they half remember to pretend that they have no responsibility for making changes, but that doesn’t make it true. Just as one example, first world countries’ per-capita rate of meat consumption alone is enough to push the world over our 1.5C warming target. But because it’s an inconvenience to make any changes to my life, I’m going to pretend I would personally kill scores of people rather than make a new recipe for dinner. We’re fucked

PRR PRR PRR

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Ok but remember this part?

We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.

Maybe we can’t convince everyone to quit eating meat, but I would hope that we could appeal to self-described environmentalists, who have a stated interest in making sustainable changes.

That’s the OP’s point, after all. That the science unambiguously states that we need to stop eating meat if we care about meeting our climate goals. Any environmentalist who learns that this needs to happen and still chooses to eat meat is acting against their own ethics.

It has to be both. Our World in Data puts it one way:

We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.

Or to cut through the flowery language - farms need to stop producing meat, and people need to stop eating it.

The biggest reduction would come from the adoption of plant-rich diets. Emissions would be halved compared to business-as-usual.