AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

I still don’t think it’s useful to look at total spend to each “party” vs the spread of spend from each source and what they are targeting.

Party represents what they are targeting, because party lines are how much of our legislation is defined. For example, low taxes on wealth is associated more with Republicans, and less restriction on abortion rights is associated with Democrats. Even if they may sometimes mix across party lines, they tend to have extremely strong correlations between party and policy, so donating to a given party is effectively donating for the policies they tend to represent.

The largest donors donate vastly more to Republicans than they do to democrats.

If you want individual policy, it lines up.

Big-tech PACs donated 2-to-1 toward Republicans and Republican-aligned ad and influence campaigns in favor of data center construction: https://www.industrialinfo.com/news/article/money-votes-and-data-centers-will-political-spending-overcome-rising-public-opposition-to-data-cente--359789

Billionaires have outspent on ads to fight a one-time billionaire’s tax in California 250-to-1 https://www.commondreams.org/news/wealth-tax-opponents-spending

Law enforcement PACs spend lots of money on Democrats… https://readsludge.com/2020/06/24/law-enforcement-pacs-give-millions-to-the-politicians-who-set-their-budgets/ …and Democrats shift to being more pro-police. https://truthout.org/articles/in-2024-platform-democrats-lurch-right-on-policing-and-immigration/

Again, it’s not that these issues don’t sometimes mix across party lines, the police spending is a good example of that, but generally speaking when a party receives donations, it’s because the donors believe they are supporting that party’s political positions.

I think the problem here is that you’re addressing an entirely different question.

The question of if someone should report someone who raped them is entirely separate from the potential chance for false allegations.

If someone is raped, they should report it. If someone isn’t raped but wants to make a false allegation, real cases of rape being reported won’t change that person’s decision to file a fake claim.

The entire point here is just “if you are raped, you should report it, even if that could ruin the rapist’s life in some way, because they raped you, so they deserve consequences”. It doesn’t make a judgement call on how we can combat false allegations.

As if the ONLY thing your memory could be used for is running AI models.

Hey buddy, we need this shit to use our BROWSERS or to play GAMES. I have a GPU in my computer that can run most new AI models when quantized at a speed that would be perfectly reasonable for any home user that doesn’t want it to literally replace every ounce of their thinking, and I bought that shit before ChatGPT was even a thing, because I wanted to play fucking video games.

I have a NAS with 16 gigs of RAM and a consumer-grade CPU that’s a few generations old, and it can still run models with zero GPU or AI accelerator if you give it a little time.

Is it going to be perfectly tuned, and run at the highest possible speed if you design a datacenter just for AI models? Of course it is. But do most people on this planet need that or give a fuck about it? Absolutely not.

Seconded on Tuta. I’m currently pretty locked into the Proton ecosystem, but I have a Tuta account as well, and it’s pretty usable if all you really care about is having an email that works. (haven’t used their calendar yet, so I can’t speak to it)

Definitely less feature-rich than Proton though. Worse spam filter, more basic UI, no auto-categorization of email by topic, etc.

To be clear for anyone who might not want to read the whole article but also doesn’t want to rely solely on the headline:

This isn’t some new surveillance system that was revealed, or even really unprecedented tactics. This was just a larger number of HSI agents assigned to tracking activists, infiltrating meetings and chats, etc than the number previously assigned to investigate suspected foreign influence on the “New Left” and anti-Vietnam War movement. (which had 42 officers at its peak, vs the Minnesota 15 case having 119)

“I should base my surveys about human behavior solely on responses from non-human machines” said… someone, apparently? Damn. 💀