So crazy that this guy built his career on being Matt Damon adjacent.

I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.

Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”

Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.

Don’t be a tankie.

The Socialist Fraternal Kiss

Absolutely nothing in the rules against it. “Being Offline” isn’t a protected class.

Facebook marketing across high schools and colleges is intense. And because it’s such a pivotal platform, you kinda need to get one and build up a - let’s call it a social credit score - just so you can endure admittance counselors and employers demanding to see your account as part of the screening process.

Sort of like getting a credit card as a teenager so you can prove you’re credit worthy enough for an apartment or car loan in your twenties. You just have to post generic mundane bullshit on the timeline and join generic mundane groups so people see you as “normal”.

:-/

You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.

Guaranteed a bunch of ex-girlfriends are getting extra double stalked.

I would sooner download a tire fire.

There’s good, actually.

Smaller communities don’t fill up with annoying bots and toxic personalities

Communities driven by bots should die

How is targeting dissidents a revenue source?

States with large pools of disposable income and businesses with big PR budgets will pay top dollar to squelch activists and opponents.

Not in most countries surely?

How much is Palantir getting paid? How much is Black Cube getting paid? There’s always a pricetag on this work and plenty of organizations - especially fascist governments - are happy to outsource the work to friendly contractors.

First Amendment was always a polite fiction of the regime. Americans get to pretend they have it until they upset someone with actual power.

But you’re always free to run scams, to slander the weak and vulnerable, and to rally bigots into a lynch mob. So the idea of Free Speech remains valuable to demagogues and unscrupulous marketing goons alike.

Cunnalingus appreciators win again

I mean, the title may be true, but I’d hardly call this a crazy law. Draconian censorship is routine and endemic globally. It’s the Free Speech policy that’s “crazy”.

As more media is heavily monetized, the real appeal of censorship is as a revenue source. Surveillance, draconian administration, and targeting of dissidents all become income streams for the platforms.

Nothing unusual about that, either

Requires a fully funded and staffed public postal service in a county that’s dismantling, privatizing, and outsourcing core components of public sector package shipping

You don’t think they are already using the surveillance state/surveillance capitalism in this process?

A lot of people are being picked up at their immigration hearings, at traffic stops, and at their jobs. This is all information already in the public record. You don’t need surveillance to be marked as a legal immigrant.

Two men holding hands? A line of people marching in a pride parade? Anyone with Grindr installed on their phones?

Take your pick.

It’s literally just guys in vans cruising around town snatching people. You don’t need anything particularly high tech for that

People aren’t being “disappeared” for nebulous and secret reasons. They’re being disappeared because they’re brown, they speak a non-English language, or they have some minor criminal citation in the public record.

We’re making up hypotheticals to be afraid of surveillance when the modern state is already snatching people up for very superficial and arbitrary reasons