• 4 Posts
  • 475 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 25th, 2024

help-circle
  • It depends on how these channels are going about finding their victims for it to be considered similar.

    Remember, entrapment is based around luring someone to do something they otherwise would not have done had the operation to entrap them not occurred. If they created an account posing as a minor, then directly DM’d a person asking if they wanted to do x/y/z with a minor, that would be entrapment.

    But if they made an account claiming to be a minor on social media, and the person contacted them voluntarily, asked their age, was told it was under 18 and still continued messaging, then sent explicit photos, that’s not entrapment.

    However, if they were then the people who initiated the conversation about wanting the person to come to their house / visit them somewhere, that could be considered entrapment, and the only evidence against the person that could be eligible for use in court would be the explicit material they sent without being prompted.

    It varies case-by-case, but from what I’ve seen, most of the larger operations tend to try and avoid entrapment-like tactics in most cases, where they only allow the other person to initiate unlawful behaviors, rather than prompting anything themselves.




  • hotel

    I think you mean “all-inclusive” resort (that isn’t all inclusive and actually charges a gazillion dollars in random fees) that makes them feel like they’re experiencing local culture while actually just experiencing the effects of the resort chain exploiting the local population for cheap labor while cheaply imitating the culture.

    Don’t worry, we Americans are definitely capable of escaping our cultural bubble! /s


  • Not only are their wages lower than their parents’ earnings when they were in their 20s and 30s, after adjusting for inflation, but they are also carrying larger student loan balances, many reports show.

    True, true. Surely they won’t try to both-sides this and make it seem like they’re overreacti-

    But by other measures, young adults are doing well.

    Oh no.

    Compared with their parents at this age, Gen Zers are more likely to have a college degree

    Because more jobs require them even when they’re not necessary. Also, see the crippling debt you just mentioned.

    and work full time.

    Yet still make less than their parents while working longer hours. How is this “doing well?”

    Plus, many millennials have more saved for retirement than they did just a few years ago, after reaping the benefits of positive market conditions.

    Fun fact, if you save money for retirement, it tends to go up, shocking.



  • Here’s a Snopes review of what I think is the same specific topic.

    It mentions nothing about these being orphan support payments, but rather, these being possibly incorrectly typed SSNs that resulted in their recordkeeping systems assuming, based on the information tied to those SSNs, that the borrowers were, say, 11 years old, when in actuality they were not, and the SSNs had just been inputted incorrectly, even if all other borrower information was accurate.

    They also didn’t stop these funds, as they were already given out. They’re simply “reviewing” them.







  • I’ve never seen subsistence living as a core belief of any large number of socialists. At least, no larger than the average amount of people in the general population that also find subsistence living to be a good idea.

    Most socialists understand that many goods can’t be fully produced by any one individual, and that we get a benefit from working together as a group. Hell, most of Socialist ideology revolves around groups of workers owning the means of production, and a government/society that shares resources between people to keep everyone as reasonably comfortable as possible.

    The notion that subsistence living is something that more socialists would support than the average person isn’t exactly something I’ve seen to be true in my personal experience. In fact, I see a lot more of that on the very much anti-socialist right, what with all the homesteading and “rugged independent man” stereotypes you’ll see thrown about over there.



  • can anyone tell me what the alternative plan was to bring manufacturing back to the states?

    what’s the alternative?

    A better plan would have involved local subsidies and tax rebates for various industries that have the ability to be cheaper than existing outsourced infrastructure if they were to be developed with a large enough economy of scale, to incentivize them to engage in local production.

    And for industries in which we wouldn’t experience lower prices even with larger local economies of scale, such as those involved in mining mineral deposits we simply don’t have enough of here in the states, we just… wouldn’t do anything to tariff anybody or provide incentives if it wouldn’t be something we were capable of benefiting from via local production?

    And wasn’t that always going to make things more expensive?

    These other methods would make things more expensive too, (albeit much less so) but they would directly incentivize local production, and crucially, only cost money when production was actually made locally. Nobody would get a tax rebate or subsidy if nobody was actually starting local production. With tariffs, however, everyone begins paying a higher cost, regardless of if local manufacturing is even happening, let alone if it’s cost effective or possible in the first place.

    Tariffs are just an inefficient way of incentivizing local production compared to other options, because they primarily exist to punish other countries and their economies, rather than uplift our own. They can be used to incentivize local production, but if not properly linked with subsidies, rebates, and job programs, they aren’t terribly effective at doing that, and they will almost always lead to higher prices on an ongoing basis.



  • I’d say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG’s filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.

    The only things I’ve also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:

    • Highly specific searches (e.g. searching for a diagram of the dimensions of common connector types, DDG shows side-by-sides of connectors, Google does that but also with more diagrams that have dimensions in them)
    • Context but not keyword based searches (e.g. “thing that has x y and z characteristics” returns more relevant results in Google than DDG, very marginally)

    And of course, there’s always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I’m not getting enough detail.


  • Which is exactly why every time I see big tech companies making another stupid implementation of it, it pisses me off.

    LLMs like ChatGPT are fundamentally word probability machines. They predict the probability of words based on context (or if not given context, just the general probability) when given notes, for instance, they have all the context and knowledge, and all they have to do it predict the most statistically probable way of formatting the existing data into a better structure. Literally the perfect use case for the technology.

    Even in similar contexts that don’t immediately seem like “text reformatting,” it’s extremely handy. For instance, Linkwarden can auto-tag your bookmarks, based on a predetermined list you set, using the context of each page fed into a model running via Ollama. Great feature, very useful.

    Yet somehow, every tech company manages to use it in every way except that when developing products with it. It’s so discouraging to see.