TWeaK

People are already boycotting American things on their own, it doesn’t make sense to punish them. If anything, that’s more likely to backfire and make that government look bad towards its people.

The only way tariffs work is if the revenue collected from them is used to do something for the country setting them. America isn’t doing that, America is being stupid. Trump is going to rinse America dry and all the tariff money American taxpayers paid will be gone (probably by the government investing in a classic and obvious crypto scam meme coin).

Other countries shouldn’t be stupid like America, they should only apply tariffs with a plan to re-invest the revenue back into their country. If they even need to apply tariffs at all; I’d argue not.

The point I’m making is that retaliatory tariffs don’t make Americans suffer, let alone the American government. They maybe mean some American businesses make a little bit less money, but that’s it. What tariffs really do is make that country’s people suffer.

The American government is already making Americans suffer with American tariffs. It makes no sense for other countries to make their own people suffer with their own tariffs.

Ultimately, tariffs are a tax; they take money from the people and put it in the government’s pocket. I wouldn’t want my governmet taking more of my money, not at least without some plan for what it’s going to be spent on (and those plans being in my or the country’s interest).

If America wants to tax Americans for buying overseas then that’s their problem, and it doesn’t mean that Europe or other countries should start taxing their own citizens.

This is why it’s ridiculous that media in other countries are criticising their politicians for not responding harshly to Trump’s tariffs with tariffs of their own.

When America applies tariffs on imports it’s Americans who pay them. It affects foreign business slightly, in the form of reduced sales, but the real victims are Americans. When other countries apply tariffs, the main victims are their citizens.

The correct response to someone punching themselves in the face is not to punch yourself in the face.

In other words, US agencies are doing less to protect US citizens and businesses from Russian cyberattacks.

Not only that, the VOA literally has its own law requiring it to be impartial and protecting it from direct interference by the US government.

VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS

Sec. 206. Title V of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 is amended by adding the following new section:

Sec. 503. The long-range interests of the United States are served by communicating directly with the peoples of the world by radio. To be effective, the Voice of America must win the attention and respect of listeners. These principles will therefore govern Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts:

1. VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news. VOA news will be accurate, objective, and comprehensive.

2. VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions.

3. VOA will present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively, and will also present responsible discussions and opinion on these policies. (Public Law 94-350)

• https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/mission/
• https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/oversight/legislation/voa-charter/
• https://uscode.house.gov/statutes/pl/94/350.pdf

The point is they’re supposed to at least keep up the pretext of not being propaganda, and this is done by being critical when permitted. Trump doesn’t want them to be critical of him at all, which goes against their mandate from Congress.

Elon Musk managed to more or less keep up the appearance of being smart for a long while, up to when he called that diver a pedo.

You shouldn’t be downvoted, but this isn’t true. While partially funded by Congress, the VOA’s mission is not propaganda.

Since its creation in 1942, Voice of America has been committed to providing comprehensive coverage of the news and telling audiences the truth. Through World War II, the Cold War, the fight against global terrorism, and the struggle for freedom around the globe today, VOA exemplifies the principles of a free press.

VOA is part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the government agency that oversees all non-military, U.S. international broadcasting. It is funded by the U.S. Congress.

Now, we can debate how much this is true in practice, and I’m sure the governmental structure of the organisation means the government can put their thumb on the scale somewhat, but the mission means they’re at least meant to keep the pretext of being independent and free.

But Trump doesn’t understand that. In his eyes, he’s paying for it (not Congress nor the American voters/taxpayers) and if he’s paying for it he gets to boss them around.

I voted in Florida and it was really creepy that all the electronic voting machines were managed by a Republican, but not Dems.

Yes but there needs to be some appetite from politicians, Dems seemed completely unwilling to entertain the idea it may have been rigged, perhaps out of fear they would be compared to Trump in 2020. All the noise about election rigging has been about people voting when they couldn’t or dead people voting and the like, no one is really talking about simply not counting votes. Meanwhile, we’re told that turnout for 2024 was relatively low, and yet the lines out of the polls that I saw were always heaving.

I also strongly believe that the last election was rigged, and am worried that no one really seems to be looking into it. Between Trump’s own claims that he would win no matter what and Elon “It’s just one line of code” Musk there is enough to be concerned with. Most likely, I think they simply didn’t count a bunch of Dem votes.

You can definitely configure NLP if you install MicroG.

Lol Mountain View… Elon Musk has a bunch of satellites that can communicate directly with your phone via 4G almost anywhere in the world.

Did you read the article? The GrapheneOS devs are saying the exact same thing as Google here…

Personally though I wouldn’t trust the GrapheneOS devs much, they’re a bunch of divas.

The statement was

What is it about the lemm.ee domain that produces accounts with the most cringe, awful takes?

Now, I wouldn’t say that’s really appropriate here, Dagwood222’s comment above that wasn’t cringe nor awful. However, apparently UnderpantsWeevil already has this perception of lemm.ee users, and hexbear users making up a chunk of the userbase is my explanation for that.

No one ever really spoke bad of lemm.ee users before the hexbear defederations, and it was a clear echo of the complaints about lemmy.ml users that also started at the same time. It’s just a bandwagon/circlejerk, really; a cheap way of getting upvotes from other users not on those instances that only has a pinch of truth. But that pinch is what I was describing.

The two devs themselves are massive tankies. They also run lemmygrad.

lemm.ee has one of if not the best admin, and was always running more smoothly in earlier versions. More than that, when other bugs were taking out .world and many others, lemm.ee was already immune and the admin helped the other instances sort theirs out too. lemm.ee has a lot of good users.

However, when hexbear was banned, users on that instance started moonlighting on other instances. There were very few instances that were still federated with hexbear but also with the others, where all the conversation was - many wanted one account that could browse both. Several went to lemmy.ml, the instance run by the formal lemmy developers, and there was a noticeable shift in user behaviour from the instance. But lemm.ee never really was targeted by the hexbear brigading that led to their defederation with everyone else, perhaps because lemm.ee doesn’t really have any massive communities itself, not as big as the others.

So yeah, lemm.ee can still browse hexbear, and with that you get a sizeable chunk of their userbase spilling over. So some lemm.ee users do indeed suck. It’s not as bad as .ml, though, and I think that’s in no small part thanks to the lemm.ee admin team keeping the more extremist users in check.

It seems so strange to me that everyone buys the bullshit that personal data is worth very little.

The data brokerage industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yet, there are only ~8 billion people in the world, many of whom don’t have internet access or have very little data being traded. Thus it’s reasonably safe to assume that an average regular internet user’s data is worth somewhere in the region of $1,000 per year.

These companies don’t do anything with the data. We create the data, they collect it and sell it, then whoever buys it is the one that actually makes something from it. If we allow the brokers a very generous profit margin, they are still stealing $500-700 from every one of us, every year.