Afaik, you don’t have to rank every candidate in most RCV systems. So If you don’t like someone, you can just leave them unranked.

As a note, Ranked Choice still has bullet voting. About 30% of voters in a ranked choice election bullet vote.

I think that stat could easily be attributed to a lack of familiarity with what is, to a lot of people, a new and different method of voting. You’d be surprised how many people don’t adequately read or understand directions.

In other words, what you’re describing isn’t inherent to the system itself and it could be much worse.

I’d guess that the number of people who bullet vote will decrease as the level of education and familiarity around “new” voting systems like RCV increases.

I call bullshit. Yeah I’m sure they spend 2/3 of their income on rights holders, mainly Joe Rogan, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.

The average musician isn’t making shit, and yet the spotify execs are sipping champagne.

Wonderful. Nothing will help people differentiate between real, trustworthy news and fake opinion-laden disinformation like AI generated people and content!

/s for the kids in the back.

Fuck man… What a sad mess this whole thing is. Imagine being taken hostage for 2 fucking months by Hamas terrorist assholes only to eventually be killed by your own country’s army of incompetent trigger happy gung ho fuckwads.

I can see from your other post that you’re talking about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:

The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar’s relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar’s residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. “Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users.”[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar’s Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]

Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don’t use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don’t you agree?

So what’s my point? Why is any of that relevant?

As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.

There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I’m saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it’s actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta’s staff would probably agree to that.

So what’s the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?

Frankly I’m not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.

I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that’s why we’re talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that’s simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.

As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.

For me personally there are two main forces at play here:

1. I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.

2. Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.

I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…

So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.

I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).

From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.

From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.

A home, for sure.

Expanding my business a bit would be reasonable.

Probably a car, even though it’s not always financially a great idea.

Any other big purchase that would enrich my life in some way (for example, broadening my education, getting a piano, traveling, putting together a family, etc.)

I’m don’t think I am.

The internet had a ton of legitimate and potential users too, but that didn’t prevent the dot com bubble from bursting.

Not only is AI built on a shakey house of cards of stolen IP and unlicensed writing, artwork, music and other data, but there are also way too many players in the space and an amount of investment that, in my opinion, goes way beyond the reality of what AI can achieve.

Whether AI is a bubble or not has more to do with the hype economy around it than the technology itself.

AI is looking like the biggest bubble in tech history and stuff like this really ain’t helping.

Part of my core philosophy is to never let other people define you. Define yourself and let other people define themselves too.

bass-slap.mid

You’re not gonna sell shit with jacked up sky high prices, even more so in a time of high interest rates. We see your lots are full of unsold cars, both ICE and EV, so maybe it’s time to bring prices back down to Earth.

We really ought to change the laws to allow for direct-to-consumer car sales. Dealerships are scummy motherfuckers who are perfectly happy to be a middleman and rip people off.

Just wait until you learn who cranked the interest rates down to nothing and handed a bunch of free money to the rich at a time when supply chains were almost completely shut down during the pandemic…

Clearly not. There are a thousand ways to read a person. And they work pretty well.

Unless you can read minds, which you can’t (even with your tinfoil hat off), then you literally cannot know things which are not somehow expressed (through words, facial expressions, body language, actions, etc.). Words are the most direct way that the vast majority of human beings express themselves, as things like body language and action require third-party interpretation, which obviously adds a second layer of subjectivity, and considerable flaws in terms of misinterpretation, bias, etc.

I stated that it is a privileged class of information. One that is excluded from scrutiny because we declare scrutiny, in this case, untrustworthy.

Simply restarting your opinion may make you feel correct (which you’re entitled to feel), but it doesn’t actually change the objective truth:

Feelings are “excluded from scrutiny” not because “we [who?] declare scrutiny untrustworthy”, but because of the simple objective truth (that almost every human being has intuitively understood since the dawn of time) that the internal thoughts and feelings of others are fundamentally unknowable, and that we rely on expression to have a window into the minds of others.

If you believe that’s not true, then answer this:

If I tell you that I’m feeling hungry right now, what basis could you possibly have to tell me that I’m not?

If you can’t answer that question, then you straight up have no argument in the first place, and that alone answers your original question.

So now I’ve lead you to water, and it’s up to you whether you drink or not. I’m not going to waste any more of my time on this.

Of course people lie, and they could easily lie about how they’re feeling. But what possible basis do you have to argue against what someone else says they’re feeling?

If I tell you that I’m feeling hungry, for example, how could you possibly make an argument that I’m not?

You could see that I just ate a sandwich, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel hungry. In fact, you could see that I just ate 10 sandwiches, but it’s entirely possible for someone to still feel hungry, based on how the brain and human psyche work.

The best case arguement is the opinion that a person’s actions are seemingly inconsistent with a certain stated feeling: for example a widow who says that she’s crippled with sorrow, only to be caught going on dates with other men. But again, you’re not arguing feelings there, you’re arguing an opinion about the consistency of behavior.

The feelings of others are fundamentally unknowable to us. Expression (words, facial expressions, body language, behavior, etc) is our only window into the feelings of others.

You see how this creates a privileged class of information, right?

No. It simply reflects the reality that human feelings are only knowable to others by means of expression.

If I tell you that I’m feeling hungry right now, what basis could you possibly have to tell me that I’m not?

You have none. How I feel inside is unknowable to others. It is a fundamental truth of subjectivity.

Any information based upon a claim of suffering becomes inscrutable.

Objective truth and facts cannot be argued, only uncovered.

Likewise feelings, while subjective, cannot be argued, only expressed. (Again, because the feelings of others are unknowable.)

If you want to argue something, then I recommend arguing subjective opinions, and hopefully you do so based on a bedrock of facts.

That’s a good argument for disallowing it. It kind of breaks the system.

Disallowing what? Feelings? And what system?

I’m not even sure exactly what you’re asking here, but emotional states like suffering are subjective expressions of feeling, not opinions.

Trying to argue about some else’s experiences with regards to suffering is like trying to argue that someone isn’t happy, sad, cold, warm, hungry, thirsty, tired, scared, etc.

As always the ultimate authority on how a person thinks and feels is the person themselves.

In other words, you can argue opinions (hopefully based on a foundation of unarguable, objective facts), but it makes no sense to try to argue against another person’s feelings.

You could argue, if you do desired, the opinion that people are too emotionally sensitive, but even that seems like a waste of time to me, because it’s very unlikely emotional sensitivity is a choice. (If it was, you could also simply choose to be more empathetic and understanding of others, just in the same way that you want other people to become less sensitive to their own feelings.)

Personally I have better things to do with my time than argue about other people’s feelings.

Ok now do the other 200, shitbags.

How about Tom Petty? Southern rocker with great lyrics and no bullshit. One of the greats as far as I’m concerned.