I think this cuts two ways.

1. If anything goes wrong with this stream at all, whether it’s Amazon’s fault or not, it will be perceived as if they sabotaged it by the people who support him.
2. If nothing goes wrong then we have the same problem we had with ByteDance and Tik Tok, where the perception is that the platform is a "bastion of free speech that people who support him put more trust in. We saw how this went with Tik Tok. Where people were convinced that it was censoring them less and promoting more liberal content when in fact we know from recent news articles that this is not in fact the case.

Neither of these things should make twitch a good platform for this type of thing, but it does happen to be what is available and well known.

Agreed. Headlines more and more rely on outrage for clicks.

It’s not physically bricking anything. It’s a firmware modification that prevents two pieces of hardware from talking to each other.

That’s because what it actually does is change your system firmware so that a physical piece of hardware commonly used for cheating will no longer connect and be available. It doesn’t actually brick anything. It prevents a handshake. It’d be like if a piece of software was able to go in and unmount your hard drive. Nothing is wrong with your computer. Nothing is wrong with the hard drive. They just don’t talk to each other anymore.

This idea that you have to travel to effect a good protest or effect change is not one I actually understand.

There are a lot of things you can do just to be an informed voter without traveling at all:

Track Their Voting Record: Websites like GovTrack.us and Congress.gov allow you to see how your representative or senator has voted on various bills and issues. This can give you insight into whether they are supporting the policies they promised to back.

Use Fact-Checking Websites: Organizations like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org track politicians’ promises and rate their progress. They provide detailed reports on whether promises have been kept, broken, or are still in progress.

Review Legislation They Sponsored: Check if they have introduced or co-sponsored any bills related to their campaign promises. This can be a good indicator of their commitment to their pledges.

Follow News and Reports: Stay informed through reputable news sources and watchdog organizations that cover congressional activities and hold politicians accountable.

Engage with Constituents: Attend town hall meetings, read newsletters, and participate in community forums where you can hear directly from the member of Congress and ask questions about their promises.

Look at Endorsements and Ratings: Organizations like the League of Conservation Voters, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others often rate politicians based on their performance and alignment with specific issues.

Even outside that there have been multiple “no kings” protests all over the country.

There have been local protests.

There are lobby groups.

There’s still town hall meetings and door to door advocacy.

The one thing you need for a lot of these things are time. That’s at least part of the reason you want to keep the general population employed. So what happens when you have an educated class of people who aren’t employed anymore because companies want to pilot AI to do their jobs? Especially entry level jobs?

I use twitch. It doesn’t take much at all to get a ban of any kind. I’ve seen twitch streamers get banned mid stream. I think this stream in particular is likely to attract a lot of people who disagree with his political leanings and want to troll. It’ll be heavily modded and there are likely to be topics that will not be discussed because they’re problematic enough that a troll could use twitch’s own guidelines against the stream.

Valve makes you buy a key to open the loot boxes.

Valve then allows the contents of loot boxes to be traded for platform currency.

Unfortunately that platform currency has a real monetary value because it can be traded for real monetary goods because you can use it to buy a steam deck of other valve hardware.

It is this direct chain of events that make this illegal gambling because this is not something you can do with baseball cards or Pokemon cards.

three core elements common to all gambling laws: (1) consideration, (2) chance, and (3) prize. So long as one of these three elements is not met, a loot box system is not “gambling”. The “chance” element is inevitably met in any form of loot boxes, but the “consideration” element can arguably be avoided by making loot boxes acquirable only by exchanging virtual currency that itself arguably has no “value”, and the “prize” element can arguably be avoided by making the loot box drops account-locked. Where the loot box drop cannot be transferred, sold, or “cashed out”, there is arguably no “prize” no matter how rare the drop is or how useful it is for in-game purposes.[1]

First question. Why do you think these students are booing?

Second question. You mention China. How much unemployment is there in China and, what is the main cause for the rate of unemployment?

The problem with your argument is that the companies that people rely on are going to have to deal with a market where AI is taking up a lot of resources they rely on, which will cause problems for their customers outside of the US.

European and African and Asian companies don’t need chips? They don’t need Harddrives? They don’t need computer components? How are car manufacturers going to build and sell new cars or fix older cars without chips? How do engineers trained to use CAD and modeling software do that without computers? (Please note that I’m not talking about some 60 year old engineer who will do it with a draft board and a pencil and a slide rule, I’m talking about new engineers who learned these electronic tools expecting to have them always available and who now are facing an uncertain future for the tech their business relies on).

The point is, there are far reaching consequences for AI in tech that effect the entire world.

This is an oversimplified version of events.

The majority of voters don’t like the current regime and are fighting it in through the avenues they are aware of.

But here’s the main problem.

The propaganda isn’t how we got here. The fact is, the conservative party in this country has been desperately chipping away at public power for decades. They enacted policy and legislation over a period of years (over 100 years if we’re gonna be honest about this), in order to defang the public. The main problem with that is that propaganda only works when you can control the discourse and that’s the reason the big push is happening now. This is their last ditch attempt to get things they want done and cash out. They do not plan to be here for the aftermath.

The average MAGA voter is indoctrinated with the propaganda but that’s not really why Trump won. He made promises that appealed to their basest/hateful natures and those are the majority of the promises he kept. He won because of complacency on the part of people who opposed him (including voters and voter eligible people who opposed him), and the hatred of the people who supported him. Some of that hatred comes from the propaganda. But some of it just comes from the fact that the problem is a systemic part of our country as an institution and that’s the major thing you leave out. Along with the complacency and the hatred, he also won because desperate people trying to cash in and cash out backed him. There’s a greed component you also left out.

The crazy thing is that greed component also exists in the voters.

Pretending that it’s simply a matter of using propaganda to get people to vote against their own self interest is only part of the picture.

They were voting for things they view as part of their self interest.

But twitch is owned by Amazon and frankly they can and do moderate Twitch streams.

This is not supposed to be a discouragement of politicians connecting with the public via any means necessary.

I just want to point out the flawed logic of saying news media is owned by billionaires so it can’t be trusted, but twitch, also owned by a billionaire can somehow be trusted.

All of that falls apart in more ways than one for a lot of people once they can’t maintain a quality of life at all. I’m not saying they aren’t susceptible to propaganda. I’m saying that propaganda often falls apart when you have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.

Young people are using AI because they want the shortcuts to the goal society said they need to achieve.

Pretty much all of the stuff you talk about is stuff a smaller subset of the population fall for. You went through and described a bunch of MAGA voting as if the vast majority of higher education graduates fall into this category.

In point of fact it’s been proven repeatedly that more often than not the reason Conservatives have been trying desperately to fight against higher education and education in general is because they get pushback from educated people more often, even after feeding them a steady diet of religion, conservative propaganda, and racism.

This is completely ignoring the majority of people to make your point.

It also ignores the last 70 years of politics and economics which explain how we got here. There’s more too it than “we convince them to vote against their own best interest”.

More than likely yes. It disables biometrics and forces the use of a passcode if you have one enabled.

On Apple devices and Android devices go into lockdown mode when they are restarted.

Both of them will when left idle for a select period of time it will reboot. This is called Inactivity reboot. This basically forces the phone into lockdown mode.

These are new features that have been implemented on Apple and Android respectively fairly recently.

Apple phones also have the ability to wipe themselves away when left off for too long. You can do this with some versions of android but for the most part the one I know of is Graphene OS.

What the public don’t know about they can’t complain about.

Flock started this campaign to proliferate their camera and surveillance equipment with a bunch of propaganda and probably just straight up bribes.

The public didn’t know what was happening and now they do know and there’s a growing number of people advocating against these cameras as a result.

You don’t get to convince a bunch of companies to eliminate job paths by getting rid of entry level positions (even before AI), sell the idea that the AI is basically going to make their degrees useless, and then try to sell them on AI after the fact.

Lol. A lifetime subscription for a singular one time payment is a bad deal in any service that requires upkeep. That’s what makes it so enticing to people generally.

I paid for a lifetime plex membership in 2014. It’s was $74.99. The use I have gotten out of it in the last 11 years has to have cost the company more than if I was a paying subscriber who paid a monthly fee.

When I say “can’t afford” I literally mean it costs the company money to keep providing these services over time. I have services available to me from my “subscription” that don’t even exist in the current offering.

I don’t even understand why this is what you focused on from what I said but I’m not doing this.

The point quite clearly is that this person very likely could have used the money they used to get started working for Uber or Lyft to do something else.

But even if they hadn’t that doesn’t mean being poor makes you do criminal shit. You can do with this information whatever you want to. I don’t care how you feel about what I said.

You ever tried to take out a loan with no credit or collateral? You ever tried to get one with bad credit?

Did you think about this at all before you made your snarky response?

Valve allows users to cash in on the virtual items they have won in two ways. Users can sell the items they won through Valve’s own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, where they can use the proceeds to buy other video games, video game hardware, and other virtual items. Users can also connect their Valve accounts to third-party marketplaces where the virtual items can be sold directly for cash. The OAG’s investigation found that Valve facilitates and even assists these third-party marketplaces in their operations.

All three games feature an optional mechanic where players can pay real money in exchange for “loot boxes”: a virtual item that drops a randomly-generated piece of cosmetic gear that can be used in-game. Most of these items have no mechanical impact and are there strictly for looks, such as silly hats in TF2 or neon-painted “weapon skins” in CS2.

Despite their lack of actual effect, loot boxes and item trading are both an extraordinarily lucrative market for Valve. Virtual items for these three games have been sold for staggering amounts of real money. One estimate cited by the AG’s office indicates that the market for Counter-Strike skins alone was worth over $4.3 billion as of last year.

While Valve absolutely benefits from the strangely frenetic market for virtual items in CS2, TF2, and Dota 2 — it sells these loot boxes in the first place, and hosts the secondary market for them via the in-app Steam Marketplace — the occasionally shocking prices for these items is part of a player-created economy. The lawsuit may be partially aimed in the wrong direction.

Nah. I actually thought the same at first. I literally asked when this was first announced in the news if it wasn’t basically the same as Pokemon cards.

The problem is this. The company producing the Pokemon cards isn’t I hope actively providing a service to trade or resell them for monetary value based on rarity. Secondary markets exist for that but a first party Pokemon company market doesn’t exist for that.

This is where valve fucked up. They allow you to get a rare drop by chance, trade it for points, and use those points to buy something with real world value. It’s a lot more like pachinko than it is Pokemon cards or baseball cards.

In a casino you buy chips. Those chips can then be traded back to the casino for cash. When you bet on things at the casino you bet chips with the understanding that those chips are work a real world amount of money.

That is what makes gambling illegal in a lot of places. The ability to convert the gambled assets directly into spendable currency.

Pachinko does it a little different. You pay to play and when you win you get little trinkets. The pachinko parlor doesn’t let you trade them for cash or anything else. But you can go next door to a place that will buy those little trinkets for actual cash. Valve shouldn’t let you trade the points for anything with a fixed actual monetary value. Which is likely what they will do going forward if this lawsuit is successful.