As we dont have the gaps in my country my guess is it a US interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as applied to the shitter.

I expect in the USA people, particularly the out groups, are believed to be inherently criminal/immoral and need to be observed to make sure they aren’t doing anything undesirable.

As the US public toilet is primarily a place for moral judgement and not elimation of waste you then get the crazies questioning if people’s gender and equipment meets moral standards for use of the facilities based on casual assessment of their appearance.

Paying to get access to data and eyeballs. Social media is about mass surveillance and influence. The customers pay the service for access to the stupid people. Always have.

It’s fucking childish. Like a spoiled toddler who doesn’t get their way so throws a tantrum and lies on the ground screaming.

The seppos fought a war to preserve slavery. The politics gets dragged to the right because on the whole they are an abhorrent, damaged, immoral society. They have massive incarceration, capital punishment, don’t act to prevent mass shootings, let people die of preventable causes, don’t have fair wages. They are ignorant about everything including socialism. Their media is fucking awful.

Yet it is the fault of their center-right political party for following the votes? They are where they need to be to get half the votes and no further. There are some shit people in the US Dems for sure. But its a reflection of a shit society. There aren’t millions on the streets demanding a shift to the left and they aren’t voting in primaries or trying to reform the political system.

The thing is if working people consistently voted for the least shit option the parties would drift in the other direction or the right would be entirely wiped out. They don’t because they are brain washed and ignorant. Instead what has happened is all the culture wars, politics of hate and fear and weird cultish bullshit that has now made the GOP the party of the uneducated working class who now vote like suckers for billionaire authoritarians against working class interests. The US needs a true Labor Party that is focused on restoring wealth to working families. But until then adults should accept they need to always vote for the least shit option until they can reform their society and have real choices instead of merely damage control.

You fool. This is social media where the loudest ignorant voice wins. You should agree with the clowns and farm the upvotes like on Reddit.

Stupid seppo propaganda because they don’t know what the fuck democracy is. Dumb cunts. Enjoy your fascist dictatorship losers.

The spread of this brain cancer will kill universal healthcare, public education and all the worker entitlements and minimum wages the rest of us enjoy in real liberal democracies. Canada and Australia are voting and we don’t need shit takes from our idiot ex-allies right now. Every vote counts here. Save this shit for the next US election if you ever have one.

Have actually seen people post this bullshit in countries with proportional representation with lots of minor parties. It’s a fucking stupid oversimplified distortion even in its country of origin.

It looks like it will be handled by third party verification services in Australia. You will likely provide some form of ID with age which is likely to be government id and the service will check it then inform the social media company you pass. The legislation doesn’t allow direct government involvement in running the verification service and the verification companies have to conform to privacy laws.

It is certainly a flawed system. If kids want to access things they will and there is potential for abuse. However when considering harm mitigation you need to look at the whole population.

A lot of the more extreme libertarian views on the Internet originate in the US where their “freedoms” of speech and firearms have obviously just been a distraction while they were robbed blind. They couldn’t even protect their school kids from mass shootings because they put ideology and theoretical bullshit ahead of morality, empathy and the survival of their families. I used to buy into the Internet libertarian stuff in a huge way in the days of IRC and Usenet before the mega rich tech bros moved in and turned the Internet into a shitshow of scams, mass-surveillance and brain washing. Still a big proponent of free software and agree with a lot of stuff from the EFF but the oligarchs ruined it. Now I want to burn it down. Anything to keep these nonses away from our kids is good with me.

The idea in Australia is to place the responsibility on the social media companies.

The government isnt filtering traffic or enforcing behaviour. It is fining companies if they don’t implement a form of age verification that is compliant with privacy laws.

We can’t even make these companies pay tax and obey other laws so I am not very optimistic but at least it raises awareness of the problem.

A woman is absolutely a threat to another human. Any animal that size is. That you think women are harmlessly is ironically, misogyny.

Yes all people are potentially dangerous.

But the biomechanics in adults are very different and need to be recognised. Statistically the physical intimidation is mostly one way when you account for sexual dimorphism in height, weight, reach, muscle mass etc. There are always exceptions but women live in a very different threat environment. That isn’t misogyny.

If people tend to hate what they fear and mysogyny is literally hatred of women like what the fuck? Perhaps some men are terrified of emotional harm. I can understand that but perhaps they would be better off with some therapy or a bit of self awareness.

I don’t understand misogyny at all. What’s it all about? If you were homosexual and were raised in an ancient Macedonian army or something perhaps you wouldn’t see a mother, sisters, daughters, lovers, work colleagues, neighbors, friends but who lives like that? Boys who live in front of a screen and are too anxious and scared to go outside? Racism I can kind of understand if you only have superficial knowledge of other people and cultures.

Once that testosterone kicks in at puberty women aren’t generally a physical threat to men. I don’t really understand all the fear of them. Some women are really, really cool. Like serious friend material and lifelong partner stuff.

I think all “western” countries were considerably more community focused in the past.

I am in rural Australia and as a kid our supermarket and hardware store were owned by farmer’s co-ops and the hotel is still community owned and puts profits back into local sporting clubs. I have old pictures of some of the community fund raisers in the past and they looked extravagant for the time for a small population. Everyone pitched in to help building sporting clubs or other community facilities or to fight natural disasters. One old timer said they thought the US influence of entrepreneur clubs (Rotary, Lion’s, Apex) was one of the first things to divide the community as the shop owners started to do their own thing separate from everyone else. We still have local community run child care, aged care and hospital. Increasingly people send their kids to the religious private school for social signalling despite the government school being well supported by parents and having excellent facilities and standards. The US funded churches are everywhere competing for customers and preaching hate and division. The disconnect between how people here naturally chose to build a community and what they are told to believe is interesting. I saw a silly old bugger wearing a MAGA hat last year. His parents probably came back from fighting fascists and helped build this community through unimaginable hard work and sacrifice.

Prosecution only happens for criminal offences here and copyright infringement would be a civil matter. I have not heard of civil actions against downloaders for years though I may be out of the loop. The notices scare people off and some ISPs might kick you off under their terms of service but they don’t take people to court.

I have never seen a copyright warning. My old, old ISP never forwarded them on principle. And now there are VPNs.

Reply that you work for Meta and Mark said it will be ok.

Even with growing disparity between the ultra wealthy and regular people most people in developed countries still score very highly for human development with a lot of freedoms, access to health, education and live reasonably prosperous lives by historical standards.

Its been a long time since most of us saw widespread famine or war or plagues decimating our populations. There is good reason to demand more social and economic progress which you would think would increase the appeal of that and not the politics of self destruction. There is no sane reason to burn it all down for most people.

Yet fascism still seems to be in a massive resurgence. Something really odd is happening. There is a huge information war that has seriously undermined society. It has taken over many religious groups, outsider groups like conspiracy believers and alt health, and conservative leaning parties. It is in online gaming and image boards and normie social media. It preys on socially immature young men, appealing to their insecurities. It preys on people looking for spiritual connections and community. Seeing peace and love hippies standing side by side with Christians and full on Nazis is fucking weird but I saw it during COVID.

The fascists were always there but they were not a political force and there is no reason they should ever be again. Not sure why it is happening or why we are letting it happen. It is certainly not in our interests. It always ends badly.

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Probably should point out that DeepSeek is owned by a Chinese hedge fund. They specialize in algorithmic trading. Can’t get much more capitalist than that. Very happy to see Chinese capitalists release an open source model. No doubt Altman and cronies will seek protection under the guise of national security. I guess free market competition is only good when you are not getting your arse kicked.

Awesome. More availability for the rest of us.

They do it because they can. They are squeezing every last drop out of their customers. Clueless people with roo much money won’t cancel. People who want to keep the product but are feeling the squeeze will go ad supported.

The rest were probably going to leave at any price as there is a lot more competition now and Netflix has adapted very poorly.

People either hop between services or go sailing wearing an eye patch or increasingly just so something else.

I think a lot of viewing time has been lost to social media, gaming and other alternatives. Don’t know if most people these days have the attention span for day long binges with their phones going off every few minutes and the FOMO. I can handle sitting in a room watching a movie with someone with them looking at their phone for half of it

That was obvious.

Option 1: a nation of predominantly anti-intellectual xenophobes organically discover a foreign language community and embrace it or option 2: a bunch of influencers from an existing platform are recruited to promote a competitor to a bunch of addicts looking for another fix. Social and mainstream media universally promoted the incorrect narrative.

I wish US citizens didn’t look so much to authoritarian states like Russia and China when they have old friends who they worked and faught alongside for years. These friends have been happily enjoying the benefits of social democracy despite an onslaught of anti-democratic propaganda, much of it from US citizens and their media.

Which brings me to the other narrative that pisses me off. That Chinese media are a national security threat but Meta and X are not. Lets be real. It is all the same shit. Any organized effort to manipulate mass opinion: politics disguised as religion, social media, conspiracy theories, cults etc have the potential to derail rational political debate, elevate populists and hand the keys to a generalissimo and it always leads to mass graves. Left or right doesn’t change the outcome which is shit. We all have to take some responsibility to fight back against this influence. Engage with people who are sucked into this shit and encourage them to disconnect.