> Whereas something like doing your own oil change requires a lot of preparation to get right
No, it doesn't. It's very simple on most cars, and certainly you could also see it with a YouTube video. Remove one (drain) bolt. Drain oil into a bucket. Put the bolt back. Fill the car up from the top with the oil listed on the cap in the amount listed on the owners manual. Take the bucket of oil to the nearest auto part's store and dump it there for free.
If you change the filter too, you just...unscrew the filter and screw a new one back on. Make sure you the whole filter came off (the gasket didn't separate) and smear a little oil on the new one.
There are some minor variations on this process depending on the exact model of car, but that's it. Variations might be stuff like "the drain bolt is normally covered with a plastic cover that requires a screwdriver" or "the manufacturer recommends you replace the washer on the bolt." (It doesn't actually matter.)
> and then you still have the issue of disposing of the oil.
I mentioned it above but because I see this comment a lot: your auto parts store or even Wal-Mart will take your used oil. Disposal is not an issue.
For some time now, neglecting radiator coolant and power steering fluid has essentially no impact. (The service interval on my coolant is either 150k or 200k miles.) Power steering is usually electric these days. I'm not sure what would ever call for valve cover gasket maintenance, unless you're removing it for some reason.
"Topping off" with oil is not really a thing, generally, unless you have a very old car with engine problems. Nor can you put the "wrong gas" in, typically, unless you have some sort of specialty car that "requires" (you could get away with it for a long time) higher efficiency gas or you have a diesel - and someone who went the extra mile to get these will be aware.
EVs also have brake fluid, so that's something EV owners also have to pay attention to - but like ICE cars, you can pretty much can just ignore it. It's not recommended but nothing is likely to happen.
They did not revoke "the subsidies." The ACA subsidies are still in place. What was allowed to expire was the temporarily increased COVID subsidy levels, which were sold as a temporary emergency expansion. If they had originally passed a genuine and permanent ACA expansion, rather than an expiring one, there's likely nothing that could have been done to "revoke" it by those currently in power.
Maybe you mean this, but it's important to be clear about the distinctions we don't mislead people, and then someone tells them the whole truth, and then they wonder what else we were wrong about.
> So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.
No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
Yes - sorry, I should have been more precise and said "in a licensed venue".
One additional point, in response to your comment: public performance licences are for events or venues, not DJs.
So if you are DJing in club, you are covered. Indeed, there are even specific technologies that log what DJs are playing, built into DJ hardware, and report back to collective licensing bodies so that the rights holders in the tracks played and mixed are properly compensated.
However, my point was less about the intricacies of licensing, and more about the ability to play the music to people under a "blanket" licence. There is no equivalent licensing framework for releasing remixes as recordings.
If the rise of fascism and hate is due to people being able to talk to each other on Facebook with insufficient censorship, it seems your actual problem is the system of governance that gives everyone a right to vote, even if they do it based on some nonsense they read online.
You are romantizising what Facebook and Instagram have become. The problem is not that people talk to each other. The problem is, that they created algos that optimize for maximal engagement and they get that by triggering the basic human feelings that create the biggest reaction: fear and anger. They literally hacked the human brain chemistry. And they don't stop when they detect that the human is struggling and getting darker and darker thoughts, but they keep pushing to extract even the last second of precision engagement.
"How long and often" people engage with content is a perfectly reasonable metric to optimize and a very close correlate of interest. There are, in fact, plenty of things going on in the world people should get mad about, or that they should worry about. Some people think that's climate change, some people think that's migration, some people think that's rising fascism, some people think that's Mamdami opening grocery stores. The fundamental problem people have is when other people get mad about stuff they like. That's the "fear", "anger", "hate." People who get mad about the things I like are obviously just irrational, emotionally driven puppets of The Algorithm whereas I am Englightened, Rational, and came to my opinions only through Reason and Logic.
What people don't like is huge masses of people coming together and having opinions that counter our modern mainstream elite consensus. Because elites are generally pretty smart that means a lot of these opinions are, frankly, dumb. Some of them simply represent different values (pro vs anti immigration, as one example.) Both are considered intolerable.
It is also perfectly true that people spend lots of time on non-politicized content. Baby videos, cat videos, feel-good human interest stories, all sorts of positive stuff is also massively popular on these platforms. That gets ignored in favor of inveighing for tight control over the political discourse because social media spreads crimethink.
The Western democratic ideal is that you have to convince the masses you're right - a disturbingly large portion of the movers and shakers have decided that instead, we should control what the masses are allowed to say and know, so we don't have to fight those battles.
OK, so, in the vein of the original thread, can you explain how Facebook would be "sowing discord" or "making people depressed and anxious" in some specific way that isn't just spreading other people's speech (ideally, in a way that is based on some objective metrics like engagement) that is Very Bad and shouldn't be allowed?
For example, are you suggesting that Facebook begin censoring information about the climate emergency because it makes people depressed and anxious? Should Facebook make sure that people don't see content they disagree with, because that promotes discord? Or is it the other way around - they shouldn't see content they agree with, because that creates an echo chamber which increases discord when they do encounter other views?
There was an experiment (granted its TikTok, but it's basically the same) where they register a new account, pretending to be a teenager and than start scrolling without liking anything. [1] The amount of extremist content that is shown is really worrying.
To answer your question, yes they should be highly regulated and forced to moderate what they show to users. Maybe even be liable since it is their decision what they show and not the users. And if their business model is then not working anymore, because it's to expensive to moderate the content, then tough luck.
OK, well, I support liberal democracy and all that entails. So we’re kind of fundamentally at odds here and probably won’t be able to find common ground.
That's ok. Thank you for the discussion. But I do wonder, should Russia and China be allowed to use these tools to sow distrust against our Democracy? For me the tolerance paradox formulated by Karl Popper comes to mind and it is a clear no.
Why is it this line of reasoning never goes into questioning just who the forces endlessly propagandizing about the need to censor social media are? Is this not sowing distrust in democracy itself? (If you can’t trust your electorate not to believe Chinese propaganda, what does that say about your attitude towards democracy as a system?) Who is doing this and why? That would seem to be very salient since much of the reporting on bot campaigns has since been discredited, with whole organizations confabulating these stories then laundering them through the media to push their desired political outcome. (C.f “new knowledge.”)
Foreign propaganda in democracies is as old as democracies themselves. It is by no means anything new; foreign influence campaigns spent enormous sums and labor trying to sway democracies from the very beginning - often very successfully. I don’t see why it’s any different for it to be published on Facebook instead of laundered through print media and rumor mills. At the end of the day you either recognize these problems and appreciate that trusting your electorate/having a liberal democracy is the best option we have compared with the alternatives…or you don’t.
> At the end of the day you either recognize these problems and appreciate that trusting your electorate/having a liberal democracy is the best option we have compared with the alternatives…or you don’t.
Many of those democracies are trending illiberal thanks to the useless yet arrogant liberal decrying of “there’s simply nothing else we can do” and championing a rotting status quo.
They are trending illiberal because of the tension between elites who think ignoring and censoring the popular will on various issues is wise and the voters who see that and think the only solution is a drastic one.
Several western countries could kill their more extreme parties overnight simply by enacting a few reforms with immigration and/or affordability.
Democracy does not imply that people should be allowed intentionally make people depressed and anxious for profit. There's no reason that must be allowed for a healthy democracy to work.
Liberal democracy does not mean that the government and other authorities hide information and opinions from people for fear it might make them “anxious and depressed.” I gave you a specific example: should they stop letting people see content relating to the climate emergency because it makes many people anxious and depressed?
That is the view of paternalistic authoritarian states whose primary concern is public harmony, not liberalism.
We're not talking about the government and authorities, we're talking about Facebook. The government showing people information that makes them anxious and depressed isn't the same as a for-profit entity intentionally tailoring individual feeds to maximize people's specific anxieties and depression because they discovered it generates billions of dollars, allowing their executives to live in opulent luxury floating on mega yachts. That whole thing isn't a part of liberal democracy.
OK, so who is deciding what information makes people “anxious and depressed” and therefore what Facebook is allowed to republish in feeds? Would it be reasonable for Facebook to censor all information about the climate emergency to protect people from feelings of anxiety and depression, even if they engage with it?
Content that speaks the truth, like content about the climate emergency is not the problem, even if people don't want that to be true. The content that are just blatant lies, nowadays even published by elected officials, that they just publish because it is in their own personal and financial interest is.
Right. So instead, a central authority determines what is true or not and therefore what is allowed to be published. Easy - there’s clearly a neutral arbiter of truth we can all depend on! So the problem was never that the algorithm let people see content that was depressing and anxiety-inducing - that’s okay - but when it does so and it’s not true. How the goalposts move.
You’re right back to what authoritarian states say and do, and diametrically opposed to what underpins liberal democracy: the idea that the demos decides what is true and good. That idea has lots of very obvious problems but we decided it was preferable to the other systems, one of which you are now advocating for. In a liberal democracy we all are responsible for persuading the people that lies are lies, not censoring them.
If you believe that the Algorithm is just too powerful and you can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas against people lying - well, you don’t believe in liberal democracy. You believe in an ideologically authoritarian state that tells you what’s true or not, and where people are not allowed to make free, (un)informed decisions.
Speaking for GP, I want to have both a reasonable legal system and safe, clean drinking water.
We can have both, and the former precludes the idea that plaintiffs and judges can simply invent new fundamental rights that require enormous sums of money and labor to implement without any democratically designed framework because they're a good idea.
We have a route to do this, it's legislation and regulation. Note that in this particular case, while these things did not work perfectly - the Jackson water system had a lot of well-reported problems, and the lawsuit was filed in response to that - there's been hundreds of millions poured into remediating the problem. It is not simply being "ignored". People are not doing "nothing." The EPA, MSDH, and Jackson authorities have been working on the problem, not ignoring it because it's not a Constitutional right. In late 2025 the work resulted in the Jackson water supply once again meeting Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.
Here is the latest comprehensive water quality report, on a reporting website that the DOJ, EPA, and courts forced JXN to create:
> Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.
> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.
Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.
Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.
I'm not going to just take the word of anybody in the US government without listening to the other side. The description on "Episode 10 Who Attacked" is the other side.
Yes, because no evidence of the injury was presented at trial other than the officer's testimony.
If he was shot in the neck, why didn't the prosecution show a photo of the wound? Why are his neck and shoulder injuries a privacy concern?
What they proved is that shots were fired and that the officer involved was fine and walking around the scene after the shooting. When he said "I'm hit" another officer checked on video and said "your good your good your good".
> Are passages about killing infidels and the other xenophobic garbage is a historical metaphorical and nuanced stuff which must be interpreted very different nowadays? Fine. But then all the other things should be also interpreted heavily - like there is no need to saran-wrap women because "the intention" or "the author's meaning" was about simply protecting them from the desert sand a-la medieval hiking handbook. There is no need to avoid specific animal meat in the age of refrigerators. And so on it goes.
I always find this mindset peculiarly baffling. From a secular perspective, we've understood since at least the 1800s that "morality" is simply the pro-social instincts that we've developed as a social species of apes, and that they are historically contingent on a million different factors for any particular group of humans, such that the exact manifestation of "morality" differs widely from culture to culture and over time. Yet comments like this invariably accept Christian moral realism as a given (and granted, it's obviously a large genealogical contributor to Western social norms today) but then sever its grounding from God and place it in...their personal feelings about right and wrong. So God using the Israelites/Babylonians/Romans/etc as his instrument of divine justice is evil "xenophobic garbage"...because divine justice is real (xenophobia is objectively evil) but the God described in religious texts actually has nothing to do with it, and actually its wrong because....uh...we say so and we're the final and ultimate arbiters of right and wrong I guess? Us, specifically, that is.
It really seems like this is the genealogical origin of the idea of "progress" you see throughout these comments as well - people are "better" now, because you can clearly see over time a large subset of people developing social norms closer and closer to our own! And unlike theirs, ours are objectively right and true, or at least closer to it. This is certainly a historically unusual view, which may have typically been rather provincial and close-minded, but which certainly did general not have this universalist, and dare I say, colonialist bent, that all must agree.
Is it possible that other anti democratic forces are working to instill the notion that the ideas of their ideological opponents are illegitimate and when voters hold those beliefs it’s only because they’re been propagandized and deceived? The idea in a democratic society a large proportion of voters cannot be trusted to make their own decisions seems extremely dangerous, and one that massively benefits centralizing authoritarian powers and oligarchs.
No, it doesn't. It's very simple on most cars, and certainly you could also see it with a YouTube video. Remove one (drain) bolt. Drain oil into a bucket. Put the bolt back. Fill the car up from the top with the oil listed on the cap in the amount listed on the owners manual. Take the bucket of oil to the nearest auto part's store and dump it there for free.
If you change the filter too, you just...unscrew the filter and screw a new one back on. Make sure you the whole filter came off (the gasket didn't separate) and smear a little oil on the new one.
There are some minor variations on this process depending on the exact model of car, but that's it. Variations might be stuff like "the drain bolt is normally covered with a plastic cover that requires a screwdriver" or "the manufacturer recommends you replace the washer on the bolt." (It doesn't actually matter.)
> and then you still have the issue of disposing of the oil.
I mentioned it above but because I see this comment a lot: your auto parts store or even Wal-Mart will take your used oil. Disposal is not an issue.
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