atlantas

RIP Canada. Over 50% of mortgages since 2021 are variable rate!

https://www.reuters.com/article/canada-banks-mortgage-rates-...

The Biden administration’s decisions not to declare a no-fly zone or help transfer Polish MiGs were both good ones; they've kept their heads during a very emotional time.

Thankful for this, cooler heads prevailed. Despite relentless pressure coming from the news media and twitter demanding that we escalate.

You are pushing the moral panic in question, and it will age even more poorly than the previous panic since it's targeting and smearing a woman instead of a story.

What is it about Harry Potter and moral panics?

Then "We need to talk about Harry Potter. The story is evil and will corrupt your kids!"

Today "We need to talk about Harry Potter. The author is evil and will corrupt your kids!"

"master branch" and "grandfathered code" and "sanity check" are just a few of the terms suddenly deemed unacceptable.

Joe Rogan says dangerous things and must be silenced. Who is a Bernie supporter smeared as alt-right for saying unapproved things.

All kinds of campus panics about "unsafe" words and ideas. One example is a professor that said a word that sounds like another word during a lecture. It made some students uncomfortable and the professor was put on immediate leave.

People being cancelled for jokes they made a decade ago.

It just goes on and on.

Same, center left here too. It feels like a cult trying to purify itself. We're impure and must be cast out. I believe, however, that it's a very loud minority that is scaring the rest of us into silence. So it appears larger than it is.

Free speech. Strangely that has somehow inverted in recent years. It wasn't long ago that censorship was the domain of the right who were in a panic about what's acceptable speech and actively trying to police it.

Yikes. Imagine thinking Breaking Points is right-wing.

Thanks for doing this!

What would be your advice to new platforms that want to take a free speech approach, while attracting users across the entire political spectrum? (to avoid the fate of Parlor and Rumble)

If it involves money and it's something you don't like, you call it a pyramid scheme. Twitter discourse 101!

"I used to be fairly optimistic that we could get through a period of consistently higher tensions with China without provoking a huge racist freakout against Asian Americans but the current reaction against all things Russian is causing me to revise that way way way downward."

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1501990346170978304

That's when the rubber meets the road. It's easy for Apple to virtue signal in this case, but I have a feeling they'll think different with China.

I replaced mainstream media with Breaking Points (https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints). I've found them to be far more reliable.

And to top it off, now you have a toothache and have to visit the dentist in the year 536.

Brilliantly stated. This is literally their one job.

I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling

As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian governments like Russia do. They silence and control information, blocking out other sources aside from their own propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous disinformation.

Serious question: Do you think pyramid schemes, get rich quick schemes, no value added services and predatory investments are new?

In the current system when an artist creates something and sells it, they typically get paid once, often lowballed. The buyer may turn around and sell it for 100x. The buyer made far more than the artist, who gets nothing in this scenario.

With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.

It's unfortunate, but what would be a good alternative?

I find the sheer volume of anger and hatred surrounding this and other related announcements completely unhinged. Why are so many people threatened by services that give their users options?

You've got to be kidding me! Neutrality is just as important as privacy for a search engine.

DuckDuckGo was doing a good job building trust for years and just threw all of that away. This was their edge and now they are simply a worse Google instead of being an alternative.

Oh I do blame that too. Housing regulation by NIMBYs have long been pushing up their own home values by making it onerous to increase supply.

Probably, but what I'm getting at is that Blackrock can afford it. What I don't understand is how so many individuals and families have been affording (or at least committing to) these prices.

Ditto housing. I just can't believe that people are able to afford the prices of the past 1-2 years and many must be paying beyond their means? I know Blackrock and other parasites are scooping up housing too, but that's not the majority of buying.

Look up power laws.

It's almost trolling to suggest another centralized vendor that can lock out people from their money at any time. Paypal is arguably the worst offender in this regard.

This is where the rubber meets the road. Let's register some predictions:

If China invades Taiwan, will Apple and Disney exit China as they did with Russia?

This. Dissidents would be cast as pro-Evil and purged from social media for misinformation.

The disheartening thing is that even if you never supported Putin, other countries treat you as enemy.

This is precisely what leads to atrocities like Japanese internment camps. We are repeating dark history in real time and it's being actively cheered on by a bloodthirsty mob who have no regard for innocent civilians and kids.

That's interesting. If they're not trying to persuade (and it doesn't appear so), then is the point of that to flex their power or what?