Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

@Outpatientzero @aral yep, I'll vote Harris, and I'll celebrate when Trump loses, but pretending she is a good candidate representing good policy, or that her winning means we have a healthy democracy, nope.

As a outsider to the USA, what really affects me is going to be how the candidates view the rest of the world. The domestic situation… I’ll get onto that. But for me, a Trump presidency is a Trump-only presidency. His idea of dealing with anything is “how does it benefit me, personally?”.

His concept of dealing with treaties, trade, and just general diplomacy is “how can I extract the most value for myself?”. Like it or not, the USA leads the world, and I would rather have someone consistent (aka Harris) doing neoliberal bullshit than someone like Trump, who only seems to listen to the last person who spoke to him.

Remember that his win in 2016 took him by surprise. That was why the damage of his presidency was relatively easy to overturn, because he wasn’t all that effective. He is ready now, in 2024.

On the domestic front… Well, I am sure he will use the power at his disposal as president to push the boundaries of The State to great effect. We don’t know whether his rhetoric is speech, or whether it is a plan. Does he really want to use his powers to lock up political prisoners, crush dissent, and remove the independence of state agencies? I don’t know. But I don’t want to find out.

It is deeply unenviable to have a choice between “dismal” and “fucking awful”. Trust me, I know, we just went through that in our own recent election. Both parties, just like in the USA, are pro-Israel, pro-neoliberalism, etc. But the result is that we starved the Conservatives of power, and… Well, the Labour party are doing… Not bad. Still not good. But definitely feels better. It is much easier to criticise a party and leader that does not want to assassinate you for believing that climate change is real.

When the USA sneezes, the world gets a cold. When the USA gets a Trump, the rest of the world will be covered in shit.

The most infuriating thing though is that this post is kind of irrelevant — because the USA has such a fucked up electoral system, the only people who’s votes matter are like 50k people who live in some state that I don’t care about.

The concern here is that old search engines can give you links and you can go into them to verify the content. AI taking over our search engines hides the sources of information, forcing us to blindly trust the AI and wherever it got its information from.

#AI

The very stable system that has enabled humans to plan and grow food at massive scales, which also allowed our species to grow to 8+ billion, is no longer stable for first time in our species history.

Let not sugar coat the reality of the situation.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/16/climate/global-water-cycle-off-balance-food-production/index.html

That's 300,000 hardware devices that use more than the average households energy usage per day, EACH, and this is only Meta and X.
Google's planned Ai is going to use new generation chips that use more power than the average home uses in a month, EACH!

This is not sustainable!

Since late 2023, GHGSat satellites detected about 20,000 sites worldwide that qualify as super-emitters, or sites hemorrhaging at 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of methane per hour.

An increase of 33% from the previous year.
https://apnews.com/article/methane-satellite-monitoring-ghgsat-climate-change-c5bdd53058cdcbf0c83a6a1080398222

Newsletter: Coinbase threatens me that continuing to report on their activities would be “.... unwise”. Also, election spending hits a fever pitch, with several new crypto PACs coming out of the woodwork.

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-69/

#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpolitics #USpol

Far from making our communities safer, the use of automated license plate readers repeatedly endangers the physical safety of innocent people subjected to wrongful detention by gun-wielding officers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/human-toll-alpr-errors

Latest comic: The Last Firewall

#uspol #USPolitics #cartoon #comic #election #democracy #fascism #media #journalism #vote

#RSS Feeds are great to follow #Webpages. In the Fedi you can also follow Channels/Accounts by RSS.

By #Masto you just put an " .rss " an the end of the Channeladresse like

http://serverdomain.tld/@Channel-Nickname.rss

By #Friendica it goes like this:

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname

the #Hubzilla CMS provides for every Channel many different kinds of RSS Feeds

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname

will give you ToplevelPosts + Commends + Likes

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname?f=&top=1

will give you just ToplevelPosts

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname?f&cat=

will give you just ToplevelPosts from a specific category depending of what you put at the end of ?f&cat=

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname?f&cat=Fediverse

We're all suffering from Election Anxiety Disorder. While there is no cure, here are some remedies. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/11/1/2281499/-Cartoon-Election-anxiety-remedies

Israeli airstrikes on #Lebanon and #Gaza kill dozens as rockets are fired into Israel - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/02/israeli-airstrikes-on-lebanon-and-gaza-kill-dozens-as-rockets-are-fired-into-israel "Since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah erupted in 2023, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded in Lebanon"

‘Welfare for the rich’: how farm subsidies wrecked Europe’s landscapes - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/02/farm-subsidies-wrecked-europe-environments-common-agricultural-policy these greedy #farmers are the enemies of nature

"The National Archives museum, under Biden-appointed U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan, has been working to reshape its narrative of American history in order to make white conservatives more comfortable...a pattern of efforts to shape its newest upcoming exhibits to better fit right-wing narratives of U.S. history. The museum has removed references to Martin Luther King Jr., Japanese internment, Native Americans, union organizers..."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/its-going-to-take-a-constant-fight-to-preserve-the-historical-record

[expletives] I just spent three minutes trying to copy somebody's full Mastodon handle, including their instance name, from the top of one of their posts by drag-selecting the text in order to Ctrl-C and couldn't get it to work.

The new Mastodon web interface is a nightmare.

Do you want to improve #codeberg and have nothing to do for the weekend yet? Check out the #GoodFirstIssue­­ s at Forgejo and let friendly maintainers help you if necessary: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues?labels=222666

Spain floods disaster: death toll rises to 205 as extra troops mobilised - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/01/more-rain-forecast-as-500-extra-troops-mobilised-in-spanish-flood-disaster what an image; those piled up cars are a monument to people's refusal to act seriously on #ClimateCrisis

21,000 laborers so far dead building #NEOM, #SaudiArabia's futuristic city in the desert - https://boingboing.net/2024/10/31/21000-laborers-so-far-dead-building-saudi-arabias-futuristic-city-in-the-desert.html "Locals have been violently evicted from traditional lands, and workers are faring even worse, according to a new documentary."