Uriel238 [all pronouns]

I don’t know! If it only applies to the California State Assembly (and maybe the California State Senate) then that would be an egregious loophole.

For your edification Climate Town’s video on Methane (Natural Gas) (on YouTube).

TLDW: Methane was sold to the US as a transition fuel for government subsidies while we invested in renewables. It turns out we weren’t intending to transition after all.

Natural gas infrastructure is notoriously leaky, though difficult to monitor. (And the NG industry has gone to great lengths to discourage actual oversight, of course.) And methane is an exceptionally nasty greenhouse gas, considerably worse than CO2.

It also includes a bit about LNG, in which methane is liquified so it can be shipped abroad and other nations can transition to more methane use.

Sans paywall

It is illegal in California as of 2025-10-20 2026-01-01

I do use them, yes. Sometimes I’ll use them similar to parenthesis to insert an aside comment – a use case noted in Wikipedia. – though I add spaces before and after each one.

I was recently accused on Lemmy of using AI to write up a post (laced with links to appropriate Wikipedia articles).

I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution

You are obviously not watching the dozens of phone videos displaying counterexamples to this statement.

Granted, it’s true for a shrinking privileged set, and the US saw for the first time in the 2014 Ferguson Unrest, just how brutal and militant the police will get if protests or rudeness to officers occur in a minority neighborhood. It’s not that police brutality wasn’t common before, but this time there were press on the ground streaming live video to the internet, and it wasn’t being filtered through news agencies.

Conservative protests get the light touch, such as the 2017 Unite the Right rally. In contrast, the George Floyd protests in 2020 were saturated with CS gas just like Ferguson in 2014.

Granted, protestors taken to court by the current regime are usually acquitted (if a grand jury succeeds in indicting them; they’re failing a lot), but then we’re now seeing protestors accused of being part of an Antifa terrorist conspiracy, and getting sentenced disproportionately for minor crimes.

Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they’re legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.

Even birthright citizenship is being challenged, and that face-eating leopard is going to take a lot of Americans by surprise.

The US is failing as a liberal society.

Capital agglomerates until it is concentrated within a few massive, monopolistic corporations, controlled by a few powerful men.

Karl Marx takes a toke.

Capitalism as a public serving economy doesn’t work when it can be zerodayed by an entity with a resource advantage.

Before capitalism, when we were just doing markets and feudalism, the concentration of wealth at the top was even then a terminal illness for civilizations.

This time, the plutocrats at the top are richer (and proportionately richer) than they’ve ever been in history. They can literally buy the world out from under the rest of us. They can buy all the elections, bribe all the officials, and take over all the governments.

Watch what is happening in the United States: This leopard is totally coming to eat your face.

This is not a paywall, but it can be bypassed if it were a paywall.

A friend of mine got Paralives for her birthday, and says it has its charm.

I assumed that they’re buying things that some people like in the hopes that they’ll glean some of that like for themselves.

The Saudi family has long been a font of cruelty, ruthlessness and abuse of power, long before Mr. Bone Saw.

When EA Origin (the EA client) became mandated for EA games, I quit purchasing EA games entirely.

No regrets. I avoided the entire lootbox thing.

Now EA is under private equity, which means, I suspect, it’ll soon go the way of Toys 'R Us and Radio Shack.

Appropriate, given EA’s long standing policy of buying up development companies and gutting them.

No paywall or anti-adblocker bullshit

I live in the United States. Crime is not about behavior or adherence to law, but who we are. Those of us who cannot afford lawyers will be framed by law enforcement or coerced into confession, or extorted into a plea deal.

And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.

So we’re not a liberal, democratic society with rule of law.

As an anarchist, I’m be tempted to start a Snapchat account and then send NSA Haikus. (The website generator is defunct, but GitHub still has a repository.)

In fact, the appropriate response is to start regularly including phrases that the AI might flag (say quotes from fiction, cited as such) to generate false positives. Especially if your criminal and political records are completely benign.

So the lesson to the rest of us is DO NOT USE SNAPCHAT especially for private messaging.

I use Signal, was pressed to do so by privacy-minded friends and have pressed other friends to adopt the client.

So long as you don’t accidentally include Jeffrey Goldberg in your chat, you’re okay.

Real US judges have ruled that click-wrapped ToSes are not legally binding, since they commonly are bypassed, and app developers use dark patterns to discourage end users from reading them.

Also, ToSes and EULAs are notoriously verbose and difficult to read. People with college level reading skills struggle with them.

So no, blaming the end user is not appropriate here.

My concern is that, as I said, they lied to me and I believed them. My first logic and critical thinking class was in freshman college, where I learned that media literacy is about checking multiple sources that don’t like each other very much. The facts that are consistent between them are most likely the actual facts. I was the sucker who got owned by the indoctrination system.

Media literacy became super important in the aughts during the George W. Bush administration. The White House started giving preferential treatment to correspondents that covered only approved stories and kept the US in a positive light. (It marked the beginning of the end of free journalism within news agencies) Foreign sources started covering the extrajudicial torture programs and the use of PMCs in Iraq and the International War on Terror. It became really important for Americans to cross examine sources to determine for themselves what was really going on.

Today, it creeps me out to hear kids talk about the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war and the international war on terror, and cite as fact details where I distinctly remember otherwise.

In the present era, we have huge swaths of Americans in FOX News silos, since FOX, like an abusive domestic partner, encourages its viewership to cut off all other sources. We need to be teaching media literacy in grade school. We should be teaching how to use the internet as a tool and not a substitute for social interaction.

When the US proscribed alcohol consumption from 18 years to 21 years, the rate of alcohol related crime and DUIs didn’t change, rather they just got older, and more people were imprisoned for it because they were old enough to know better (allegedly). If we cut off internet access to kids until they’re 18, or even the current proposals to raise the age from 13 to 16, it only means kids will be less experienced and less prepared at a later age.

And kids who are diverse, and fit outside the white, straight, normal mainstream, presently are utilizing resources on the internet to help them cope in a society that doesn’t like deviance very much. These resources literally save lives.

I think an education system that actually took itself seriously, and intended to teach kids in good faith will be able to not only handle kids having internet access, but will be able to integrate its use into education, better preparing children for adulthood.

But also, as I said, I am an outlier. I’m neurodivergent and I’m queer, so I do not have the pulse of the children of the US. In the way I assume not all men are in concurrence with the manosphere, I also submit not all children are daft and need to be taught in single syllables without distractions. If they are, we should get rid of school sports leagues. I suspect more kids would benefit from internet access and robust training in media literacy (including social media savvy) than would be aided by a device ban in school (or by age-gating social media).

Note: There are actual studies about the harms social media has on kids, and the scientific consensus is that harms are significantly less than what is being claimed to promote age verification. It’s looking a lot like the same moral panic that occurred about video games, violent movies and television. But then big social media companies like Facebook, X and Google would enjoy the reduction in competition from smaller sights that would result from an AV mandate, hence they are lobbying to mandate locking up the internet.

My disagreements with the policy are twofold, but I was a weird kid. And I am a weird adult.

Firstly, when my social studies teacher or my American history teacher tries to pass state propaganda as fact, I want to have the internet available to find sources either that confirm what I’m being taught or refut it. And similarly when our chemistry class can only provide a poor, hazy image of what we’re doing, I want to be able to go online and get a better one.

We didn’t have the internet when I was in school in the eighties, and instead, we had shitty textbooks and a state mandated syllabus. It was evident, even then, that we were being indoctrinated with an agenda, and being denied informed consent.

And as a naïve kid, I believed my schooling and grew up Republican… Eventually, I’d learn how much bullshit was spoon fed to me, and that our school districts, in fact, do not have an agenda to equip students for adult life, rather are instruments of control.

And secondly, the internet provides lifelines online for kids at risk, such as neurodivergents, LGBT+, kids in dysfunctional homes. And they should have access to them. I didn’t have those resources, and I believe my outcome is worse for it.

I get it, regarding bullying. Social media harassment is a problem, but by comparison I was cornered and outnumbered three to one by kids twice my size. Kids do not require social media to hurt. Since it was their word against mine school administrators sided with my assailants. Every time. I’d work out later they just hate weakling kids, and believe I should be able to hold my own against such odds.

I can assure you kids will be bullied anyway, just as sex trafficking increased when SESTA / FOSTA cut off internet resources to sex traffickers (and killed personal ads and ended online sex worker support groups.)

But then, I’m neurodivergent and was in that gap in which I was quite bright and interested in learning, but had testing difficulties so I wasn’t eligible for gifted programs. The mainstream school district wasn’t intended for me. But then there wasn’t a place for me at all.

The US state education districts are not being run in good faith, prioritizing obedience over critical thinking skills, ideological doctrine over factual history and enrichment of companies and administrators over paying faculty and budgeting learning materials. Restricting students from their own resources is yet another admission that the US does care what happens to students, and reinforces the notion that schools are not institutions of learning, but detainment centers to lock kids up and keep them out of mischief until they are legally responsible for their actions.

But as I said. I was a weird kid. And my schools assured I would never live it down.

Funny thing, UK camera’d up London in the aughts on the pretense of fighting crime.

That didn’t work either.