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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2025

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  • Discord is just another social media site that has a whole lot of people fooled into thinking it’s not creating profiles on them for advertising. Gonna get real obvious real soon though.

    I guess thats OK for community dev teams and stuff - like it works well, users can come and accesa the faq or support and leave. But it can leave a walled garden of data in there if they want to move elsewhere later though.

    Larger issue is the people that share their whole lives there as a quasi-Facebook. That’s all getting hoovered up and sold to the highest bidder - alongside data like exactly what activity you do on your PC (processes running when and where for how long etc - Discord monitors a lot)





  • I mean the section you list ‘reception’ lists some vagueries about how it’s been recieved (positively and negatively) in various countries but it’s certainly not shouting out that it’s unreliable.

    Likewise the controversies section below has three relatively minor events over its entire history.

    Hardly seems like a smoking gun…


  • TL;DR: The end product is the same, whether it be natural or artificial. The real concern, is if the product should really be consumed at all.

    This is hot crap. They are different chemicals, the end product is not the same and you’re spouting misinformation.

    Most of the artificial dyes that people have banned in countries other than the USA are derived from petrochemicals. Natural dyes have been in use far longer and have been shown to have fewer negative health outcomes.

    Eg. Red dye containing bugs (cochineal, E120) has no known health effects except to an extremely small percentage of the population whom are allergic to bugs, hence it is marked as an ingredient when used, to alert those with allergies. Its replacement alternatives are:

    • red dye #2 (amaranth, E123) which was made from coal tar, and is now made from petroleum byproducts. It is a suspected carcinogen and is banned in most of the world including the US.
    • red dye #3 (erythrosine, E127) was first extracted from coal tar and is derived from phenol, currently extracted from petroleum byproducts and it is a known carcinogen and restricted heavily in what it can be used in since the early 1990s in every developed nation except the USA, until this very announcement by the FDA and RFK jr which will bring the USA in line with the rest of the world’s protections. California also separately banned it in October 2023.
    • red dye 40 (Allura red) is an entirely synthetic dye invented by a chemical corporation in 1971 by azo coupling between diazotized 5-amino-4-methoxy-2-toluenesulfonic acid and 6-hydroxy-2-naphthalene sulfonic acid. I don’t know what that means in order to determine if its feedstocks are petrochemicals, but mice studies showed bowel disorders and DNA damage which caused several countries to ban it over the years, however it’s currently believed to be safe if the maximum daily limit is adhered to.

    And that’s just red dye.



  • Change takes time and they’ve been anti-gay for a very, very long time. No sane person thinks a single pope solved all the centuries of repression in 10 years.

    What I do know is that the conservative Catholics I personally know thought Pope Francis was “too liberal” and “just saying woke things because that’s what young people like nowadays” and those are both endorsements to my ears.

    Especially his attitude on climate change and income inequality and tax avoidance by the wealthy - there is a lot of that in conservative church groups and if their God’s PR representative is telling them to cut that shit out and look after the environment better then great.



  • I feel this is a bad analogy, Wikipedia and IA are not a hard drive spinning in a server rack, they are community projects - made for the public good. They do not face the same issues. The problems they repeatedly face are always the same - funding (which is largely solved) and the issue discussed on topic - legal.

    The reason it’s important to defend the IA/Wikipedia and pile our resources behind them instead of splitting off new projects is that if they lose legal cases, any other projects with the same or similar goals will face exactly the same attacks and results. Unless you intend to host your replacement on the moon.


  • I think that if we work together as people we can achieve more than just a couple of good organizations that can fade.

    That is exactly what the Internet Archive and Wikipedia are - a bunch of people who wanted to achieve a shared goal in an open, free, and democratic manner.

    As soon as you start building something to replace what they’ve made you’ll quickly realize what they did - it’s very big, so it needa layers of governance, and you don’t want mismanagement by any one person or handful of small people, so you incorporate it and make a charter of your mandates, policies, procedures for stakeholders to vote for removal of people causing issues, clauses stating the data and corporation are owned by your non-profit entity and may never be for-profit… And pretty soon you have yourself an institution.





  • Fair, and if tarrifs were his primary ‘unusual’ policy decision that might be the most reasonable assumption with respect to Occam’s razor, but when you add in the hundreds of other deeply damaging actions he’s taken against US institutions, core government branches, and functions it really tips the conclusion toward intentional sabotage.


  • I hate influencers too so I get it, but I figure its mostly kids and young adults who grew up watching him, so I put the blame more on the systems and communities they grew up in.

    Those kids should have been protected by say… A strong consumer protections board, or parents controlling their screen time & curating their viewing, government banning phones at school, or outright banning social media for kids, or a quality education teaching them media literacy - but all of those things are demonized as bad things that those socialist European countries have.