Signal no longer requires a phone number. You can now create an account. Not sure if that helps your outlook on it, but yeah. It was a fairly recent update that this was rolled out.

Edit: being told we still do need numbers to register. I haven't gotten a new phone since well before the change was made, so I haven't actually created an account and gone through the process. It looks like I misinterpreted what was going on when I read the changelog.

"Generic Democrat" polls better than Biden. You can argue he has a chance, but you can't argue that he's popular, or polling well against Trump. I kind of take issue with "crushed" a descriptor of 2020 too. Skin of his teeth seems more reasonable, and in an environment that's completely different from right now. They did it with Hillary, another very unpopular candidate and we got Trump. They're doing it again now, and it seems nuts to go so balls out against actual voters rather than the people who are literally deciding who the candidate is. But what do I know🤷‍♂️

Purity test😂

You'd be better off yelling at the people who are pushing the worst possible candidate against Trump. Let's pretend you convince me to vote, congrats you've convinced 1 person in the interwebs. Write to your reps...ramp up the pressure and forget about me. Biden's losing with or without my vote, it's a good bet. When that happens you can blame people that didn't want to vote , or you can blame the party that's shooting itself in the dick...over...and over again. I know who will get blamed, and I don't give a fuck.

Haha. Not sure why you're being downvoted, he's not even running a campaign. But somehow in the end this will be the progressives fault. Suck a dick dems.

They're not wrong. The Dems aren't the good guys here. As usual they're just slightly less bad. Someone that loves democracy lets a primary election happen rather annointing their chosen meat puppet....sorry, candidate.

Yeah, a couple of decades ago China was a miracle as western institutions repeatedly redefined the poverty threshold to make global poverty look like it was improving. Back then it was touting the power of the free market, with most of the gains being in China. Now that they want conflict with China, those numbers are no longer good enough. I'm not saying China doesn't have a poverty problem, I'm just saying this is illustrative of propaganda changing the narrative.

You're comparing linear distance to surface area of the south China sea. I'd be curious to know how close to Chinese airspace this bomber or group was flying. Fair enough though, if you think it's not analagous we could open it up to the entire gulf of Mexico/Caribbean. It seems pretty clear to me that Chinese aircraft in that area would result in a tantrum that would probably escallate beyond tailgating.

Oh we're 100% on the same page about books, there is no equivalent to that with the dems. But I was talking about the larger idea of censorship, not books specifically. I don't think that you can say with honesty though that specific institutions are specifically attending to drive narratives in ways that Democrats want them to. Cable media is an easy one, tech companies are another. Shadowbanning and suppression of specific topics have and are happening, and are censorship. They algorithmically and explicitely tamped down legitimate persuits like discussing lab leak, until it actually became the most feaseable beginning of COVID. They suppressed the hunter Biden bullshit (I'm not taking that on its merits, just saying it happened, and near an election).

On another note, I'm not your enemy here. I responded to something that I thought I could add something to. You obviously did the same. We can make Lemmy a more healthy place to talk than Reddit was.

Guess you won. I'll just pack up and head out with all my wrongness. 🖖

Your second paragraph is where I think the win is. When you have self custody of things, you have more ineroperability and stuff like that. Largely I buy the statement that all this is a solution in search of a problem. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. It broadens the possible space of options in the future, which I find to be exciting.

Edit..added the following.shit

There is at least one airline using this NFT model currently, in Argentina I think. It could be that the CEO is using the service because he's just a crypto maximalist but I believe the win from their point of view is that they get a cut of subsequent secondary sales. They've sold the ticket once, maybe you can get a bit more for it.

As far as the card game goes, what your saying, that the game could be shuttered is not different than what we currently have. It's only different in that you're able to own the cards while it's running. Maybe you want to gift your child a good card that you have, you can just send it to them. Impossible currently because you don't control anything in hearthstone except how much money to spend on packs.

I don't think that I'll be able to change your mind. I get the bad blood with crypto, really, but I guess I just don't share the absolute conviction that the whole thing is a scam.

The way you're breaking down ownership is true, but it's true about every form or ownership. The deed to your house? You don't own anything, that's just a piece of paper that someone says prooves that you have a right to live there. Whether that's saved in a county records department or a blockchain that doesn't really change. Point taken, but I think it's a broader point than how you were using it.

I'm not really sure what makes saving your deed information on a blockchain less valid than in a county records department though. I mean breaking it down, a blockchain is really just a ledger that keeps track of information in a cryptographically secure way. I think that this has gotten out of hand because of all of the get rich quick schemes, and that's fair. It's happened....a lot. But does that invalidate the whole endeavor?

The current exchange system has rent seeking vultures sitting on top. Visa, MasterCard, these fuckers sit there and take a percentage of every transaction that theY fascilitate. What are they doing? Keeping a ledger. We trust them to do it accurately and pay them steeply to do it. Now we have a self managing ledger that requires no trust from anyone. Can you really tell me there is ZERO use case potential here?