It's really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from "Do no evil" to "Don't even bother pretending not to."

This shouldn't be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they're fined less than they made off of it, it's not even really a fine. It's just the government taking a cut of the action.

The "why" is certainly that someone in the state beef industry gave him a pile of money.

Ironic that the thread is about men dying on average younger than women, and the majority of the responses are people completely ignoring that fact and instead just taking an opportunity to negatively stereotype men so they can shit on them collectively.

Well... except that "cis" is actually a shortened form of the precise, latin-rooted, technical term "cisgender," which is the opposite of the precise, latin-rooted, technical term "transgender."

And it has nothing at all to do with heterosexuality, or with sexual preference in any way, shape or form.

So he's not just wrong, but wrong in pretty much every way he could possibly have been.

Which seems to be pretty much par for the course for the world's richest middle-aged teenage edgelord.

Ah... the venerable old "make a 'loan' then forgive it" strategy for paying bribes.

At this point Thomas might as well have a tattoo across his forehead that says "I am corrupt."

If he had even a speck of integrity, he'd resign.

This is such a deeply disturbing viewpoint.

When someone says that a lack of religion leads to a lack of morality, what they're necessarily really saying is that they're so deeply sociopathic that they not only can't reason morally, but can't even envision the possibility of doing so. They're effectively stating outright that they can't even imagine arriving at sound moral judgments through the application of reason, empathy and concern for others, and that the only way they can even conceive of morality is as a set of rules laid down and enforced by some enormous daddy figure who's going to punish them if they break them.

It's astonishing really. And sobering.

It's to the point that he might actually have benefitted the UAW by doing this.

It might well have reached the point that he's so widely recognized as a shallow, childish, fatuous, vindictive douchebag that he's a sort of reverse bellwether - his opposition to someone or something actually leads to increased overall support and his support leads to increased overall opposition.

Of course they are.

A pertinent point that Solzhenitsyn made in Gulag Archipelago - he said that in all the time he spent in the gulags, he never once met a person who had not been legitimately convicted of a genuine crime.

The way it worked was simply that the USSR had such an extensive and nebulous set of laws that it was effectively impossible for anyone to obey all of them all the time, and so much information on all its citizens that whenever an official wanted someone disappeared, it was just a matter of checking through their records and finding which law(s) they had broken, then arresting them, trying them and convicting them.

The US oligarchy is actively pursuing the same basic strategy, and for the same basic reasons.

Makes sense.

Elon undoubtedly has folders full of cool images he's saved, so while he was still focused on the "X" idea, he rummaged around and found that one and thought, "Yeah! This is gonna be sick dude!"

Thus are decisions made by the world's richest teenage edgelord.

I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."

It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.

And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.

"Lemmy" can't handle anything. That's by design.

"Lemmy" is really just a piece of software that people can use to run forums that will federate with other forums and so forth and so on. There is no central "Lemmy" authority that could do anything, and that's by design, and a lot of the point. It means that there can never be a Lemmy spez or Musk or Zuckerberg, fucking things up for everyone.

The higusersto manage their own activities - to authorities are the individual instance owners, so it will fall on them to deal with illegal content as they see fit. Presumably they'll generally work to keep it off of their own instances through active moderation, and they'll block other instances that they have reason to believe do not maintain acceptable standards.

And like it or not, some share of responsibility will fall on individual users to manage their oen activities in order o avoid problematic instances.

The trade-off for having no central aithority that can fuck things up for everyone is that there's no big mommy/daddy to watch over you and protect you. The fediverse is better suited for people who are okay with that.