Who Cares 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (242)

• On the post: Judge Uses D&D’s Failure To Make Him Worship Satan To School Florida On Social Media Moral Panics

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 12 Mar, 2025 @ 03:34pm

  They can get away with it because the people they do this for don't know better and/or have no choice. So you need to educate the masses. It won't be fun because critical thinking is hard, logic is something most people have heard of but can't actually do without a class per trimester for two years and having to redo at least half those classes once (and then they'll ignore what they learned since applying it is hard and takes effort). Poverty is another deal breaker. If people are busy to survive they don't have the time to actually spend time to understand an issue. Complacency, a combination of laziness and not wanting to rock the boat since people have a pretty decent living situation as far as they know. Not much to do about this one even though people were warned that keeping a republic takes effort. Tribalism, us VS them, fear of the other. So you vote for your pol even if you need to go on an empty stomach and clothespin on your nose when you vote. Hard to counter since humans are a group animal (not a herd one as people like to claim) but education can blunt the worst. Reformation of how voting on the federal level works. The current system encourages extremist positions. There is nothing to punish politicians for taking one since there generally is no alternative and the people who vote to get a politician on the ballot tend to like such positions (this is also why the previous point is so bad, minimal engagement would shut down the people voting for extremists since they generally represent only a small portion of the total population). If you think Trump and the MAGA crowd is bad then study up on the Know Nothing movement. That is what was needed when the political system on the federal level was less ossified as today to actually break a party due to taking extremist positions. TL;DR: Wanting the politicians to behave is treating symptoms, you need to address the base problem and that is the voters. Some of the hurdles for that are explained in this post.

• On the post: Judge Uses D&D’s Failure To Make Him Worship Satan To School Florida On Social Media Moral Panics

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 12 Mar, 2025 @ 05:29am

  There might be legislators that need to be educated but I'm going to give you categories to show why that will only work on a limited set. You have a group that knows but uses it for virtue signaling, vote retaining, or something else to keep the people that (might) vote for them happy. Then there is the group that has been educated, either from the education they had, or on the job (sometimes repeatedly) to which the adage "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his job depends on his not understanding it" applies. And then you have the true believers. Education is useless against those since they think they are right regardless of how many lies (to them, not you) you use to convince them otherwise. So they end up blaming a bugbear or straight up deny when it gets pointed out they are wrong.

• On the post: Elon’s Twitter Destruction Playbook Hits The US Government, And It’s Even More Dangerous

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2025 @ 12:27pm

  Uh no not everyone is aware, it is just that you think they should be. In fact a staggering amount of people are not aware to the point that they are absolutely stunned, if they don't go into denial, about the policies that Trump was going to enact. There are (still) daily stories about people, who when interviewed have reactions running the gamut from disbelief to accusing the reporter in question to be lying to not even realizing their current predicament is the result of early actions by Trump (That last one a nurse, voted for Trump, who gave up their job to start working at the VA and was in the process of moving when Trump froze hiring).

• On the post: The Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 21 Jan, 2025 @ 09:58am

  Having an open protocol is not a guarantee that it cannot be hijacked. The strategy to hijack an open protocol is: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. That is Embrace the protocol. Extend it with features that are not in the protocol but just for your version (do need to insure that they are wanted). Refuse to hand over the keys to those features and thus Extinguish the competition. Takes a bit more effort but as IE6 and Chromium Manifest V3 show it can be done.

• On the post: IP Slapstick: How Everyone From Funko To A Registrar Fucked Up And Briefly Took Down Itch.io

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 14 Dec, 2024 @ 06:17am

  Now, while that seems quite unworthy of any sort of takedown notice whatsoever, BrandShield managed to somehow report that page for “fraud and phishing” for reasons I can neither get out of any of the reporting nor speculate using my own wetware.

  I can think of several reasons for skipping copyright: - Severity of the accusation. Copyright starts out as a civil violation and stays there for a long time. Fraud is criminal from the get go and even seeming to co-operate with criminals will get the government going after you. - Not all countries in the world have a DMCA setup, if they have it do not enforce it, or only enforce it for people living in the country in question. - Laziness. - No counter notice system so stuff stays down or stays down longer due to the time it takes to refute the accusation.

• On the post: NHTSA Starts To Take The Safety Threat Of Comically Large Trucks More Seriously

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2024 @ 09:22am

  Better suggestion then victim blaming. Actually build roads to be able to be used by traffic other then cars. Instead of wondering why people are forced into car traffic (if they for some reason have no car available) and then blame them for having to take risky behavior.

• On the post: NHTSA Starts To Take The Safety Threat Of Comically Large Trucks More Seriously

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2024 @ 09:20am

  It’s not that heavier cars do more damage. It’s that they can’t avoid collisions as easily.

  The EU states that the reason for more severe injuries that non-car using road users receive from collisions with American pickups (people figured out how to legally import them, primarily the Dodge Ram, without having to comply with EU safety & environmental regulations) is that they are not built with the safety of other road users in mind. And that combined with the weight results in non fatal injuries being 3 to 5 times worse then with cars legal in the EU.

• On the post: Lionsgate Marketing Consultant Built Movie Trailer Filled With AI Generated Fake Movie Reviews Of Old Films

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 28 Aug, 2024 @ 05:03am

  And on that, you can quote me.

  No need, ChatGPT did it for me.

• On the post: Banks Realize Backing Elon’s Twitter Buyout Is Close To ‘The Worst Buyout Of All Time’

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 22 Aug, 2024 @ 10:00am

  Maybe next time, skip the star-fucking and focus on the actual economics?

  Why should they? The main reason that they couldn't profit from this is that Elon managed to get the ratings on Twitter/X pulled before the banks could slice and dice the loans into some form of asset backed security and off load most of the risk (while pocketing a nice chunk of cash in the form of commissions) to the greater public.

• On the post: Brain-Wormed RFK Jr. Sues Meta, Cites AI Chatbot Reply As Proof Of Shadowbanning

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 16 May, 2024 @ 01:19pm

  Getting paid by the hour by Kennedy, per word by the worm.

• On the post: Link Taxes Backfire: Canadian News Outlets Lose Out, Meta Unscathed

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 10 May, 2024 @ 03:34am

  I suggest to be a bit less gullible and actually think for yourself. Just the initial claims should have resulted in your rolling on the floor laughing that they dare to claim that this isn't a link tax when citing actions that on the internet effectively always involve linking and can only be effectively taxed thanks to the linking. That is obviously something the lobbyists that wrote the bill put in there to be able to make the claim you made to people who don't know better. Then the claim that this is voluntary. Well yeah that is technically not a lie since the publishers can voluntarily decide to demand money from people linking to them. Whoever links cannot then voluntarily decide not to pay. Arbitration, well there is a reason that a lot of corporations in the US put that in as mandatory since the entity that gets to setup the panel is generally speaking the one that wins the arbitration. This isn't helped by the fact that the reasoning for the arbitration is explicitly stated as determining how much entities linking have to pay the publishers. And then the absolute denial of what was written in the article you are responding to. Not linking has basically had no effect on how long people stay on Facebook. The article also shows that the publishers massively benefited from having their articles on Facebook. Funnily enough the law in question only allows transfer of money from linkers to publishers since the real world data shows the publishers should be paying the linkers. And then again an attempt at wordplay to deny something that even most backers of this law admit, that it is a link tax. You know why it is a link tax? That doesn't cost any effort since getting referred to someone else on the internet most of the time comes with data on that it is a referral. Makes it cheap to tally compared to the fractions of a cent that the publishers can get from getting the linker to pay. Anything that doesn't link requires an expensive setup that would generate no income. Why? Well in the case of Facebook the link tax can be extorted from Facebook even if it is not Facebook that put up the link but a user did, else said one target with deep pockets. That screenshot? Well they first have to track it down, which fails if it is in a private group or sent privately between people (oh no money lost that a link would have tracked). So you get it in a public group, now you need to track down the poster, now you need to guesstimate the number of unique views, and then send the poster a check demanding 0.2 cents since the screenshot got viewed 2000 times. Oh and you need to keep doing that from time to time since it might have gotten more views where that is automatic if you can just track referrals. As to why you need to go to the poster. It is not put there by Facebook so you cannot sustain a claim that Facebook would need to pay for it. So yes this is a link tax since then the publishers don't have to put in a lot of effort while they can pretend it is the linkers that are doing the access instead of the people putting up the links on for example a Facebook page and aggregate those fractions of a cent to something that actually make them money.

• On the post: Link Taxes Backfire: Canadian News Outlets Lose Out, Meta Unscathed

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 09 May, 2024 @ 02:25pm

  What the researchers found is that users are still using Meta platforms just as much, and still getting news from those platforms. They’re just no longer following links back to the sources. This has done particular harm to smaller local news organizations:

  This is not surprising. The same happened in Spain when they decided on a Google tax. There it crippled local search engines and local news organizations in the same way while only having limited effect on the big international players. There is a reason that Spain repealed that bit of idiocy.

• On the post: Twitter’s Former Top Execs All Sue Elon Over Missing Severance

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2024 @ 04:31am

  The person you are looking for is Haraldur Thorleifsson. Sold his company to Twitter but instead of taking cash for it he got the payment in the form of an increased salary. The $100 million clause if he got fired effectively handing him that deferred payment for selling his company.

• On the post: Company Threatens To Sue Cyclist For Trademark Over ‘Near Miss’ YouTube Video

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 06 Jan, 2024 @ 06:41am

  1) No, that is defamation not trademark. 2) No, that is defamation not trademark. 3) No, that is not what trademark law is for. 4) No, that is not what trademark law is for. I'll make it short. Don't bother making up excuses or pie in the sky what if scenarios since nothing that you can think up would result in a valid trademark complaint in this situation because that is not what trademark law handles.

• On the post: Polish Indie Repair Shops Had To Hire Hackers To Tackle Pointless, Train-Crippling DRM

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 27 Dec, 2023 @ 01:38pm

  Uh what are you blathering about? There is nothing here about the DMCA. Are you really trying to claim that only the USA has copyright(s) and enforcement of said rights? Never heard of the Berne Convention and the various revisions and add-ons to it negotiated over time?

• On the post: Polish Indie Repair Shops Had To Hire Hackers To Tackle Pointless, Train-Crippling DRM

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 27 Dec, 2023 @ 10:02am

  From here, where someone did a summary of the presentation. https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/accusations-that-newag-pl-is-intentionally-making-its-trains-fail.258894/#post-6530155

• On the post: Polish Indie Repair Shops Had To Hire Hackers To Tackle Pointless, Train-Crippling DRM

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 27 Dec, 2023 @ 09:41am

  Don't forget the undocumented GSM modem hidden in a deliberately mislabeled electrical component through which at least some of the trains got an update to the "brick the train if it stands still for 14 days"-command to "brick the train if it stands still for 14 days in these geo-fenced areas"-command. Newag even had the chutzpah to complain to Poland’s former minister of digital affairs (Janusz Cieszyński) that they had been attacked by cybercriminals. Janusz reaction boiled down: "I actually understand this and the evidence suggests nothing of what you are claiming."

• On the post: Pettiness Personified: Tesla Removes Disney+ From Vehicles Because Elon’s Mad At Disney

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 20 Dec, 2023 @ 03:24pm

  It isn't about whining. It is about these grievances they have and getting even with the people that are the target of said grievances (even if said grievances are imaginary, fabricated, or a way to deflect blame). Why bother going to a place where there is no one to hurt.

• On the post: Pettiness Personified: Tesla Removes Disney+ From Vehicles Because Elon’s Mad At Disney

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 20 Dec, 2023 @ 03:18pm

  Oh we're taking that track? Then I've got news for you. Every single human male starts out as female. You even get a partial uterus before one of the few functioning genes on the Y chromosome activates and destroys it. So by your reasoning every single human on this world was and forever shall be a biological female.

• On the post: Elon, After Personally Driving Away Advertisers, Tells Them To Go Fuck Themselves (Repeatedly), And Says ‘Earth’ Will ‘Judge’ Them For Killing ExTwitter

  

  Who Cares ( profile ), 30 Nov, 2023 @ 12:29pm

  Ugh. It is that temporary hospitalization for an unwilling person can only be done if they are a direct danger to themself or others (and then only with some form of affidavit or warrant or whatever). Because watching that video Musk needs help but he believes he won't need it so won't ask for it himself.

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