hihihihi1234

Yeah, fair point. Time will tell I guess.

True in the UK too. Cigarette adverts were banned forever ago. Then they stopped displaying them in the store. Now, if I'm not mistaken (I don't smoke), they don't even display branding on the packets - the packets have a very plain, uniform design with no flashy colours or logos.

If she had stepped down before 2016, Obama would have been able to appoint another liberal judge to replace her, and the political balance of the court would have remained unchanged. Instead, she died in 2020 and Trump replaced her with a far more conservative judge, which is indirectly one of the reasons why Roe v Wade was just overturned.

Of course, it must be remembered that almost no-one actually expected Trump to win 2016. So perhaps she didn't feel like there was actually much risk of her being replaced by a conservative, so it was safe to stay on.

I don't think all 40 million women have lost "all" legal access. Eg Florida and Virginia are banning abortion after 15 weeks - which is actually less restrictive than in most of western Europe.

Eg France bans abortion after 14 weeks; Norway bans it after 12 weeks.

Why do the other popular VPNs not have any integrity left?

El Salvador isn't in South America.

Um... how is this news? We left the EU in January 2020. I'm not sure what it would mean for Britain to leave the EU without Brits losing EU citizenship, and I've never heard anyone suggest that this might be the case.

It's nearly six years since the referendum - who exactly is surprised by this "development"?

I too would like to read a citation and further details to support the claim.

What? You meant to write "electric cars" in your first sentence, right?

Where in the UK do you think is a good place to do this kind of thing? My wife and I have been toying with the idea of doing something like this - it won't be for at least another few years, but it's still really just an idea at this point; neither of us have much experience in this sphere and we're not sure where to start.

What do we need to know? Any resources you recommend we check out?

Some people experience so much of their reality through a screen that I wonder if maybe their online version is effectively their "real" self.

This is "Crossrail", aka the Elizabeth Line, the Tube's major new extension that opened this week (after years of delays.) So it hasn't had much chance to get dirty yet.

Beggars and homeless people are common in London, but less common on the Tube since you can't get very far inside most stations without a ticket.

Considering that this section of the London Underground opened to the public just three days ago, it would be quite the feat for it to be already covered in filth.

I don't follow crypto stuff closely, so maybe this question has a laughably obvious answer, but: what's wrong with Binance?

Link for those interested in learning more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_explo...

NB there have been several other similar scandals but Rotherham is the most famous.

Speculation, tax avoidance and money laundering, mainly.

Nobody is "denying wealth inequality" here either, the point is just that the headline statistic may be a bad way to measure wealth inequality in crypto.

Why do you use Bing?

> I've read reams and reams of treatises on the topic

Care to share any of them here? I'm not that knowledgeable about BTC so I have no idea whether or not you're right, but I'd love to learn more.

Look up "bleeding Kansas"

You guess correctly.

This person isn't my friend, and I consider him beyond help.

I know this guy who's a rabid anti-vaxxer who thinks the COVID vaccines are a bioweapon engineered to kill people as part of a shadowy conspiracy to lower the world population by a billions. He claims that vaccinated people are dropping dead of heart attacks left, right and centre and it's all being covered up. Recently he sent me some "evidence" of this claim which was a compilation of clips (many taken from live TV) of people collapsing or fainting, sometimes clutching their chests, overlayed with spooky music and the Pfizer logo in the corner. Don't you get it? All these people are collapsing because they took the vaccine!

Except within five minutes I was able to find many of those same clips in other videos - eg by searching YouTube for "people fainting" - and most of them predated the pandemic by years. Clearly some troll had just found a bunch of old clips of people collapsing and edited it together into a lazy piece of anti-vaxx propaganda. And it works! People fall for it, even though this particular clip took about thirty seconds to debunk.

My point is - I've seen videos before of people jumping from buildings. They're not hard to find online; the now-defunct r/watchpeopledie was full of them, as was Liveleak (RIP). It would be trivially easy to find a bunch of these clips, edit them together and give them a caption that claims they all happened recently in one place and are part of a disturbing new trend.

So I'm not convinced that this video you shared is what it claims to be.

Considering that this whole thing started with fake videos from China of people dropping dead in the street, I'm treating any new videos from China with extreme scepticism.

Well as a programmer I've seen how the sausage is made in the tech industry, and thus have less faith in the security and reliability of software than the average citizen does. So what you say could make sense.

Yeah I've wondered the same thing. I don't have the statistics in front of me but I'm pretty sure that the unvaccinated are on average poorer, browner and more working class than the vaccinated. Which is to say that the same people who don't trust the jabs are generally the same people who have longstanding reasons to distrust a wider society that's weighted against them.

It's easy for me, as an affluent middle-class white guy, to say "shut up and do what you're told because the experts know best" - but on some level I really can't blame people from less advantaged demographics for being so distrustful of the "experts". After all, it's not like the governments and corporations pushing these vaccines have always worked in the working class's favour in the past.

To be clear, I believe that the vaccines are safe and effective and that everyone should get jabbed. But I can't help but feel like all this demonisation of the unvaccinated is driven at least partly by good old fashioned snobbery and class hatred. "How dare these lower class inferiors not do as we say? Why can't they be smart and sensible like us, the wealthy enlightened?"

Have people already forgotten how much pressure the government was under in December to lock us down again? SAGE were predicting 6000 deaths a day, as if their modelling hadn't already been discredited ten times over, and all the usual suspects in the media and the Labour Party were screaming for more restrictions. If it hadn't been for partygate, the backbench Tory rebellion, and massive public resistance in the form of protests and more, Boris would have caved to SAGE and we'd have had another two months of our lives stolen, another Christmas ruined, another term of school missed, another million livelihoods destroyed and another ten billion added to the public debt - and it would have all been completely unnecessary, because Omicron was a fat load of nothing and SAGE's modelling turned out to be wrong yet again. But people would have pointed to the low death rate and said "I told you lockdown was necessary! If we hadn't locked down we would be seeing 6000 deaths a day!"

Also, these protests werent just against lockdown. There were enormous protests against vaccine passports, and they were successful - the govt had vaxpasses ready to go in the summer and pushed them back repeatedly before cancelling them in the face of public pressure and tireless campaigning from civil liberties groups like Big Brother Watch. If it hadn't been for the protests then you wouldnt have been able to go to Sainsbury's in the last six months without scanning your QR code.

Finally, there were also protests against vaccine mandates, and in particular the vaccine mandate for NHS staff. Personally I found those protests silly - I would have thought that NHS workers of all people would understand the importance of getting vaccinated, but the facts are that the government initially announced that NHS workers would be fired if they didn't get the jab then walked this back when it became clear that enforcing this rule would mean firing tens of thousands of intransigent NHS staff and they couldn't afford the shortages. There was a gigantic protest in London in January against the NHS vax mandate (not that you'd have heard about it on the news) - a protest which unequivocally achieved its goal.

If you don't think people were protesting against anything real or that the protests didn't achieve anything then you haven't been paying attention.

This isn't the right thread to have this argument and I imagine dang will remove your post, but I just want to note: Trump and his supporters aren't merely alleging that there were some irregularities in the election (which may be true), or that the media was overwhelmingly biased towards Biden (which is definitely true.) They allege that there was enormous, widespread fraud that stole millions of votes and handed the election to Biden despite Trump being the rightful winner - and also that the evidence for this fraud is mounting and damning and there's a huge conspiracy by the media, big tech, etc to cover it up. That's a much stronger claim than anything you say and I'm yet to see good evidence for it.

I'm not sure why you're talking about COVID, Russia, oil prices etc because none of that was mentioned; I actually agree with most of what you wrote in your latter paragraphs. But this isn't the place to have this kind of flamewar.

Parler got booted from everywhere based on alleged connections to Jan 6th that, in my estimation, were very tenuous, no worse than what had been seen on more established platforms, and seemed to me to be little more than a convenient pretext to shut down an upstart competitor. Whatever your take on Parler, the episode was a sobering lesson in just how difficult the big players in this industry can make it to do business if they decide they really want to get rid of you.

Maybe the word "censorship" is too loaded, but the claim that big tech platforms permit a narrower range of expression than they used to is so uncontroversial that it's barely worth defending. That's not always a bad thing; many of the people who've been banned in recent years are noxious pricks whom I don't miss, but what happens when the people who've been banned from Twitter and YouTube, kicked off AWS, terminated by Cloudflare and blocked by Visa and MasterCard decide to start a Substack because its commitment to free speech means it's the only place that will host them? I won't name names but I can think of, for example, a couple of semi-prominent figures who have been banned from other platforms due to their, ahem, "heterodox" views on vaccines, who now write on Substack and reportedly make a very healthy income from doing so. And worse actors might join the platform if they haven't already.

Is it really such a conspiratorial "slippery slope" to suggest that if the people who've been banned from everywhere else grow a huge, lucrative audience on Substack, then Substack is going to come under increasing amounts of pressure to kick them off - pressure far greater than what it's received so far in the face of lesser controversies? What form might this pressure take?

When am I going to be able to add strikethrough text, superscripts and subscripts to my Substack posts?

I have a follow-up question to #3. Like the parent post I commend your stance on free speech, but recognise you host some controversial figures that other platforms have been happy to ban. The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower, and as Substack gets bigger it's naturally going to attract more attention, both from those who call for increased censorship, and from those who others might want to censor. The particularly controversial writers are naturally going to gravitate to Substack if it's the only place that will let them have an account.

So do you ever worry that you might end up like Parler? What happens if AWS, Cloudflare, payment processors etc. decide to kick you off the internet because of whom you publish? Right now it seems unlikely that they'd become that intolerant, but a lot of unlikely things have happened in tech in the last few years.

Are you worried about this eventuality, and are you preparing for it?