Still apparently no recorded kills, even if it’s not something he would have had interest in hiding

“you had me at extraordinarily expensive” DJT

The thing is that social media have an oversized influence that makes a calm discussion of possible solutions very hard to have. When the US recognized the implications of letting a foreign power exert so much control over their people, they tried banning TikTok, or breaking it up so their US operation would be under US control.

Facebook should also be split and its EU operation purchased by a European company, that could then spend more time implementing the other changes you mention (doom-scrolling, data protection) and less time lobbying to get all these pesky EU regulations removed.

And yes, it does feel heartbreaking to count the US as a threat to national security, but China has never threatened to annex Greenland with military force, so what would have been paranoia and extreme anti-americanism last year is now the sensible, level-headed thing to do.

Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it’s also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.

Yep. Also, going by that measure, Hitler was a vegetarian and lover of animals who never personally killed anyone

The US being by far the biggest exporter of movies, the only way this makes sense is that Trump is not seeing enough ass-kissing (and bribes campaign donations) from the US movie industry, so he’s actively trying to damage them.

Claim foreign movies are a threat, wait for other countries to retaliate against US movies, sit back and watch bribes sales of $TRUMP grow as the major studios seek his political favor.

I read the article, looking for Musk to explain more and all I got is that he can’t be a Nazi because he has never personally killed anyone.

No, seriously, that’s the clever defense of Mr. Geniusman.

I’ve not harmed anyone in my life, so it’s an outrageous thing to claim that I’m a Nazi, because the issue with Nazis was not their mannerisms or their, you know, choice of dress, but the fact that they killed millions of people

Because clearly the US has a trade deficit in movies and entertainment, right?

that’s not what is said here. The Federal government is prosecuting him and the States of New York and Pennsylvania are prosecuting him too. The lawyer is arguing that’s too many prosecutions for the same alleged crime.

and the open attempt to subvert our own democracies too.

To be honest it makes a bit more sense to me now… I used to have this nagging thought in my head: “ok, yeah… Russia is funding all the social disinformation campaigns and more, but Facebook alone is worth more than Russia’s GDP and Zuckerberg is powerless to stop them?”

Narrator voice: “they weren’t trying to stop them”

when your only skills are being angry and stupid you have to get creative

true! Plus, there are already a bunch of really bad popes in the history of Christianity that would give Trump a run for his money

Downloaded streetcomplete, looks fun and useful. Thanks for sharing!

But on my personal list of “thoughts that make me shit my pants” living in a real-world Handsmaid’s tale ranks pretty high, though.

Most kings, dictators, emperors in history claimed to be gods themselves or at least to have been chosen by whatever gods were popular in their territories.

Generally none of these guys were big on following the moral teachings of “their” religion, more to claim that what they want is a direct emanation of the will of the gods, so it must just be accepted.

That’s why separation of Church and State is a thing in a working democracy and that’s (of f-ing course) why it’s now being targeted

also in my experience, while a lot of Germans are happy to chat with you in English in a social setting, business talk is usually expected to be held in German

nah, Trump is a rage-powered sack of IOUs badly arranged to resemble a real human being. If you want to get rid of Trump, you have to try to delight him and remove his power source. All of his cabinet and several world leaders are trying more an more openly to kill him this way. The true unsung heroes of our time!

I think that’s already uncomfortably close to reality.

A fully AI company was already tried as an experiment. There is also a company that appointed an AI CEO but I suspect this one is a publicity stunt. The experiment was a “failure” by the way, with AI agents only completing less than 20% of the tasks in the fake company and with some hilarious mishaps. But 20% of a company tasks being done in full autonomy by (not specifically trained) AI is scary.

Right now, various socials are full of AI generated fake engagement, images and videos. Meta is offering AI-powered ads. The obvious question I see asked every time, also here on Lemmy, is: if most of Facebook becomes a zombie world where comments and fake engagement is all LLMs, who would buy those Meta ads? That question was actually what inspired this wildly successful (-27 votes and counting!) showerthought of mine: this fake engagement only makes sense if Meta thinks we’ll give AI more and more agency to choose the products we buy and (eventually) buy them on our behalf. So it’s going to be AI convincing other AIs to buy. Our money becomes sentient, so to speak,

Crazy talk, right? Well…

yes, 3.6% less profits for most of us means “should I pay the electricity bill and starve for a couple of days?”. For Ronald McDonald it probably means “here’s another round of layoffs to streamline operational efficiency or whatever”