Hard disagree. Tools can absolutely be blamed or otherwise regulated on account of their affordances. You’re very close to the “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument.

I struggle with the framing of generative AI as an a11y tool as well. I understand that it may serve this purpose, but it’s much more than that. Generative AI deserves scrutiny for being such a powerful disinformation tool, for driving massive power consumption and for perpetuating harmful biases.

Also I don’t see what you’re trying to achieve preemptively calling anyone who disagrees a reactionary… Look, you’ve been posting a lot of hot takes daily for a while now and I feel like maybe you’d profit from reading and reflecting on things, take time to dig into stuff? Right now you’re just asserting one thing after another as fact with little to support any of it.

“Lesser evil” is an idiom and as such should not be taken literally. It essentially means that between immoral options, the least immoral one should be chosen.

In a democracy, a voter will often have to choose between candidates while none of the candidates espouse the exact same positions as the voter. The voter is essentially faced with a multiple criteria decision. I’m against the idea of not voting on account of there not being a candidate filling all the criteria. Voting remains a fundamental way of influencing our governments. You can get involved in other ways as well if you wish to do more.

That duck looks spectacular!

What has baffled me the most since yesterday was a vox pop airing on a local (canadian) channel. The journalist had travelled shortly south of the border to Plattsburgh, which is historically blue but has recently been more tight. How the casual Trump supporters remained unfazed was chilling.

One slick office lady explained calmly how the recent judicial events did not relate to Trump’s proposed politics and that therefore it didn’t change her voting intention. Another woman would explain how she prefers to vote for someone honest who speaks his mind, someone that was never involved in politics, so that’s why she’s still intending to vote for Trump (her husband had voted for Biden last election and had apparently regretted it).

It’s somehow way more shocking to witness some very average sounding and looking person make so little sense. Is it the average American news sources messing with people’s minds that much?

It’s telling that once again China is shown to coerce their citizens by threatening and punishing their loved ones. In Canada, there is a public inquiry right now about foreign interference in federal elections. China is a main subject, as they’ve coerced Chinese students into meddling with contestant nomination. The students’ family and legal student status were threatened.

Step 6 is baffling. They bomb the Hamas operative’s family house, but they don’t bother checking if their target is even there at the time of striking - let alone minimizing civilian deaths. Then once the residential building is destroyed they don’t even care to know if they actually killed their target. The alignment between the declared objective and the methods employed is awkward.

I see this includes the five food groups: fat, sugar, salt, food colouring and bacon.

I would bet that the war on the transgender is entirely thought by those monsters in a machiavellian manner. The transgender will always be a minority and yet they can never by collectively eradicated. As long as there are people, some will be transgender. Moreover they are very easy to frame as an “other”. This makes them a very fine enemy to generate fear and hate from. No risk of significant backfire, no risk of running out of them either.

Anyone knows good bands with Māori influence? Her chanting slaps.

Agreed. Sewers serve an important sanitary purpose. I propose to characterize Twixxer as an out of control tire fire.

Oh look, another article about how the plebs are whiny for no good reason. Haven’t the masses heard? The numbers look good and Goldman Sachs said the hard part is over.

And the restaurant bill.

A couple of points you might find interesting:

• Biden was supposed to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas cancelled his presence following the hospital bombing, then Biden discussed with King Abdullah and they agreed to call it off.
• Biden was not complacent with Israel in his address at Tel Aviv. He urged Israel not to give in to rage, drawing a parallel with USA’s mistakes following 9/11.
• During his trip, Biden finally managed to convince Israel to let humanitarian aid into Gaza.

I might be overly optimistic, but I feel that countries (including the US) supporting Israel are in the process of diplomatically clarifying that their support is not really unconditional and that peace is the only acceptable objective. In that sense I don’t think his trip was all bad.

For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas

The article blames COVID for people’s pessimism about the economy and shows some very serious looking spiky graphs. I don’t like how it seems to argue obliquely that the economy is good now but the peasants are too whiny to notice.

I can’t be the only one to feel like the economy (whatever that is) mostly improves through the average person’s misery and mostly suffers whenever we get some kind of windfall. Moreover it’s driving us right into some kind of apocalypse. So if some pollster asks me how confident I am that the economy will get better soon I don’t know what I’ll say to be honest.

I understand this is tongue in cheek and I agree that everything is getting worst. I’ll still answer to your question even if not everyone can enjoy this: the normalization of remote work. Best thing that happened to me because of COVID. I’d even say it outweighs the permanent degradation of my sense of smell from the virus itself. It can’t be taken for granted though and many bosses are pushing back.

We have no reason to laugh at ancient Rome’s unfortunate use of lead pots for cooking beverages and lead pipes for drinkable water. Down with plastics.

The summary’s second sentence should read “The man reportedly made disparaging remarks before opening fire with a handgun”. The article is quite short too, so it might be better to just go ahead and read it.

An actual big deal for the conservative: rainbow flags being sold at Target.

I was wondering what was going to happen to her. Turns out she’s going to a wildlife sanctuary!

This turns out to be a rare occurrence though, between 300 to 1000 “problem bears” are euthanized in the US every year. This one was saved because of the media attention she was attracting.