Israel (at least in large part) is why they're pushing the tiktok ban now. It is a little hard to connect the dots on this because the China-reasoning seems strong on the surface. I agree that China is bad, but there has not been any stellar evidence to show that China censors or otherwise manipulates users on the platform. You can easily go to tiktok and find videos discussing how awful the Chinese government is, information about tiananmen square, Winnie the Pooh jokes, etc. In comparison, the data that came out of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal was far more concrete, and Congress did nothing. Certainly there were not 81% of house members coming together to force Facebook to sell. Tiktok has even offered to make major concessions about data privacy.

Israel's war in Gaza is deeply unpopular and the fascists in Israel and here in the US are concerned that they are losing popularity. Tiktok has 100+ million active users in the US and the heaviest anti-Israel sentiment (the government and the US's relationship with the Israeli government, not the Israeli/Jewish people) is heaviest on Tiktok, which is dominated by young millennials and gen Z. This is leaked audio of the director of the anti-defamation league (a very pro-Israel organization) speaking about this. He basically tells his audience that they have a "major major major... problem" and specifically says that they have a "tiktok problem and a gen Z problem." Listen to the audio- you can agree or not with his reasoning, but he's essentially saying that the spread of ideas on tiktok is causing their polling issues.

People like this want to stop the spread of ideas on tiktok because young people are organizing, boycotting, and putting dents in the system. They do not like that young voters are having a larger and larger influence. These young people are also boycotting major companies like McDonalds and Starbucks who have taken pro-Israel stances, and these companies have lost profits from this. All this to say - I don't think there is any lack of motivation by people with lots of money to destroy the platform where these people are organizing.

It is incredible how much money Israel pumps into our politicians, both Democrats and Republicans. Joe Biden himself is the largest recipient of this money. There are anti-BDS laws (specifically for Israel) in 37 states. I don't think many people are aware of just how much influence Israel has in the US. It is surprising and disturbing, but I am equally surprised/disturbed at how little attention these topics have received on Lemmy of all places. I don't think it takes a genius to start making these connections and to start asking questions - maybe this isn't the full picture but there is a lot of stuff here to be skeptical about. That said, I absolutely do think this kind of information is suppressed on other platforms, and they want to suppress all of tiktok because it's dangerous to them.

It is entirely job dependent. I have been in jobs where it was just a grind and going the extra mile simply put a smile on my boss's face. In jobs like these the best thing you can do is carve out as many hours as possible during the work week to build new skills or apply to other jobs. I've also been in jobs where going the extra mile directly contributed meaningful skills to my resume/portfolio and helped me get a new job with way better pay.

We literally destroy food in this country instead of giving it to people who have nothing. The "scarcity" is entirely manufactured.

Perhaps the commenter is referring to Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) who has been a staunch supporter of Israel's "defense" in Gaza.

A lot of people in the comments are saying how this won't hold up or how unconstitutional it is but 35 fucking states have already passed anti-bds (boycotts, divestment*, and sanctions) laws that do the same thing as this bill but Israel. If the politicians are sufficiently bribed enough, they won't care what the laws actually are.

I think it's a mistake to call them moderates. The "moderates" in the US have gone to great lengths to brand themselves this way, but really they are neoliberals who have bought into every aspect of conservatism except maybe the most depraved social views from the alt right, which they excuse as "just an opinion". They love to play both sides and act like they have some moral/intellectual high ground because they consider "both sides" when really they are already waist deep into right-wing ideology.

I left out a crockpot of mostly eaten mac and cheese on the counter. I was on the couch half-asleep when I heard my keys (which were next to this crockpot) jingle. I didn't say anything, I just turned my head and saw my cat running for cover as if it had just tripped the alarms during a heist gone wrong. How do I interpret this in any way other than my cat knowing what it was doing was naughty?

I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to say these companies aren't destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It's important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.

Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google's whole business relies on users needing Google's search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.

So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.

I agree that the Internet is a mess of misinformation that looks daunting, but isn't it a little disingenuous to say this like it's just the internet's problem? People can write whatever they want in print media and on TV too. I wish we had an educated populace that could self-police, but we don't. We need the FCC to be able to apply fairness doctrine (or something) to get bad actors out of news media. I know we can do this because when I search for things online, I regularly see content that is removed by DMCA. Clearly we have the power to police the internet, it's only because there's a vested money interest that we aren't doing something similar with news.

But doctors are required to report anything that they identify as an immediate physical threat (e.g., to the patient or because of the patient). I found out recently that this is entirely subjective - different doctors have different ideas about what constitutes a threat. So, in a lot of ways, no, medical secrecy may not protect you if you tell the wrong doctor.

I feel like I need to step in and personally rebuke this shit. Voting absolutely does work. Showing up to vote once isn't going to magically fix everything - it's going to take many election cycles to reverse course. US policy doesn't reflect the will of the people because we've been apathetic for so long. Saying "voting doesn't help" implies there's no point in voting, and not voting guarantees that we will lose our democracy. I'm sympathetic to those who have been hurt by the conservative and capitalist agenda in this country who are losing hope, but making claims like this essentially makes you an ally to the corpofascist machine.

Please vote.

I've seen this a lot lately on lemmy - that android needs "saving" or that we need government intervention to stop Apple. But, I would argue that android is its own worst enemy. Even the best android phones are plagued by quality issues, both hardware and software. Google's own pixel lineup has seasonal class action lawsuits over build issues, and now they automatically opt you into non-arbitration agreements whenever you activate a new Google phone.

Personally, I'm willing to take the risk because, in my experience, stock android is just so much better than iOS (and other android flavors). But therein lies the issue - android could compete with iPhone just fine, but android manufacturers can't (or won't) compete with apple's relentless pursuit of build quality and software polish. Another damning aspect of this is that Google is supposed to be the best software company in the world, yet they've taken more than a decade to figure out messaging - something apple figured out back in ~2010. Android doesn't deserve to claw back market share in the US until their phones are actually better per $ than the iPhone.

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