deweydecibel

Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.

I’m so sick of this shit.

Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it’s about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.

You’d also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they’re collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.

The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.

Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That’s a pattern of risky behavior.

Tell me what you think he could have done without Congress.

Let’s hear it.

Give me the actual steps that you believe Biden could have done but did not do.

The only Democrat with the power to do anything at the moment is Biden, and his power is limited.

But he’s been doing a lot within that limited power.

And I genuinely don’t care whatever some asshole from hexbear with their Lemmy World alt is about to pop in here and reply with, because the fundamental issue is not Biden, it is Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress is absolutely fucked, and that is not Biden’s fault, it’s the Constitution’s fault, and the fault of Red State conservatives that have completely gerrymandered their states to hell, and the Supreme Court that did not stop them. It is not biden’s fault at the Supreme Court is now stacked with corrupt conservative justices that will strike down anything he does that they think they can make a case against.

It is very, very convenient to forget that the other two branches exist when you’re intent is to make Biden look like he hasn’t done anything or committed to his campaign promises.

PS for those unaware:

If you use Firefox, you can add a custom Search engine with the Search URL string:

https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%25s

Then set that new custom Search engine as default.

Kind of wish they would stop trying to push this as “editing”.

If all you can do is draw on top of it, you’re not actually editing it.

I’m not shaming them, I understand why they can’t have a full built-in PDF editor, but people that don’t know any better are going to open it up expecting an actual editor and be disappointed.

I know it’s not the point, but I love the completely arbitrary bit where they’re walking down a road together, and has absolutely no bearing on anything the happens.

Now can we please get them back in phones?

Realistically, outdoor cats don’t travel much. They just hang out in their neighborhood, chill in their favorite spots, etc.

Cats have their territory and that’s where they spend their time, doing cat things. It’s just that an outdoor cat’s territory isn’t limited by walls.

These days? It’s sucked to be an American for decades.

The point is the entire concept of AI training off people’s work to make profit for others is wrong without the permission of and compensation for the creator regardless if it’s corporate or open source.

They’re also evidence of why the book banning doesn’t really work as well today as conservatives would like it to.

Book banning was an effective way of controlling what your young population was exposed to before the internet and social media. It worked best when the young weren’t even aware of the information they were being denied.

But social media is making sure they’re all very much aware of what has been hidden from them. They know what’s going on. You will find teenagers in particular are kind of resistant to being told no by an authority, so they’re going to do something about it.

Now, don’t feel too excited about this, because there’s a threat here. Every single time you see a conservative talking about more stringent age verification for things on the internet, part of what they’re actually trying to do is create an avenue to control the information kids are exposed to. They are pretty open about how LGBT issues, particularly the T ones, can be labeled as “sexual” and “inappropriate”. With very simple changes to the regulation, they can suppress children’s access to anything they like as long as they make a half-assed argument that it’s “inappropriate”.

Unless you want content and more people to interact with.

Like, people keep saying “oh yeah you can jump instances” as if that wasn’t possible on Reddit. You could go to different subs or make your own. But what good were most of them? As long as there’s a “default”, a main “hub”, people will go there, and that’s where everything will be happening. The alternatives and smaller instances will be starved out.

Centralization is not about the software, it’s about the people. Users centralize where others are. So when the big hubs are allowing threads to poison the well, it’s poisoning the thing most people want to drink from, and the thing new visitors will be most likely to drink from.

Threads represents something that a lot of people came to the fetiverse to escape. If threads wants to join, fine, but I believe it is in the best interest of all of us if there is a large alternative “cluster” that is separate from it rather than being tied up with it.

A separate galaxy in the fediverse, that says in big red neon lights, “Get your corporate bullshit away from us. This is our space, for people, not for you to make money.” And if we let them in immediately, it becomes increasingly difficult for that galaxy to retain that identity.

And I’ll just gently point out that once Threads joins, separating from it will not be easy because you will have Threads users here actively pushing back on the separation.

How is that different from Reddit? If trolls want to search and scrape and find information on people, they’re going to. You can’t put your information on the open Internet and not appreciate there’s always a danger of that.

See, the fact you think the IQ tests matters in any way means your uniformed about it, which comes back to the topic at hand.

IQ tests are bullshit; it’s been proven many times.

Yet you were told they weren’t. And that informed how you think.

I could call you stupid for bringing up an IQ test.

Or I could accept that people not having all the knowledge in the world is just part of being human, and that there are many things you know that I probably don’t.

George Carlin did an incredible job making a certain type of person believe being a nihilistic asshole was the height of wisdom.

You, of course, are firmly in that 10%, I assume.

Nothing does quite so good a job revealing how highly they think of themselves as sharing that Carlin quote. It’s the clarian call of the faux intellectual.

Reasoning is based on knowledge. There have to be things you accept as truths first before you can start reasoning, and those truths are not universally shared, nor do they have the same weight for everyone. That includes you and me.

There are things we don’t “know”, and things we don’t know that we don’t know, but we nevertheless think of ourselves as informed and capable of reasoning. To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about looking down on those that don’t know things you know and declaring them less-than.

The basic point is there are countless factors big and small that influence any individual’s thoughts and ideas at any given moment. Our minds are very complex things, and our lives are messy, absorbing all kinds of information and stimuli that affect it in ways we don’t properly understand or even realize.

When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.

And there’s a lot of dark history behind this, too. The history of psychology is riffe with falsehoods about quantifying intelligence, and often it was simply about prejudice.

You want to call people stupid for doing stupid things, sure, I get that. I do that. We all do. But the more you try to create these general arguments about human stupidity, the more it unravels, and the more it reveals about you.

lol, funny thing is that this isn’t really a story about ice cream machines - anyone who’s seen melted mcds ice cream foam knows that ain’t ice cream.

It’s funny people think this is some sort of secret. It’s right in the name of the product: soft-serve.

That’s what soft-serve is. Basically a bastardized form of ice-cream mixed with air to make it soft and add volume. The mix is often extended with stuff like CMC, but that’s hardly unique to McDonald’s.

The formulation of the mix at McDonald’s is probably just “extended” more than you might find at other places, but the fact it’s “foam” is hardly the scandal.

My guess is that it’s trying to reduce spam and fake account generation.

Thus preventing the growth of any small providers and further entrenching Microsoft, Google, Apple, and a handful of others as the only “viable” options.