Most of the population was disenfranchised in those examples. Peasants, slaves, urban poor and women generally weren't allowed to vote. Some very brief exceptions aside, universal suffrage only really emerged about 100-200 years ago (like you said). But clean elections without some kind of elite manipulation have arguably been nonexistent or extremely rare.
Readit Newsfaidit commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy
faidit commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Paid DNC (US Democratic Party) staffers were caught swaying/manipulating some of the largest political and regional subreddits: https://archive.is/XfL8h
Interesting, but this is still done inefficiently by a relatively small group of actual humans.
The damage that a Thiel/Musk owned industrial bot swarm can do is much greater imo. I've seen Discord bots (shapes.ai) that can converse responsively in gen Z slang, react emotionally when praised or insulted, display great political astuteness, and are virtually indistinguishable from real people. Someone with enough money can deploy those at massive scale and keep the operation secret.
faidit commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord
Thanos at least had the decency to only target 50% of the population.
It is saturday! Guy had a trouble during non-business times and advice to make a complaint to ACCC?
People who unlock accounts do not work on weekends, it is not front line of support who works all the time.
What happened with giving a chance to people (which is Apple consists of) to actually do something before complaining to 4 letter agency?
Also ACCC will not deal with such complaints. It says right on their home page.
I didn't see a timeline but there were indications that the author has been trying to resolve this for much longer than one day.
Regulatory agencies can forward complaints to other authorities and act based on them even if they can't resolve the particular issue for the complainant.
With space music (Gas - Microscopic): https://youtu.be/NvG-jqGsWSk
I really wonder if Google has any reasonable QA people still working on this stuff.
QA is the spouses of engineers. Management is a revolving door of the "smartest people" who are thinking about what to eat or their next job. Voices of reason get lost in the noise.
faidit commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui
Yeah I know it's an unrealistic ideal but it's fun to think about.
That said my theory about power and privilege is that it's actually just a symptom of a deep fear of death. The reason gaining more money/power/status never lets up is because there's no amount of money/power/status that can satiate that fear, but somehow naively there's a belief that it can. I wouldn't be surprised if most people who have any amount of wealth has a terrible fear of losing it all, and to somebody whose identity is tied to that wealth, that's as good as death.
Going off your earlier comment, what if instead of a revolution, the oligarchs just get hooked up to a simulation where they can pretend to rule over the rest of humanity forever? Or what if this already happened and we're just the peasants in the simulation
faidit commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui
faidit commented on Work disincentives hit the near-poor hardest (2022) niskanencenter.org/work-d... · Posted by u/folump
The decision to implement benefit cliffs is absolutely intentional, because income requirements that cause people to fall of medicaid or SNAP completely are sharp, and maybe 10 % of the population rely on those. Obamacare subsidies are phased out gradually, because half the country relies on Obamacare, and if there were issues around Obamacare, that would have repercussions at the ballot box.
It serves to have an underclass that politicians can dump on, it seems.
Maybe it's just incompetence, bureaucratic morass etc but it really does feel like the system was designed to fail, and trap us into this false choice of a broken welfare system vs. no welfare at all.
UBI and/or UBS (universal basic services) would be so much better but there was a sustained propaganda campaign to tell people that free things are communism and therefore bad. Now Western countries are becoming ungovernable due to regulatory capture, tax evasion and industrial-scale manipulation of opinion by the elites, so fixing these problems within the current democratic system is an extremely uphill battle. At least Mamdani's election gives us some hope in the US, but there's only so much one city or even one country can do on its own without worldwide changes.
faidit commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
I have been to the Dollar Store (and similar) many times and have never witnessed anyone getting yelled at for saying, "Hey, I think this was a mistake. Can you correct it, please?" (or any other place I shop - especially the grocery stores). We tend to have very positive experiences when pointing out pricing errors. My mother-in-law made it a point to review the receipts ever time we went to the grocery store. No big deal. As other have said, sometimes you get +10% of your money back and other times you get it for free.
Yes, mistakes happen; yes, people get over charged. But to imply people are shamed for asking to correct the error just seems...odd.
I mean, that person actually got yelled at and had to leave the store. Some are more sensitive than others and just the fear of an unpleasant interaction is enough for some people. I've let small discrepancies slide just because the staff looked overworked and I didn't want to make them stop what they're doing, run down to the aisle and check prices and get their supervisor. For most I think it's just a time thing. It isn't worth a couple dollars to commit to an unpredictable amount of time going back and forth and waiting for a manager. I salute those lions like your MIL who stand their ground and fight back but there are also many, maybe most, who are just in a hurry or want to avoid confrontation.