Good job. You’ve earned your rubles and can clock out now.

Sometimes pretending to be too socially stupid to be deceptive has advantages. This seems naive.

The Russians also pay some people to influence opinions. It’s hard to even know if the above “skeptical” comment is genuine.

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Your logic (“I can’t believe it so it’s likely untrue”) is flawed. “I can’t believe the world is round so Occam’s razor it must be flat because that I can understand.”

Putin is very smart and the KGB were smart and they bested US intelligence, according to the now deleted article, not in those exact words. Why is that so implausible?

There could just as easily be other bought or compromised US officials, not just Trump. The thinking “but this couldn’t really happen, it’s too sneaky and complicated!” is a pretty naive counterpoint.

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Right, but Biden failed in his communications with people.

He said it wasn’t that bad. That wasn’t reassuring.

Even if soil problems and climate change are leading to crop reductions, and if that’s the real issue, along with increasing the money supply, telling Americans “eh, it’s not that bad everything looks fine based on the CPI” was an epic fail for a President.

His strategy may have been the best option, although that’s doubtful, as I can think of various policies that would have reassured people without altering the money supply and am familiar with classical economic theories, but he failed to make people feel like he saw their pain. It was terrible politics from Biden, who is usually great at this stuff, and he failed at this because he was never in charge before and could rely on his extreme likability while in lower offices. I’m not denying Biden’s intellect, he was tremendously smart and presumably still is, but he screwed up his messaging with the public.

so fucking crazy and illogical that it’s just a distraction and not real

“look over here while we implement Project 2025! Beyonce! DEI! What’s your opinion?! Let’s engage in a racist and pointless debate about whether Beyonce deserves singing accolades while we ready the wall for women who get abortions.”

Are you saying voters shouldn’t be shocked? I think many Christians are indifferent at best and complicit at worst. If some Muslims hadn’t sat out the election or voted Stein, would it have made a difference? It seemed like Trump was voted in by a landslide because average middle class people hate inflation and Biden was quasi-gaslighting people with CPI inflation statistics that include decreased smart TV prices and RAM costs as well as increased rent and food at similar weights that doesn’t reflect what hurts consumers most while failing to reassure the public that yes, it was a problem, and that he was trying to do something. For about 2 years there was a major problem with nothing done by Biden. He was going to get voted out and Kamela Harris, who was in power and could have galvanized some sort of policy instead of doing nothing for 2 years was going to get voted out. They failed the public in a very important way and pretended the inflation problem wasn’t bad. It upset people, even Democrats and liberals, and lost them almost all of the moderate vote.

Even if this is technically true, if there is a certain amount of aid and a certain percent goes to US deals that are exported, and then the aid gets bigger with the expectation of larger more expensive export deals, I’m just not sure if this is meaningfully true rather than technically true. I am not downvoting you, BTW, I appreciate the correction, but just belive you are are confusing a semantic difference with actual ignorance.

I think the poster’s post was not about this specific instance, but about the bigger picture. If someone gives you 20 dollars in food aid and then you buy 20 dollars in oranges from them, is it a sale or is it really more of a gift just masquerading as a sale? I think that was the poster’s point, not whether the particular article refers to something actually gifted versus paid for.

I get your sarcasm, but what should I be doing as a poor US citizen?

-Writing letters? (Unlikely to persuade people because opinions are divided on humanitarian versus hard-core Christian theologian views. I would need to remotely deprogram elected officials for this to work.)

-Holding signs to protest? (Unlikely to persuade for the same reasons.)

-Sending lengthy theological arguments to right-wing types? (I could try it. It would be strange coming from an atheist but I could try? It would be more effective than trying to deprogram them.)

-Donations? (I looked at some organizations helping Gaza and many of their leaders make substantially more than me per year and I’m dealing with financial hardship. It’s hard for me to donate to an organization with leaders who have high salaries while I struggle with bills, but maybe that’s a bad excuse. Maybe some leaders with high salaries donate to their own organization, but if so it wasn’t listed.)

-Direct donations? (I should probably do this, and I’m not sure how to do this.)

Please, tell me the appropriate response for a poor person, even if it’s anything other than nothing. I just feel like nothing I do will be effective.

I’m sorry people of Gaza, this is really evil and as a US person who has paid taxes, I’m a part of it. I wish I could stop it but am poor, I’m not sure protesting would work. I feel helpless and also responsible. This is no different than when everyone looked the other way and refused to take Jewish people during WWII. I am sorry for not realizing what this was sooner and disbelieving the severity and evilness of it at first. :-( There’s really no way for me to opt out of this unless I leave the US, become like Henry David Thoreau and just don’t participate in society, which may mean death for me, or actually just choose to die so I no longer have to be part of a disgusting and evil society. The regular people of Gaza aren’t part of this war and war crimes are being committed. It probably means nothing but I’m so so sorry.

He may have made a calculation about this not based on money and can’t disclose it without altering the calculation.

Example:

Scenario 1: Tell Trump to fuck off for treatment of transgender people. Result: Trump using monopoly power to break up Facebook, truth social increases in power, no way to monitor hate groups effectively

Scenario 2: Pretend to agree with Trump and move hard right, monitor hate groups, come back slowly center in subtle ways, no rise in Truth Social users, ability to shape acceptance over time

Even with fuck you money, saying fuck you makes scenario 2 possible. Say what you want avout Zuckerberg, but he’s no idiot. If I as an indifferent person can do a simple decision tree example in 3 seconds in my head, imagine how much he analyzed such a big decision.

My point is Facebook sucks because they make it almost impossible for users to use Facebook without submitting to surveillance capitalism and ban people without giving them recourse in a mean shitty way. He must be aware of that and for allowing that, he sucks. And as a US company that is likely in bed with surveillance capitalism and the intelligence community, their “private” ways of verifying individuals is unlikely to be private, and they offer no alternative. So he sucks for that, but I’m not sure he specifically sucks for this reason. He’s even heavily implying strategic thinking is requiring him to do things he otherwise wouldn’t and can’t discuss it without altering the outcome.

Whether the end never justifies the means (same “we won’t vote for Kamala because of Gaza stance” mindset) is better ethically even if impractical is another debate.

fine don’t tell me

please teach me what this is and how to do it

i’m all about learning new things

Well when I asked DeepSeek, because you can see it thinking, you sort of see it trying to please the user and deal with the censors and political environment lurking in the background, it’s like instead of just thinking it has to sort of do this dance of politeness to not upset the censors. I even cut and pasted information from Wikipedia about it and it was like “no, I need official sources” so I cut and pasted the bibliography part from Wikipedia and it was like “the user is crazy and making up official sources” (jk). It said something else, but it was odd that when even when given overwhelming information, it seemed almost afraid to budge or purposely stupid. It seemed like “official sources” was the slang it used for government-approved information, just like “misinformation” in the US often meant during the Biden administration “not approved by the US administration.” (Although misinformation was sometimes applied to false things, people got banned on Facebook for saying the lab leak theory when saying anything other than “it came from a bat” was misinformation and they had said scientists had done genetic tests proving it came from the bat, gain-of-function covid lab next to the market be damned.)

i don’t even know what that is. no wonder i’m so unpopular.

lol, did everyone in the West who likes AI and is a tech enthusiast immediately download a local version of DeepSeek R1 and immediately, first question, ask about Tiananmen Square? (I know I did.)

Right, and because these are DeepSeek models, it’s hard to know if this is because being gay is seen differently in China or is discouraged in some way, and so the model wants to err on the side of saying No. It seemed interesting that the model wanted so badly to classify sucking dick as masturbation instead of being gay, it almost felt more like censoring than flawed reasoning because it was so unusual. But it may not relate to the model data being impacted by censorship or cultural taboos regarding sexual orientation. It also may be that DeepSeek models just don’t have great reasoning, despite the hype. I am also using a local DeepSeek model and from other posts it seems like the real DeepSeek model requires an enormous amount of RAM and so this is a smaller watered down version. I wonder if larger models are less prone to reasoning like this.