If they're not already exempted by law, legislators are likely to carve out exemptions. Federally, the FOIA already exempts the government from releasing data that would violate privacy (which was one of the hurdles to releasing Epstein related documents prior to Congress passing a law to demand it).
Isn't the entire argument for these based on the fact that people don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place? Not that I'm sure they won't try to make an excuse as to why it's different, but as far as I'm aware, you're allowed to just film in public.
This is not an issue of being filmed in public, this is an issue of not having the choice to opt in or out of the aggregated data harvesting performed by unregulated AI models owned by unregulated for-profit corporations that have no legislative oversight or safeguards.
If a human followed me around in public recording me, went through every frame and highlighted my face, my car, my license plate, dents and scratches that identify my car, where I'm going, what I'm doing, cross referencing that to other public information to build a dossier, I would have a solid case of harassment against that person. That's some stalker shit.
The bills going through Washington's legislature (where the original parent was talking about re: release via public information laws) do try and address this such that the systems aren't massive dragnets of everybody, always but far more targeted, I think.
An agency may access, operate, or use an automated license plate reader system and its associated data only for the following authorized purposes:
(a) Any law enforcement agency may use an automated license plate reader system for the purpose of comparing captured automated license
plate reader data with:
(i) Data on any of the following watch lists maintained by either a federal or Washington state agency: The department of licensing, the state criminal justice information system, the federal bureau of investigation kidnappings and missing persons list, and the Washington missing persons list; or
(ii) License plate numbers that have been manually entered into a state or local automated license plate reader system database, upon an officer's determination that the license plate numbers are relevant and material to an investigation of a vehicle that is:
(A) Stolen;
(B) Associated with a missing or endangered person;
(C) Registered to an individual for whom there is an outstanding
felony warrant; or
(D) Related to or involved in a felony.
33
(b) Any parking enforcement agency may use an automated license
plate reader system for the following purposes:
(i) Enforcing time restrictions on the use of parking spaces; or
(ii) Identifying vehicles on a watch list for impoundment or immobilization under a local ordinance enacted under RCW 46.55.240,
provided the list includes only license plates of vehicles subject to
that ordinance.
(c) An automated license plate reader system may be used as a
component of photo toll systems authorized by RCW 47.56.795 or
47.46.105
(d) Any transportation agency may use an automated license plate
reader system for the following purposes:
(i) Providing real-time traffic information to the public,
traffic modeling, and traffic studies such as determining
construction delays and route use; and
(ii) Enforcing commercial vehicle systems at Washington state
patrol enforcement sites and weigh stations.
That said, the only thing that really stops them from being massive dragnets of everybody always would essentially be how they're configured, which obviously can change. I think we've seen enough misuse of systems and tools throughout history that it's worthwhile to be mindful of creating easily misused systems and tools.
Perhaps, but the entire ecosystem of associated buzzwords/ideas is pretty popular in our culture today: "job creator" C-suite executives magically "create" jobs and/or raise pay because their budget for taxes goes down and they just don't know where else to put the cash, thus everyone benefits. Is it a straw man? Sure. Is it the same pablum often delivered by the evening news and politicians? Yes. Is reality a TON more complicated and often counter-intuitive? Yep. (Raising wages doesn't seem to have a _direct_ correlation to inflation, it's correlated but often lagging and muted in response; job creation seems to be mostly a market effect not corporate decision; the modern definition of "fiduciary duty" means extra cash should go toward immediate stockholder benefit so stock buybacks are always FAR more likely than employee benefits; etc; etc).
The one area I'd push back strong on is that nobody is "advocating" for it. Many stockholding orgs/individuals are. They don't care if its a straw man, they know what the real-world systemic effects are of lower taxation rates.
> "job creator" C-suite executives magically "create" jobs and/or raise pay because their budget for taxes goes down and they just don't know where else to put the cash, thus everyone benefits.
The real concept, which is actually true, is business owners and managers and investors have money - whether risking money for a startup, or spending revenue from customers - and that money goes into investing in infrastructure and paying salaries, and paying taxes. Their taxes then pay for the public sector employees' jobs and all other public costs. That hierarchy is why making sure people want spend their time and money in your country, because it pays for everything else.
The fact that it is private equity that is going to evaporate when the bubble bursts is the only silver lining I can see. However, my natual cynicism makes me bet they'll spend whatever they've got left over on their pet politicians to use government (ie, public funding) to bail themselves back out.
You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.
> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,
Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look
I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.
Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.
A Bluesky dev has admitted that the "show less/more" items did nothing. It was in the context of supposedly hooking them up to real code at long last, though I've yet to see any practical difference. Anyone who claims they worked all along is not arguing in good faith.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy
If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
By default bluesky blocks adult content, once you enable it you can dial in what kind of adult content you wish to see. I know this is all anecdotal, like the links you posted... But I started a new account to see what it's like. I can scroll the default algorithm for 5 minutes and not see anything questionable, and my actual account exists with adult content turned on and I never see it. After signing up the new account, I can search for furry or diaper content, but it appears that none of it is like "nsfw" (mostly just people in furry costumes or diapers but no sexual content or nudity).
Just to solidify, I just went and created a new account to ensure I was right, and I was. You need to go to your settings, go to moderation, and enable adult content. I scrolled continuously for 5 minutes straight and saw no adult content on a default account. And on top of this, as far as I can google, Bluesky has never had adult content enabled by default, so if you are seeing it, you enabled it.
Indeed, source very much still matters. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
"Qui bono," who benefits, is a great question to ask about the organization and the story when reading it, especially when combined with Hanlon's Razor. Tend not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. And when malice is reasonable, then make sure to ask Who Benefits from the malice. If that's difficult to determine or the benefit seems small in comparison to likelihood of human stupidity, assume human stupidity.
Is the organization historically trustworthy? (MSNBC and Fox News, when not being talking heads and not talking about the current culture war buzzwords, tend to do good reporting.) If the story is wrong, is it reasonable to assume it's because someone somewhere misread something, mistyped something, misstated something, or otherwise made a mistake? (Perhaps the story breaking or otherwise too recent for slow, quality research. Perhaps the reporter, while trained in research, is not expert enough to come to the correct conclusions of their research, or is not researching or can't find nonexistent peer criticism to the research, both big problems in science reporting, especially when the reporting is of initial findings that haven't been peer reviewed.) If the story is not accidentally wrong through human stupidity, then qui bono, who benefits from malice? (Does it present a politician as unhinged or out of control? Does it ? And especially, would the story impact wealth, either to hurt it or protect it?) Sources like PBS, which (while they are NOT immune) are impacted far less by click-through ad rates and through funding partially derived from donations and public funding have less incentive to push narratives that benefit particular monied and/or political interests, or foreign sources like BBC or AJ don't get as much benefit when it comes to stories about US events that don't tie directly back to their organizational/political benefits. (When these are NOT the case, of course, then malice become far more easy to assume for these sources!)
So is it more likely that Governor Whitmer targeted gardening supply stores during the early pandemic because she was testing/pushing the limits of government power to limit the freedom of citizens to go where they wished or to expand government's economic control over the American marketplace, or is it more likely that there was political power to be derived from presenting the image of the governor as petty, tyrranical, and nonsensical? Or is it more likely that everything, both the initial EO's presentation, the angry response to it, and the fact-checking of the response, were victims of our human foibles?
Personally, I think it's far more likely a mix of human stupidity in writing the EO in a way where it was easy to misread the EO as specifically targeting gardening stores, combined with a malice decision to push hard on what was probably originally a misreading because it presented a view of the governor that worked to politically tear down her trustworthiness as she was taking actions that were having an economic impact on monied interests in the state (the EO essentially tried to turn big box stores into grocery-only stores to limit gathering, which during the Fog of War of the early pandemic was a reasonable health goal even if years of hindsight have given us a far better view of how impactful that actually was or not). Plus some stupidity on pushing back far too hard on the fact-checking response to give the impression that the EO didn't even mention gardening (it completely did, very clearly, in the list of attempts to pre-empt loopholes to the EO's attempt to limit the uses of large stores in order to minimize the reasons for people to gather in them to limit crowd sizes). Also, the Facebook/Twitter viral news sources get their money from clicks, so their stories tend to be far more about pathos than ethos or logos and truth is all-too-often a casuality for them.
I'm sorry about the length of my thoughts here. Bevity is the soul of wit, and I'm a rather witless man.
"Democrat" is a long-used general US political slang to refer to an individual member of the Democratic Party (or to refer to a collective of individual members if used as the plural "Democrats"). In the past few decades right-wing commentators have made frequent improper use of the slang to refer to the official party, partly due to its easy association with negative words such as "autocrat" and "plutocrat", resulting in the common misuse of the slang. However, there is no such thing as the "Democrat Party" or "Democrat nominee".
And it'll be pretty easy to keep track of how many crimes they _do_ discover, because the first one will be trumpeted loudly everywhere, and then after that they'll use the entire list of people as though it's a partial example: "How do we know that this individual is not associated with <crimes>, as we've already seen with _countless_ examples, like <the unspoken entirety of the list of examples>?"
Yes, but each time diluting the power of the justices individually. Right now if you have one wacko justice who decides on the basis of political ideology instead of some of the established legal theories they have 11% of a say in things. Add another few justices who are relatively normal and the ability of the wacko to swing things into dangerous territory goes down. Even if the tit-for-tat tries to cram more wackos in you have to try to convince the Senate to let more and more obviously terribly choices through.
"We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's already present for all users!" Repeat until you gain enough influence that ActivityPub is seen as inferior.
Then comes "Extinguish." Breaking changes to MetaPub reducing federation to only MetaPub clients or give up entirely and turn off federation anyways.
ActivityPub is the first glimpse at a future where social media networks are interoperable over a common standard similar to mail. And from recent history the period we are in is one in where governments are looking for open standards as a hedge against big tech.
The idea that Meta would deliberately harm a standard, shut down competition and invite anti-competition investigations is far-fetched.
And then we revert to the state where we don't federate with threads, which doesn't seem so different from not federating with them today. This is weird jealous break up logic. No, you didn't stop talking to me, I stopped talking to you!
I know, right? It's like, I don't even want to HEAR about your ideas on how to fix a broken system unless you've taken the personal responsibility to try and reorient your personal life to adhere to your proposed ideas while continuing to try living in the still-broken system even if that personal transition, without any systemic changes to the surrounding culture and community, make your new life impossible to live.
That's the way we _always_ implement change in America!
*Also, do you not like that the socialist merely _has_ two homes, or do you not agree with the reasoning behind _why_ they have two homes?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/wa-cit...