Seems to me that it’s 99% of American voters who are useful idiots.
The minimum wage hasn’t increased in 15 years and you all are still voting Democrat or Republican and actively support a trillion and half of your taxpayer dollars going overseas to war. Idiotic is a very good word to describe people who convince themselves it’s a good thing to vote against their own interests every two years.
The problem isn’t voting. The problem is the candidates that run, and the massive lobbying and dark money industry that keeps people in power that benefit only moneyed interests. I sure as fuck had no desire to vote for Hillary or Biden, but the only option was to abstain or vote for a third-party candidate (who absolutely would not win) which would allow Trump to win. We’re not able to truly vote for a candidate we want, we just have to vote against someone who’s worse.
Even when we truly try to get someone in place who wants to make a difference and could do, we can’t. In 2020, Bernie was going to win the Dem nomination. But the DNC changed the fucking rules and all the other candidates dropped out and supported Biden, and even if Bernie had made it to the convention, the “super delegates” could just decide to choose someone else. They literally will not allow us to choose the person we want. And Republicans are such hatemongers, that they’re going to choose literally the worst person on the fucking planet as their candidate.
As much as we’d love for everyone to just decide to vote for third-party candidates, it simply is not going to happen. We are in an absolutely fucked situation where we can’t make things any better, have no control over what’s happening, and can only vote against someone worse. Further, many, many local voting precincts are heavily gerrymandered, making a fair vote nearly impossible.
actively support a trillion and half of your taxpayer dollars going overseas to war
I, and many, many others do not support this and actively oppose it
The minimum wage hasn’t increased in 15 years
The problem with this issue and nearly all others is lobbying and campaign finance issues. If we could ban lobbying, ban political donations, and force all candidates to use only public funds for campaigning, we could make a massive difference. But you know who decides if that will happen? The exact people who do not want the rules to change.
Also, if your post was, in any way, a defense of Stein, if I were going to vote a third party I’d rather choose a candidate who didn’t have dinner with a fucking room full of Russian oligarchs
Many democrats have run on platforms that include raising the minimum wage. Many blue states have much higher minimum wages than the federal minimum, with California going up to $16 in January. It’s not democrats fault when voters refuse to give them control over both congress and the white house at the same time.
Democrats have a slim majority in the senate, which is not enough to get whatever they want done without compromising, especially considering that two senators are not as left wing as the rest of the party.
As far as war and military spending goes, I agree that the party could do better.
That’s not really how it works. It would only make them look stupid if they did that, and increase the risk of being voted out in the next election. Because of the filibuster, legislation generally needs 60 votes in the Senate before it goes to the president. Democrats have 51 seats, with two frequent defectors. Imagine if Biden’s record going into 2024 is that he vetoed every single piece of legislation.
It’s infinitely better that they simply pretend to be powerless rather than using the power we gave them to create meaningful change. It’s too bad people can’t eat excuses.
The two party system is a direct consequence of the antiquated boring system US (and UK and CA) have. While it remains, voting for a minor party is a wasted vote.
Need ranked preference voting to make minor parties feasible like AU, or better yet go to an even fairer system of mixed member proportional like NZ and DE.
All of these issues will remain the same no matter who you vote for.
The Democrats have had the White House and Congress twice in the last sixteen years, and even had a supermajority for part of Obama’s presidency.
All we (and by ‘we’ I mean the poor and middle class) got for it was more expensive health care and higher war spending. We didn’t get a minimum wage increase. Health care and education are now cost-prohibitive for tens of millions, and infrastructure in most areas of the country is declining. For an added kick in the junk, Roe was repealed when Democrats had the majority and the White House and they did nothing about it.
Tell me you don’t pay attention to or understand American politics without telling me…
The supermajority is the only time the democrats reasonably could have pushed anything through while the Republican party’s only goal is to obstruct any and all progress. Any yes, during that time there was lots of infighting. We also guaranteed health insurance for the first time and passed the ACA.
Want change? Go make it instead of yelling at a bunch of people that also want change on a semi-popular forum.
Huh? She opened a new instagram account that ended with “2024” that got shut down. That one she mentions in the tweet is the original one that she lost access to. afaik she’s only got that one account now, unless you can point to another.
I’m pretty sure what happened is she went to login to her account for the first time since going dark after her misappropriation of donor funds was reported in 2021, didn’t bother to go through proper channels to get something reset with instagram, made a new account and then played the victim when she got bounced by rules to prevent identity fraud.
<a href="">YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users</a>
Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
I knew I wasn’t just imagining things. I like to listen to music on YouTube when driving to work. And sure, the internet reception there is spotty (danke, Merkel), but for a couple weeks now I’ve consistently had a very long “buffering” period every time the next video/song loaded up.
Well, joke’s on them. I found out about NewPipe and its built-in video/audio downloader, because I complained to an acquaintance about it.
I only seem to barely notice the difference… At first i couldnt understand what everyone was talking about…but yeah its a small delay over what it used to be. Also it seems any bookmarked vids will no longer autoplay… you have to click play… is that a thing anyone else has to do ?
I tried Edge and it seemed only a small bit faster to me, but it did autoplay. Are there any other anomalous strange effects google has done to youtube that i might have missed ?
I never had issues with adds on FF and ublock … still don’t.
Needing to click to play a video is a Firefox feature, and it’s been there for ages already. It doesn’t allow any audio to play until you interact with the page.
Nope. This has been going on for months already. Nothing new here. There’s atleast three different kinds of pop-ups for adblock users and the same solution works for all of them.
Disable all other adblockers, disable enhanced tracking protection for youtube.com in Firefox (shield icon in addres bar), remove your custom adblocking rules and update uBlock Origin manually atleast twice a day; settings > filter list > quick fixes > click the clock icon > click update. Alternatively you can also just purge catches and update all filters but that takes longer is is not necessary
I’ve been sitting pretty with both uBlock Origin and uMatrix stopping both the ads and the delay from YouTube. Not sure what exactly is doing which, but it’s been working for me
It’s a strange post in general. Someone’s substack, written in some generic faux-journalist style, with one source for the main claim (“a Redditor”), who isn’t linked to. Don’t know why it’s being shared here.
Didn’t this happen a couple months ago? I’ve been using UBO after the update and NewPipe (Android)/FreeTube (desktop) before that without issues. The new thing they’re doing is the 5 second delay for Firefox users.
rather than uninstalling adblockers entirely, can't they just whitelist YouTube? Ad Trackers only have value when they track people across multiple sites: if the tracker only functions on YT then users get the video views they want and YT gets near-worthless tracking data.
There is a reason I only watch YouTube on my phone or laptop and not my smart TV. Because we went from one ad every few videos to multiple unskippable ads per video. It has become worse than old cable TV.
Peertube is also gaining traction and I personally enjoy that, just needs more content creators to stop worrying about chicken and egg and start protecting their content.
I’m okay with just not using YouTube. The Internet sucks compared to how it was back in the day. Now it’s built around selling you something. Fuck that.
Same. Since… forever I maybe use youtube once or twice per year. There’s nothing interesting for me there that I can’t find somewhere else, and often in written (not video form), which is less time consuming and less prone to useless “padding” for “monetization”.
It’s not even about selling you something, it’s about selling you, period. They sell the user’s attention to advertisers, and don’t much care about anything else because anything else is too hard to quantify in a spreadsheet.
These days I mostly go for paid content like Nebula, alternative platforms like Odysee or PeerTube, or even Newgrounds - remember them? It’s not always possible to avoid YouTube entirely since some creators I follow only have a presence there, but transitions like this take time.
Yeah, I actually haven't seen the nag screen in a couple days, whereas I was seeing it often last week. Whatever updated circumvention uBlock has figured out, it's working just about perfectly.
samrome58.substack.com
Active