There previously were scams that invoked Bill Gates’ name, but I guess crypto made it much easier, especially since anyone can watch Musk gush on about crypto on YouTube, thus validating the ideas for the gullible.

Isn’t that the promise of App Clips? iOS and Android both allow you to run a mini app temporarily for shopping and not cluttering your system.

The internet always moves on; the most popular bulletin boards and usenet groups and web forums eventually fell and people moved away. Even Digg had a powerful following and heavy user traffic and due to Reddit style changes everyone left too. Reddit just as likely.

This isn’t rare and not altogether a bad idea.

My university had a problem of students bringing their own WiFi routers before the dorms had WiFi. Students would set them up incorrectly and cause a series of problems with colliding DHCP servers and interference and it would cause outages for nearby wired students.

A lot of IT departments locked the network down for these reasons.

That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website

Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.

Good. Let’s hope the public moves to mastodon.

Is that what I said? No. Of course it can be and is tracked. But I’m not going to Hand over my biometrics and make it easier for them.

That’s a strawman, who said otherwise? Showing ID is one thing, storing your ID and tracking your trips is another.

It’s discussed in the article. We can’t really be sure if they do, but they already store the measurements of your face along with other bits of metadata. They could reconstruct your face with it even without the photo. It’s a deceptive claim, because even if they throw away the camera video they still have your face for all intents and purposes.

Why would I give Microsoft money if they’re behaving like this?

It’s more like Reddit is a bunch of edgy teenagers who already skew in favor of liberal ideas far beyond that of the regular voting public. It’s why atheism is wildly popular on Reddit as well as issues like abortion or trans rights, when the American public is far more evenly split.

Yes there’s some campaigning going on on Reddit as well but it’s dwarfed by the left wing base already on the site. The swell in anti-Biden posts make this split all the more obvious.

We all know Trump doesn’t actually want to serve his country. During a Hannity interview Trump couldn’t name a single thing he wanted to enact in his second term. It’s all about keeping himself out of prison and helping heal his wounded ego for losing in 2020.

I’m not too worried about the dyed-in-the-wool Democrat from California upset that we change from Biden

Californians don’t matter here. Voters in swing states like Pennsylvania do. Ohioans are less likely to vote for Gavin Newsom over Biden. If you magically think that Newsom can ramp up a presidential campaign from scratch and beat Biden’s name recognition and win Wisconsin in only 6 months, you’re being insanely optimistic.

Look, I despise Biden since he ignored all his advisors and set a disastrous Gaza policy, and want anyone but him. He was one of the worst candidates of 2020 but since he was “the most electable” we were told to shut up and fall in line. His electability has faltered. But it’s almost July, the window of time to replace him and win already closed. I’m not going to keep arguing, we’ll agree to disagree.

a President who is predicted by polling to lose to Donald Trump.

Biden’s numbers are baked in.

No, we have a president who is ahead in some polls and behind in others, 6 months before an election (which is generally unreliable since the polls fluctuate wildly this early). Pollsters and political scientists unanimously report polling in June is not reliable this soon before Labor Day. Look back and you’ll see HIllary, Romney, and Dukakis all ahead at this point in previous elections. The reason we are having this conversation is because people got skittish about the Debate, but we don’t even have accurate post-debate survey data at this time. The snap surveys by CNN and others showed a muddle of some people claiming Biden won anyway and others not. More data will come in next week.

And don’t forget the counterfactual; if you replace Biden despite winning the primaries in a landslide, you will anger many voters. Millions of people voted for Biden and this was not close; they rejected Dean Phillips and alternatives. People voted for Harris as a known backup; skipping her and having Newsom take over will cause a storm and backlash of a size we can’t quantify yet. There simply isn’t any data on Democratic voters that show any Biden remorse; you’re operating on the vibes from social media and some pundits.

In truth, we really haven’t been through this already.

Correct, and replacing Biden is a huge risk. It could cost the election the same way John McCain took a gamble on Sarah Palin and lost.

We already have Newsom vs Biden and Newsom vs Trump polls. And the pundits talked endlessly in 2020 about the shortcomings of each candidate and why they’d struggle against Trump. We’ve been through this already.

If Biden steps down then of course whoever gets nominated will get a bump of course, but like we discussed collectively in 2020, they’d have their own separate hurdles. Bernie Sanders would energize many voters but his socialism talk would turn many voters off. Pete Buttigieg struggled to connect with voters of color. Warren had some political flubs and Trump launched many attacks on her etc. while there’s concern many Americans still won’t vote for a woman for president, and so on. The point I’m making is that you may find yourself in a situation in October where you WISH Biden was running again with his high poll numbers and solid national record that other candidates lack.

Show me one with higher poll numbers than Biden. When they were head to head in 2020 each polled lower than Biden against Trump.

I don’t want to defend Biden. He should go. He is a corrupt old man with a ton of baggage and his Palestine policy was atrocious. But I don’t see any of those people beating Trump based on the data we have.

We all know that Biden is a liability. BUT WHO WILL REPLACE HIM? I don’t like the man but who else in the party can take his role? Nobody credibly challenged him during the primary. Harris doesn’t poll as well as Biden and does worse. We’re stuck with him because nobody stepped up all year or last year, and everyone who wants him to step down thinks some magic TBD savior can show up out of nowhere and magically do better. Heck, Dean Phillips tried to run for president on the exact same issues and promised identical policies just in a younger person and he lost the race badly.

We’re stuck with Biden, and likely will lose.

The problem is that the debate doesn’t really change much… except for low information and undecided voters. They don’t know what Trump is spewing and whether it’s a lie or not. When he makes up wild claims that Biden is unanimously declared worst president in history, they don’t know that’s a lie, or that Trump is lying about capping the price of insulin or the existence of 9 month elective abortions, etc. Trump’s confident lies actually win over a lot of undecided people who don’t do any research into the topic.

A libel case is different.

The problem is Trump could claim “oops I forgot that I agreed with the crowd in 2016” and that is different than intentionally lying. That’s why journalists have to split hairs here; George Santos can be called a liar but saying Trump lied this time is harder. It opens a can of worms; when Biden inevitably gets a detail wrong in another story of his should they call him a liar?