Why would we ignore facts on the ground? Do you have any better facts?

Your hypothetical makes no sense because murder is not ordinary or basic. But even if it were… “Couldn’t have happened to a worse person.” Right? “Karma’s a motherfucker.” Right?

Many Americans are so blindly patriotic that they don’t realize their health insurance system is much worse than dozens of other countries. At the same time, many of these Americans also know that they’re being scammed. It is interesting to look at that cognitive dissonance. And it is interesting to look at mainstream media, so afraid to point out how screwed everyone in the country is, because of some evil rich assholes.

Define AI. Then you’ll see that it has been used to fight fraud for decades.

It was last week.

Cars because they are so big, and ugly when in disrepair. Small scale hoarding is a small scale problem.

RTO was always an excuse to fire people. Fuck all the media outlets who pretended otherwise.

Stealing is when you take something from someone illegally. What you described, and what OP described, is not even close to that.

First, what was taken from who? Money from the government, let us suppose. But legally. And even if it were illegal, which it isn’t, what is the damage? Of course there is none. It’s still 100% moral.

Comically, this is such a mild example of the Prodigal Son. Didn’t folks learn this shit in Sunday School?

A logical fallacy is a specific technical term pointing to an issue with the logic itself. What you are accurately pointing out is the missing information and hidden premises. In other words, you are finding issue with the facts, not the logic.

The safety argument is wrong. Security through obscurity was debunked a century ago, and you’re floating it again. In reality, it depends on the details, because of course it does.

In a little hut that the chair lift operator of the ski area (closed in the summer, when I was there) would use normally.

I think Biden should have gone hog wild with shenanigans that Americans actually need 4 years ago, but you’re right that now would still be a good time.

How it looks is beside the point. If it’s moral then it’s moral, and people who are looking at it need to deal with it. As for what Trump’s sycophants will do, they’re going to do crazy s*** anyway.

When judges ignore plea deals, they are asking for people to strip them of power. That’s what happened here, the judge deserved what they got. If you can’t find justice in the courts, then to hell with the courts.

That’s not exactly true. Being able to talk about sexual identity using specific terms is highly useful for people who are in relatively unsafe communities.

Here’s one example of Facebook adjusting its algorithm several years ago. You can remark that it ought to do more, and I may agree with you, but that’s totally different from saying it doesn’t do anything positive. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/how-facebook-algorithm-works/

If your argument is that there can be drawbacks to using social media, I think everyone agrees. But remember, we were told horror stories about pinball, pool, comic books, chewing gum, Dungeons and Dragons, the list goes on and on. So with that in mind, I hope you can understand why I’m not convinced by a few studies that social media is net negative in value.

And the reason we have laws requiring careful drug testing is because of damage that was done in the past, proven damage that actually happened, people whose lives ended short because they were doing things like imbibing radioactive chemicals. Your suggestion that we ought to treat social media the same is putting the cart before the horse. The burden of proof is on you, not on social media companies.

No, generations past did not get by fine without social media. They just had no solution to various problems. Two classic ones are eating disorders and marginalized minorities.

I don’t understand. Are you honestly claiming that you don’t see any possible value in social media for teenagers? We could talk about people with eating disorders. We could talk about marginalized minorities who can find support in distant communities because where they live is ultra-conservative. We don’t have to work hard to think of those examples, they’re well documented, they’re very real.

Of course you could argue that the harms outweigh the benefits, but to pretend that there are no benefits is just mind boggling.

Just because it looks like people moved on easily doesn’t mean they actually moved on easily.

I recall that some years ago Facebook was looking into their algorithm and they found that it was potentially leading to overuse, which might be what you’re thinking of, but what actually happened is that they changed it so that people wouldn’t be using Facebook as much. Of course people who are opposed to social media ignored the second half of the above statement.

Anyway, when you say the algorithms are demonstrably unsafe, you know you’re wrong because you didn’t demonstrate anything, and you didn’t cite anyone demonstrating anything. You can say you think they’re unsafe, but that’s a matter of opinion and we all have our own opinions.

It doesn’t matter what you think. Kids will do what they want to do and that’s that, so everything else is a question of how much time and money and posturing people want to do.

Even if everything you wrote is true, none of it applies to the United States because we have the electoral college. Sorry, but it’s not Europe, and we have our own weird system.