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Palm oil cultivation is wildly harmful in many cases. And palm oil is not a replacement for olive oil.


Have you spent any times with bees? Beekeeping really changed my opinions on bees. They are quite industrious and very gentle.


Are those body builders controlling for other variables? Changes in diet, exercise, performances, routines, etc?

I'd believe any number of things could correlate with body builders as they spend a lot of time changing their bodies.


I believe anecdotally that a lot of bodybuilders get on a T cycle after atleast a year or so of spending a lot of time in the gym natty. So noticing a relative difference might normalize for the other changes.


The U.S. has funded terrorist organizations since forever. You think this is novel?


Maybe if your leader is a dictator and it looks like you are losing, defecting might be a better option than fighting to the death for a leader who doesn't care about you.


Most of the Syrian army was made up of people forced to be there or to be imprisoned ~

A lot where changing clothes in the middle of the street.


Exactly what I'm saying!


I don't know that I agree with this characterization. Was Assad particularly stable? Was he able to prevent rebel groups effectively?

HTS of today might be different from HTS of the past, but that's very much could be just their propaganda. We'll see. Given "guaranteed evil" vs "probably evil" I'd probably prefer the lesser evil.

I very much suspect Russia is fully focused on Ukraine and cannot or will not project force in the region.

Iran has been remarkably restrained over the past little while, and I suspect they want to keep things cool and not hot.


"Was Assad particularly stable?"

Looking at the speed with which the Syrian military now unraveled, the government was an empty shell of its former self.

Russia was in no position to intervene. First, the development was too quick. Second, the best units are on the Ukrainian front and redeploying them would certainly inspire the Ukrainian General Staff to probe the Russian defenses. Third, the Russian general (Kisel) tasked with leading the Syrian detachment was/is an incapable commander, sent there as a punishment.

Russia cannot fight two wars at once.


If by "for years" you mean "since its inception" then yes, 100% agree.


Did they stop it? Maybe in airports, maybe. The practice is still very much alive.


The order to stop the program of "consensual searches" at mass transportation facilities was sent out on November 12, and the more detailed report that I linked to on November 21st. Do you have knowledge of these DEA consensual searches happening at airports or other mass transit hubs after November 12?

Or are you referring to broader law enforcement attempts to do consensual searches or civil asset forfeiture seizures, which are absolutely still a problem?

I guess my point is, there are still massive problems with the way policing happens in this country. But the Biden administration has ordered this particular problematic behavior to end, specifically in response to the incident brought up in this article.

So, are you just making vague generalizations, or do you have actual knowledge that this program has not ended?


Civil asset forfeiture, including by the DEA, is still very much a thing. Having a President end it in airports affects some tiny fraction of the broader problem.

And it only ends it until a future admin un-ends it. I could see both democrats and republicans deciding that they will allow this practice again.

I think it's much more correct to call the practice "paused" until we legislate it away. "Ending" implies a finality we cannot possibly be comfortable with.


Yeah, I agree with you that there are larger problems that still need to be addressed; and that this stop isn't necessarily permanent, but something temporary that might come back once there are more controls in place.

But situations like this are nuanced and complex, and we are in a better position than we were a month ago, due to actions by the Biden administration.

It is easy, especially in cases of such long running problems like civil asset forfeiture, to get cynical and fall into the mentality that there's nothing that can be done. That's not the case. It is possible to improve things, through political and legal processes. Not always as easy as you would like. Frequently slower, and with regressions. But progress is possible, and it's worth keeping track of who makes that progress to inform future voting patterns.

Cynicism can be an effective tool to blunt efforts at reform.


I believe it's possible to improve things. I don't think this is an example of a material change. I, personally, find both the incoming and outgoing administrations to be truly repellant.

But where it makes sense to do so, I will give credit.

This just feels like something that can be undone with a few minutes of trump's time. If it stays paused then great. And I'm sure halting the practice even for a few months does material good for people, I just can't give more credit when the Biden admin could do much more to halt it.


It's absolutely pseudo science. People love it, and it's useful as a tool to recognize "different humans problem solve differently", but like, taking it more seriously than that is a problem.


While there is criticism of MBTI, it can actually be quite useful in sparking interesting conversations about work styles and preferences. It also helps people reflect on their own tendencies/behaviors in general.

I won't pretend its perfect, but it can be a fun team-building exercise and provide common language for discussing differences.

We are working on a stealth startup which will use AI to analyze e.g. Slack messages and build out results of personality tests using methods like MBTI, so that e.g. when reaching out to someone in your workplace, you can get view a personalized overview of how to interact with that person, their behavior, how they might prefer you communicate with them, etc. Email in my bio for anyone interested, we're looking for early adopters.


I wish you success, however...

In my current team we all sit down about every six months and agree how we should communicate, giving our own preferences.

After a few weeks, it's back to normal, i.e. 90% of the team making real-time interrupts in Teams, irrespective of stated preference, urgency, whether info is supplied as agreed, etc.

I don't see it being much different because an AI tells them so.


That's a really interesting idea, but how do you make a business case for something like that? It'd be far too easy to just resort to whatever the organization's cultural norm is, especially for high-priority comms.

I couldn't see myself paying for something like that, anyway, but would be interested to hear your business case.


This ban has always felt so silly. If it's privacy and data harvesting as a concern, don't a million apps do that? If it's anti-China sentiment, why TikTok and not a million other things? If it's about protecting elections and propaganda, why not X and Meta and YouTube?

It's so weirdly targeted to me. Why TikTok only?


> If it's about protecting elections and propaganda, why not X and Meta and YouTube?

Because the government is not threatened by X, Meta, or YouTube. In many ways, it exists in their pocket. There's not a lot of looming dissonance between what those parties are interested in seeing happen and what the modern federal government (as run by either party) is pursuing, and at this point, those each provide far more value as an allied propaganda arm than as a hostile propaganda risk.

But China and the US have directly competing interests in many places around the world, and the radical changes that both countries have undergone in the last 80 years have set the stage of a fresh contest of power. Obviously, both parties would like to navigate that contest in the best position possible. Allowing your anticipated opponent access to unmediated, private communications with hundreds of millions of citizens in an already vulnerable democracy is not a great position to be in during that contest.


It’s very simple, the entire young generation lives on TT. It’s where they get all of their information. It’s owned by a foreign adversary. We already have laws against foreign owned media for radio and TV, why would this be any different given this is TV in 2024?

I’ve used both reels and TT. I’ve only ever gotten lots of pro-China content on TT.


So, you agree that most countries should ban US social media, as most of them probably have laws against foreign owned TV and radio?


most of them probably have laws against foreign owned TV and radio?

Better check on that. I know of a few countries that have no problem with foreign-owned radio stations. I assume that applies to television stations, too.

When the Iron Curtain came down, radio companies from around the world started buying up signals in eastern Europe.


Yeah, I was thinking more in Europe and some countries in Latin America, which I know more. Not in Eastern Europe, where after the end of Soviet Union, a shock treatment were applied, creating a free market without any restrictions.


You would be surprised perhaps, but a lot of countries actually ban US social media.


Yeah, it is true for some definition of "a lot", but still is a minority, a number of countries much smaller than what should be according with that opinion. Nonetheless, it is funny how before US had the urge to do the same to control which parties should be allowed to mass spread messages within its borders, the common sense and default ideology was that those bannings in the Internet were a proof on how evil and dictatorial these countries were, in contrast to how free were the USA. But unsurprisingly, perceptions and ideologies always change with time, always based on how convenient and useful they are for the powerful.


You cannot be dogmatic and unrealistic. When adversaries are systematically abusing your own systems to influence your society repeatedly, you need to take action. This is far less action than say China is, which not only doesn’t allow TikTok as is on their own population, but has banned all us social media for years and years.


Ok, another metric to look at is population access. If you combine population of China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Myanmar, etc it’s more than 2 billion people without access to American social media platforms.


I tried TikTok and never saw much political content at all. The algorithm gave me little dances and bad cooking. I finally got it to ditch the bad cooking and show me some interesting pseudo 70s horror AI videos. But then things kept repeating and I bailed.

How did you manage to get Chinese propaganda?


Just keep using the app. It wasn’t at the beginning.


I used it for like two weeks.


I've used TikTok extensively for the last three years and never found any pro-China content at all.


Speak for yourself, I dont have any 'foreign adversaries,' really that sounds like cheap talking points and nothing to do with my interests as an american.


Data harvesting is a-ok. Propaganda by Americans to Americans is protected by the first amendment. But a foreign state harvesting data and applying influence is more straight forward.

Look at the proposed solution: Just sell TikTok to someone else who isn't China.


Because the AIPAC lobby explicitly called TikTok out for exposing young Americans to footage of the Gaza genocide (causing support for Israel among US youth to reach and all-time low), and pushed for the ban. The US politicians who initially pushed it had received hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations from AIPAC.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/business/tiktok-accusatio...


Its a straight line, openly conceived.


because tiktok was doing FB stuff better and FB got scared and lobbied. I think that about sums it up.


X, Meta, and YouTube are not indirectly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The end.


So... nationalism? We like our surveillance state and demonize their surveillance state?


Yes? And it's not so much about the surveillance in the first place as opposed to the algorithmic manipulation of content to shift narratives and spread propaganda. Whether or not one believes the US based companies do similarly is beside the point, precisely because they're US based, whereas TikTok is the product of the US's primary economic and ideological adversary


oh, but give a chance for rebuttal: I find the US propaganda simplistic and violent. I much prefer this Chinese propaganda, as an american consumer.


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