Oof.

Shit, congress passed a law codifying that too!

They’re associating it with your debit/credit card, unless you’re buying with cash only. Also, the “identity” isn’t so much the target as the “profile”. Don’t get me wrong, if they are able to personally identify you, the communication will be much more… personalized… (good english) - mailings, texts, emails and coupons for stuff either you’ve bought or adjacent to your stuff (with better margins for the store) addressing you by name, grouped with other purchase-history items. But back to the profile: building a profile of your likes, dislikes, brands and such is valuable data that gets more $ for corporate as the fidelity gets higher. And as it does, the messaging to you gets more targeted.

There was a time where there were many sites on the internet; hundreds, thousands even. And someone could search for content in topics they were interested in and find discussions in forums. I hope the internet becomes that again and sites like reddit burn to the ground, their servers salted to never grow again.

The world recovered from the burning of Alexandria, and it would recover from the death of reddit. And from the rumbling of their new ad injection schemes, the sooner the better.

As long as first-past-the-post elections are the norm, any political scheme will distill to two opposing factions, because that’s the only way to effectively compete. We must push for ranked choice voting.

To your last point, yes. The average user doesn’t even glance at the permissions before blindly accepting them. It is also true that an alarmingly high number of users/consumers /don’t care/ about basic privacy concerns that affect things like targeted ads, PII, and information that could be used to affect things like credit score.

And hyper-detailed too… You can identify a US highway and part of an interstate on that second map!

And of course, predictably, Israel responded exactly according to plan.

If convicted of any of the numerous crimes he’s charged with, this man and his co-conspirators represent a palpable danger to democracy and should never be able to get near the levers of power again.

As it stands, the public should recognize the danger he and his ilk have already demonstrated on the world and domestic stage and relegate them to a bad memory.

What were trees? (fer the youngin’s)

That’s been a refrain among the great plains dwellers since I was a kid and the term “global warming” was first ideated. Every winter, some chucklefuck would “lol, I’d like some of that global warmin’ right about now!”

And they still do it, while complaining about persistent summer drought diminishing crop yields, bitching about government “handouts”, and being the biggest recipients of them in the form of farm subsidies to produce corn that gets shoved into high-fructose corn syrup and spiking morbid obesity across the entire country.

/rant

Professor Farnsworth: “Good news, everybody!”

“we’ve shot objects down without explanation as to what they were”

You mean like the balloons we shot down that were… wait for it…

Balloons?

How’d E.T. get in the box?

From an interview on a right-wing talk radio show. Context clues are important. Dude’s lucky he didn’t say anything more stupid that couldn’t be backpeddled like this was.

And as for ‘turning himself in’, it’s pretty suspicious that another city employee who was responsible for reviewing the footage also reported it up the chain of command, but the city couldn’t determine who did it first.

But yeah, let’s trust his version.

Wish I would have known that…