Seriously great question at this point. In 2016 it was commonly accepted knowledge that if Putin released a video of Trump getting pissed on by a woman in a Moscow hotel, that would be the end of his political career.

Since then, he’s been found to be a rapist in court, has attempted to overthrow the government, and has been found guilty of about 3 dozen felonies with more charges pending - which doesn’t matter any way since Trump’s judges have granted him legal immunity to anything he wants to do. And he was just convincingly reelected with his party winning both the House and Senate.

He is not going to run for president again ever in a free and fair election in accordance with the US constitution; that would require changing the constitution in ways that the Republicans don’t have the numbers for, or at least interpreting the existing constitution in a way that is so contorted I don’t think even the most conservative supreme court judges could support it.

So in other words, he does not need anything from the American public anymore. He has no reason to care if part of his base opens their eyes to what he really is (at least, as long as at least 1/12th of the public will vote not to convict on any jury - but he can also self-pardon for anything except impeachment).

I therefore don’t think the kompromat theory holds much water today.

More likely, the Russians calculate that this is an opportunity to sow division in the US - they’d hope for a civil war as the best case. Supporting Trump, as a divisive president, was a start, but they wouldn’t want too many people happy with Trump either, so they want to make the haters hate him even more than is rational, and the sycophants continue to love him more.

Of course, the risk for them is that they make Trump want to support Ukraine to a greater extent than the US currently is, instead of the opposite. They probably calculate he is incompetent and nothing much will change for them either way. Trump is certainly installing yes-men who will be loyal to him but likely not the most competent leaders; this is an effective way to disrupt a government, but it is likely that a declining narcissist who has structured things to remove all dissent will not be at all effective in achieving outcomes that require complex strategy and coordinated execution. So I think they probably consider this risk to be acceptable.

Self-hosted Gitea or Forgejo. It’s pretty easy to host, and if you’ve got a reliable Internet connection and an always on computer, you can host it from home without too much effort.

IANAL (and likely neither is anyone here) - and I think the answer would be “it depends” on other details if you asked a lawyer to make a decision on what you’ve shared. So I think that is the only route if you can’t get YouTube or the blogger to do the right thing.

Some relevant things this might hinge on:

• Is the person posting this doing making videos as a business venture - e.g. by making videos that they hope to profit from (e.g. by including advertising in it, or through YouTube monetisation)? If this was done as part of a business, that could make a big difference (generally businesses are held to a higher standard).
• Which country did this happen in? Laws are different between countries.
• Did they deceive you in any way to get you to do what they wanted for the video?
• Are you a public figure in any way (prior to the video)?

Some potential causes of action that your lawyer could consider if they apply:

• Misleading conduct - if they used deception in the course of their trade.
• Fraud - if they obtained valuable consideration (your video performance) through deception.
• Privacy Infringement - if they processed (including collected) your personally identifiable information (e.g. including images / videos of your face, or the identifiable sound of your voice) without consent or another lawful basis / denial of right of erasure. Some of this could apply to Google too - you might be able to submit a Right of Erasure (right to be forgotten) legal request, and at minimum they might need to blur your face and mask the audio so you aren’t identifiable.
• Copyright infringement - potentially what they recorded counts as a performance and you have a copyright interest in the video. Another one that could apply to Google and be used to take it down.

54 kg of fentanyl is an insane amount to have all in one place.

Just to put it in perspective:

• Assuming the lethal dose (LD50) of fentanyl in humans is similar to in mice (probably a good assumption), it is 7 mg / kg of body weight by injection. Assuming an average body weight of 70 kg, 54 kg is enough to kill 110,204 people.
• Apparently for opiate tolerant people (e.g. addicts), the therapeutic dose for strong pain relief is 12 μg / h, so in a month, an addict wanting to stay dosed up the whole time might use 8.64 mg total. 54 kg is enough to supply 6.25 million addicts for a month.
• According to a UNODC estime, in 2023, there were about 60.3 million opioid (including opiate) users worldwide, including prescription drug users. So that one stockpile could supply 1/10th of the world’s opioid users for a month. It almost certainly isn’t for supplying prescription drug users, and many opioid addicts likely try to avoid fentanyl, and there are other competing sources - so 1/10th is a lot.

I’m not sure why they’d stockpile so much in one place, given they apparently have the capacity to manufacture more - unless they were planning to use it to kill people (see: they also had a weapons cache and explosives) instead of to sell as a drug. Or perhaps the 54 kg is an exaggeration and includes packaging and so on.

Not legal advice, but I believe denying all facts even the ones that are obviously true is setting himself up to pay costs for proving those facts, even if he was to win overall.

Nintendo are over litigious and have a reputation for weaponising copyright laws to shut down legitimate competition - but I suspect this might not be a good test case for challenging this.

It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.

Well it used to be (when Reddit was FLOSS and Reddit didn’t take communities off the founders who created them, at most they’d close the community) that people saw it as choosing Reddit to host the community instead of creating it somewhere else. However, Reddit has since changed the rules drastically, and essentially taken the communities people created there.

Best response for mods is to move your community somewhere else, and put in an automod rule redirecting people to the new community on Lemmy or whatever. Reddit will probably eventually try to take over and keep competing with your community under the original URL.

I was reading this post recently: https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ - I guess it applies to communities equally as much as it applies to anything else.

Maybe technically in Florida and Texas, given that they passed a law to try to stop sites deplatforming Trump.

https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess125_2023-2024/bills/3102.htm

“The owner or operator of a social media website who contracts with a social media website user in this State is subject to a private right of action by a user if the social media website purposely: … (2) uses an algorithm to disfavor, shadowban, or censure the user’s religious speech or political speech”.

In May 2022, the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled to strike the law (and similarly there was a 5th Circuit judgement), but just this month the US Supreme Court vacated the Court of Appeals judgement (i.e. reinstated the law) and remanded it back to the respective Court of Appeals. That said, the grounds for doing that were the court had not done the proper analysis, and after they do that it might be struck down again. But for now, the laws are technically not struck down.

It would be ironic if after conservatives passed this law, and stacked the supreme court and got the challenge to it vacated, the first major use of it was used against Xitter for censoring Harris!

Here’s an idea: if the US wants a say in the ICC, maybe they should sign the Rome Statute.

When Russia adopts economic policy from satire: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE

Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base?

A business being in a position to be able to implement differential pricing (at least beyond how they divide up their fixed costs) is a sign that something is unfair. The unfairness is not how they implement differential pricing, but that they can do it at all and still have customers.

YouTube can implement differential pricing because there is a power imbalance between them and consumers - if the consumers want access to a lot of content provided by people other than YouTube through YouTube, YouTube is in a position to say ‘take it or leave it’ about their prices, and consumers do not have another reasonable choice.

The reason they have this imbalance of market power and can implement differential pricing is because there are significant barriers to entry to compete with YouTube, preventing the emergence of a field of competitors. If anyone on the Internet could easily spin up a clone of YouTube, and charge lower prices for the equivalent service, competitors would pop up and undercut YouTube on pricing.

The biggest barrier is network effects - YouTube has the most users because they have the most content. They have the most content because people only upload it to them because they have the most users. So this becomes a cycle that helps YouTube and hinders competitors.

This is a classic case where regulators should step in. Imagine if large video providers were required to federated uploaded content on ActivityPub, and anyone could set up their own YouTube competitor with all the content. The price of the cheapest YouTube clones (which would have all the same content as YouTube) would quickly drop, and no one would have a reason to use YouTube.

would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark

And in the efficient market, that’s how much the service would cost for everyone, because otherwise I could just go to a competitor of YouTube for less, and YouTube would have to lower their pricing to get customers, and so on until no one can lose their prices without losing money.

Unfortunately, efficient markets are just a neoliberal fantasy. In real life, there are network effects - YouTube has people uploading videos to it because it has the most viewers, and it has the most viewers because it has the most videos. It’s practically impossible for anyone to compete with them effectively because of this, and this is why they can put their prices in some regions up to get more profit. The proper solution is for regulators to step in and require things like data portability (e.g. requiring monopolists to publish videos they receive over open standards like ActivityPub), but regulatory capture makes that unlikely. In a just world, this would happen and their pricing would be close to the costs of running the platform.

So the people paying higher regional prices are paying money in a just world they shouldn’t have to pay, while those using VPNs to pay less are paying an amount closer to what it should be in a just world. That makes the VPN users people mitigating Google’s abuse, not abusers.

Yes, but for companies like Google, the vast majority of systems administration and SRE work is done over the Internet from wherever staff are, not by someone locally (excluding things like physical rack installation or pulling fibre, which is a minority of total effort). And generally the costs of bandwidth and installing hardware is higher in places with a smaller tech industry. For example, when Google on-sells their compute services through GCP (which are likely proportional to costs) they charge about 20% more for an n1-highcpu-2 instance in Mumbai than in Oregon, US.

that’s abuse of regional pricing

More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.

Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.

However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.

High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.

So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.

they have ran out of VC money

You know YouTube is owned by Google, not VC firms right?

Big companies sometimes keep a division / subsidiary less profitable for a time for a strategic reason, and then tighten the screws.

They generally only do this if they believe it will eventually be profitable over the long term (or support another part of the strategy so it is profitable overall). Otherwise they would have sold / shut it down earlier - the plan is always going to be to profitable.

However, while an unprofitable business always means either a plan to tighten screws, or to sell it / shut it down, tightening screws doesn’t mean it is unprofitable. They always want to be more profitable, even if they already are.

They don’t have any leverage, because the people calling the shots in Israel (and to be clear, that is the likes of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who want effectively no Arabs river to sea, and hence Netanyahu, who I think would do just about any atrocity no matter how abhorrent just to stay in power and out of jail) value the pretext to invade far more than they value the lives of the hostages.

So the hostages do not actually give Hamas any leverage over Israel - hence why Israel is not willing to agree to anything. Hamas should not have taken civilians hostage or targeted civilians in the first place, and they should release them. That is still an ongoing war crime, even if it is overshadowed by bigger ones being perpetrated by the Israeli side.

Hamas never had a chance of winning on military might.

The best chance for a good outcome for the Palestinian people is through raising awareness of the plight of the Palestinians, resulting in international pressure. The pressure against Israel arising now is because of the severity of Israel’s war crimes, while Hamas’ war crimes are one of the key talking points used to justify not taking action. Hamas could help Palestine win the information space war by taking the high road; winning a military war is futile for them.

While it is not fair to punish Palestinian civilians for the war crimes of Hamas just because the interests of Palestinian civilians are aligned to Hamas’ goals, there are many people who don’t see it that way. Palestinian statehood (or a non-apartheid one-state solution) would now get far more international support if the Palestinian militants shifted to peaceful resistance.

Votes on this comment:

1. Came from 14 different instances - many of them major. Of those instances, the instance with the most votes contributed was lemmy.world (i.e. your own instance), from which my instance has seen 14 votes for that comment.
2. Of the voters, I looked at the distribution of the person IDs assigned on my instance, which approximately represents the order they were seen by my instance (e.g. they voted on or interacted with another comment). If there was vote manipulation, I’d expect to see lots of IDs close together. However, there are not runs of IDs that are close together. To avoid this when manipulating votes, they’d need to have planned in advance, and made accounts and used them individually over time before finally deploying them to downvote you.

If there are instances that are a significant source of vote manipulation, and the local admins are unwilling to address it, there are options available to instance admins like defederation.

However - in the case of your comments, there is no meaningful evidence of vote manipulation.

True, except the difference Israel is still taking occupied land and building settlements, and excluding the people born there from them.

The government at least needs to pick one of the two options to move forward (as well as acknowledging and making reparations for those with traditional connections to the land who were affected by past injustices):

1. The two state solution: Palestine is a genuinely separate sovereign state, with a right to self determination, airspace, control of their territorial waters and so on. Israeli government representatives only enter Palestine on invitation from the government. Anyone born on Palestinian land, even on a former settlement, is a Palestinian unless they find another state to accept them and renounce their citizenship. Palestinians have equal protection of the law, and are expected to follow Palestinian laws on Palestinian land, or face the Palestinian justice system. If they renounce their citizenship, they are subject to Palestinian immigration law and might have to leave Palestine.
2. The one state solution: The entire Israeli occupied ‘river to sea’ area is one state, and everyone born there is an Israeli citizen, with equal rights under the law, power to vote, etc…

The problem is the current right-wing extremists in power in Israel do not want either solution; they want to have it both ways - when it comes to ownership and control, they want to deny the existence of a Palestinian state. But when it comes to citizenship, they want to claim everyone born on the land they occupy is not Israeli so they can deny them rights and exploit them. Their life is substantially controlled by the Israeli state, but they get no say in the leadership of the state - undermining claims it is a democracy. They don’t have equal protection under the law - Israeli authorities protect settlers taking land against people with generational connections to the land.

None of this is new in history, as you point out. Most of the Roman Empire, most of the former British Commonwealth, etc… had similar things in the past, with massacres of the native people, lands confiscated, native people been treated as having fewer rights than the colonialists, etc…

What is different is that those are all past atrocities (although fair reparations have still not been paid in many cases, at least further atrocities are generally not continuing to anything like the same extent), while Israel continues to commit the same atrocities to this very day.

Or use it as a Progressive Web App. This could be a good thing for awareness of PWAs and for them being seen as a killer feature that people won’t buy a smartphone unless they support them well. A transition away from app stores to PWAs can only be good.

If they are doing TikTok, maybe they should do Facebook, Reddit and YouTube next.

While Milei doesn’t have a lot going for himself, in this case it could also be that the companies supplying the fuel have some US component / have more to lose from not having access to American markets than they gain from supplying that airline, and it is the US government to blame.

The US blockade of Cuba is, of course, very hypocritical; there have been human rights abuses in Cuba relatively recently (e.g. the crackdown on peaceful July 11 2021 protestors), but if that is grounds for continuing sanctions of an unrelated industry for links to that country, then if there wasn’t a double standard the US should firstly be sanctioning Israel for years of brutal repression and apartheid in Israeli-occupied Palestine, and secondly be sanctioning itself for the police crackdowns on protestors calling for righting the wrongs in Palestine.

And also the videos were being used to incite people to retaliate. Immediately after the attack, a rioting mob seeking vigilante justice surrounded the church, trapping the paramedics (who were treating the assailant) and the assailant inside. The mob apparently injured dozens of police, damaged about a hundred cars, including writing off a number of police cars, and some people armed with illegal weapons climbed a ladder to try to get into the church.