I’m sure a decent amount of people would still vote for him despite him being in jail. If there’s box for him on the ballot, they’d probably even vote him after he died.

Not so sure about that. Like populism in politics, religion gives you simple answers and justifications for complex situations and easily comprehensible explanations for complex phenomenoms.

In a world that is getting harder and harder to grasp, people get lost in the big picture. Things like globalization, climate change, foreign affairs, our financial system etc. are all hard to understand for a big chunk if not the entirety of the population.

Dictators, monarchs as well as religion all provide easy guidance: Do X. Don’t do Y. You are the good guys, people who are/do/think Z are the baddies.

No individual thinking required. No boring facts, no discussions, just faith/loyalty/patriotism that counters every argument and allows you to feel superior and put the blame on someone else.

I think in situations of high social inequality or disruptive events (war, famine, financial crisis, pandamic), there will always be a high demand for religion and political extemism.

Is there a credible source for the costs of hosting? Wikipedia is listing similar ad revenues as you did but no info on the costs. YouTube has 2.7 billion users that watch in average around 11 hours of videos a month. If 2 billion USD/y would be sufficient to host all that that’d be just 0,74 USD/user*year or 0,06 USD per month. That sounds really cheap considering that you have to pay for storage, traffic, backups and redundancies (at least I never heard of significant outages or data loss on YT).

Does anyone have a credible source on the number of employees YouTube has? If you search for that you fine vastly different number from just 2k to 189k employees.

TBH I’m not sure if a platform like YouTube will ever exist in a non-commercial way. Many creators that I follow reached a level of professionalism that comes with significant costs. You need expensive cameras, microphones, lights, high-end computers, drones, personnel costs for cutters and people that help with research. They have travel costs, sometimes rent for offices etc. All that just to produce the content.

On top, there are significant costs for hosting. I mean YouTube is hosted on multiple data centers rather than a bunch of servers or even home computers. Already Lemmy, which is mostly text and pictures, is a decent financial burden to instance owners. Not to mention the time for moderation and administration. And even here, in a place full of hardcore FOSS supporters, it’s not like admins are drowned in donations.

If YouTube ads and product placements are the only source of income for content creators, then the only alternative would be that consumers directly pay for the content and the platform. Or that such a platform would be paid by some state / taxes. Both of which don’t sound very realistic to me.

I have no clue if there’s indeed any proof for such a claim, but the theory that I read elsewhere is that it’s a way to obfuscate money flows.

If a foreign nation (Russia, China, North Korea, whoever) would like to engage in the election, they can’t just donate to the campaign officially. But instead, they could buy a couple thousands of these coins in smaller transactions.

TBH I’m rather with you. I think the majority of these coins is just bought by some MAGAs. For foreign nations there’d be probably more efficient ways to transfer money like shares etc.

I only ever used it for 3D printing but FreeCAD apparantly also has a floor plan functionality. I found this video that might give you some insights on how it looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMk7pdnEnXM

When using FreeCAD for 3D printing, you don’t necessarily have to add measures/constraints to everything, so I’d assume it’s similar here.

Looks like the close-up of an elbow. They can also make up for an ass crack or a fake vagina. What a versatile part of our body!

How the hell can one have patent of ‘catching a creature through aiming’ or even more crazy to me ‘riding a creature’ in games? Both concepts exist in so many games and even in real life. I mean did Nintendo never hear of horses?

If you miss being named after the bird now, you might be interested in this petition: https://www.change.org/p/change-the-name-of-this-bird-to-türkiye

Ey, stop putting so much pressure on these hardworking people! They already had the intend once to send out an invite for a brainstorming session to create a first draft of the concept of the plan! But then they got distracted by all these important people tasks that you folks don’t have any idea of! Be more patient and show some respect! Like Trump when he visits a cemetry.

Personally, I don’t like noticeable make-up. If it’s barely visible, it’s fine as well but in general I like ‘no make up’ the best.

It’s also not only about looks:

• If you wear make-up, you have to be careful with rain, touching the face, kissing etc.
• It may take a lot of time to apply.
• It’s expensive.
• It’s rather bad than good for your skin.
• It’s bad for the environment (more trash, animal testing, contimination of water etc.).

No make-up = Win-Win-Win-[…]

As she apparantly liked roses before and now does no longer, I read it as ‘she was born without the ability to smell’.

ICQ, obviously.

How do you suddenly gain that ability? Are there implants for smell as well? Or did they extract some lego bricks that she stuffed up her nose as a kid?

What is CSAM? It is an abbreviation for many things apparantly. Are you referring to ‘Child sexual abuse material’? Did you encounter such things on Lemmy?

So far I luckily didn’t come across anything like that but I also blocked all porn-related instances that I saw so far.

Who else was waiting for the plot twist? I thought she dumps him because his voice sounds like a drowning pig in panic or so… :'D

Yeah and you’d have to deduct one from the day of the week. So they’re meeting tuesdays and thursdays at 8 PM.

It’s not okay to take away useful tools and options from non-criminals on the basis that criminals use them. We do not ban cars on the basis that they are a tool for drive-by shootings.

Again, I would say that should depend on statistics. If a tool is misused for criminal activities in the vast majority of cases, I think you have to make some compromise on personal freedom in favor of security and law enforcement.

Not really. Marginalizing and oppressing non-criminals is not justified by a hunt for criminals. If your approach to hunting criminals harms non-criminals, you’re doing it wrong.

Isn’t that the case for many preventive security measures? I mean the baggage checks at the airport are time consuming and restrict everyone on bringing liquids, large batteries, forks, knives etc. into the plane. And I’m pretty sure, the ratio of ‘terrorists carrying bombs’ to ‘just normal people bringing their water bottle’ is significantly worse than the crime : non-crime factor in case of FedEx cash.

Same with routine controls at a border or on the highway. It’s annoying for many people due to delays just to catch some few smugglers, overloaded trucks etc.

A security camera in a bank will film thousands of regular customers before it ever (if at all) gets to see a robbery.

I fully understand that people criticise all of these measures but to be honest I have some doubts that getting rid of everything would be a smart idea.

Law enforcement by definition deals with suspects not convicted criminals. So even if we moved to a purely reactive law enforcement, your measures will still affect the innocent suspects.

The case at hand is even more perverse, as the civil forfeiture practice actually hinders enforcement of law. They do the money grab for the money. When you seize cash, you send a clear signal to criminals that they are being investigated.

That point I see as well. But wouldn’t the alternative be even worse for you from a privacy perspective? They keep the practice of scanning packages but rather than seizing the money, they send investigators after the intended recipient. That wouldn’t only dramatically increase the costs of law enforcement but also lead to innocents being supervised.

When you seize money from a tax evader a year before they evade tax by filing their fraudulent tax return, you actually sabotage the opportunity to catch them (it’s crime-prevention prevention). You can only catch them by recording the cash and letting it go, then auditing their tax using that information a year or two later.

Not all money transfers are taxable income. So if police knows that you received 10,000 in a box last year but didn’t declare it that doesn’t automatically mean you invaded taxes. The criminal could say, that it wasn’t their money and they gave it to someone else, declare it as a gift or a returned loan from a friend. They could also just say that the package was stolen from the porch and never arrived.

Furthermore, the recipient on the label may not be real person. Maybe the money is shipped to “Mr & Mrs Activist Punk” but the real criminal is waiting in front of the house to intercept the delivery.

All in all, I still think seizing big amounts of cash from deliveries is somewhat acceptable as long as…

• Police can provide statistics to underline that the practice is used by criminals in a significant manner.
• All cases are well-documented and no money is going to the policemen themselves.
• There is a reasonable limit (e.g. don’t seize 100 USD that aunt Marty sends to her nephew for his birthday).
• The sender and recipient are informed about the money being seized and have a chance to reclaim it if they can proof the legitimate background.

Please leave some internet for the rest of us!

Regarding all the companies you’ve critized: isn’t that unfortunately the case for many if not most bigger companies?

I don’t live in the US, so I can’t guarantee that the following statements are all correct and up to date. However, after a quick research many of the issues apply to FedEx as well.

FedEx donates far more money to republicans than democats and did so historically (source).

FedEx critized Trump in 2018 on some specific ideas but couldn’t find anything like that in the recent past.

If you sign up with FedEx, they may share all your data with their partners. According to Reddit even including your including your credentials (wtf). (source).

FedEx may scan the ID of the recipient (source).

FedEx requires an ID when sending in store (source).

Cash shipments are officially forbidden as per the FedEx ToS, no matter if the package is insured or not. If money is shipped anyhow it is not covered by the insurance. (source .

Didn’t find infos on memberships but FedEx promotes digital payments and the ‘Better than cash’ alliance source).

According to this petition FedEx and Pfitzer are among the biggest funders of ALEC and Project 2025.

TBC. Just wanted to list a few of the quick findings.

Regarding acceptance of cryptocurrency or other forms of payments, I think that’s similar for sending cash in a box. Again, I don’t live in the US, but in Germany you’d be having a hard time to find a jeweler or other professional entity that accepts such a form of payment. First, they won’t want to have discussions if packages are lost or valuables are partly stolen from the package. Second, they don’t want to be associated with dubious businesses. Furthermore, there’s a legal limit for cash payments of 10,000€ to avoid money laundering.

I think to get back to the original topic, it’d be interesting to see some statistics on what percentage of the cases where police seized cash from packages were legal (although against FedEx ToS) and how many were related to criminal activities. If it’s like 90% crime and the 10% legitimate senders/recipients have a chance to reclaim their money after providing further details, then I’m fine with that. If the numbers are the other way around, I’m siding with you. ;)