• 4 Posts
  • 266 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong).

    Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate’s campaign, but that hardly matters in practice.

    Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party?

    Yes, but it’s extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990.

    Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election?

    No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC.

    Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it?

    That’s illegal, which doesn’t always stop them from doing it.




  • Messaging, web browser, podcasts, navigation, a couple services that require a phone to access. I tend to not install apps that could be websites.

    Hardware drivers are surely dated. Android, on the other hand is 15, and I assume getting updated to 16 soon. I think I’m pretty good with regard to the sort of zero-click exploits I’ve heard of used for targeted attacks. If somebody slipped a trojan into a software update, I could have a problem, especially if it was a privileged app like AccA or Adaway. Of course, updated drivers wouldn’t protect me from that.


  • The entire smartphone industry.

    I use five year old smartphone (Pixel 4a). I can afford a new one, but I don’t need a new one, and it would be worse in ways I care about (bigger, probably without a headphone jack), without being better in any way that really matters to me, so I don’t want a new one.

    Official software updates ended a couple years ago, but I’m running LineageOS and I got an update this week. Google has intentionally made it hard for most people to use LineageOS or any other Android distribution not blessed by Google as their primary phone by allowing app developers to check whether it’s Google-approved. For now, I can usually work around that, but it would be too big a hurdle for most people.

    The kernel is getting pretty old though; it’s 4.14 when I’m up to 6.17 on my laptop. This is because SOC vendors don’t release open source drivers, nor maintain the proprietary ones for very long.

    Finally, there’s the battery. Mine is in great shape because I use AccA to limit charge to 60% most of the time, but charging to 100% as most people do would have greatly reduced its capacity by this point. Replacing it requires melting glue and some risk of damage. Most phones are like that now (though that’s changing due to EU regulation).







  • He then said I groomed him.

    He was trying to make himself feel better about being creepy with a kid. He’s wrong is this situation. There isn’t really any room for ambiguity.

    Neither of us were exactly saints

    You were a kid. Kids are entitled to do dumb stuff while figuring out how social interaction works, and should not feel bad about it years later. He was an adult, pretending to be a kid online and being very creepy. Depending on exactly what he said, sent, or requested, his behavior may even be criminal in some jurisdictions.


  • Reading through this story, I don’t see any mention of sexual contact, which would make it pretty hard for there to be any sexual assault. If I’m reading this right, it looks like you, as a child had a purely online relationship that was half roleplay and half real with an adult.

    If you knowingly misled him, kids do dumb things sometimes; don’t do that again. If he knowingly mislead you, he’s an asshole. If he continued having romantic or sexual chats with you knowing your real age, he’s a creep.