Thanks for the inside view. I never knew a lot of the survey takers came from mobile games or that spending could be tracked.

They could have an AI tweak the statistics if they seem unrealistic

That someone is Peter Thiel according to this: https://corbettreport.com/the-stupidest-poll-of-all-time/

Yup.

Why are they in lemmy.ml? Because they wanted to congregate somewhere and Lemmy was made by far left people and is federated so it’s probably a good choice to avoid censorship.

Why do they admire authoritarian regimes? Each may have a different reason but one common reason is because those regimes are anti-western or socialist/communist. So if you’re socialist/communist, hate a lot of aspects of the west or just like rooting for the underdog but still want a big team you can throw your support behind then those countries are the obvious choice. Of course you can be socialist, communist or anti-western without supporting authoritarian regimes, but then you basically have to admit that every time socialism/communism has been tried it has failed and you may be discomforted by the thought that there’s no powerful countries fighting for humanity and become hopeless.

Why are people socialist/communist? Usually because they see a lot of problems with capitalism, often to do with inequality, while socialism/communism promises total equality and fairness.

Why are people anti-western? I wouldn’t say the people we’re talking about are consistently anti-western, since they don’t oppose many things the modern west represents, like LGBTQ, technology, “democracy”, human rights, common law, federalism, hedonism, progressivism, etc. It seems to me they only dislike the aspects they’ve been told to dislike by western mainstream media and education, which focuses on things like the Atlantic slave trade (rather than slavery in Africa, the middle east, eastern Europe, pre-Columbian America or literally anywhere else in all of world history) and Nazi Germany (rather than Communist Russia, China, North Korea or Cuba).

You mean human societies everywhere are failing and some people attribute that to capitalism

I think it’s debatable who is worse. The country who killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with nuclear weapons and millions more in world domination efforts including soft power and manipulation, or the country who killed hundreds of thousands in a single communist purge, millions more in Holodomor and would probably have nuked cities if they had invented nukes first. Several other countries are/were similarly bad and many others would be if they had sufficient power.

But they don’t oppose everything the west represents. Like technology, LGBTQ, “democracy”, common law, federalism, etc. It seems to me they only dislike the aspects they’ve been told to dislike by mainstream media and education, which focuses on things like the Atlantic slave trade (rather than slavery in Africa, the middle east, eastern Europe, pre-Columbian America or literally anywhere else in all of world history) and Nazi Germany (rather than Communist Russia, China, North Korea or Cuba).

Your comment betrays an ignorance of the subject and makes no sense since you link to an article that is predominantly about equating goodness with other properties, whereas your criticism is about the idea that nature is good. It’s obvious you actually had the appeal to nature fallacy in mind but nevertheless you linked to an article which barely mentions it. Also humans are part of the natural world so your further comment requires explanation.

Leacked? Is that a portmanteau of hacked and leaked?

Of course designer babies would take longer since the human genome had not even been decoded yet. But now anyone’s DNA can be sequenced cheaply it’s only a matter of time. We recently got a company that lets you pick your IVF embryo based on predicted IQ and other genetic indicators.

Natural is usually better, so I don’t consider it a fallacy. Subverting nature is always bad. Picking berries, hunting or farming are definitely better for us and more rewarding than sitting in front of screens to make a line go up.

There’s a big difference between fixing something that’s broken and finding a workaround that ignores how things are supposed to be done.

How is it different? That’s like saying what’s the difference between selling babies or baby toys at Walmart? And additionally what does it matter if those babies were grown in artificial wombs or using AI-generated DNA or some other techno-dystopian horror?

This is why biometric verification was always a bad idea

Indeed. And as bad as designer babies are in the best of worlds, it’s obviously going to be abused for population control or practitioners with an agenda.

The huge acceptance of growing babies in a lab for money is very disheartening

They have researchers working on other things too, don’t you worry

Use cash for now, but start transitioning to other privacy currencies, especially those that don’t depend on technology, such as precious metals and local currencies like Ithaca hours. Edit: I say transition away from cash (as in government-produced cash) because that they have serial numbers that enable tracking and they can decide to declare them invalid or inflate away their value through printing if people continue to use them anyway.

Bills also have serial numbers on them