Uber Black is “Luxury rides with professional driver.”

“Professional” insinuates “paid”, so the other Uber drivers aren’t paid?

My bowels have been questioning a lot lately, so it’s not entirely without precedent.

1 I had assumed votes were private 2 If I don’t hear soon that votes are private, I’ll simply stop participating and return to lurking. I’ll eventually just wander off to the next thing that doesn’t expose my votes to potential bots and/or abusive actors.

Soon she’s going to reveal she’s a Borat/Andy Kaufman-esque comedian and we’ve all been pranked.

Decades ago, a collegue of mine (who once worked in hard drive design) said, “Oh, hard drives stopped reading 1’s and 0’s years ago. Now they compute the probability that the data just read was a 1 or a 0.”

What’s the second reason?

From the article, it sounds like the HPV vaccine would help prevent these penile cancers.
Refresh my memory… weren’t Republicans up in arms trying to prevent their children from getting the HPV vaccine?

So now India AND Israel AND Russia?

I’m going to take a somewhat different tack to describing this.

There are many ways to motivate large groups of people. You’ve likely seen this a lot and not really noticed or paid attention to it. Some examples are tribalism (“Hey! They’re not one of us!”), nationalism (“Those dirty foreign people!”), religion (“Do what I say and go to heaven!”), money (“Do this and I’ll give you something valuable”), etc.

One of the best motivators is fear. (“Do this or I/they will do something you really don’t like”).

Political groups need something to motivate large groups of people. When done well, they appeal to the better sides of humanity. When done by the lazy, the dumb and the craven, they go with the simple one: fear.

That’s what Conservatism has been hammering for a while now. They don’t really have a way to appeal to people’s better sides, primarily because their platform isn’t to make humanity better off. They platform is to make a few people better off to the detriment of everyone else. So they try tribalism (“Those brown people are trying to take your money!”), nationalism (“Those foreigners are taking your jobs!”), religion (“Those non-Christians are trying to install sharia law!”), etc. The most effective one is still fear. So getting their followers scared and angry is the best way to motivate them, get them to stop thinking rationally and build moats that will isolate them from people that might talk them down.

This is used to motivate people to vote in certain ways, as well as motivate them to watch advertisements. In other words: power and money.

Look, I don’t want to give away too much, but don’t waste time trying to untangle the tea leaves here. It’s all babbling horsesh*t like so many other beliefs systems we can name. They don’t understand any of this and are hoping that they can basically talk their way out of these situations. The noises that they make have no meaning, rhyme nor reason.

I read on Lemmy that is was a “secret”. Promise not to tell anyone or this won’t be a secret anymore.

/s