As far as cults go, they don’t sound like a “literal cult” when reading about them on Wikipedia:

Ian Johnson argued that applying the ‘cult’ label to Falun Gong effectively “cloaked the government’s crackdown with the legitimacy of the West’s anticult movement”. He wrote that Falun Gong does not satisfy common definitions of a cult: “its members marry outside the group, have outside friends, hold normal jobs, do not live isolated from society, do not believe that the world’s end is imminent and do not give significant amounts of money to the organisation … it does not advocate violence and is at heart an apolitical, inward-oriented discipline, one aimed at cleansing oneself spiritually and improving one’s health.”[74]: 224  David Ownby similarly wrote that “the entire issue of the supposed cultic nature of Falun Gong was a red herring from the beginning, cleverly exploited by the Chinese state to blunt the appeal of Falun Gong”.[63]

If you want to maintain some sort of privacy when voting on any platform in the Fediverse:
Create an alt account, do not make any posts/comments with it, only use it for voting.

Otherwise we would need an instance that generates a bunch of voting accounts. Then, when you vote on something, the instance randomly assigns that vote to one of their voting accounts and sends out that vote information to other instances. Then only the Admins of your home instance would be able to view your voting history.

Looks like they were actually aware of it after all.

If you watch the video of it, they come in very calmly and the first thing they say is, “you’ve been swatted again.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbqBZ1v8BRg

TL/DW:
Pokimane started a snack company. There are rumors that the company is going bankrupt. The website is suddenly inaccessible (this is what the “deleted everything” statement is referring to).

Well, on the fediverse votes are public.
For example any Mbin instance can show you who is upvoting.

Although keep in mind that an upvote doesn’t necessarily mean that someone agrees with everything that was said (or even anything that was said). It could just mean that they think the post is fitting for the community and contributes to the discussion.

Personally, a tankie statement like that is definitely deserving of a downvote.

You must be very young,
haven’t seen many movies,
only seen the worst movies,
or else you really need to get into directing and make a movie that will put everything else to shame.

Or maybe that’s the translated name of some movie I’ve never seen. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Although, I am curious, what would it take to make a good movie in your opinion? Or what do current movies seem to be lacking in?

deleted by creator

The “Natural Flavors” ingredient in the U.S.

Just because something claims to have natural flavoring for strawberry, doesn’t mean it actually comes from strawberries.

Something “vanilla” flavored may actually come from chemically processed wood pulp, or even the anal castor sacs of a beaver.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/the-truth-behind-the-clean-label-myth-what-natural-flavoring-really-contains/ar-AA1RSQBb

• “Zero calories” or 0 grams of [blank] in the nutrition information. The regulations let them round down if it’s less than 1 gram.

For example, take a look at the “Serving size” of some cooking spray. 1/3 of a second of spray means 0.25g… So everything is zeroed out in the Nutrition facts.

Wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened.

For instance, there are regulations in place that mandate that anything called “white chocolate” must contain at least a certain percentage of milk. Which, in my opinion, is ridiculous. If someone wanted to create “white chocolate” using cacao butter and a dairy free alternative, they should be able to call it white chocolate.

Worst case scenario here, we just adopt a name that’s ridiculously close to what it used to be, like “vedgurger” or “sausagies”.

You can take your pick here: https://ground.news/article/connecticut-police-find-decomposed-body-after-standoff-with-man-who-shot-at-officers_21cc82

Wait, why would they get in trouble? PepsiCo owns all of these companies (Frito Lays, Naked, Doritos/Cheetos, etc.).

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PepsiCo_brands

This is an important point. Simply giving a ton of rice to an area will put the rice farmers in that area out of business.

They’ll need to grow something else to make a living, but then when the next year comes around, no one is making rice anymore and they’ll be dependent on that external flow of rice.

Some other countries build up math skills a little differently. For instance, in Portugal, they teach a little bit of Algebra, a little bit of Geometry, and a little bit of Calculus every year.

In the U.S. the students focus on Algebra, one year, then Geometry the next, then Algebra again, and finally Calculus (if they did well in the previous math courses).

So, if a student transferred for their senior year of High School from the U.S. to Portugal, they would have a different experience compared to their peers. They would find all of the Algebra and Geometry sections very easy and be able to help tutor the other students, but then they would struggle with the Calculus portions and need help from the others.

I’m not sure how common this is among other european countries. I would be curious to know how math courses are taught in other countries.

Oh, oh, I know! How about they release an app, or a website, where we can take a picture of the face of any of these Agents, and it will confirm if they’re actually one or not.

On a serious note, it would be very useful to have a better system of confirming who is an actual agent or not. Something like plugging their badge number into a website and they have to confirm a daily code or similar.

I mean, votes are public in the fediverse. I wouldn’t try to read into the reasoning from a single downvoter too much though.

One downvote could be accidental. 2 downvotes in the same thread makes that seem less likely.

Downvoting/Upvoting doesn’t mean the same thing that it does for everyone. Some use it as an agree/disagree. Some use it for whether a comment is productive and adds to the conversation or not. Some use it as a visibility score whether they think a comment should be seen by others first or whether there are other comments that are better. Some may agree with most everything in a comment except for one part and then downvote because of that.

This isn’t a problem that’s unique to “capitalism”. It’s a monopoly problem. Even in other economy types this problem would exist. For example, with communism almost everything would be a monopoly.

A free market is supposed to provide us multiple options to take our business, but we need regulation to keep capitalism in check.

We do have laws against monopolies, and there is already a case against Live Nation/Ticketmaster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Live_Nation_Entertainment

The way to really fix this is through our legal system and representatives. We need to pressure our representatives to pass better laws to prevent this from happening again as well as electing officials who actual care about issues like this.

Poe’s law strikes again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe’s_law

(Maybe use a ‘/s’ next time)

It might be better if you can link to the timestamp around where this takes place.

Especially considering that you just linked to a 7+ hour video. Edit: just realized that you do have the start time in there. Looks like GrayJay only handles &t=____s instead of &start=____s

No problem! Thanks for the edit.

The only video I could find of events leading up to the shooting was this one (if you want to add on to the comment): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4qBLgk9hWw