Yes, lemmy.world

You can tell it’s fake because it suggests that corporate would just hand you a new benefit out of the blue.

I don’t look at it as thanking them for these things, but rather the fact that we’re all doing those things with our tax dollars and they’re the ones getting shot at because of it in my place. To a large extent if you live in the US and reap the benefits of American dominance you’re just as guilty. Obviously the problem is - where else do you go? It makes infinitely more sense to stay and vote for a better world. Not blame the working class people the bad voters have abused.

Let’s not forget “We need this right away!” then it takes weeks to deploy because the people who requested it weren’t actually ready for it yet (if they don’t change their mind and decide they don’t actually want it at all).

Miss Cleo was big in the 90s. And she wasn’t even the dumbest one. Americans have always believed in stupid bullshit. The CIA used to hire psychics too. Go back to the 1920s, and Americans pretty much took it for granted that fairies are real.

What’s changed recently is that the news media went from being a mostly curated place where completely lunacy was hard to find, to a right wing clown show led by con artists. When I was a kid news was for nerds only, now it’s more like the national sport where everyone has their team. And don’t underestimate the degree to which this was done deliberately - Elon buying Twitter was a pretty clear example of the billionaire mafia taking a platform that was sort of trying to be more attached to reality and making it a lot dumber and more right wing.

Because protests don’t do shit. There were mass protests over police brutality in 2020. Didn’t do shit.

It’s completely unrealistic in the short term, more so in the long term. This would require arresting millions of people - there simply isn’t enough jail space. They would have to execute people on sight, and that’s also not realistic because low level soldiers would refuse (there’s a reason the nazis needed to build a system instead of just executing jews on sight). Obviously if this were attempted it would result in extremely violent resistence which would destroy any economic, political, or other incentives for such an action.

Instead we can see what happened in Russia for a more realistic example - there was a slow elimination of dissent. Even today there are some Russians who vocally oppose Putin and don’t get arrested so long as they stay small enough. And that’s in a place where the society never had a culture of freedom to begin with, so here it will probably be much harder and obviously MAGA is much dumber than the Russians too. But regardless that’s why it’s very important to be vocal now and oppose any silencing of dissent, like the removal of pro-Palestine activists here on green cards or even the pardoning of pro-Trump people, as this combined with harsh punishments for others is effectively silencing of speech. It may not affect you now, but if they keep at it for a decade or two it’ll get to you eventually.

The rain test was far more concerning because it’s much more realistic of a scenario. Both a normal person and the lidar would’ve seen the kid and stopped, but the cameras and image processing just isn’t good enough to make out a person in the rain. That’s bad. The test portrays it as a person in the middle of a straight road, but I don’t see why the same thing wouldn’t happen at a crosswalk or other place where pedestrians are often in the path of a vehicle. If an autonomous system cannot make out pedestrians in the rain reliably, that alone should be enough to prevent these vehicles from being legal.

Because to me personally this kinda feels like America is still stuck in those slavery/segregation times

Yes. American culture is very much based on social hierarchies, and slavery created a very easy, color-coded social hierarchy. So it’s hard to get rid of because a lot of people are invested in it - whether they admit it or not.

Americans (except for the most liberal) tend to look at race as a biological reality and regard anyone saying race isn’t science as woke extremism. Generally when science conflicts with common/traditional sense in America, common sense wins. The only reason quantum physics isn’t banned from schools yet is because probably only about 10% of Americans know the first thing about quantum physics.

Americans also regard a wide variety of racial discrimination - such as in dating (including who you allow your kids to date), or where you live, or where you send your kids to school, as “not racist”. This is considered not racist because the goal isn’t to harm racial minorities, but rather you’re just doing it to protect your place in the social hierarchy. The race-based social hierarchy. And if this harms minorities, well it’s not like it’s your fault right?

And if you dare try to suggest that the above is racist, people will get very angry at you and do things like elect Trump.

So yeah, racism is still very prevalent in the US.