I’m new here and don’t know what to put in my profile. She/them, living in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

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  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • In our case it was a city of about 40,000 that only existed for two weeks, so it’s hard to say how it might scale

    Keeping order is one thing, but police do a bunch of things no one else has time for.

    Endless follow ups, liaising with social workers, taking long statements for inquests, or spending all day protecting someone’s right to peacefully protest.


  • Maybe it’s because I live in a country where the police don’t carry guns (and sex work is legal), but I found it really hard to put my finger on exactly what they are advocating for here.

    They seem to be saying that police only exist to enforce middle class interests? I don’t think that’s entirely true.

    I would like to see more change in how policing is done, but the idea that communities self-police is idealistic. Sure they do in some ways, but it can be just as selective and just as damaging as anything police do.













  • It is way worse than I thought from the title and bot summary. I thought maybe they mistranslated a word like “activist” but no:

    The issue, which was first reported by 404media, affected users with the word “Palestinian” written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word “alhamdulillah” written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”

    It was literally just alhamdulillah that got this weird sentence added to it!

    After the first video, Instagram resolved the issue. The auto-translation now reads: “Thank God”. A spokesperson for Meta told Guardian Australia the issue had been fixed earlier this week.



  • I don’t really understand some of this. Why pair it with a VAT? VAT itself is a known to be a regressive tax because poor people/ households spend a higher percentage of their incomes on consumption (food etc) so the effect of a VAT is to raise their overall tax percentage.

    This is definitely what happens in my country, where we have a flat 15% VAT on all goods and services. As someone on disability that means I’m being taxed an extra 15% on most of my income.



  • When will people realise that google has tailored algorithms and we are not all experiencing the same search results?

    The first thing you’ll see if you search Google for “tank man” right now will not be the iconic picture of the unidentified Chinese man who stood in protest in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, but an entirely fake, AI-generated selfie of that historical event.

    No, this is the first thing the author saw. Probably because they are a journalist writing about AI.

    When I google tank man I don’t even get the AI image on the first page. The top result is from history.com. If I go to google image search it is the 7th result on the page. The top result is from wikipedia.