Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.

Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.

Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.

Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

It’s real. From the yahoo news article that someone else linked: The defense secretary wrote “Cool story, General” in response to a tweet from retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges about Adolf Hitler gathering Nazi generals in 1935 and them being “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.”

I think no one mentioned these yet: My favorite tablet games are the ports of old BioWare classics like Baldur’s Gate 1+2, Icewind Dale, … Excellent ports imo, bur I did play them on a 10" tablet, I wouldn’t try to play them on a phone. https://www.beamdog.com/games/

At the time when I became inactive on Reddit, Azerbaijan was building up to finish the Nagarno Karrabach conflict once and for all. There was a lot of blatant anti Armenian, pro Azerbaijani misinformation being posted in relevant discussions (that they were tolerant, only wanting peace, there was never any ethnic cleansing, …), and most of those comments went without anyone posting a simple fact check to debunk it.

I suspected that they had been sharing a blocklist and had blocked most of those who would call them out on their bullshit. I didn’t bother either since I just expected to be blocked as well and I had basically given up on the platform anyhow. I found swapping accounts to read threads annoying as hell, so it was easier to not comment and just be silently disappointed in humanity.

The fact checks that I did see at the time, were mostly posted as a reply to the top comment of the chain, hoping to go unnoticed by the one spreading misinformation, but that will only work for so long. Reddit is fucked when it comes to discussing political news or gauging public opinion (imo), it’s now designed for spreading misinformation (imo again).

For anyone wondering how the blocking feature has been weaponized to spread misinformation, in 2022 a redditor did an experiment: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/

Afaik, the blocking feature is still in the same state as in 2022, which makes modern reddit a heaven for spreading misinformation.

Nationalism? You’re really stretching there. I don’t really get how that comes into here either. More ad hominem arguments, this time against me, won’t convince me either.

Ultimately it’s really simple to convince me. There is data. You want this data to not be true and you want to convince me that this data is not true. To convince me that this data is not true, your options are:
A) showing that the institution has on other occasions fabricated data. B) or showing that that report has been shown to contain fabricated data or used a flawed methodology.

You can do neither. All your arguments against it are purely ad hominem, against aspi, against the entirety of Australia, against the evil west with their freedom of expression, with also some whataboutism about Israel thrown in. But you have no actual arguments or any kind of proof whatsoever that that data is not real. You may not want it to be real, but it apparently is. Your unwillingness to accept facts that do not align with your beliefs is a you problem.

Whataboutism? I’m not going there. All your arguments against the data that you don’t like were ad hominem. You have no objective basis for your narrative other than your personal beliefs.

The report is 4 years old and as far as I can find, since then there have been no retractions of anything in it, nor has anyone shown that their were flaws with their methodology. You may not want to acknowledge it, but that data is real. This is something that has really happened.

It’s a report that has been widely reported on in the media at the time. They could not just “craft data” and get away with it. Forging verifiable data is the stupidest thing that a think tank could do if they want their future reports to also be picked up by mainstream media. They can be creative with their conclusions or accusations, but claiming that official government data says X, while it doesn’t, that’s not going to fly and they know it.

I assume that when they claim that the official Chinese county data is showing certain things, that that county data is indeed showing those things. Otherwise they would have no credibility and their propaganda efforts would be wasted.

There was also per county data available, showing a correlation between the size of the decline and the ethnic makeup of the county: “The largest declines have been in counties where Uyghurs and other indigenous communities are concentrated. Across counties that are majority-indigenous the birth-rate fell, on average, by 43.7 percent in a single year between 2017 and 2018. The birth-rate in counties with a 90 percent or greater indigenous population declined by 56.5 percent, on average, in that same year.” https://www.aspi.org.au/report/family-deplanning-birthrates-xinjiang/

The meme checks out: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/population-birth-rate-by-region/cn-population-birth-rate-xinjiang . Birth rate was 1.588 in 2017 and at a similar level in the years before that, 1.069 in 2018, 0.814 in 2019 and so on.

Extra surveillance and repression reportedly started in 2014, mass incarceration in 2017.

A non exhaustive list of what makes them awful: https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-paypal-so-bad/

Afaik, the issue that was making the most victims, was that they were facilitating scammers that targeted sellers:
5. Good Luck Recouping Losses as a Seller in Disputes.
89% of sellers experienced dispute resolution problems with PayPal in 2021 surveys. Despite providing evidence the item shipped or service rendered, they lost cases and sums averaging $622.
This is driven by PayPal‘s buyer-favored review round taking 1-2 weeks. This favors scamming buyers at the expense of legitimate businesses.

Iirc, there was a time when Paypal always sided with the buyer, irregardless of evidence or past track record, the review process was useless. Once scammers picked up on this and began scamming sellers en masse, Paypal still kept their policy unchanged for years and sellers started to raise their prices on platforms that forced them to accept Paypal (ebay used to do this). Ebay has since tossed Paypal off their platform. I don’t know if Paypal ever improved.

The setup of this movie reminds me of Locke with Tom Hardy. That’s also basically a movie where you watch 1 person in a static situation (in a car in Locke) conducting remote project management. I’d have never expected a full movie to work with that setup, but Locke pulls it off imo.

It probably has to be pedophilic instead of pedophile to be correct.

When calling that number, the caller will need somekind of proof that they are in control of the car that they are trying to opt out of ads. Afaik, the easiest way to accomplish that when requiring a phonecall, would be pairing phone and car. But obviously Stellantis is not going for easy with this setup, so this is purely speculation on my part.

? Where did I say it was about cost? I don’t live in the usa. The 3 hospitals that I could potentially pick from are public hospitals and their cost for the same procedures would be exactly the same, since they have to stick to a government price list. But between those 3, I still have a preference.

Some people will already have a preference and not need to look up anything. I would have if the accident happened near where I live. Imo it’s not a bad question at all.

Apart from how insane it is to put obtrusive ads on a car dashboard, having to link your phone to your car and then call a phone number to opt out of touchscreen display ads is 🤯

There is going to be a reason that they’ve set it up like that.

In my region, it seems that expensive stolen bikes mostly go to eastern Europe, Ukraine and Romania in particular.