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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Leadership wants her out, and she finally accepted the option of letting another Democratic senator temporarily fill her position on the Judiciary Committee while she was unable to attend for many, many weeks in the most recent episode - but Republicans refused.

    At that point, Democratic leadership can decide that they want her out so badly that they’ll simply hand Republicans a win. Or they can try to get her back in her seat with her hand on the button, so that Democrats can get at least a few wins in the Judiciary Committee.

    I want Feinstein out, but I still think Democratic leadership made the correct decision.


  • Flashback:

    Under Navarro’s plan, dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep,” former Vice President Mike Pence was to send disputed election results back to the states, thereby forcing hours of debate on Capitol Hill.

    “It was a perfect plan,” Navarro said in an interview late last year with the Daily Beast. “And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protesters, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”

    Now that the masterminds behind the plan to end democracy in America in order to install an unelected dictator are seeing some consequences, how about we also go after co-conspirators like those “over 100 congressmen” who were so happy to go along with it?











  • “Market dominance” simply means that a single company has the means to shape the entire market - not that it must have 90+ percent market share.

    You’re essentially arguing that it’s easier for a user to find a third party app in the App Store, install it, create an account in the app, and start messaging than it is to start messaging with the pre-installed first party app.

    I don’t find that persuasive.


  • Apples to oranges.

    The reason is that messaging services like WhatsApp became popular in Europe because carriers charged exorbitant fees for SMS messaging at a time when no single phone manufacturer absolutely dominated the market. Apps like WhatsApp made it possible to communicate with people, no matter which specific phone or brand or platform they were using.

    If the iPhone (with iMessage pre-installed) had been the dominant smartphone and ecosystem at the time, chances are that what’s happening in the US would have happened in Europe in exactly the same way.

    It’s exactly the same argument as with Windows and Internet Explorer: if Windows had been one podunk operating system out of many, nobody would have cared. The whole issue was that Microsoft used the market dominance of Windows to quasi-lock users into Internet Explorer.


  • Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US?

    Of course they’re not blocked.

    People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone and sits right there on the first screen, because it’s marginally easier than picking a third party app in the App Store, installing it, and creating an account.

    It’s the exact same argument that Microsoft made when they bundled Internet Explorer with their OS.