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It's like website companies that state in their privacy statement "We and our 6457 business partners take your privacy and data very seriously...."

No, I claim today's prize for tautology. 😁

I should clarify, with eroded I don't meant that they are lost per se. But they do not function as expected, i.e. inform and calibrate folks to a common baseline of reality. As I mentioned, I think even without hijacking, we would run into at least similar issues as we do not have mechanisms to deal with a couple elements. a) oversupply of information (in the broadest terms, includes cat videos), b) constant distraction by algorithms and related mechanisms, diminishing the time spent on sifting through the presented information, potentially related to that, c) diminishing role of folks trusted to sift through that and present a coherent analysis with explanation. Folks increasingly are not willing or able to read longer articles (much less, books) and even have not the patience (nor do they expect) folks to explain why certain conclusions are wrong or not, even things are even slightly complicated. The latter was always an issue with the broader populace, but the attention span has even further diminished. Also, the conventional wisdom to simplify things for e.g. science reporting has now become a liability.

Just my two cents. I think "lazy" is not very useful way to think about this situation, as it is not easily quantifiable and because of that, we will not know whether it is something new for this election or whether the level of laziness (whatever it may be) has been unchanged. However, the question of inept is more interesting, and while it is pretty useless as a broad statement, it is important to look how people adapt to the onslaught of information presented to them. Even without malicious players, the democratization of information requires some skills to be able to identify reliable information. This used to be the role of news, but their role (and ability) have been diminished. Add to that broader societal changes in education and (I think) we have a serious erosion of ability to, even identify facts (much less interpret them). The fact that there are malicious players are able to utilize it to their own benefit is, I think, just a symptom of the overall vulnerability we are facing. And so far, I have yet to see an approach beyond teaching medial literacy in school. And that does not seem to yield much benefits outside of limited tests, either. In part because the approach is still based on outdated assumptions. The way people think about information, the desire for instantaneous answers and all the other elements are changing how we think and what what information we trust. It mirrors in a way some themes in Orwell's 1984, only that it is not governmental mandated language, but rather an emergent property of information overload.

Wanted to address this last night but was really tired, which I expect to be for the next four years. As for the information pipelines; it's less than they have become eroded but have been hijacked and also multiplied exponentially over the years, not just of new pipelines but reservoirs and filters of varying levels of pollution. Information does the rounds through this clusterfuck of piping and bad faith hijackers, that would make any plumber quit working on fixing that project and bring it all down and start from scratch. Take any given subject, calculate how many true things can possibly be said about that subject and compare that to how many untrue things you could say about it. Lies and falsehoods are insidious not in that sometimes they can be told rather convincingly told, but falsehoods outnumber truth and facts. Truth and facts are limited by the reality that is, whether lies and falsehoods are limited by human imagination. Not to mention that the most insidious kind of lies are the ones that twist and bend truth and facts, turning them against those ideals at times. We also need to recognize our own place in this information system as filters and reservoirs in our own right. Sorry to stretch the metaphor so much but the pipeline is really more like a web built by a bunch of spiders high on acid at this point. Everyone has a megaphone, so all we hear is white noise and are in a near constant state of information overload. Add in AI bots and info generators and it's going to get even worse. The Internet itself is, at this point Jung's collective consciousness technologically enabled, it is a grand repository of all human knowledge, true, but that is just a small part of what it really is. It's the digital mental imprint of our species, the good, the bad and the ugly. I don't mean to sound so dour or dramatic. This is just what comes to mind when I think about your question independent of this election bs. I do hate to admit it but I agree with Zap here. I work with Trump supporters, working class people are not lazy and they aren't bad people either. We need to be more mindful of the power of cult influence that makes it's followers, dangerous but also victims. They have good reasons for lashing out, they are just brainwashed into picking the wrong people to lash out at. The real problem are the snake heads that fuel it all through lies, truth warping, bullying and manipulation. Usually for profit, power and/or. The Nick Fuentes and Donald Trumps of the world. Look at Trump's own upbringing. Clearly his father learned from his Sith master well, because that's the sort of dynamic I see in Trump's upbringing and in the MAGA cult and you can see it in scientology. The biggest liars, backstabbers, bullies, brutes and manipulators are what rises to the top and competition does not stop at foe but spills over into competing with your own camp in a constant game of one up on whoever you can trample on to climb up. The problem isn't that these people are lazy, far from it. They are criminally and immorally sophisticated and should not be underestimated. The result of this election make that clear as day and it's as clear as day who is running the show, the mega rich. It's always money fought for and money rules. In a hyper capitalistic monopoly economy, the only true economic power is buying power and the richest men in the world got behind Donald Trump and Donald Trump still has a day of reckoning coming, either due to health problems or JD Vance or some other evil entity to completely take over and use every opportunity Trump gave them to solidify and iron grip on everything.

Glad we agree

A global trend involving inflation and incumbents. Could Harris have done anything to buck the trend or was it unavoidable? “This has been a banner year for elections; nearly half of the population of the world has gone to the polls in 2024 in a rare aligning of the calendar. The temperature of the world has been taken. And with a few notable exceptions, and to the extent that those elections were free and fair, the result has been largely the same: Virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world has lost.” https://prospect.org/economy/2024-11-06-globally-predictable-result-election-inflation-trump/

The information media are largely responsible for what's happened - and all the very shit that's going to happen. The mainstream media treated Trump as if what he said and did were normal and acceptable; they very often translated his idiotic ramblings into language that resembled policies. They let stand unchallenged many of his lies and diversions. For ten years, they gave him the spotlight he requires to flourish, out of all proportion to other candidates; even covering his rallies while in the White House. They've had an unbalanced set of standards for Trump and everyone else; a ridiculously high tolerance for his toxic rhetoric, and severe judgment of his opponents. (Some of them will regret that.) Worse, the right-wing media have co-opted all sources of 'information' to half of the country, so that the people who have been pre-primed for decades (by previous GOP candidates, by their state governments and propaganda organs) to believe the poison he spews never heard any other side. (Some of them will be richly rewarded for it.)

It’s amazing what happens when the world’s richest man owns X/Twitter and instructs their engineers to change the algorithm to prioritize all Trump related posts and content, then has that amplified by vast troll armies from authoritarian nation states and useful idiots across the US.

Field of Theoretical Science I developed based on Nuclei-Shells Here-Then I study how arrangement of certain Nuclei can give rise to SuperConductivity, the process is an echo of how Proton warped a Pre-Electron space to form Electrons. That was yesterday... Today it seems theoretically possible not only to create a shield the likes of which seen in many Sci-Fi films on spaceships, but my unique version based upon the science, suggests... Radiation been mechanical energy can be caught & channelled into its 'correct' mechanical place/position. Differs from Blackhole as that warps breaks down matter. More Wandering Planet that grows not by taking one energy and converting it to other work order, rather taming harmful radiation by channelling to machine where its useful work. Recycling at cosmic level