@wdlindsy tiresome but ultimately meaningless. Puerto Ricans know that Trump's rally featured a speaker who called their homeland a "floating pile of garbage." They know he didn't apologize.

The political press in the US does not feel comfortable driving negative impressions of Republicans.

The eagerness with which they elevated Biden's slip of the tongue demonstrates how pathological their need to let Republicans off the hook is.

@molly0xfff I'd add that Trump's chief economic advisor is predicting that Trump's policies will trigger an economic crisis on par with the Great Depression.

@protecttruth 100%.

I would add that the ADL has a space in "the inner circle" *because* they've spent a half century acting as reliable partners and supporters of the Democratic party.

Their influence is derived from generations of hard work. Getting people elected. Helping them stay in office.

This is all cast as some sort of dark and sinister conspiracy when it is literally the opposite.

Relationship-building is one of the key virtues of representative democracy.

@wdlindsy that poll shows a 10 point drop on that question (from 68 to 58) since February. Suggestive that Trump's demonization of immigrants is backfiring.

Considering how systemically biased towards rule-following American public opinion is, imo that small majority is not a good sign for Trump and the republican party.

@polotek I wish I could give you a more insider view of it. I knew a girl who knew a guy who worked for a map making company.

IIRC, he was fatalistic about it from the couple of times I talked to him. To paraphrase: "My bosses are idiots. Mapping technology has been getting better for years and my company just didn't react and now Google owns everything."

I also think he said it was overall a good thing because the map makers were basically operating as a cartel.

@polotek My biggest frustration with the current moment is that the moniker "AI" is being slapped on any data processing more sophisticated than an Excel spreadsheet.

What your friend is describing is what the mapping industry went through ~20 years ago.

The difference now is that no one called Google Maps "AI." It was sufficiently compelling to describe what Google Maps actually did.

@wdlindsy at a fundamental level, i think this misses the point. He's, if there was a historical person named Jesus who served as the foundation for the stories of the New Testament, then that person (and everyone who followed his teachings) was Jewish.

However, the Christian faith regards him literally as "the son of God."

Which means he was the first Christian (even if the actual Christian religion as a historical fact took many more years to come into existence).

@ariadne @spacehobo @andrew I was just pondering about how the challenge of instance moderation increases exponentially with the ease of setting up a federated server. And how the critical lack of sufficient tools for community moderation is actually being masked by how finicky it appears to be to set up a mastodon instance.

(I lucked into one of the unicorn instances of the fediverse apparently)

@dave @JasonW @molly0xfff and no concept of design!

@molly0xfff I like the web now, but "the good old days" are basically everything before Facebook. Especially the 90s where it felt like a playground with unlimited possibilities and everybody was having fun.

(I know not everyone was having fun, it just felt like that).