211–220 of 302 posts
I don't really understand. Do you have anything to hide from you government?
It's 2026 & we still have people saying this ..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the best joke I've heard in a long time
The version I know is a little different: A Russian visits America and meets an American at a bar and they get talking about life in Russia. "How is the propaganda?" says the American. "It's everywhere, but it's easy to ignore it" says the Russian. "Yours is much better." "But we don't have propaganda here" says the American. "Exactly" says the Russian. idk how a person can be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag…
Being 5, I didn't know the difference between ethnicity and nationality (I'm Asian but I was born here and didn't know any life outside of America). So I was afraid that my teacher would not let me be American anymore if I didn't say the pledge. So I said it and never refused to say it in school again.
It wasn't til I was well into my adulthood that I realize how absurd that situation sounds.
I’m surprised to see no comments on this yet: [The White House app] ships with 3 embedded trackers including Huawei Mobile Services Core (yes, the Chinese company the US government sanctioned, shipping tracking infrastructure inside the sitting president's official app) The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them - but it’s embedding its SDK in its official app?! I…
> I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there Assuming incompetence gives the administration a cover to get away with anything. I'm not quite sure they're as stupid as they all act. Someone is surely using the facade of incompetence to rot things from the inside out.
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> I mean if you agree with it, it’s not propaganda A very workable definition of "propaganda" might be "an idea crafted specifically so that you will think it was your idea in the first place" That's why "agreeing" with propaganda is not the correct verb. You either believe propaganda or you don't. This has nothing to do with reason or logic.
Sure, and this 70% of Americans bullshit is propaganda by that measure. It is frequently trotted out on HN and is met with enthusiastic belief despite being total ass pull. There are US Senators pushing this propaganda and people enthusiastically agreeing.
Politicians taking advantage of the fact that their constituents will not fact check them is propaganda 101.
The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available throug…
- No search competition, when you search on duckduckgo or google for the page a competitor can bid to show up, won't happen with an app.
- Notifications, this is a big one. We live in the attention economy and apps are more likely to slide into push notifications - with ads - than webpages.
- Some users have a mental model that more easily maps to "this app is my go to for this task" and struggle with webpages. That's a psychological and incentive issue. Apple support PWAs but just barely and don't like them because they don't partake in the 100 billion dollar revenue 30% payment processing extortion.
- More intrusive access and "better" targeted advertisement.
- Once an icon is on the home screen somewhere, chances are some users are going to use it because they notice the icon and would not have done so if it were just a tab inside the browser. The attention economy strikes again.
- Companies _love_ to build a relationship with customers. It's usually a very one sided and jealous relationship where getting the user to install an app is perceived as a step in that direction.
- Users are more willing to create accounts for apps than webpages (citation needed, this is just a gut feeling)
- On mainstream iOS and Android it's much harder to block ads in apps than it is in the browser.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but those alone explain why we see them so often.
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What? Trump is just a symptom. The US didn't suddenly become what it is now because of a vote. Like it or not (and I certainly don't), the people voted for this, twice. Whether they voted for it because they actually wanted it vs they voted for it because politicians convinced them they wanted it, it is what we wanted.
I don't deny that Republicans existed before Trump, but Trump being elected certainly fast-tracked this skyrocketing fascist disaster.
An America that didn't like fascism would have never even let this man win the primary.
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The current administration has created a narrative that everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad. Facts or meaning do not matter any more. I honestly don't understand how the USA has become this. This won't end well.
The USA became this through Trump being elected.
It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?
It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.
No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).
Fear what comes next. If there is a next.
I’m surprised to see no comments on this yet: [The White House app] ships with 3 embedded trackers including Huawei Mobile Services Core (yes, the Chinese company the US government sanctioned, shipping tracking infrastructure inside the sitting president's official app) The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them - but it’s embedding its SDK in its official app?! I…
The current administration has created a narrative that everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad. Facts or meaning do not matter any more. I honestly don't understand how the USA has become this. This won't end well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phrase "live paycheck to paycheck" means "To spend all that one earns without saving anything", not the literal interpretation of "failing to die between paychecks" that you seem to be using here. (IIRC, 60-70% is based on surveys, that percentage of people feel they're living like that, but actual stats are much lower, like 25% or so, but it's important to make sure the same thing is being discussed when having…
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b. Partisans? https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/slow-boring-bias-and-credibil...
2.
a. LendingClub: "According to a Reality Check: Paycheck to Paycheck survey conducted by LendingClub and PYMNTS, 60% of employed U.S. adults, including more than four in 10 high-income earners, are living one paycheck to the next with little to no financial cushion.": https://www.lendingclub.com/resource-center/personal-finance...
b. LendingTree: ""Americans Rely on Credit Cards to Make Ends Meet As 64% Admit to Living Paycheck to Paycheck": https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/paycheck-to-p...
c. PYMNTS: "61%: Share of the U.S. population living paycheck to paycheck as of December 2021 // 54%: Portion of baby boomers and seniors who live paycheck to paycheck": https://www.pymnts.com/study/reality-check-paycheck-to-paych...
d. PNC Bank/The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.: "67% of U.S. workers surveyed say they are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s up from 63% last year." page 6: https://www.pnc.com/content/dam/pnc-com/pdf/corporateandinst...
e. ADP Research: "Nearly two out of three workers say they’re living paycheck to paycheck.": https://www.adpresearch.com/repetitive-task-workers-financia...
f. All those are neutral. If you want, I could also find slight D-leaning: CNBC / SurveyMonkey: "more than half of Americans (61%) consider themselves to be “living paycheck to paycheck,” up from 58% in March of this year": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/07/majority-of-americans-feelin...
g. As previously mentioned, 60-70 is a vibes check, asking people how they feel. Those same vibes checks from R-leaning sources do much the same, they just don't report it with the same phrasing. Which is fine so long as everyone's on the same page about what words mean, but even with the stricter phrasing that R reporters prefer for "paycheck to paycheck", it's not even close to the same meaning you were using which comes across as being needlessly literal-minded for the sake of rhetoric rather than situational awareness.