Schadrach

They know they don’t have to be any good, they just need to be marginally less terrifying than the alternative.

A Mastodon instance is used by, at best, a few hundred to low thousands of people, and is going to be small and relatively obscure

Both Gab and Truth Social are Mastodon instances (albeit not federated, though if they ever enabled federation they’d be immediately blocked by a majority of instances due to a combination of anti-corp and anti-right sentiments). Gab was actually the largest Mastodon instance for a good while (unsure about currently) - if you see any Mastodon clients that have negative reviews about not connecting to the largest Mastodon instance, that’s what they’re referring to (several clients blacklisted Gab at the client level).

Read the rest of that sentence. The difference between how the US and CCP have their hands in private companies is like the difference between fingering and fisting.

Eh, that’s one of those things that’s going to happen regardless of which candidate wins. Israel is basically our only consistent ally in the Middle East, so we’re going to play nice with them regardless of who wins.

We’re not at war with them, but they are certainly a foreign adversary. Much like Russia in that regard, we haven’t been at war with Russia since we tried to support anti-Bolsheviks back in 1918 but they are definitely a foreign adversary or else that whole Cold War thing was really weird.

LOL. “russia was correct in banning facebook and twitter”. Feel better now?

They could justify that policy the same way - we are a foreign adversary of them and having our companies control their social media could lead to the same sort of problem for them, even if our government doesn’t have it’s fingers dug into our companies in quite the same way as the CCP does with Chinese companies.

If they’re going to do this TikTok ban bill, they should cast the net a bit wider - it’s be nice if it hits Tencent by accident.

I’m sorry the foreign adversary that controls a popular social media app isn’t white.

Not that I agree with the morality of what Nintendo is doing but their claim is that the emulator can’t be used for anything meaningful besides piracy

Homebrew, game modding, etc…

18, 16 with parental consent is pretty typical in the US. Like a majority of states.

There are only ten that have no under 18 marriage under any circumstances, most work basically the same as WV, two actually require you to be older than 18, and California has no hard minimum. Massachusetts is one of the states with a hard limit of 18, but that was only passed in 2022, before that Massachusetts had no hard minimum same as California.

As for being weirdly familiar with these laws, five minutes with Google can get you there.

The whole point is it’s dumb to pick on WV for having essentially the same rules as a majority of states as opposed to the 20% who don’t consider parental or judicial approval good enough for an exception, the two who don’t consider 18 old enough or the one with no minimum.

?? WV is shitty for a lot of reasons, including this bill (seriously, there are more important things to deal with than being upset someone called it “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding”).

But marriage in WV is 18+, 16+ if the person and their parents both sign paperwork to approve, and their spouse is no more than 4 years older than them. I wouldn’t call that aggressively permitting child brides, not compared to say California which technically has no hard minimum age of marriage unless they’ve changed the law in the last few years.