I generally agree with you, but it is so complicated. I read a piece in The Nation a few years ago (written 2019) and whenever I see a question like this I have to dig it up. Sex workers in Spain applied to become a union (OTRAS, for short, full name basically means “the other women") and were approved in August 2018. Here are a few snippets:

After OTRAS was legalized, its two dozen or so members—who include women and men, both trans and cisgender—quickly found themselves engulfed in a national controversy. Prominent activists, academics, and media personalities swarmed social media under the hashtag #SoyAbolicionista (“I’m an Abolitionist”) to denounce what they saw as basic exploitation masquerading as the service economy. The union’s opponents argue that in a patriarchal society, women can’t be consenting parties in a paid sexual act born of financial necessity. They liken sex work to slavery, hence their name: “abolitionists.”

OTRAS calls this abolitionist opposition “the industry.” “They live really well off of their discussions, books, workshops, conferences, without ever including sex workers,” Necro says. “We’re not allowed to attend the feminist conventions.” OTRAS accuses “the industry” and the government—the two loudest arms of the abolitionist camp—of racism and classism, and is irked by their claims to feminism. “A government that refuses to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest women with the highest number of immigrants? How is that feminist?” Borrell bristles. “We’re the feminists, the ones fighting for their rights.”

While advocates for legalization argue that it will make sex work safer, abolitionists counter that it could instead endanger women who, unlike the members of OTRAS, did not choose to enter the profession on their own. Abolitionists frame their anti-prostitution stance around the issue of human trafficking, specifically for prostitution. They argue that regulating sex work will simply allow traffickers to exploit women under legal cover.

“The trafficked women have no papers, so if police raid a club, the women have no choice but to say they’re there because they want to be,” says Rocío Nieto […] Once law enforcement is out of earshot, Nieto says, “none of the women tell you they want to be there. None of them tell you they want to do that work.”

A handful of smaller radical-left parties also back OTRAS, as well as one unlikely ally: the right-wing Ciudadanos party, known for its harsh anti-immigration stance, among other more traditionally conservative postures. “Experience shows us that when the State refuses to regulate, the mafias make the rules,” the party’s press corps wrote me in an e-mail.

Decades ago, before the internet, when your local radio stations and newspapers paid for service to a special machine that constantly churned out stories from stringers and main branches, there was a saying that I no longer remember but went something like, “Associated Press gets the story first; United Press gets it right.”

We never doubted that AP/UP/Reu/(etc.) were feeding most the news. The sources were right there in print.

It is good to remind people that while there are an endless number of websites, most news still comes from a handful of sources. I will even agree that our sources are all biased.

That said there are some stories where bias should be expected; where there aren’t really two sides. Example: “Locals outraged by villian’s kicking puppies!” Good reporting might include the reasoning, but the public is not going to side with the puppy-kicker. Surely there was a better way to handle the situation before it got to that.

The public does not side with Hitler, either. Personally, I am thankful that the larger public has been ‘brainwashed’ into thinking Hitler was ‘bad’. It saddens me that there are Nazis (or neo-Nazis) in countries that fought to end that vile cause. The citizenry should know better. More than that, the citizenry should know that all autocrats are bad. Any benevolent dictator is still mortal and will cede the position to someone else, and it won’t be long before the ‘someone else’ is not benevolent.

So: thank you for posting the link reminding everyone to be critical of all news sources, but also remember that some things are fairly reported. Sometimes a point of view is valid. Sometimes there is an actual solid truth that is being told. Yes, sometimes that truth is getting sensationalized, but that doesn’t it make it less true.

For this particular case, I will re-iterate that I am worried about potential strife. If my family was living in Venezuela, I would want a stable and well funded government without corruption and without dictatorship. I don’t think the people had that as a ballot option, and I don’t trust any of the players. I do miss Chavez, though. The U.S. gave him a raw deal.

I just love it when someone posts propaganda and then goes into their own thread attempting to discredit everyone else as propaganda.

I’m anticipating strife and reporting from additional sources. This could get ugly and people should be aware of it.

Note that al-jazeera itself reported this in the article you linked:

“Everything we have seen so far indicates the results of the government are just produced,” Phil Gunson, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Venezuela, told Al Jazeera. He claimed the tallies announced by the government-controlled electoral authority did not correspond to the votes cast.

“The result that the opposition claims is the correct one … corresponds very closely to what opinion polls have been saying for the last several months,” Gunson said. “All the partial results we have seen so far indicate the opposition got something like three-fifths of the vote.”

Maybe. APnews says:

Authorities delayed releasing the results from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours,” hampering attempts to verify the results.

After finally claiming to have won, Maduro accused unidentified foreign enemies of trying to hack the voting system.

Per bbc:

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among those expressing his scepticism after the result was announced by the National Electoral Council, a body which is dominated by government loyalists.

• The UK Foreign Office also expressed concern over the results

• The Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, also said he found the result “hard to believe”.

• Uruguay’s president said of the Maduro government: “They were going to ‘win’ regardless of the actual results.”

• In a congratulatory message, President Vladimir Putin told Mr Maduro: “Remember, you are always a welcome guest on Russian soil.”

That said, I didn’t really want Maria Machado “—derided by the Chavista leadership for her pro-market views and her upper-class background“ — to lead a puppet government after getting kicked off the ballot.

yeah yeah yeah, and not just there and not just the U.S. DoD. I think we all understand that psyops are a common military tactic. We can’t even be assuaged by the idea that the U.S. government isn’t ‘allowed’ to run such campaigns on its own citizens because: why would they even worry about that when they can just ask a dark-money PAC or the media to do it for them?

lol!

Edit: ok, I laughed, but I wanna be clear: not at you. I don’t think any of it SHOULD work like that, but in my imagination, I can visualize it happening, and some of the crap that went down what with the National Weather Service agreeing with a sharpie edit to their map… I just can’t exclude the idea that such craziness could have happened.

– but I totally admit I was just riffing on a concept

No, but I think he likes to order the military around and might give a rambling ‘order’ like, ‘China bad. China vaccines bad. Why send good vaccines to those sh-thole countries for free?’ – and then in so many words telling the Pentagon to make them all f-off and die.

The U.S. admission followed a June 14 Reuters investigation that revealed how the Pentagon launched a secret psychological operation to discredit Chinese vaccines and other COVID aid in 2020 and 2021, at the height of the pandemic. As a result of the Reuters investigation, the Philippine Senate Foreign Relations Committee launched a hearing into the matter and sought a response from the U.S.

According to the June 25 document, Pentagon officials concluded its anti-vax campaign was “misaligned with our priorities.” It says the U.S. military told Filipino officials that operatives “ceased COVID-related messaging related to COVID-19 origins and COVID-19 vaccines in August 2021.”

… so Trump?

I imagine Biden had a lot of fires to put out once he became President in January 2021, but it would have been nice if this scheme ended sooner.

Cory Doctorow has been calling out this enshittification for years. The whole read is good, but here is a sample chunk:

Amazon’s monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.

Amazon is no longer a place where a scrappy independent seller can find an audience for its products. In order to navigate the minefield Amazon lays for its sellers (who have no choice but to sell there), these indie companies are forced to sell out to gators (aggregators), which are now multi-billion-dollar businesses in their own right:

See also his piece Amazon is a ripoff.

A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon’s own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and “junk ads” (that don’t match your search) turn Amazon’s search-ordering into a rigged casino game.

It would be more useful if Biden did the Court thing rather than waiting for Harris to maybe do it if she wins. What if she doesn’t win? What is she wins, but the existing Court does yet more damage between now and then?

I do agree with you that Biden was a good President. I’ve never seen a President that did all the stuff we wanted, but they’ve always faced opposition and had to make comprises to get anything at all pushed through. I really wanted nationalized health care, but the best Obama could do was Obamacare – which isn’t great, but is sooo much better than the whole ‘pre-existing conditions’ denial system we had before. I really want the U.S. to stop backing Israel because of the Gaza crisis, but I don’t want to see all the surrounding nations to wipe Israel off the map if the U.S. isn’t there. I thought Biden gave a fantastic State of the Union speech. We know it was on a teleprompter, but he delivered with energy and style. I suspect his decline (as with so many other aging people) has been uneven/sporadic, so I can’t even blame anyone for ‘hiding’ his decline because I bet everyone was seeing lots of good days in there, too – at least until the last month or so.

Off topic: I have a relative going through a sudden decline. She’s been old for a long time, but the last couple months have been a dramatic change for the worse despite no particular health issue. She’s just suddenly much, much older and even her neighbors are commenting to us family. Seeing it in her, I imagine Biden might be going through the same thing.

True, but I’d still rather infrastructure to be publicly held utilities. Energy suppliers are a strange case because any company can become part of the grid, but the power lines to our homes are generally controlled by one entity. I want at least that entity to be responsive to the public, but I also don’t want random suppliers taking down the grid.

Whenever it comes down to definitions I like to go to expert definitions rather than common language. For food (are tomatoes a fruit?) I use FDA definitions, for which the definition of bread excludes what you’d mean by “cake”.

• Layman readable synopsis (bakerpedia)
• Sec. 136.110 Bread, rolls, and buns. (fda)
• Sec. 136.115 Enriched bread, rolls, and buns. (fda)

I don’t think the FDA defines cake, but it does specify how different types of cakes, brownies and such should be labeled (search for “cake” here).

I’m paranoid that if/when governments get in an argument, foreign infrastructure will either shut off or escalate pricing such that the public suffers (and yells at their local leaders to ‘do something!’).

Chinese-backed companies have distinct advantages over competitors in the U.S., such as heavily subsidized supply chains for raw polysilicon and unfinished solar modules, as well as low-cost government financing.

U.S.-based Convalt, for example, is struggling to bring online 10 GW of U.S. capacity at a factory it started building in upstate New York in 2022.

“If we are to succeed, we need American manufacturers like Convalt to survive this onslaught of low prices, to build factories with capacities that allow us to compete against the largest global firms, with Chinese beneficial ownership,” CEO Hari Achuthan said

This is one of the many reasons it is a bad idea to privatize utilities/infrastructure. That said, U.S. subsidies helped destroy economies across the globe (like Jamaica’s dairy farmers via world bank loan rules), so it is basically ‘fair play’ for China to play a similar game.

This is the way.

You start frying an onion and then figure out what you’re making for dinner.

It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?

The agency is home to one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, which includes information on shifting atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, plus hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of ice-core and tree-ring data.

Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.

Tell people 2025 would do this. No federal weather means local counties would have to pay Big Business for tornado/hurricane warnings. We’d pay more for fish because fishermen can’t get data unless they pay. Plane schedules become even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds.

Look: we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask people to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers – such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing “The Superbowl” unless you pay for a license. How’s any of that going to make things better?

P.S. This article is posted to several communities, so I’m reiterating this post repeatedly.

Coffee badging is the practice of going into the office for a few hours to “show face,” which could entail coffee with co-workers or sitting in on a work meeting — but then leaving to work remotely.

More than half — 58% — of hybrid employees admitted to checking in at the office and then promptly checking out, according to a 2023 survey by Owl Labs, a company that makes videoconferencing devices.

Research shows that employees are more engaged when they have opportunities for development, learning, mentorship and career pathing, he noted. “Without these, ‘coffee badging’ is just a symptom of a deeper problem.”

Well, at least the article points out that employers are doing nothing to incentivize the workforce. Oh, except possibly spying on them. Cuz people love that.

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me several people pointing at a computer screen and discussing whether an image is faked

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