If a protest of a billion people happens, then it cannot be ignored by the media.

I know, it was hyperbole, but the point is that if 12 million people are on the street, it’s not that the 12 million people need to get people’s attention, they are indicative that the people already have that perspective and are showing it in the streets.

A small protest has a goal of getting attention on a problem that people may lack awareness. A multi-million person protest isn’t about a need to raise awareness anymore, it’s about showing the awareness and commitment that is already there. For whatever volume of people actively protest, you can be sure there’s a singnificant multiple of that number of people who agree with the protestors but didn’t take it to the streets for one reason or another.

Well I meant the more rhetorical “pushing”, but yes, some of the activity of the claimed non-violence seems a bit violent.

I would say that I doubt you can have millions of people protest and manage to be completely non-violent. Some folks will take it to violence in the name of the cause, some will opportunisticly do it under the cover of the movement, and finally some might “false flag” to try to discredit the movement.

There are way more DGUs than there are not.

I think this is a pretty gigantic citation needed here. I couldn’t find anything supporting this assertion but plenty of material showing the opposite.

…the perp taking his own life.

Well, technically, that is someone with a firearm I suppose…

On the one hand, most of those incidents cited were in the face of a regime that also didn’t want to care. Just hard to ignore circumstances if 3.5% of your people are out on the streets and likely most of the people off the streets agree with them.

On the other hand, they base this on very few instances, so it’s hardly a statistical slam dunk, it’s vaguely supportive of some concepts, but anyone taking note of specific numbers is really overextending the research beyond what it can possibly say.

I think it’s not “3.5% of people want an outcome” but “protests of significant magnitude to have 3.5% actively on the streets pushing” correlate with a very very large population that agrees, but not enough to be out on the streets.

So even if 40 million people want single payer, there are not 12 million in the streets.

But again, this is based on a scant handful of “movements”, so it’s pretty useless on specifics. Most I can see as a takeaway is perhaps that a violent movement may be too high stakes for people and a largely non-violent movement can attract more people and more people usually matter more than more violence.

Based on the article “no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of a population has ever failed” has the caveat of “we only look at 3 of them, and those 3 worked”.

So their overall sample size is small, and the 3.5% sample size is just 3. Further, those 3 had no idea someone in the vague future would retroactively measure their participation to declare it a rock solid threshold.

I think the broader takeaway is that number of people seems to matter more than degree of violence, and violence seems to alienate people that might have otherwise participated.

At least conservative media at least tried to declare we have no reason to support Ukraine.

Of course the Klan also flies the US flag.

Culturally in the rural south, a lot goes into convincing as many people as possible that the civil war had little to do with racism and instead it was about the elite northerners vaguely bossing the poor southerners around.

As a consequence, they get that flag flown by a fair number of oblivious people that either worship some idealized vision of the antebellum south or just in general people saying “being a rebel is cool”.

Like Dukes of Hazard fans largely treated it as a symbol of generic righteous rebellion rather than referring to the core principles of the conflict that created the flag.

Yeah, my education growing up featured pro-confederacy curriculum pretty hard. It sums up as “The union didn’t ban slavery at all until midway into the war, and even then only for rebelling states to scare the union border states into staying with the union to keep their slaves”.

Of course, they had to really gloss over the various declarations of secession, some of the legislative moves of the period, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But in exchange there was just so much support from the daughters/sons of the confederacy… Sure they could point out how much the Union was slow-walking change, but it was absurd that we were taught that slavery was at most a footnote as to why the war kicked off.

The conservatives were being anti-Ukraine from day 1 of the invasion, they didn’t even wait for Trump to be relevant again.

Russia has a lot of the conservative leadership and media hooked even without Trump.

can’t even do video playback on VLC.

I remember back in the day when I downloaded the first divx file my K6-400 couldn’t smoothly play… I had been so used to thinking of that as a powerhouse coming from my Pentium 60, which was the first one I ran Linux on.

Way way too much stock is placed in that study.

For one, their total sample size was only 323 events, only 3 of which met the “3.5%” level. So the statement that change is inevitable based on only 3 instances is really crazy.

Further, none of those three instances had participants thinking that 3.5% was some sort of goal, it was a correlation. So now you have a lot of protestors treating 3.5% as a goal rather than some organic emergent property of the broader movement. Even if there was something inevitable about having a 3.5% participation rate when no one is aware of that metric, simply knowing of the metric can change a lot.

Of course, that was well below the claimed “magical” 3.5% level.

The cited scenarios were rarely democratic in nature.

Of course, in all the scenarios cited, there was no one telling them “get to 3.5% and things will happen”, so with everyone saying “if we get to 3.5%, things will happen”, that could itself break the “rule”, as a sort of self-denying prophecy.

Further, it happens to hit the magical “3.5%” number everyone was throwing around.

Maybe it’s correct and others will vouch for it, analysize, but an estimate that’s significantly higher than an already decently high number that bridges the apparent gap to the 3.5% number almost exactly seems too conveniently on point, like someone wanted to stretch the numbers as little as possible while still hitting the designated number.

My understanding is that the train system and automotive sector are kind of opposite.

For automotive, the government does the roads and private industry does the vehicles.

Conversely, the rails are largely private industry excluding Amtrak, and Amtrak is mostly responsible for the trains with their government granted monopoly on passenger rail.

It’s part of what really limits passenger rail, the companies that own the rail mostly want to rail from places like ports, and negligible value for rail between population centers. Also Amtrak has to suck it up if a rail is busy (wasnt supposed to be the case, but cargo operators were allowed to make trains too long to fit on bypass spurs so they can’t get out of the way like they were legally required to).

One thing left unclear is how the determination is made about emergency versus non emergency.

If it’s a separate number, ok, seems clear cut enough.

If it’s human always answers and if it’s some bullshit they just click a button to punt to AI instead of just hanging up, ok.

If they are saying the AI answers and does the triage and hands off immediately to a human when “emergency detected”, then I could see how that promise could fail.

To be fair, that article was overall pretty plainly stating that the protests were overwhelmingly more well attended. Yes they had one line that raised the possibility of weather as a factor, but I think anyone but Trump could see the facts as presented in the story telling the real story.

Also went out of their way to characterize the protests as peaceful and the only politicians under violent threat were Democrats, despite the magnitude of protests.

Being able to just cut off access to the application means a customer has little choice.

For a competitor to pass them, they first have to catch up. To catch up, the customer needs to be able to extract the data from the application to give competition a chance. If they get closer to catching up, they tend to be bought out. Lot of speedbumps to discourage competition. Also, to get funding those competitors have to pretty much promise investors they will also do “as a service”.

For assets versus expense, I see a pendulum, largely based on how appreciation/depreciation pans out versus acquisition cost and loan interest rates, as well as uncertain start up versus steady business. I’m not sure software is giving enough choice in the matter the let that swing.