Not_mikey
@Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Rich People Are Becoming Less Willing to Help With the World’s Problems 3 days ago:
We’re talking about median, and the median person in the US gets employer provided healthcare and usually some form of employer pension/401k contribution plus social security, so I don’t think those would be much different cost wise for a median US vs UK resident. I’m sure Britain uses there taxes better than us and has better benefits, especially for the poor, but I don’t think that fully accounts for the gap.
- Comment on Rich People Are Becoming Less Willing to Help With the World’s Problems 4 days ago:
Median post-tax household income is £36.7k
Wow that seems low, US median household income is $83k, even with taxes and conversion that seems like a significant gap and I always thought US and UK had similar price levels. Are taxes just that much higher? Or are households smaller ? Or are incomes in the US just that much better?
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
The person was talking about how certain people annoy them, he may have implied it was you but if you don’t think description matches say so and move on.
But if we’re talking about being a good digital neighbor, you should try and see how your implication is annoying or offensive. There are issues with credentialism but it is not just some arbitrary aristocracy, people put in a lot of work to get there credentials and take pride in them. If you start saying all these experts don’t know what they’re talking about and I found out something they couldn’t is dismissive of all the work those experts put into learning about there field. Like don’t you think doctors get annoyed by all the homeopaths or anti vaxers who dismiss all there work because theyve done there own research?
- Comment on il boohoo 1 week ago:
Initially yes, and they were probably grinning ear to ear when they first bought it, just like we were all grinning ear to ear when we first drove by ourselves, but once the novelty and excitement wear off it goes back to the meh face.
It’s like skiing/snowboarding, the first couple times you go down a run your having a great time, but once it doesn’t become a challenge then it loses its excitement and fun. With skiing though theres a lot more elements of variation (trees, bumps, jumps, narrow trails, grade variations, snow conditions …) to keep things interesting whereas driving roads can only vary with curves and grades, both of which are in a much narrower band of variation for safety reasons.
There’s a reason tons of people spend tons of money every year going skiing but not too many people are renting super cars to go and drive around the hills.
- Comment on il boohoo 1 week ago:
You almost never see anyone happy in a Ferrari either. Look inside one and you’ll see someone with the same blank expression that you see on everyone driving and anyone on the bus. Despite what car commercials drill into your head no car will change that meh feeling.
- Comment on Calling all Dickheads! 1 week ago:
wildly inaccurate “natural history”
If you consider the fact it was written in 1850 it is surprisingly accurate, like it was talking about whales eating giant squids a century before the scientific community accepted that.
Also the whale descriptions are the point, the book is about the enlightenment drive to understand and therefore master nature with Moby dick standing in as a refutation of that idea, being unconquerable no matter how much knowledge you have. Without the descriptions you could write off Ishmael and the crew as a bunch of idiots who just didn’t have the know how to take down Moby dick.
- Comment on It's all relative 1 week ago:
Are diabetics (which you’d probably become if you ate cheesecake daily) addicted to insulin then?
- Comment on You should quit social media for good 2 weeks ago:
It seems a lot of your critiques are more of the media in general and not social media.
if I got my news and my understanding of the world from Lemmy, it would be easy to believe a whole bunch of people in the United States have given up on civil society and committed themselvesto political violence.
Yeah and if I got my news from Fox News or the New York post it would be easy to believe the cities are full of gangs of maurading immigrants. At least lemmy doesn’t pretend to be a “fair and balanced” representative of the US. Everyone here knows lemmy is far left relative to the US just like they know everyone’s not using or interested in Linux .
As for the favoring of longer form more in depth content vs short form out of context content, that’s just what people like and are drawn to regardless of the media type. More people will watch TV news with shorter segments and less content then a newspaper, and more people will watch late night with even shorter form and less context then TV news. And then there are people who don’t watch or engage with the news at all because they have other things to do.
If anything lemmy is better then a lot of the other social media because it doesn’t disincentivize links. Most other platforms the algorithm is optimizing for watch time / keeping you on the platform, so links to long form news articles get down rated because if you click on that link and go to that site for 5 mins, that’s 5 mins your not spending on the platform. For that sample you took half of the top posts were links to articles, see how long it would take you to find one article link scrolling through tik tok.
Of course, the most passionate, angry, dramatic, and emotion-provoking memes get the most upvotes and go to the top of the algorithm.
Again this is a problem with all media, if it bleeds it leads has been an adage for centuries.
In general lemmy is showing people what they want to see, which media in general has always tried to do. Yes there are a lot of valid critiques of the behavior that this prerogative incentivizes, but that’s different than the critiques of algorithmic social media that prioritizes engagement and staying on the platform, which brings in a whole new set of problematic incentives in addition to the standard problems of media.
- Comment on You should quit social media for good 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, most of what the article complains about is algorithmic social media and how it boosts engagement of any kind, whether positive or negative. This leads to “extremist” takes gaining ground easier then moderate takes. Combined with algorithmic siloing, echo chambers etc. That we’ve heard a million times, make people more radical and disconnected from reality.
The “algorithm” most people use on lemmy is just most up voted, so controversial takes rarely rise to the top. A lot of the stuff would be considered controversial outside of here, but within lemmy there’s a “hard left” consensus where the moderates are probably democratic socialists.
- Comment on Anon doesn't like the doors 4 weeks ago:
Was going to write a list but I’m too lazy so I’ll just go with the first one that comes to mind: all falls down.
- Comment on GET THAT BREAD 4 weeks ago:
Maybe they did, guess i meant dark web market links
- Comment on Dubious Islands 4 weeks ago:
This is missing the island of southern Ontario made by the trent-severn waterway Image
- Comment on GET THAT BREAD 4 weeks ago:
Wonder if lemmy cares about posting dark web links like reddit. Here’s a listing:
drughub666py6fgnml5kmxa7fva5noppkf6wkai4fwwvzwt4r…
Let’s see if this comment gets deleted.
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 1 month ago:
This, people love to think Rome fell because of moral degeneracy and corruption, but that was probably at its height under Commodus or Nero when the empire was very stable and secure. The later emperors were relatively modest and to an increasing degree impotent, so it mattered less if they were incompetent, though many of them were, and that didn’t help.
The reality is empires all eventually fall, they lose the military edge that won them the empire, either by degrading or the “barbarians” learning and catching up, and the forces that were kept in check by the military tear the empire apart.
- Comment on The crab housing market 1 month ago:
desires a system where the larger
and strongercrabs should have their pick of the housing market andless powerful(smaller) crabs simply have to take whatever smaller,less desirablehousing is left over.Power and strength have nothing to do with it, they aren’t fighting over who gets the bigger shell, they’re trading.
Smaller doesn’t mean less desirable, otherwise the small crabs would not give up the big shell voluntarily. They want a shell that fits there size, not the biggest one.
This system takes into account size as opposed to our current housing system, which is all about power (in the form of wealth). We’d be better off if we considered size as we have a lot of small families in big houses (empty nesters) and big families in small houses (families just starting off in a small apt) and redistribution those could help both parties.
The problem is that we are in a “bigger is better” mindset, and that empty nest family doesn’t want to give up their house even though they don’t need it.
- Comment on 2022 vs. 2026 FIFA World Cup ticket prices 1 month ago:
Sucks to be Mexican. The world cups finally coming to your country after 40 years and the tickets are too expensive for the locals to afford.
- Comment on 2022 vs. 2026 FIFA World Cup ticket prices 1 month ago:
Will probably be great in Mexico and Canada, they’ll probably fill the stadiums there with the people who don’t want to go to the US to see it.
- Comment on Missing banana for scale. 1 month ago:
Is there any evidence it stood on two feet? Figured it would look more like a gorilla then this.
- Comment on Zoom’s CEO agrees with Bill Gates, Jensen Huang, and Jamie Dimon: A 3-day workweek is coming soon thanks to AI 2 months ago:
It’s sufficient to say there is an immediate profit motive to just fire the workers and pocket the surplus, I think.
That doesn’t explain why they don’t just do a three day work week and pay workers 1/2 of what they did before. Cost wise it would be the same and would make the same profit as firing half the workforce, but you’ll almost never see companies reduce hours instead of head count.
They don’t reduce hours because that means the person will probably get a second job. Now they’re not the sole employer and the only thing keeping that person from poverty. This makes getting fired a smaller threat as the second job can hold you over for longer. It also gives the employees more bargaining power when negotiating for raises / benefits as they can threaten to quit and just live off the second job for a bit, they can also play both employers off one another to compete for the employees time. These all increase worker power which capitalists/employers don’t like.
A long unemployment line has the opposite effect and decreases worker power. It makes firing a bigger threat as the employee knows it will be harder to get a job, so the employer can work them more and pay them less. It also reduces employee bargaining power as the threat of quitting isn’t as real and the employer knows it.
This is why a Marxist approach is needed, economics just looks at the dollar and cents, but if you look only at that you can miss underlying power dynamics that also drive behavior.
- Comment on Zoom’s CEO agrees with Bill Gates, Jensen Huang, and Jamie Dimon: A 3-day workweek is coming soon thanks to AI 2 months ago:
Marx called this more then a century ago, any labor saving technology will always be used to put people in the unemployment line instead of lessening work because capitalist love a long unemployment line to keep the workers in line.
He thought that it would lead to the unemployed masses teaming up with the imiserated workers to overthrow capitalism, which hasn’t happened…yet.
- Comment on Girls who play after-school sport in UK 50% more likely to later get top jobs, study finds 2 months ago:
I feel like both parents working is more common in working class families then rich ones. A rich family may have one of the parents working part time or not at all because they can afford it.
Yeah a working class family may have one parent who is chronically unemployed but I feel that’s more the exception to the rule, as capitalism does a pretty good job of putting those people on the streets and having the state take away the kids.
- Comment on We are helping 2 months ago:
So eating meat is now rebelling against the billionaires…
For every dollar a billionaire spends trying to get you to eat less meat, other billionaires spend 100x more trying to get you to eat more meat through advertising, lobbying, etc.
If you want to play into the billionaires plans, eat more meat. If you want to help stop climate change, eat less meat.
- Comment on We are helping 2 months ago:
Same with cars, even if we completely ignore climate change we maybe got a century left of oil before it’s too expensive to drive. By not investing in other transportation now we’re just making it more painful when we finally do rip the bandaid off.
- Comment on We are helping 2 months ago:
And not littering won’t fix the underlying problems of single use plastics wrapping everything we touch, and the corporations that want to keep it that way. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t litter.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 2 months ago:
Yes, there are plenty of other investment opportunities, the fact that you chose the one that profits off of housing insecurity shows you don’t enough about it to forgo a little bit of extra money.
Like other people have mentioned you would also have to be advocating against your own interest. Yes you can do that but your passion will at least be dulled by your innate desire for profit. You’d have more passion and will for the cause if you didn’t own investment properties, even more if you are renting and are a victim of housing commodification.
Another point is that you’d be adding to the demand of houses and thus raising the price. You could argue it’s a drop in the ocean, but that sort of attitude leads to a million drops in the ocean and rising sea levels. You would also probably be buying it on a mortgage that’s larger then the house was previously on so the floor for rent , the break even point, would be higher.
Eg. If you bought the property for $400,000 on a mortgage for say $2,000 a month from someone who only had a $200,000 mortgage on it for $1,000 a month you’ve now upped the rent floor $1,000.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 2 months ago:
You could make a lot of these same arguments for owning slaves. If you don’t buy them then someone else will, and they may be a worse master then you. Better that you buy them and treat them right, provide them good food and housing, while at the same time advocating for the abolition of slavery.
In both secenarios you may say you want what’s best for them, but that desire is in direct conflict with your desire for profit so either you become a bad investor or a bad slave master / landlord. Why bring yourself into that conflict instead of investing in something without those moral implications?
- Comment on [Video] Genius way to solve homelessness in USA 2 months ago:
Ideally yes, Palestinians have a right to defend themselves from genocide.
Realistically you could sell those weapons to Ukraine since the weapons industry is the only thing keeping this shit country going.
- Comment on It's almost here 2 months ago:
Come to San Francisco, the weather never goes above 70 degrees and we have the best bread bowls and they only cost $25 (without tax)
- Comment on Bring out the trumpets and pour out the beer 2 months ago:
You can still use free fillable forms, you can fill out the raw tax forms yourself online and can submit them online there. Not the best UI, it’s literally just the forms, but you cut out the middle man so they don’t get more money to lobby congress to keep this dumb system going. It’s also free if you make more then $85,000 , which alot of the “free” software isn’t.
- Comment on Help. 3 months ago:
If llms are juiced up auto complete then humans are juiced up bacteria. Yeah they both have the same end goal, guess the next word, survive and reproduce , but the methods they use to accomplish them are vastly more complex.
