isleepinahammock

@isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You must have an internet connected smartphone to eat⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  [CITATION NEEDED.]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don’t want your license plate to rust now.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I just cover my entire car with flexible screens and cameras. The image from one side of the car is displayed on the images of the other side of the car. Can’t track a car if you can’t even tell a car is there at all! I’m sure this will have absolutely no downsides whatsoever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Emergency Alert About Wildfires⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If nothing else, how about just the increased risk of car accidents that comes from more people being sleep-deprived after being woken up in the middle of the night by a warning siren?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do Centrists know about electability?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The main purity test right now in the Republican party is simply whether an elected leader is willing to be completely subservient to Trump.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do Centrists know about electability?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You never heard of a RINO? This is exactly how conservatives have managed to pull the party so far to the right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Supermassive Games announces layoffs, up to 75 positions to be affected⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Their name has now been changed to Stellar Mass Games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mars Bar from the 1990s found during house clearance - shrinkflation in action⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a question to give a judge an aneurysm. How do age of consent laws work when time machines are involved?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's one cliche "Moral of the story" in media that you hate more than anything else?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re correct that this creates cognitive dissonance. The racist, upon meeting a minority member that doesn’t uphold the stereotype, has two contradictory facts in their head:

  1. All members of a minority group are bad.

  2. This member of that minority group isn’t bad.

  This is cognitive dissonance. Both of these cannot be true at the same time. One of these premises must be wrong.

  Hollywood imagines the bigot will treat this like a physicist disproving a theory by finding a counterexample. But bigotry is anyhing but scientific. You can’t reason your way out of a place reason did not lead you to. Instead, they adjust their premises to:

  1. Most members of a minority group are bad.

  2. This member of that minority group is one of the few good ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And why do you figure you can’t write a law to accommodate that as well? Some of you guys are looking for so many nits to pick that you think it would be impossible to ever write a law regulating anything whatsoever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is an ex-cop and ex-bastard?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have an idea for a crazier law. It will be legal to steal from self-checkout, as long as what you steal is less than 25% of the total purchase. 😂

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are datacenters in space more lucrative than on earth?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s an ad hominem. I’m clearly implying that your analysis indicates you lack fundamental knowledge of basic elementary physics and engineering principles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Grocery prices are already constrained by the fact that people’s budgets can only stretch so far. If you raise prices faster than people can handle, they just start buying cheaper food options.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You think that was arbitrary? Do you have any idea how much work stores put in to setting prices? It’s more complex than this, but to illustrate, companies will maximize for total revenue, so quantity sold times price. And they know that whenever they raise the price, even by ten cents, some number of people will not purchase that item. They only raise prices if they predict the decline in sales will be more than offset by the increase in revenue per item.

  It may seem arbitrary to you, but it’s anything but. The prices in the store are already at what the company estimates to be the optimum total revenue level.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think this addresses anything I said. Market constraints prevent them from raising prices, not math. I perfectly understand the math you’re describing. You’re failing to understand the economics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why doesn’t your grocery store charge $20 for a gallon of milk then if they can just raise prices as much as they want? Have you never even heard of supply and demand?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You do realize that the prices in the store right now are already the maximum the stores can charge, do you not?

  Corporations are soulless and greedy. They don’t set their prices by buying from a supplier and increasing them by a fixed percentage. There is no point where a company will go, “well, we could charge more and still have the product sell, but that would be improper.” They already set their prices to the maximum the market will bear. They cannot raise prices further without a net loss of income. They set their prices for the maximum product sales cost and quantity sold.

  And why can’t the elderly or disabled use self-checkout? If you’re capable enough to walk through a store and grab items from shelves, you’re capable enough to slide them past a scanner. If they’re shopping with a caretaker, then the caretaker can run the check-out instead. The level of dexterity required to use a self-checkout is the same as needed to grab items from shelves, inspect and bag produce, etc. Sure, some people are too disabled to use a self-checkout, but those folks are also too disabled to shop for themselves at all. That was literally how these systems were designed. The companies didn’t want to have to deal with scores of people who were dexterous enough to shop, but not dexterous enough to run the self-checkout.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are datacenters in space more lucrative than on earth?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Something tells me you are not an engineer…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are datacenters in space more lucrative than on earth?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve been hearing the marketing hype of a Nazi space company CEO trying to prop up his company’s stock price so he can unload his rotten shares.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No. Because that would require raising the prices at the regular check-out as well. And companies cannot just raise prices as high as they want. The prices you see in the grocery store are already the company’s best estimate for the highest price the market will bear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re pretending that stores can just arbitrarily raise prices. They already set their prices as the maximum the market will bear. And yes, ultimately the point is to make self-checkout cheaper than regular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Doesn’t seem that easy to work around. A checkout is either self checkout or it isn’t. Write the law to define a self checkout as “a check out where the majority of items are scanned by a customer rather than an employee.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I know Reddit sucks but this one is funny.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m afraid I don’t know the context. :(

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between Woke and Political Correctness?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To conservatives they’re the same thing. Every decade or so conservatives pick a new loose catch-all term to describe everything they hate. It’s necessary to organize an otherwise empty philosophy. There have been a whole series of these. After awhile, the general public recognizes them as the bad faith labels they are. The following terms have all been used in the exact same way by conservatives over they years:

  • Woke
  • Politically correct
  • Gay
  • Cosmopolitan
  • Intellectual
  • Elite/Ivory Tower
  • Subversive
  • Degenerate
  • Bolshevik/Red
  • Untermensch

  Note, most of these terms have actual definitions outside of the one used by conservatives. Bolshevism for instance is an actual political philosophy and movement. You can go read books written by real historical and present Bolsheviks if you want. But when conservatives in the McCarthy era used the term Bolshevik, they weren’t referring to the actual political philosophy. Anyone trying to push for absolutely any modicum of social change or improvement was slandered as a Bolshevik. You could be the CEO of a major company, completely onboard with the capitalist enterprise. But if you advocated for desegregation, conservatives would call you “Red” or “a Bolshevik.” As used by conservatives, these terms have no real meaning beyond “bad.” Hell, sometimes people count as “woke” simply because of who they are. Transgender people are “woke” regardless of their actual beliefs. You could be a conservative Catholic trans woman who wants nothing more than to marry a cisgender husband, adopt six kids, and go to church every Sunday. You would still be “woke” to conservatives.

  Now, if you want to talk about the actual definition of “woke” and “political correctness” before they became conservative dog whistles? AFAIK, political correctness never had any widely used definition outside of conservative fever swamps. Woke, however, was originally a term from the left, referring to anyone that was actively mindful of social injustice.

  You can practice this yourself. Listen to a conservative rant about the people they hate. Whenever they use the word “woke,” try substituting one of the historical terms in your mind. You’ll find they work just as well. This is possible because ultimately they mean nothing other than “bad.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I know Reddit sucks but this one is funny.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I know Reddit sucks but this one is funny.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  (Sorry, your short comment inspired me. Sorry this ended up being so long.)

  I imagine it’s a hard balance to strike. These artifacts and mummies ultimately need guarding. They’ve been protected from the centuries only by obscurity alone. All the ancient tomb traps failed long ago. You could put him back in his tomb, but now you have to guard the tomb. Otherwise someone will break in there and steal it. Some oligarch would absolutely pay a fortune for the bragging rights of having Ramses II’s mummy on display in their villa. With the shear number of mummies and historical sites in Egypt, if you left things where they are, the Egyptian government would have to pay people to guard thousands of sites around the clock. And you then have to worry about the guards stationed at these isolated sites being bribed to look the other way as the thieves break in. (Or becoming thieves themselves.)

  Amusingly, the Egyptians of today seem to be in the exact same situation as those of 4,000 years ago. Almost all ancient royal graves were looted in antiquity. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb was such a hurricane specifically because it was the only royal tomb we’ve ever found that wasn’t looted. The ancient thieves were after gold and jewels. But today, if they put it up for auction, I imagine the mummy of Ramses II would probably sell for more than its own weight in gold. The ancient thieves mostly tore apart mummies to find jewelry buried within the wrappings. Today the mummies themselves are the jewelry. Ancient thieves robbed the pharaohs of their wealth. Modern thieves have come for the pharaohs themselves.

  It’s really just a security problem. Once you dig something up, you have to guard it. And it’s a lot easier to guard a hundred mummies in one museum than it is to guard a hundred mummies at a hundred different tombs scattered throughout the countryside.

  Sure, you could just say, “screw it, no more archaeology, we’re just leaving everything in the ground!” But then again, thieves can excavate tombs just as archaeologists can. And if you never reveal the ancient secrets, if living people never get to see these ancient mummies and artifacts, practically that’s little different than letting the treasures be looted. Morally I’m not particularly concerned about disturbing ancient graves. I don’t believe in ancient curses, or that we will be disturbing the real afterlife of a pharaoh by doing whatever we want to his corpse. To me these are just inanimate objects. Their worth comes entirely from the value they have in the present and future as the cultural heritage of the Egyptian people (fuck the British Museum). An artifact left forever in the ground, never again to be seen by living human eyes? To me that has no more worth than any random rock.

  Living human beings are what provide value and worth to inanimate objects, even if those inanimate objects used to be human beings. I don’t support looting recent graves or the ancient burials still revered by modern people (like ancient Native American burial sites.) But if the actual living indigenous people are OK with it? If they’re the ones leading the effort? If we’re not going to hurt any living people by digging up an ancient tomb? I’m all for it. Graves are for the living, not the dead. If it wouldn’t cause pain to my own friends and family, I would be completely OK with someone just chucking my corpse in a garbage bin after I’m gone. I don’t need it anymore. To me, it’s literally trash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I know Reddit sucks but this one is funny.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is actually a fun bit of historical trivia. That passport isn’t something someone just cooked up in Photoshop. It’s real.

  In 1976, his remains were issued an Egyptian passport (nearly 3 thousand years after his death) so that he could be transported to Paris for an irradiated treatment to prevent a fungoid growth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dangers of Socialism they warned us about...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism.

  I really dislike this kind of thinking. People citing that we’ve never had a communist country tend to think:

  1. Only true Communism counts as communism. (So no failures of any real nation can ever be attributed to it.)

  2. Any country with any degree of market economy counts as capitalist. (So the sins of any nation can be attributed to capitalism.)

  They use an extremely tight definition for communism and an extremely loose definition for capitalism. I’m a leftist myself, but I can recognize the intellectual inconsistency.

  By the same logic, I could argue that the Catholic Church never covered up sex abuses by priests:

  True Catholicism has never existed, as there’s never been a time it’s been truly universal. (The word “Catholic” means “universal.”) Obviously we can only ever talk about the failures of Catholicism once we’ve actually achieved true Catholicism. Until literally every single living human being is a devout Catholic, any discussion of the merits of Catholicism is purely theoretical and shouldn’t serve to guide our decisions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dangers of Socialism they warned us about...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For certain kinds of communism/socialism, authoritarianism does seem pretty much inevitable. It’s not inevitable for more distributed community-oriented forms. But for any socialist/communist government organized at the national level, authoritarianism seems inevitable to me.

  In order to seize the means of production, you have to do just that - seize it. You have to send scores of armed men out with guns to physically take control over all the productive assets in a country. And those assets are then available for the state to use, for whatever reasons it wants. Sure, the people in power will promise to use those resources for the greater good, but who is going to stop them if they don’t?

  If we’ve seen anything in the last 20 years in the US, it’s that power and wealth are interchangeable. Wealth is power. Power is wealth. It’s why I oppose the very existence of billionaires - no individual should have that much power. If that weren’t true, I wouldn’t care so much about them. I really don’t care if a billionaire builds an obnoxiously large yacht. I do care if they start throwing their money around and controlling national policy. And whenever a government seizes control of the entire economy, it now owns the entire wealth of a nation. And if you have all the assets, have complete authority to decide who works what job, have complete say on where people get to live? Well that government now has total power over everyone’s lives.

  Any government that powerful immediately falls to authoritarianism. Why? Because there is one and only one locus of power in that country now. Ambitious people can’t start a business or seek power through some other level of government. All resources are controlled by the central state. If you want to have any influence at all over that society, you need to get in power of that central government. The government is all-powerful. The stakes are total. Power is completely centralized. You as a leader either control everything or nothing.

  It’s rather impossible not to end up with authoritarianism when a form of government requires, as a first step, to gather all power and wealth under the control of a single authority.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries dating apps⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it is a very reasonable concern. Upon hearing Helen’s story, it’s very easy to see how it might have been a Clever Hans situation. At surface level, Helen Keller’s story sound a lot like Clever Hans.

  The difference between the two is that Keller’s claims actually stood up to scrutiny. Hans could never perform his feats in independent and controlled testing. Keller was able to function and communicate independently with people for decades. But if they are not aware of this history, I can see why people are skeptical.