SpaceCowboy
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 6 days ago:
Well the government can break up corporations which results in more competition. They can also enforce standards which also allows more competition. This gives people more options so they can’t just set prices in a monopolistic way.
Unfortunately there’s not much the Canadian government can do about Walmart and Microsoft as they aren’t Canadian companies. And Kamala’s opportunity economy has been cancelled so it doesn’t look there’s going to be any positive change in the US for foreseeable future.
But they could break up Loblaw’s at least.
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 6 days ago:
Well the debate should be over whether the taxes cause things to be expensive or it’s corporate greed causing things to be expensive.
Next time you see one of the ubiquitous Poilievre ads claiming it’s taxes that’s making things unaffordable, think about where the problems actually are.
- Comment on CEO brains go brrrrr 1 week ago:
Which of these isn’t real?
- Most of Founding Fathers owned slaves
- Elon Musk treats workers like shit
- The Founding Fathers wrote pretty words about rights and freedoms
- Elon Musk writes words about right and freedoms.
- Founding Fathers were wealthy because of the work done by slaves
- Elon Musk is wealthy because of work done by oppressed people under apartheid
You keep saying I’m divorced from reality, but which of these things do you think isn’t real?
- Comment on This happened today at a company in India. Better keep a smile on your face 1 week ago:
It’s internet real…
Somebody really posted that on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/…/shitizdogra_firing-layoffs-job-act…
And if you search on LinkedIn for “Ashu Arora Jha” there is an account that looks real.
Whether or not it actually real and not just internet real is anybody’s guess. But it’s not something OP made up anyway.
- Comment on CEO brains go brrrrr 1 week ago:
So you don’t believe that George Washington owned slaves? Talk about making up a reality in your head.
You were indoctrinated from a young age to believe in the myth of the Founding Fathers. Everything you heard in school, all the the monuments, the faces printed on your currency all reinforce your beliefs. So I understand that it’s not easy to accept that these guys were the Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of their times. But it’s not some dead slave masters that guarantee your rights. This mentality results in apathy and taking rights for granted which made the US susceptible to fascism. Mythologizing a false past leads to people wanting to go back to that false past.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say MAGA is about wanting to go back to full on slavery, but there is a feeling there that people of certain ethnicities should “know their place”. And people certainly “knew their place” when the Founding Fathers were running things didn’t they?
- Comment on CEO brains go brrrrr 1 week ago:
George Washington also owned slaves. As did most of your Founding Fathers: politifact.com/…/evidence-shows-most-47-men-famou…
The founding principles of the USA were around rights and freedoms for land owning white men only. Everyone else were meant to serve them. Which is more consistent with the principles of Elon Musk than with your principles.
Though he’s still a significantly better man than Musk on the whole.
Thomas Jefferson literally owned slaves. Elon Musk offered to buy a horse for an employee to get a handy, while Jefferson raped his slaves. Jefferson was way more “flawed” than Elon Musk is.
- Comment on CEO brains go brrrrr 1 week ago:
Most of the founding father fucking owned slaves.
Elon Musk writes about rights and freedoms. Thomas Jefferson wrote about right and freedoms. Elon Musk is shit to the workers he gets his wealth from. Thomas Jefferson got his wealth from slaves. Elon Musk sexually harasses his female workers. Thomas Jefferson impregnated his slaves.
Elon Musk and the other billionaires are being 100% consistent with the Founding Fathers you idolize. This is why arguing that these billionaire assholes aren’t “in keeping with the Founding Fathers” is so weak. Deep down we all know that these guys are acting exactly like the Founding Fathers. It really makes sense for so many people to think Trump, Musk and all the other scumbags are like the Founding Fathers because they actually are. They just aren’t like the mythologized Founding Fathers that you believe in. But the Founding Fathers you believe in never existed.
The actual people were just a group of rich slave masters that wanted to take away more land from indigenous people. They wrote some nice words about rights and freedoms to fool people into being willing to die to serve their interests. Which is exactly what MAGA is all about isn’t it? Rich people talking big about rights and freedoms to get people to support them having more power.
- Comment on CEO brains go brrrrr 1 week ago:
I thought the purpose of the US founding fathers was to gain power to prevent the British government from having a say in abolishing slavery. Also so they could ignore the treaty the British made with the Indigenous peoples living to the west of the 13 colonies. They wanted that land and didn’t like those assholes in London preventing westward expansion via genocide.
These people have been so intent on gathering money and power, they haven’t realized why the founding fathers did the exact opposite.
You might be surprised about how consistent they are with the “Founding Fathers” by saying some nice words about “freedom” while their actions say the opposite. The American Revolution didn’t fundamentally alter things (slavery existed before and after the revolution) it only changed who was in power. Pretty words on a paper didn’t give people freedom. It was people voting, unionizing, and oh yeah, a bloody civil war that brought freedom. And then even more voting and unionizing and protesting for over a century.
The US is a weird place not too dissimilar from the society depicted in 1984, just with Big Brother replaced by Founding Father. Founding Father isn’t watching over you. Founding Father was hypocritical slave-master that would have more in common with the likes of Elon Musk than they would ever have with you.
Writing nice words about freedom while acquiring wealth from the work of slaves, isn’t that consistent with Elon Musk?
- Comment on CEO brains go brrrrr 1 week ago:
Image of a guy in an SS uniform being happy that a lifeform which was trying to defend it’s home from invasion is afraid.
I don’t think that image is saying what you think it’s saying.
- Comment on Does anyone else think the NYPD photos of the UHC CEO shooting suspect don’t match? 1 week ago:
Yeah the shooter had something more like a rain jacket. But he may have put on the rain jacket that he wasn’t wearing earlier when going out to shoot the guy. Backpack is different, but that may have been stashed in the park.
But what seems odd to me is that this whole thing was obviously premeditated, but a guy that’s intent on murder is smiling and chatting up the receptionist? I guess that’s possible, but something that further suggests that it’s a different dude.
We really only have the top half of the faces looking somewhat similar in a couple of grainy images. It’s plausible it’s the same guy, but given the information we have, it’s more likely not. But we don’t have all the information, so who knows?
- Comment on Honey 1 month ago:
There’s also a pretty… sane… subgroup that proposes ‘corrective breeding’; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their ‘natural’ state
Yeah I feel like that is just forcing animals to live in the way humans want them to live under a weird assumption that we know what they want.
I could live out in the wild if I really wanted to, but I don’t because living in a heated home, having access to healthcare, and having a grocery store nearby is way better than starving to death, getting frostbite, dying of a disease, or getting eaten by wolves. I don’t know how an animal wants to live their lives, so who knows, maybe they’d rather die of disease over being poked by a few needles by a veterinarian, starving because there’s no mangers filled by humans, or getting eaten alive by a pack of wolves. Maybe animals want that, but there’s no way of knowing and it’s a really weird thing to assume given humans don’t want to live that way. We live happy an fulfilling lives without having to constantly worry about being eaten by wolves, why would that be a requirement for an animal to be happy?
I think people see nature from a Disney cartoon perspective where the only danger is a human hunter. But the reality is nature is extremely brutal.
I don’t think a perfect ethical solution to domesticated animals really exists. Best we can do is just treat animals better. If they seem like they’re happy enough, then that’s probably alright.
- Comment on Honey 1 month ago:
I think that’s the distinction between vegan and vegetarian. Milk is vegetarian since it’s not eating a cow, but it’s not vegan because an animal was used to produce it.
So honey not being vegan is the same kind of thing.
- Comment on Honey 1 month ago:
Seems like a weird thing though. A lot of domesticated animals can’t survive in the wild. And even the ones that can, it would only be in certain parts of the world, and they’d be an invasive species.
So do we want all of those animals to go extinct? If you eliminate all farm related activities with these animals, give them a place to live out the rest of their lives, but then what? But do you not allow them to breed? Or just let them all die off so they go extinct?
Or do you keep some of them in zoos? Given they’ve been bred to live on a farm, does that mean you have zoos that are identical to farms? And if you can get milk, eggs and honey from these animals if they’re technically living in zoo (which is exactly like a farm in every way) what’s been accomplished?
- Comment on Why do residential skyscrapers always seem to include balconies that never get used? 1 month ago:
Mine love it out there.
The trick is to bring them inside before it gets cold.
- Comment on How come people who are against abortion are in favor of the death penalty? Kind of seems like a contradicition/ 1 month ago:
Most people aren’t all that well informed and don’t do a lot of crtical thinking about their political positions on things. Many people are only guided by their emotions.
If your Church says that life begins at conception, then abortion is killing babies. So you’d be angry about abortions happening.
If you hear a horrible crime, you’re angry about that and might want the person that did that crime to be executed. If you never hear about or think about innocent people being execute, never consider the ethical problems with a government killing people, never consider the costs of it, and all the other arguments against the death penalty, then you can go through life thinking there’s no problem with it.
And even if you hear the rational arguments, they get overpowered by emotion the next time someone says “abortion is murder” or you hear about a horrible crime happening that might qualify for the death penalty.
- Comment on Should you trust that doctor? 1 month ago:
Does the amount of vicodin he’s using put him higher or lower on the graph?
- Comment on Should you trust that doctor? 1 month ago:
DOOM has no need for your silly meme graphs!
- Comment on Fead 2 months ago:
My understanding is there’s a lot of coral reefs in the Bermuda triangle and, like you say a lot of shipping with through there. So it makes sense a lot of ships went missing in that area.
Sailors are a superstitious lot so there were stories about it being cursed. Kinda like how it’s bad luck to carry bananas on a sailboat.
- Comment on Fead 2 months ago:
It’s a triangle, so it’s under your bed, in your closet, and in the attic.
- Comment on Those are so ugly. Who would even buy these... oh, right. 2 months ago:
“Interesting… you’re wearing your crocs in the desert style, like a Fremen. Who taught you to do this?”
“It just seemed to make sense…”
“He is the Lisan al Gaib!”
- Comment on "But I prefer The Creature if it's all the same to you." 2 months ago:
I feel like the Frankenstein might have been a product of a poor upbringing.
Doctor Frankenstein is the real monster in the story.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
On the internet, the first to make an accusation wins. If if the accusation is false, they still win. So even when they actually do the things they falsely accuse others of doing, they’ve already won the argument on the internet.
“You’re just accusing us of doing what you did” is stronger than “You’re now doing what you accused us of in the past” when the rhetoric is more important than the facts.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
If they were any good at it they’d be employed as journalists and win Pullitzer Prizes for their work. Nixon having his goons break into a hotel to steal information from his opposition is a hell of a “conspiracy theory”. But we don’t consider it that because Woodward and Bernstein put in the work to find the evidence.
Your typical internet conspiracy theorists are just plain lazy and very susceptible to selection bias. They make up things to fill in the gaps of their theories and refuse to change the made up bits even when they find evidence to the contrary. The general contrarianism of the internet pushes people to think the opposite of establish facts.
In the end it’s just a mess of made up shit that conforms to the emotions of the person that made it up. These conspiracy theories are promoted among those with similar feelings. They push way more lies than anyone else.
- Comment on Ok boomer 2 months ago:
I used to love using the self-checkout. But then it became a trend among the corporate overlords here to get all paranoid about people stealing food, so now they have the weight system calibrated too strict. Now if you breath on the items in the bag it locks you out and someone has to come unlock the system to continue scanning. So it’s not really worth the hassle, and seems kinda pointless since an employee has to unlock the system after every few items.
- Comment on Anon browses ancient memes 2 months ago:
It’s what you don’t see that’s significant too. Someone from Taiwan making a funny meme that might make you feel like Taiwan is a cool place that you wouldn’t want something bad to happen there? Probably not going to see that. Someone in Hong Kong being nostalgic about when their vote actually made a difference? Not going to see it. A Uighur just talking about their day to day life. Not going to see it.
Everyone knows people have a limited amount of time to consume information. If they fill up that time with anything and everything other than the things they don’t want you to be thinking about, they can erase these things from public consciousness.
China is full of fun and happy people! Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Uighur people? Never heard of them!
When it’s a person discussing things with you rather than a very small set of algorithms controlled by a very small group of people, you’ll hear about things you might not hear about from an algorithm. Sure it’s determined by what the person you’re talking to knows about and what they care about, so it’s very random. But at there’s at least there’s a probability you’ll hear about things that are inconvenient to the powerful people for you to know about.
- Comment on Anon browses ancient memes 2 months ago:
You’re saying there’s no potential for anyone to put a spin on the memes you’re consuming? You believe it’s not having any kind of influence on you in any way?
- Comment on Anon browses ancient memes 2 months ago:
Yeah but you can only get controlled absurdist bizarre stuff. It’s not people recommending things to you, it’s an algorithm that’s controlled by people with dubious intentions.
Sure you’ll see memes and funny stuff, but only the ones that have been approved by an unseen algorithm. So it’s the appearance of randomness, but not actually random.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Republicans are also always on about how the government is bad (even when they’re the incumbents) and how deregulating things make everything better. Libertarians are people who drank a full jug of that particular kool-aid. Also like republicans, they tend to only care about gun rights, though they will sometimes pretend to care about other rights to make it feel like an ideological thing.
- Comment on Big Penny! 2 months ago:
Yeah I’m pretty sure it’s the same bridge. It’s kinda internet famous. They raised the bridge a little since that video, but it still peels the tops off of trucks.
- Comment on Why limit immigration? 2 months ago:
From an economic perspective, it’s mostly positive. Raising a child is expensive, and those costs go on for about 20 years before you have a person that’s economically productive. Most Immigrants are adults and can join the workforce immediately. The economic costs of their childhood was paid by the country they came from. It’s a negative for the country they came from, this is refereed to as a “brain drain.” But for their new country, it’s like a tax paying worker just appeared out of nowhere.
As for the economic negatives, the big one is housing. Too much immigration all at once can result in a shortage of housing. It can also put stress on public services and infrastructure. Businesses may not have the capacity to serve a larger population. These things can adapt of course, but you can’t instantly build a house and you can’t instantly expand public services, etc. So you might want to limit immigration so an area can adapt to all of the various economic needs of a larger population. An immigrant will work and pay taxes and contribute to the local economy, so long term it’s all positives, but there can be a lot of short term problems if a population grows to rapidly.
As for social… well I’m not really much of a sociologist, but just from I can see, people who already live in an area might be uncomfortable being around people of a different culture. Might say crazy things like “They’re eating the dogs!” Yeah that’s crazy, but it is a problem. Not caused by the immigrants themselves, but it’s a problem that does happen when there’s immigration.
But there’s social benefits. Can learn from a new culture. May get some new options for restaurants to go to.
Generally the young will enjoy more social benefit (going out to the different restaurants and learning about different cultures), but the older people will tend to be uncomfortable with it. But that’s just the tendency.
So overall I’d say you do need limits on immigration to mitigate the short term issues, but it’s all positives in the long term.