ristoril_zip
@ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Voyager 1 1 week ago:
Keep in mind too these guys are writing and reading in like assembly or some precursor to it.
I can only imagine the number of checks and rechecks they probably go through before they press the “send” button. Especially now.
This is nothing like my loosey goosey programming where I just hit compile or download and just wait to see if my change works the way I expect…
- Comment on Does enshitification happen because companies are publicly-traded? 2 weeks ago:
I’ll let others address the “enshittification” angle but I thought I’d point out that “shareholder value uber allies” is a relatively recent … “innovation” … in economic theory, brought about by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Milton Friedman in the last half of last century:
chicagobooth.edu/…/what-made-chicago-school-so-in…
The rethinking of what the boards of companies are supposed to do (from maximize stakeholder value to maximize shareholder value) and how they can operate (from requiring justification to approve mergers to requiring justification to block mergers) really took off with them, and exploded when former union boss Ronald Reagan found “religion” (because Nancy’s pussy was just that good) and ruined the economy for workers.
Lots of other people contributed, including Clinton after he “won” the 1992 election with 40% of the vote due to Perot splitting the Republican vote. His campaign of fiscal conservatism but without less bigotry became the model for the Democratic Party for the next two decades.
Anyway, Biden’s FTC is finally working to help workers again, which might even release the death grip of the Chicago School from our economy. We’ll see after November I guess.
- Comment on Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy? 4 weeks ago:
I’m sure this will come if the wrong way but if you’re genuinely concerned about discovering diversity of thought, you’re going to have to tell us what your positions are for example.
I’m all for finding diversity, but so often what people who post these are looking for is an echo chamber. Like if you’re really wanting to be challenged, and you’re a conservative, go to socialistworker.org and read up.
But if what you’re concerned about is the nerds in Lemmy seem to be left leaning, that’s just the nature of smart creative people. We value skills and creativity over hierarchy and structure.
- Comment on Would you drink breast milk if it was commercially available? 1 month ago:
Yeah I’d try it once. I mean I’m sure I accidentally tasted it when my wife was lactating but I never took a big swig.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
The answer is “vote” but not just once. Not just for federal elections. Every election, you should be there. Show up to candidate forums and bother your current electeds.
Every government is like a ship of various size, it takes a while to see the turn even start, let alone have the course actually get corrected. The bigger the government, the harder it can be to get long lasting positive change accomplished. (This isn’t a “small government is better” thing either, it’s just how large organizations work.)
If you can, run for office. If you can’t, find someone you trust who can and support them. Not just Congress or president or governor. City council, county government, school board, on and on…
- Comment on You understand? 4 months ago:
Santa & his coterie are quantum so it doesn’t matter what you think his velocity is
- Comment on Sigma college loans 4 months ago:
fortune.com/…/biden-canceled-one-hundred-billion-…
They’ve forgiven $132 billion so far. It’s not what we wanted, but unfortunately the Republican stacked Supreme Court said Biden couldn’t do blanket forgiveness.
It’s almost like it matters not just who the president is today, but who the president was for the past several decades. And who is and was in Congress.
We can build on what Biden and the Democrats did accomplish, but only if we give them the tools to do so. If we want more stuff like the child tax credit expansion that we got in 2021, we have to reelect Biden and get strong Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. If we want more stuff like the inflation reduction act that is creating jobs and repairing infrastructure, we have to vote for Democrats.
They’ve made it clear they want to do more (i.e. build back better, blanket student loan forgiveness, protect abortion rights). Those long drawn out fights with Manchin and Sinema weren’t just for show. They were a clear indication of what the Democratic Party wants to pass if it has the votes in Congress.
- Comment on Hormones are powerful drugs. Taken by everybody. Creating massive aggresstion, obsession and mental disturbance. What would freedom from its influences look like for a society? An individual? 4 months ago:
The problem honestly is your concept of hormones is incomplete. There are no hormones that only do one thing. They might have a primary function. But they all have secondary and tertiary functions. They all regulate other hormones. Evolution doesn’t do single functions.
If you knock down a “fight” hormone you’re probably going to mess up the homeostasis of the body in other ways. You can probably “fix” that artificially, but you’ll be constantly chasing the next side effect. Humans are chemical Rube Goldberg machines of infinite order. Disrupt one thing and it all goes out of whack.
- Comment on Covid lockdowns had ‘catastrophic effect’ on UK’s social fabric, report claims 5 months ago:
It’s quite cunning of the capitalists to blame COVID lockdowns for their acceleration of the wealth gap that was clearly growing faster and faster before COVID.
Never mind that the lockdowns kept people from dying, right? Kept the hospitals from being even more overwhelmed. The capitalists would rather have a bunch of dead workers than lose productivity.
Let’s see if we keep falling for it. I know all the MAGA people in America and their ilk internationally have already. Next will be the people who don’t really pay attention to world events.
- Comment on So angery 5 months ago:
Probably has braces
- Comment on Do you think that membership into suicide pacts will increase dramatically within the next decade because the world is falling apart at the seams? 5 months ago:
It’s easy to focus on the negative, especially because that sells more toilet paper and beer on TV (and Internet sites).
But as Mr Rogers instructed us, when you see bad things going on, look for the helpers. There are a lot of people out there working to put the seams back together even as others are picking at them.
So far, the seam fixers have been winning. I think they’ll still win. For all its downsides, there is a huge upside to globalization: the wealthy people have more to gain from a mostly peaceful planet than from a mostly war stricken planet. Now, there’s profit in that “mostly” that is - to my way if thinking - bad. It’s something that (small “d”) democratic people should push back against.
Like, think about the American bullshit in Iraq and Afghanistan. We actually stopped being at war in those places in the recent past. We don’t have large deployments of active duty troops out there killing poor brown people. That’s good.
Biden also seems like the most likely guy to strongly resist the inevitable calls for war from the military industrial political media complex. Not only does he have personal experience with the loss that comes from war. He has decades of experience in government which makes him less likely to be hornswoggled by generals who want to blow shit up. (If he can purge all the white supremacists from the military that will also help.)
Don’t only look at the bad news. There’s good news out there, too.
- Comment on Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth 5 months ago:
When social networking changes to social media, that was the end of the “good” Internet.
It’s possible to get it back if we kill off the social media companies, but it will be hard. The tantalizing nature of profit for selling use data is apparently quite the siren’s song.
The fediverse is a promising development, though.
- Comment on We have had guns for 200 years but mass shootings only became common in the last 30. So what changed? 6 months ago:
I love how all the people talking about how semi auto guns have been around for X years and blah blah blah completely ignore the massive uptick in production, sale, and distribution of those guns in the past 30-40 (or so).
People have more or less been able to buy assault style semi auto rifles for a long time, but they only “recently” (I guess 30-40 years might not be so recent?) started actually buying them in large numbers. Mostly thanks to the NRA, if I had to point a finger.
The problem is that a really angry or disturbed or whatever person with access to a high rate of fire weapon and lots of ammo (because they’ve been told that next election Jack Johnson or John Jackson will be taking their guns) can literally just pick it up and go kill half a dozen or more people in 30 minutes. There’s nothing we can do to intercept that. (And “good guys with guns” have a terrible track record, including cops.)
We even had a little experiment in the 90s where people were buying a lot of these and then we banned them. Mas shootings (4+ victims according to the FBI if I recall correctly) had been going up but then they went down until …
W and his Republican stooges (or maybe he was the stooge?) let the ban expire, mass shootings started ticking up.
The drivers that lead people to mass violence probably are the “root” of the problem, and I would guess hypothetically that if we could snap our fingers and solve those it wouldn’t matter how many or what type of guns there are out there. The problem is that we aren’t even trying to fix those problems, and the Republican Party is actively making them worse, AND we’re making these literal weapons of war easily available to everyone.
- Comment on Why do people say that "return to office" is about raising commercial real estate prices? 6 months ago:
Considering that the Muskrat can apparently be the full time CEO of 3 companies simultaneously you might be surprised.
CEOs think they’re different from us normies, and have a lot in common with other
superstarsCEOs such that their interests seem more shared.It’s complex, for sure, but yes to some extent the “back to office” CEOs care that the commercial property market stays “healthy.”
- Comment on Why do people say that "return to office" is about raising commercial real estate prices? 6 months ago:
It’s simple supply and demand. If lots of white collar workers are WFH, then hiring new people doesn’t require more office space. If you can grow your company without leasing office space, or by leasing a smaller office, demand for office space goes down.
Office space owners who use that for income suddenly don’t have (as much) income. So maybe they lower lease rates to attract new tenants. Well, now tenants stuck in higher rate leases start doing the math on penalties for breaking their existing lease vs the new prices.
If remote work stays popular or grows (hint: it’s growing), this CAN result in a race to the bottom on commercial real estate leases, which makes them less valuable investments, which could lead to a massive sell off.
All of this makes CEOs itchy. So they try to justify return to office policies. This just chases their best people into the arms of competitors who will support WFH (and naive pay more without high office space leases to pay).
I think the era of regular office work for white collar workers is over. Maybe a couple days a week for client meetings. But why not just go to the client site?
Office work was killed by COVID. Good riddance.
- Comment on I believe science but I don't understand science. Does that make me religious? 7 months ago:
You’re falling prey to a common trope from religionists: an ambiguous usage of the word/concept “belief.”
I trust what experts in fields outside those I’m deeply familiar with because generally speaking people like them have gone to the trouble of demonstrating what they claim is actually true in the past. That makes it rational, in my opinion, to trust claims that they make today and in the future within their field of expertise.
So to some extent I get the religious commitment of people who have directly experienced what they consider to be miracles. It’s rational, in a way, to become religious after experiencing what you consider to be a miracle.
The vast majority of religious people have not directly experienced a miracle the way I’ve directly performed scientific experiments that validate others’ reported results. They’ve heard about miracles. They’ve read about miracles. That’s not the same, and I’d argue it makes their religious beliefs irrational.
Now, what would probably happen if people were only religious after directly experiencing miracles? I bet religions would just fade away and eventually people who experienced “miracles” would instead contemplate then as unexplained phenomena that could probably have AB explanation rooted in the physical world, and also but become religious.
In a world where religion is encouraged and celebrated, of course people who experience what they consider to be a miracle will first turn to a religious explanation. But if we imagine no religion…
- Comment on 15 More Free to Play Overwhelmingly Positive Steam Games 7 months ago:
It’s really sad considering how amazing DOTA was umpty bajillion years ago. Also Enfo’s survival.
- Comment on In the U.S., what exactly are we supposed to do when an ambulance, with its sirens on, approaches from behind? 7 months ago:
“Supposed to do” is kind of vague, but many people have answered the “legally required to do” already.
If you or someone you love dearly were in an ambulance heading to the hospital to deal with an emergency medical condition (or waiting for one to arrive & provide transport to the hospital), what would you want everyone in the path to do? Whatever the answer to that is, do that. For me, the answer is, “as quickly and safely as possible make a path for the ambulance.”
Is that pulling over? Stopping? Pulling into a parking lot? Continuing to drive until one of those options is available? Depends. Are you on a crowded road with no way to pull over? Then stopping will impede the ambulance. Don’t impede the ambulance. Are you the only car on the road? Then slow down and move to the right (in the US).
- Comment on Why shouldn’t firearm manufacturers be held accountable for the use of their weapons in crimes? 8 months ago:
I’m not sure “this was used in a crime” is the sort of thing that can be legislated or sued over, if that makes sense. I think the more reasonable standard for successfully adjudicating criminality is people’s or their constructs (corporations) acting negligently in the production, marketing, sales, and distribution of “things that can be dangerous” or “things that can be used to commit crimes.”
The huge issue most of the responses in this thread have is that they say “you can’t sue someone for making something just because the end user did a bad thing with it” oversimplification of how basically the entire world works.
The only reason manufacturers of anything have plausible deniability on being partially responsible for crimes committed with their wares is the strong likelihood that they could not have known the end user would do that.
If I hand craft a knife on and sell it on the Internet to someone who sends me a message asking “hey is this knife good for stabbing my bitch ex?” there’s a decent chance a good lawyer could get me for negligence at a minimum and possibly accessory to a crime. Because a reasonable person might conclude that knife would be used for a crime.
There’s a reason a Remington settled the lawsuit from the Sandy Hook families for $75 million: www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/us/…/index.html
They were never going to be liable for making the gun (particularly since gun manufacturers have a special law protecting them). But they clearly determined there was a decent chance they’d lose in court regarding how they marked, sold, and distributed guns, so they decided shelling out $75,000,000 was a better business decision.
If there’s a company making screwdrivers out there and they’re aware there’s a screwdriver murder problem in a city and they manufacture and distribute their screwdrivers to that city and put up billboards and take out magazine ads glorifying how good their screwdrivers are in a fight… they ought to be liable. Not because a screwdriver can be used to hurt people, but because they should reasonably be aware that in that city their screwdrivers had a good chance to be used to hurt somebody.
- Comment on Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses? 8 months ago:
Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to “finishing what daddy started.” In 2002-2003 the W’s cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.
It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that’s why he got all paranoid.
With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would’ve been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.
Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don’t know what the best “after” would’ve been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could’ve helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.
- Comment on Are straws an unnecessary (but convenient) invention? 8 months ago:
Technically all inventions are “unnecessary but convenient.” Our ancestors got by just fine without fire or tools or clothes for much much longer than we’ve been inventing tools and using them.
Don’t get me wrong, today’s humans would almost certainly die out without our tools because we’ve adapted so heavily to having them (especially fire and clothing).
- Comment on How are slavery reparations fair? 8 months ago:
Let’s say that 5 generations ago, your great-great-great grandfather had a farm. It was highly productive and had a great location.
Let’s say that my great-great-great grandfather went to the local government and paid bribes and maybe did some light killing and stole that farm. No matter who your g-g-g grandfather talked to, they all pointed to the new deed and told him to suck eggs. Your g-g-g grandfather fell into despair and poverty. His children grew up poor but also worked hard and climbed up the wealth ladder a little. So too did their children, and so on, until your generation. Let’s say you’re lower middle class or so. No generational wealth to speak of but not in poverty.
Meanwhile my family has developed that farmland, partitioned it and sold or leased pieces of it for business and industry. We have phenomenal generational wealth all built on that initial theft of land.
But hey, you never had land stolen directly from you, and I never directly stole the land. Everyone in the area knows exactly what happened. Everyone in the area knows that my generational wealth is built on theft. Nowadays everyone talks openly about it, including me.
Now, from the outside looking in, I say that the absolutely morally right thing to do is restore the ownership of the land to the descendants of the person who owned it. But from the inside, the living descendants of the thief say hey, WE didn’t steal the land. We just benefit every day from the original theft. Why should we do anything to make amends for that theft, which we don’t dispute but don’t want to be accountable for either.
- Comment on Is there a more politically conservative part of the fediverse? 8 months ago:
Could you define “conservative” in terms of politics (presumably US)? For example, low taxes and small government? And/or anti abortion and pro religion? Anti gun safety legislation? Anti regulation?
Perhaps you’re looking for the more contemporary definition of “conservative” that’s come about since the Tea Party or MAGA movements started? Mostly focused on being against whatever liberals/progressive are for?
As others have mentioned I think there are a lot of spaces out there for the latter group. I’m not sure many exist for the former group.
- Comment on Nothing infuriates me quite like anti working class propaganda being pushed by the eilte 8 months ago:
How is “despite waiting lists being a record high” on the doctors? That’s on the hospitals or government for not hiring enough doctors, probably because they don’t pay well enough. The doctors should add “the waiting lists are too long” to their complaints (if not already on there).
- Comment on Push For A 4-Day Work Week Picks Up Steam — And Critics 9 months ago:
It’s gonna be middle managers and owners criticizing. The former because they add no value, the latter because… oh they add no value either, but they also profit off our work. But they’re afraid their lack of value adding will be discovered.
- Comment on Do you believe the medical industry has financial motivations to push sex change surgeries on children? 9 months ago:
Who is “pushing the idea” exactly? Do you have some examples of that being pushed? Examples of specifically “trying to convince perfectly healthy boys and girls that they are the opposite gender”?
Also do you have specific examples of under 18 children having their sex organs removed (for transition surgery not for cancer or whatnot)?
How do you feel about children like teenage girls having breast enhancement surgery?
- Comment on Do you believe the medical industry has financial motivations to push sex change surgeries on children? 9 months ago:
No more or less than “the medical industry” (whatever that is) has to push other procedures that are unethical and currently forbidden by every professional organization. Procedures which aren’t being done on children now and have no realistic chance of being done in the future.