rowinxavier

@rowinxavier@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don’t more people start profit-sharing companies or co-ops?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This requires capital to do and the traits that drive having capital in the first place under capitalism also drive making capitalist structures to get more capital. It takes acting against your interests in capitalism to make a co-op.

  That said, as a group a bunch of people could invest equally and have a fair amount of capital, especially with access to business loans. The key problem here is accessing finance and legal structures. The structure of an LLC is not really ideal for a co-op as it assumes individual ownership not group ownership. This can be worked through in a few ways but it is always a workaround, just something to make it work in the current system. The ideal would be some sort of shared, maybe creative commons, legal frameworks written up and cross checked by a bunch of lawyers. I think it could be done and very successful, but making that structure would require input from a bunch of people with experience with co-op structures. That said, once it is done they can all benefit for future endeavours and so can anyone else.

  The other issue is culture. The USA has a culture of avoiding interdependence and being very individualistic. This is great for atomising workers and preventing unions, so it is encouraged from all capitalist sources including western media such as film and TV but also in things like which books are published and which are passed on. Nobody wants to produce media that will result in their own loss of financial wellbeing or status. Finding a way of shifting the culture is definitely a hard and currently unsolved problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your most recent games played?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Half Life 2, I got a new laptop a couple of years ago and it was the first that could actually play it properly but I never got to it, then the big update came out and wow, so worth it, loving it.

  TES IV Oblivion. Love it, so silly, I love thieving.

  Autonauts vs Piratebots, such a fun and cute little programming game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gives you hope to keep going?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I work in disability support. Some of the kids I am working with have gone over the last year from non speaking to using sign and are making real meaningful progress in their self care skills. They can keep going in the face of difficult times, so my problems don’t seem so hard.

  Also, in Australia we have the NDIS, a system for funding disability supports in a socialised manner without restricting what options someone uses too much. While all governmental systems (or any systems with money) are susceptible to grift progress is being made on catching fraudsters and prosecuting them while also closing the loopholes they exploit. The NDIS will be around for a long time to come and will help Australians with disabilities determine their own futures and make them a reality. There are problems with it but honestly it has been a game changer and I think it is a model for the rest of the world to aspire to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, missing people who hurt you sucks. I have had that experience, it sucked a lot and took years to get through, but now I don’t miss them at all. Honestly losing them was a great thing for me in the long run and it was a good opportunity to learn who I was and what I could do. I left at 17, never finished high school, but went on to have a great relationship with my now spouse, we worked together to raise her younger brothers from 12 through to 18, we have a cat who is an asshole that I love dearly, and we have moved more than a thousand kms away from my toxic trash family. I am happy now, you can be happy, this is just a shitty, bumpy start and it will be confusing, but the emotional systems you have will recalibrate and you will not miss them the same way you do now. Honestly I just regret for them that they couldn’t see how silly they were being and how much they hurt myself and my siblings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some video game quotes that is stuck in your head?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  HUMILIATION!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some video game quotes that is stuck in your head?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Its war, and it ain’t easy”

  Honestly one of the best games ever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solution for the Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or it rides along both rails, taking out everybody perfectly. Sick grind dude, such a THPS visual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a planet was completely covered in water, wouldn't it all be freshwater?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well it depends too on how long things take to settle out. Salt is easily suspended in water, but silt is not, so the water would be salty but not muddy. The water would also probably have lots of photosynthetic bacteria/algae in it, so you would probably have blooms of green, blue, red, and brown all over. Those blooms would uptake light and carbon through that process then as they died drop the content down the long water column. All sorts of feeding below that would create a full eecological web. If there were deep sea vents, volcanic activity breaking through the sea floor, you would have a second source of energy and chemistry at the bottom. That said, the over level of life at the surface would be limited by things like iron, phosphorus, copper, and so on. Any heavier ions would be less available at the surface because there is no surface erosion bringing them in at the top so as they are bound up in dead algae they will drop to the floor.

  The rate limiting at the sea floor will be based on energy but not too bad, you would likely see a lot of diverse life around vents and it would have a fairly large complexity over time. That said, the depth would make for less complex life due to the lack of light and associated vision. Some things would make light but it would be dangerous to make and would not be super common.

  Another interesting consideration is the geography of the sea floor. Would there be fault lines? If there are continental plates but way under the ocean they would still have movement, so subduction and so on would play out, so you would probably have chains of vents along the diverging or merging plate boundaries. Life would spread along these lines, so life would be closely related at nearby vents but distant over the surface of the planet. I would anticipate a fairly heterogeneous population over the surface of the planet in the deep, but far less so at the surface.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a planet was completely covered in water, wouldn't it all be freshwater?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on the composition of the planet. If it is just a massive ball of water floating in space then it will be whatever purity that is, plus whatever space dust and impactors bring in.

  If it is basically a terrestrial planet with water on top, say earth plus a lot of water, then it would be salty. The thing with salt water is contact between the water and rock. If there is sufficient heat it will circulate, so salty water from the bottom of the ocean may be heated by magma or similar and then it will be less dense, floating upwards to the surface. Along the way it will mix and cool, leading to dispersal of the dissolved salts.

  The only way I can imagine a planet with a solid subsurface completely coated in freshwater would be if the planet snowballed hard, no radioactive materials left in the core making heat, no significant tidal pull on the core, and then after reaching a very cold temperature having slow addition of clean water from comets. That said, comets are dirty, they have lots of stuff, so you would need somehow clean comets. Still, at that point once sufficient water has hit the surface it could form a thick enough layer over the salty ocean below and start to melt, maybe from greenhouse effects. As soon as it runs away and keeps heating enough it will start to melt the core ice though, so you could have a short lived window in that freak occurrence but it will be very temporary and not at all likely.

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a house advantage in a "double-or-nothing" coin flip game?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If everyone has the same amount of starting capital it is a fair game assuming both can opt out at any time.

  That said, the house appears to not be able to opt out (they definitely can, you just don’t think about that part), and the house has more capital. For them each time someone plays a round there are only 3 possible outcomes. Half are the player loses, then a quarter are the player wins and plays another round, and lastly a quarter are the player wins and ends the game. The only case where the player wins is option 3, in all other cases, so 75%, the house wins because the next round has another chance to make the player lose directly at a 50/50 chance or play another round.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How exactly does one eat 1500 calories a day?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  OK, so good, a clear starting point.

  First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.

  The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.

  So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.

  So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.

  Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.

  Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.

  Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How exactly does one eat 1500 calories a day?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.

  1. There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.

  2. Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.

  For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.

  So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.

  Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.

  That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.

  Can you give more detail about your goals?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I improve my handwriting?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.

  After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.

  If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spelling wasn't part of the curriculum⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Man, it looks like AI art the spelling is so bad. Impressive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have unlimited cellular data on my phone but not if I use it as a hotspot.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Root your phone and you can manage which APN is used by tethering. If you can’t do this consider trying a connecting to a VPN before enabling tethering, the connection will on some devices remain active on the normal APN because changing would disconnect the VPN and keeping connected is higher priority than updating the APN. Also USB tethering and WIFI tethering may behave differently.

  In the end this is a good argument for better regulation. When you buy a car they don’t get to extract more money from you because you drive out of state or use it for business. The fact that telecommunications companies have so much power and access to basically monitor what you are doing and bill accordingly is insane. You should pay for a service with a simple and clear contract and all this crap should be made illegal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  UBI will cycle in the bottom of the economy.

  When you give a rich person more money they buy assets and increase their wealth, it does not impact their spending activity and has no measurable impact on economic activity.

  When you give a middle income person more money they buy something new or pay down debts. Buying something new stimulates economic activity, but paying down debts is really just another wealth transfer to the banks which are owned by rich people.

  When you give money to low income people they spend it. They have unmet needs and always have something they can spend that money on. That money then generates economic activity.

  Increasing economic activity is what all of the interest rate and inflation talk is about. If you get people spending money that generates activity which increases wages, increases income, and decreases wealth inequality.

  A good example is during the GFC the Australian government gave low income people $750AUD, about $350USD. The prime minister asked people to spend this money rather than save it. People bought a bunch of things, in the people I knew it was mostly TVs and new clothes, things you can put off for ages but benefit from whenever you buy them. All of this purchasing stimulated the economy, leading to Australia being less impacted than almost any other G7 nation. We recovered very quickly and boomed from there.

  If you want a more long term example look at any welfare. If you have extremely poor people they just die. They are underfed, have weak immune systems, and they face imminent death. They can’t access housing so they end up on the street. They have tonnes of inteactions with police and end up in the criminal justice system. They end up having their lives ruined and being purely a drain economically. They suffer.

  If you give them enough money to have housing and food they are not going to be as costly to manage. They won’t require policing, they won’t get sick as often, and they will suffer less. Will this increase the competition for the lowest cost housing? Yes, but the answer to that is to build more housing. Even with the impact to housing cost this will not result in 100% of that payment going to landlords. People don’t pay their whole income for rent, they will buy food and other needs first, so if they are faced with too high a rent cost they will remain unhoused but at least tbey will eat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are mental hospitals run like prisons?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have some experience with mental health in Australia and it is pretty dire honestly. There is a constant sense that the staff are concerned first with making sure you don’t hurt yourself because that would be a breach of their duty of care. This unfortunaty made much of the interaction between staff and patients adversarial.

  I am currently entering the individual suppory industry and we have a concept called dignity of risk. You have to remember that people are entitled to take risks that they consider worthwhile regardless of what you think. This means if someone wants to smoke weed that is their choice, I can’t stop them. If they want to drink that is their choice and I have to respect that. This is because they are their own people and have their own autonomy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨would it be possible to live in the modern world only using a laptop?? no cellphone anything⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it is possible, though fairly prohibitive. You can get modules for connecting a Sim card to your laptop to make and receive calls and SMS, so all the third party authentication messages and calls can be done. Apps can often be run through an emulation layer for Android, not so much for iOS, but yeah, it can mostly be done.

  That said, there are devices like the Pinephone which run a mainline Linux distribution like Arch or Alpine and can also do calls, SMS, and if you are brave use some android apps. If you can use a Pinephone for it then you can use another Linux laptop with a phone module to handle everything else.

  I am much more worried about things like banking now. A bank that allows use of an app on your phone with NFC is great but when they take away using anything else I would become a little more worried. If they can keep an option open, say having standard cards along side phone NFC, then the lock in is much less profound. If we get to a point where they cannot operate without Google or Apple giving the go ahead then they cannot move away if things get bad, so those monopolistic companies can extract more value from those banks and that gets passed down. This applies to tonnes of other services like taxis, food delivery, booking doctors appointments, and so on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I clean my mouse wheel without taking apart my mouse?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you flip the mouse over you should see a circular piece of plastic. Rotate this and it should be able to pop out, at which point the ball will also fall out. Inside you will see a pair of rollers and a wheel, all of which may have gunk on them. Clean off the gunk and make sure they spin properly. Replace the ball, the circular plastic, and then rotate the plastic to lock the mechanism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is propaganda frowned upon?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Before the more modern definition took hold propaganda was not a term that held any real negative connotations. It was really just like marketing or evangelising, a behavior or product which uses various methods to change opinions. The big problem is when you have political or corporate powers using these tools to change opinion about something in a way that degrades democracy or causes harm.

  For example, oil companies stand to benefit from people being uncertain about the science, so when they engage in propaganda they are trying to inject doubt where there is none and to do so in a way that will benefit them in the short term. This will cause massive harm in the future, potentially leading to a significant number of wars and a staggerig death toll, but that is not part of their consideration.

  Another example is alt med. When someone claims that their pill can make your brain work better and will also boost your sexual performance all while protecting you from the dangers they just told you about they obviously stand to benefit from you believing them. They create the need and then offer the solution. Alex Jones is a good example of this. He tells you that the global elite are planning nuclear war, then in the next ad break tells you about iodine for radiation exposure.

  So why is propaganda frowned on? It is more like propaganda is the label we give to marketing or evangelising that we consider worthy of frowning. Someone in another countries may sort different things into evangelising, marketing, and propaganda categories but they will do so based on their understanding of the world and you will likely agree with most of their sorting. Almost everyone thinks that Nazis are bad and put their marketing in the propaganda bucket.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone *not* love using their bidet?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  For handheld bidets or the hose attachment this applies, the ones where it is fixed have much more flow and deal with the problem that way. That said, I’ve never used one of those so I can’t say.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this it? Is there anything more to life, am I missing something?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, there is more.

  You sound like you are experiencing burnout and as a result anhedonia and depression.

  Burnout is a very real clinical condition caused by the demands you are operating under being dysfunctional in some way. It is very real and can lead to a dangerous depression.

  Anhedonia is the loss of enjoyment in things you previously enjoyed. For example, when I had anhedonia video games because uninteresting, boring even, and the effort required to play was too much and there was no reward to playing.

  You need to deal with this before it escalates into full blown depression and burnout. It can take much longer to fix than it will take to stop now, so get started ASAP. Starting an antidepressant may be helpful, it may not, but it is just one tool and I personally would avoid it having done it before.

  The other steps for managing burnout are largely about changing the demands on you, the level of connection to other people, and what you do to relax. Exercise is a really helpful tool and honestly is what makes me resilient against another bout of burnout now.

  Good luck

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone *not* love using their bidet?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I can provide you the answer my partner gave me to the same question. The bidet provides water with a direction to it. You wash front to back, so all the material is lifted and pushed further away from the vulva and only fresh clean water arrives at the vulva itself. Also, as in chemistry, dilution is the solution, as you are washing less and less undesirable material left and the water runs cleaner and cleaner. So take extra time, wash front to back, and do multiple slow passes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People who back into parking spots: Why?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  When I am entering a space I have 360° visibility. I see all, I know all. I can therefore make a calm and practiced motion while being fully aware of my surroundings as I park.

  When I am leaving the space my view is inherently restricted. If I am pointing out I can see to both sides, see oncoming and same side traffic, see pedestrians, and see even more as I pull out of the spot.

  If I am pulling out in reverse I can see far less. I have a very twisty neck so I can see behind me (180°) plus another maybe 40°, leaving me with an 80° view, but it is from the opposite end of the car space so it is narrowed. As I pull out I see more, but the whole time it is more narrow. I can’t see the rear of vehicle and I certainly can’t see far to either side of the vehicle at the road level.

  So I think the key is thinking about your worst visibility. I think the overall visibility is better when I reverse in to the space and drive straight out when compared with driving directly in and reversing out. I think I can see small people and kids better over the bonnet of the car rather than out the rear window and I think I can react better to the situation when I am reversing in than when I am reversing out.