BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

This was to be expected- if you amortize over the lifetime of the equipment, it's much cheaper to get your electricity from panels than it is to pay someone to burn fuel and give you electricity. This has been true for years and the biggest obstacle for most people doing it has been available financing to do it. It's better now but in 2013 when I did my system the financing options were terrible compared to, say, purchasing a car. (I also got a car that year and it turns out that auto sellers have in-house banks to facilitate financing, solar rooftop sellers not so much)

Iranian teen injured on Tehran Metro while not wearing a headscarf has died, state media says was murdered for not wearing headscarf but AP can't quite bring itself to call it murder

Fixed it

Majority of Republicans now insist Trump never tried to overturn election

Of course they insist that- they were involved then and don't want consequences now

It's the return of company scrip.

The most-garbage/toxic notion of tech platforms these days is when they masquerade as tech platforms but are really unregulated banking platforms.

I’m convinced that Trump belongs in prison, but it’s up to the state to prove it.

Given the long record of witness tampering and intimidation and such that's well-documented and has been for years, my feel is it's ABOUT FUCKING TIME the state decided to take up the question.

I mean, yes- burden of proof and all, but when the defendant has been bragging he did all of these things in public and on media and in speeches to crowds, it was time to do all of this a long time ago

Time for India to get hungry and eat its billionaires

In the 1880s the phenomenon of the Robber Baron became a thing- industrial capitalism and corporate power vaulted private citizens into spheres of power and influence to rival that of royalty.

Sure enough, allowing the Robber Barons to become influential led to the collapse in prior regulatory regimes that had once balanced the interests of workers vs. their employers and the resulting abuses (and poverty) led to a crisis of confidence in fledgling democracies, in which socialists would argue for democratizing the workplaces and fascists would argue to reject democracy altogether and revert to a stronger-strong-man model of government that wouldn't fail the way monarchs had in the face of the democratic revolutions of the 1840s.

It was a messy process, but by the 1930s much of the world had figured out it would be much better off with its billionaires on short leashes, its monopolists tightly constrained, its fascists shamed into hiding (or pushing up daisies). The resulting economic boom is still remembered as a high point of the middle class, and it lasted until the 1970s because until then the PR efforts of the industrial barons were laughed off as being transparent and self-serving. Eventually enough of the folks that remembered life under the Robber Barons passed on and by the time the Boomers came of political age they stopped protecting unions and enforcing antitrust law and defending the New Deal.

Since then, the corporate-power/pro-billionaire lobby has re-asserted corporate power to a state of affairs that has concentrated wealth and power much more than it was even in the deepest throes of the Great Depression or the decades leading up to it.

Of course the Billionaires are feeling ascendant. Also, at this point people are generally becoming as eat-the-rich as they were in times when it took literal violence to re-establish labor protections and re-assert democratic authority over public affairs. This is the second big-cycle of declining/crisis- democracy -> fascism -> resurgent democracy since the wave of democratic revolutions swept Europe in the 1840s and 50s. We're in the dark part of it now, the forces of fascism are ascendent and extremely powerful but don't forget they are and will always be a small minority

And he is still in congress, voting

I mean what sort of madness is it to suggest that if you call apartheid apartheid it's not about the apartheid it must be antisemitism instead /s

Isn’t that in the Torah?

Yes, it's in Exodus. Exodus is part of the Torah, as well as the Old Testament, along with Leviticus. The Torah is the first 5 books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)

Leviticus (11:9-12) is where shellfish are banned, mixed seed or fabrics (19:19) It is where modern Christians cherry-pick their justifications on being anti-LGBTQ. (Lev. 18:22, 20:13)

Point is, they cherry-pick from the Old Testament when it suits them, and if you look at the rest of the rules in the books they reference that they ignore (e.g. tattoos, touching pig skin, eating pork, shellfish, etc. etc. ) it's totally fair game to point out the rules they ignore in the same books as the ones they cite.

Oh, he's concerned about funding social security?

Bullshit. He doesn't give a fuck about that.

The reason Social Security faces solvency problems is that wages (on the low end, at least) have been kept flat for close to 30 years. Wages are the basis for Social Security funding!
Its solvency challenges aren't because the Boomers are retiring, the actuaries were able to see that coming when the Boomers were kids. The thing they didn't see coming was that suppressing wages would become a bipartisan affair.

When Johnson says he's going to fund social security, he's not going to fund social security- he's going to dangle that as bait to get stupid people to support a national ban on abortion in hopes it will soften the backlash against the GOP for its unpopular anti-abortion politics.

IDK about anyone else here, but when I see anodyne-sounding-but-doublespeak org names like 'Alliance Defending Freedom', it's a red flag.

ADF has never defended freedom, unless by 'freedom' you mean the ability to discriminate against LGBT folk and women. They proclaim themselves to be for "the right of people to freely live out their faith" but really that only seems to cover folks whose faith is some flavor of political bigotry.

Yeah so when Johnson remarked that "God has ordained each of us" to congress, the flavor of God he's talking about is the one that wants laws to protect anti-LGBT bullies and vigilantes, not their victims. Meanwhile everyone else whose faith does not abet that shit now gets to hear him claim to speak hate on God's behalf

Also in case you forgot, the history of sentencing people to 'hard labor' derives from the post-civil-war practice of convicting black men in kangaroo courts (after all, the 13th Amendment allowed for slavery if it was punishment for a crime). When they were told they couldn't keep slaves but they could enslave people if they were convicts, the notion of 'convict leasing' was born.

PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything.

Yes, this is more or less the circumstance we arrive at when the burden of proof for consumer safety is on injured parties to prove the particular thing unsafe, or its use negligent after the fact, in courts against often powerful corporations with lots of money to spend defending themselves, as opposed to the burden being on would-be sellers to prove its use safe and environmentally responsible before bringing it to market.

I appreciate your post, it really is informative, and it explains how problematic it will be to connect injured parties with the people that harmed them, how now that some people depend on those things and will accept no substitute and will continue emitting more of it into the environment, that the rules as they are don't provide real remedy or solutions for problems that were perfectly legal to create and everyone involved did nothing wrong.

That right there, really, prompts the question- would we really be that much worse off if we had consumer safety rules that put the burden of proving a product or technology's safety and sustainability on the seller, or on some sort of product safety testing system?

If that were to mean industrial chemicals had to undergo trials or studies in the way that pharmaceuticals do, sure there probably would be fewer new things. OTOH if there had to be even the most-rudimentary plan for the lifecycle of a product up front, maybe we wouldn't have millions of tons of discarded plastics or forever chemicals in the environment that everyone knows there's no money to clean up (because our system protects those that profit by externalizing costs).

Anecdotally, I clock more hours WFH than I ever did going into the office- the matter of having to catch the last train out of town put a hard limit on how long I could crank code.

Without those extra 4 uncompensated hours in my day (plus the overhead time and mental energy monitoring the timeline of my day vs. just doing what I do), I get more done and I have more time to do it. Being autistic, I appreciate having uninterrupted time-blocks I can use to hyperfocus and get things done- and having to be aware of when to tie things up and GTFO in time to catch that train interrupts that.

Schwarzman isn't really concerned with my well-being or with my productivity at work- he's concerned with maintaining high demand for commercial real estate like my company's office. He can pound sand.

I still go in every once in a while just to show my face and get some IRL time with co-workers, but my employers aren't pushing the 'get back to work and do real work' line, they're aware that working in the office (we're mostly coders and such) will cost us productivity if anything and they're just encouraging us to get in a few times a year and do some face to face social stuff.

Translation: "we did the thing you suspect so don't investigate pretty plz"

It has always never worked.

I try to help

But corporate death is... yanking their charter and seizing their holdings You know, kind of what they did to the Trump org And that was a long time coming

it can be done

Yes, if you want technological regression.

You know, when I learned about the problems associated with non-stick cookware, I stopped buying that shit and replaced mine with cast iron, steel, and ceramic-coated cast iron. That might be regression in someone's book but really the cookware I'm using now isn't going to wear out in a couple of years, these things will last the better part of forever- and keeping them seasoned is not difficult once you know how to do it.

I also don't miss the lead in gas or paint, the asbestos in construction material, industrial coolants based on CFCs, or DDT-based insecticides, or thalidomide-based anti-emetics.

It feels to me like a missing piece in this conversation is any consideration at all for balancing private profits against public costs when weighing whether or not a particular chemical or technology ought to be sold or used.

Yes, they're better for solving the narrow use case of being a fire retardant now and that'll save someone a little bit of money while it's in use vs. using more water or soaps, but what of the costs thereby put on everyone whose drinking water now has that stuff in it and their increased cancer risks over time? Or what if instead of non-stick aluminum cookware, we used seasoned steel and iron cookware and nobody has to die of cancer because DuPont dumps its manufacturing waste in nearby waterways?

I remember having this conversation about fracking fluids and how "economically important" fracking was to the economy at the time, but those wells are tapped in a matter of a year or two and if the neighbor's water is rendered undrinkable, that's a spoiled resource that will remain spoiled for a long, long time- long after the profit is all gone and the well operators have abandoned those wells. If the mess costs more in externalities to others than it creates in profit and value for the people doing it, the thing has net negative value and probably ought not to be done.