BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

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

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2 yr. ago

This sounds fantastic on its face, but I seem to keep on hearing about how desalination will solve all kinds of problems and we still have this particular problem.

The missing piece, it seems, is the will for it to be used as infra at scale. Meanwhile selling bottled water taken for free from public lands for several dollars a liter in single-use bottles remains a multi-billion dollar industry. (an industry, I might add, that is aggressive about lobbying to protect its interests)

I recently hiked up to the Muir Snowfield on Rainier (aka Tahoma) in Washington State; I'd been there in August and September of prior years but this time it was shocking to see how much of the snowfield was just gone; I was looking at bare glacier, complete with crevasses, when in years past that was usually still covered by several meters of snow.

Usually in September the weather will be noticeably cooler, and usually above 10k feet it's freezing- but on the day of my visit it was t-shirt weather above the cloud deck and the usual quiet was instead the sound of water running under the ice.

This is not a Swiss thing, it's an everywhere thing

Trump Putin wants a shut down.

fixed it

Several injured after UAW strikers hit by vehicle Motorist hit-and-run striking workers with vehicle, causing injuries

fixed it

Is city ownership socialist though?

Not necessarily. That would turn it into something more like a public utility than like a for-profit business.

I mean, it's "not socialism" when the fire department or the power utility aren't private, for-profit corporations, but it is if the grocery store is? LOL

Since the pandemic I've been working from home and that gives me time to take food-shopping off of my wife's share of the household work. I noticed pretty quickly that every supermarket under the Kroger group was gouging on prices, so when they acquired Safeway I discovered there's a WinCo in my town. (WinCo is employee owned, has the feel of a warehouse/bulk store, and it beats Kroger/Walmart/Amazon/GoodFoodHoldings stores on price, by a lot. Plus, the employees don't have the energy of beaten animals and that matters to me for some reason.)

Good on Chicago doing this but there are already alternatives to Walmart and Whole Foods in some places if you look.

The stores left because of the crime

The crime stories (yep, they made a big buzz and media ran hundreds of stories about that one shoplifter in San Francisco) wildly overstated the actual amount of crime. It's just so interesting that corporate news oversold that story, so much so that a person that didn't know better would think that was a pervasive thing in urban areas and cities are all hellscapes of disorder and flames.

Meanwhile, shareholders rewarded Walgreens' management with a boost to stock prices after they reported they'd be pulling out of 'crime-ridden' areas. They didn't leave because of the crime, they left for the stock bump and told the crime story to make it look less-bad

If you do the comparisons in normalized dollars and compare to productivity, minimum wage (if it tracked to the same purchasing power as it did in the 1950s) would be somewhere around $26 in today's dollars. If you do the same but track to inflation, it would be about $22.

When the wage doesn't keep track to inflation, it's not 'increasing', it's a pay cut. When it doesn't track to productivity, it's a pay cut out of labor's part of any growth.

When workers earning suppressed wages compete to buy things like housing, they're bidding against the class of people that received the share of productivity they didn't- and when the folks making more bid up prices of those things, it's a double-whammy of foregone wage + increased cost-of-living.

Y'know what might be an appropriate measure? Prosecute people that stoke or incite violence against our troops

Not gonna lie, it's almost refreshing to hear FTC acknowledge what's been true for years

the swath of companies who provide streaming services, but not their own ISP

TBH, this seems to point towards the need for a model of connectivity provider that's more in line with that of a utility than that of a vertically-integrated bandwidth+content-sales conglomerate.

We don't need connectivity to come bundled with content; that just creates motive and opportunity for shitty ISPs to do anti-competitive bullshit like throttling competitors' content.

Plus, the cost of delivering bandwidth has plummeted by more than 80% in just the last 15 years- there's no reason for it to keep costing slightly more over time to have internet service, except that the people delivering it have a stock price to pump.

If we want net neutrality, we should separate ISPs from content providers in the same way we separated retail banking from investment banking

It's... honestly sad that this is what makes the news

On the one hand, do I think they did it? 100% yes. On the other, am I surprised the law is signaling they might do something about it? Also yes.

There have been dozens of credible reports of such violations, of children being maimed and losing limbs even, and now finally there's a probe? Watching the law take this much time to announce it will begin to investigate what's been in the news for years almost convinced me it didn't want to do it at all.

Trump Floats the idea of Executing Calls for Volunteers to Murder Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley

fixed it

One of the most-striking experiences of my regional metro core's death throes was needing to pee but my train was delayed. Tried walking across the way to the local train station to use their facilities but the security guy they'd hired to keep the homeless out about fought me to keep me from using the restroom.

If you wonder why your city streets and transit zones smell like piss, it's because when you lock up your bathrooms to keep the homeless people away, they'll piss on your street

These are perfect examples of things that at scale should become cheaper but don't. Yes, there's more of it and that cost something to deliver, but the cost of delivering bandwidth per Mbps has decreased drastically (like, by 80+ percent) while the price of having a plan does not in any way reflect that. Likewise, the cost of delivering cell phone service has gone substantially down but the dollars-and-cents price of having a cell phone more than tripled between 2006 and 2020.

Sure, they're better and faster than they were, but there's no good reason for them to cost more, other than you have money and they want it

things being made today are a lot more complicated

There's a kernel of truth here- yes, a lot of everything is more complex (and a lot of it, like cars that now have better safety features and standards- is just better) today than it was- but that's not the whole story behind why everything is more expensive today, particularly in terms of labor's buying power.

Today, there are things that haven't improved in power or technology or quality (looking at you, broadband cable and cell phone connectivity, and basic foodstuffs, and commodities like fuel and timber, and health insurance, and housing) but cost so much more because largely none of these markets are elastic or competitive, and there's been so much 'vertical integration' in these spaces that in years past would have run afoul of basic antitrust enforcement of laws on the books.

Speaking of things that used to be illegal and still should be but aren't, stock buybacks account for a lot of money that used to go to payroll, but which now sidesteps payroll and goes directly to capital in seriously tax-privileged ways.

Basically, that means capital has been getting regular raises since the 70s but labor's rates mostly haven't kept up with inflation- and as such, ought to be regarded to be pay cuts.

I don’t know that liberals have really been able to insert themselves into the rural propaganda space like conservatives have.

It probably doesn't help that most of the media targeting them is owned by people that want the regulatory state to go back to where it was in the late 1800s so they can become modern-day Rockefellers and Carnegies

The missing bit of context to make it logically consistent is that they think we all live in a hierarchy (social, class, gender, race etc) in which the rules apply differently to folks lower in it than they do to folks above them.

If you accept that as your premise, everything about their behavior is logically consistent- except for the part about inventing a magical hierarchy that only exists in their agreement that it does, in which they are your superiors and it is their right to tell you what to do but never vice-versa.

If you look at it in this light, when they howl at democrats for breaking rules they don't think apply to republicans, they aren't invoking anything like a set of shared rules applying to everyone, they're invoking the hierarchy and they think they're putting people in their rightful places (never mind that it's colossally arrogant and entitled to assume you're here to rule over your inferiors when there's no agreement that anyone here is anyone's superior)

Should?

yes.

Will it?

LOL no