BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

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

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2 yr. ago

mmmm. While I like the idea of dismantling any barrier to building more-affordable housing, I really don't like putting churches in the position of having the homeless be beholden to them. Part of the reason so many churches object to public anti-poverty/anti-homeless policy is that they're angling for the bar to be lower so they can leverage people's desperation into the opportunity to proselytize to them and convert them to their faith.

I am reminded that Jesus didn't command his followers to keep people hungry and poor in order to make them into believers of Jesus, he said that helping the poor and downtrodden is the way to come to know Him.

Keep the church out of the poverty business, thanks. Also while we're at it, never ever forget that it costs the public more in taxpayer money and resources to keep homeless people homeless than it does to put them in an apartment and give them some time with a social worker.

Y'know, if I could use gmail and pay a few bucks to do it (and not be tracked everywhere without a way to opt out) I would do it. Likewise for any social media that makes its money by trading my privacy for it, I would pay them for the service of being a conduit by which I can keep track of friends and family if it meant I wouldn't be followed everywhere by ads. As for how ad revenue funds so much of the useful content online, it's depressing as hell to see that political propaganda is free while informative media is sequestered behind paywalls. I'm old enough to remember when the news was a prestige business and didn't have to turn a profit

The fact that platforms like Meta give advertisers (or propagandists) the ability to target their messaging to people that fit a detailed profile, tho, ensures that our politics can now be cheaply and profitably flooded with shit, and that in real ways is a threat to democracy, I think.

TBH I think these calls for age limits or term limits are indirectly targeting real problems (like since when do we want people born before the automotive age regulating the internet? and why are both parties led by people still stuck in the 70s?) but the indirect-targeting has a way of creating unintended consequence:

• a shorter term limit will term out qualified, great representatives with real expertise
• a shorter term limit may intensify corruption if a rep or senator only has so much time to cash in and line up that fat consulting gig

Fundamentally, the voters should be voting out the Feinsteins and McConnells when their age or health conflicts with their ability to represent their interests, and this "let's have age limits and term limits" resolve kinda speaks to me of a desire for self-governance to happen, but without voters having any responsibility in the matter. It's time for our relationship to self-rule be a lot less passive, a lot more assertive.

The meta-problems at play (corruption, the presence of money in politics, the role of first-past-the-post voting to force voters to vote based on how they bet other people will vote, etc) aren't going to be resolved by term limits or age limits- if we want our elected officials to reflect the public interest, all of those conflicts-of-interest have to go.

I'd like to see ranked-choice voting replace FPTP, and for money to be strictly limited in politics, and an end to the permanent campaign our politics have become, and for revolving-door gigs for ex-legislators and regulators to be strictly scrutinized, and for voters to be able to confidently vote out their dinosaurs. If we fix those things, the problem of being ruled by people too old to do the job probably goes away by itself.

What if life extension radically alters what is thought of as “old”?

Then we should celebrate that, and re-calibrate accordingly

they did it targeting the super wealthy instead of blocking traffic or otherwise hindering innocent people

Reminds me that the point of protest is to be disruptive. Oh, you're blocked on your way to do your job? Your job is to do your job, not to fight other workers on behalf of your employer

I don't get the whole 'protest should not ever inconvenience anyone, ever' line of thinking- if I'm travelling for work and I get stuck in traffic behind a protest, I bill my time and that's how I pass the disruption signal along to where it needs to land

I can see an argument for the proposition that maybe we don't need dogs that are big and powerful enough to injure or kill people.

But, I take claims about how a breed "is gentle" with an entire ocean of salt- individual dogs might be calm and well-trained or socialized, it's the ones churned out of puppy mills to be sold at top dollar to shitty people who want a tough, scary dog that seem to be sketchy.

I've been around lots of well-adjusted big dogs that are just big hunks of love and slobbery affection, but really I hate seeing stories about how some dog that "is a good boy" mauled a child and if I had my druthers, dog owners would be required to carry liability insurance proportionate to the dog's size or bite force or some factor correlating to its breed, and to the dog owner's income or wealth. Oh, that would make big, dangerous dogs too expensive to own? Maybe they should be.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of [...]

Yes, I remember. I had some of those dreams.

I was never a candidate for starting my own tech company, I was a self-taught dev living with undiagnosed autism and if anything, the plan was to work for a tech giant my whole life or until I could cash in some options and retire with some security.

I worked for Microsoft from the mid-90s to 2014 and it was all going basically to plan until one fine day 18,000 of us were called to a meeting to be told we were being laid off. I understand why they did this (there were groups in the company that did more or less the same things but with different tooling and I'd been working to align those things, because obvs we could use resources better and strangely management didn't want that) but it hurt a lot to learn that a big part of the mass-layoff logic was not so much about efficiency or doing better work, it was about juicing the stock by making the market happy about cutting labor costs, and it was about depressing the kinds of wages folks like me could bargain for. (There's nothing quite like a sudden dump of ~18k new job-seekers in a regional market to press those salary offers down by 20%)

It's 9 years on and I'm working at a smaller shop, writing open-source software and I still don't make what I was making then (and I've been watching as Amazon and Microsoft and Google keep on running this mass-layoff play every other year). I could probably make better money if I jumped around from job to job, but frankly where I'm at is a good fit, they're accommodating of my neurodivergence, and there isn't the specter of immanent buyouts or mass layoffs to juice the stock.

Looking down-thread, I see some dispute about whether folks in my position are petit bourgeois or the proletariat, and really I don't care what label you lot think is the right one- at this point I'm a middle-aged professional, I work for a living, even though in my 20s I was pretty hopeful I was tracking to be able to retire by the time I'd reach my current age. (yeah, short of winning the lottery that's not happening and when I think too hard about that it's not bitterness I feel, but chagrin)

Looking back, I recall being abruptly 'let go' from a contract when I was passing out union leaflets while working as a contractor at Microsoft, and frankly I hope they press to unionize again and the new rules about union-busting are in effect when they do it.

If someone refuses to abide by the terms of tolerance, then they have no right to be protected by it.

Yes. Although it's correct to point to Popper's paradox of tolerance, it's better to regard tolerance to be the terms of the contract that provides your rights and protections. Oh, you want to void someone's rights? Don't expect the protections of the contract if you're in breach of its terms.

This (treat it like a contract, or like a treaty) doesn't just avoid the mind-boggling that some people experience trying to get their heads around a paradox, it provides tools by which to restore a broken peace.

Seems a little bit like when your cell phone carrier disables the tethering feature on your phone and wants to charge you money to enable that. For me, infuriating to know that I'd paid to have hardware capable of being a wifi hotspot, then to be charged to use it. The "service" being provided amounts to first-we-degrade-the-thing-you-paid-for, then we-charge-you-ransom-to-get-it-back.

complicate attacks on Biden’s age

Do they, though? For that to be true, the following would also have to be true:

• The people mad about Hunter Biden making money on his dad's name would also be mad about Trump's kids doing that
• The people mad about Obama taking vacations (or golfing) while in office would also have been mad when Trump took more vacation time and golfed more
• The people mad about Clinton lying about a blowjob would also be mad about Trump's infidelity and lying
• etc.

I'm going with: it doesn't complicate anything. They don't care about their people living up to the standards they demand others live up to, the point for them is that double-standards are a feature, not a bug.

LOL self-defense is escalation now

Explain

There are easy ways to have a bad time using psychedelics (like not picking a controlled environment, not being prepared for that your trip will take some time). Knowing these things ahead of time/being prepared matters quite a bit in terms of your ability to have a safe, pleasant trip.

This sort of knowledge, sort of like "you shouldn't plan to operate heavy machinery after drinking that cough syrup or those 7 beers" is key to responsible use- and it's the irresponsible users that become the poster children for the 'ban everything' crowd.

Y'know, this sort of rhetoric seems less about making a prediction (there will be violence) than it is about cueing his audience to prepare to be violent, or at least to accept that there will be violence.

Yeah, it looks like an innocent prediction from the guy that can see the writing on the wall, and that's why this kind of talk takes this form and not the form of explicitly calling for political violence from particular people- this way it's all deniable and stochastic enough that nobody's (hint, hint) actually breaking the law out in the open.

That all sounds to me like he's not trying to defend himself in court, that instead his entire plan is to win the presidency and stay there for life. All of these claims (I can do the thing, it's totally fine believe me) amount to confessions that he did what he's charged with, but are also appeals to his base that the courts are wrong and illegitimate.

It's cute how if Ukraine fights back that risks nuclear war, but when Russia invades a sovereign country it doesn't

If they enforce this law I think there will be a lot of lawsuits about unreasonable and illegal stops by the police, and I think the women suing will win.

All good points. Unfortunately, this probably means they'll stick to doing the unreasonable and illegal stops on people they think won't be able to afford to bring lawsuits.

Also, questions of 'is this actually legal?' have a fine way of becoming moot when the it's cops doing the lawbreaking and who polices the police, right? Especially in states with long history of good-old-boys justice networks

Disregarding the fact that getting an abortion should not be a crime, in general, traveling to commit a crime is not a right.

This puts the cart before the horse in important ways. First, the government cannot (except with probable cause) treat you as if you are presumptively guilty of a crime until it's done with the due process of proving it. Is being female and in a car probable cause?

Second, is it a crime to travel somewhere to do a thing that's legal there?

Here, both the 4th Amendment and the Commerce Clause of the constitution (in theory at least) constrain the state and officers of said state- the 4th protects privacy of person, home, effects, and papers and requires a warrant to search those things, and the commerce clause implicitly forbids states from enacting laws that effectively regulate commerce in another state.

In theory, under the Commerce Clause states are not authorized to enact law to criminalize that which is legal in other states- that authority is reserved to congress. If that's the case, the phrase 'traveling to commit a crime is not a right' is missing an important piece- the crime part. If abortion is a crime here and the person is traveling there to do a thing that's legal there, this isn't a crime.

Unfortunately, there are already reports of police stopping women in cars on the highway to check if the women are pregnant and off to another state. The notion that a locality or state has the right to violate your privacy in order to veto your travel if it's for purposes they don't like seems impossible to square with the 4th Amendment or the Commerce Clause, but I guess that's not stopping these people

Capitalism really is trading goods for currency, and allowing lending and investment.

That's commerce. Commerce predates capitalism, by a lot.

Capitalism also involves other things that go beyond basic commerce, such as systems of property law to incorporate quasi-sovereignty to capital ownership. That's more or less where we get the default model of businesses as de facto dictatorships ruled by the owner, vs. being democracies organized by stakeholders or participants. It's a big, deep subject that's unfortunately talked about in reductionist terms a lot. It's probably not helpful that a lot of early (and recent) scholarship on capitalism seems to frame itself as revelation of the nature of capital and markets, as if capital and markets are natural forces and not man-made things.

This last bit- treating capital and economics as if they were laws of nature (instead of being contrived by men)- does a lot of work to obfuscate fundamental systems of power, which in turn helps keep that power unaccountable. One major source of tension between capitalism and socialism has to do with whether the sovereignty of ownership ought to be democratized or subject to democratic accountabilities.

Some examples of being subject to democratic authority is basic labor protections, the 40 hour work week, safety regulations- if the voters impose on employers the requirement that employers provide a safe working environment, it's a counterweight to the general notion that owning the business makes one king of everything in that sphere- that is, it subordinates capital to the authority of the polity in which it operates.

This is where it's time to revisit why and how the economy fared so well in the USA when high top marginal tax rates incentivized top earners (and business owners) to spend on things that got them something when the alternative was paying 90% on money above the line to be in that bracket.

When that money was spent on higher wages or hiring more people or funding pensions or on research & development, the result was growth and a prosperous middle class. The super-wealthy were still super-wealthy, the major difference was that high top marginal tax rates created incentives for them to spend their money in ways that actually did trickle down