Fried_out_Kombi @ Fried_out_Kombi @lemmy.world

embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environ

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2 yr. ago

It's funny how people always use play it like "oh, it's just differing opinions" when what they're actually defending is indefensible malarkey like nazis and tankies. They know if they made a meme saying we should "try to understand" nazis and tankies, they'd be downvoted to oblivion. And so they hide behind a shield of "differing opinions".

These cretins have a right to post nazi and tankie shit on their own instances -- them's the beauty of the fediverse. But I also have a right to not want hate speech, genocide denial, and Hitler/Stalin/Mao simps polluting my feed. It's not mere "differing opinions" when one person's opinion is "Holodomor didn't happen, and if it did, the Ukrainians deserved it" or "Holocaust didn't happen, and if it did, the Jews deserved it" or whatever apologia they wanna peddle.

I mean, the whole point of the fediverse is self-moderating. Each instance is allowed and encouraged to operate how it pleases, so instances that don't tolerate hate speech, brigading, Nazis, and tankies are, imo, justified in removing such content as well as defederating from instances ripe with those issues. Likewise, instances that are more permissive of those kinds of things are free to defederate (or not) with whomever they please. If people are unhappy with how their local instance has acted, they can just migrate to another instance. This "drama" is just the fediverse working as it is supposed to.

The quick basics I would want are single transferrable vote (STV), as it has a ranked ballot, regional representatives (important in a large, diverse country, imo), and pretty (although not perfectly) proportionate results.

I would also increase salaries and pensions for elected officials, but on the stipulation that they and their immediate family must liquidate all investments in order to take office, including real estate. The reason for this is to eliminate ulterior motives and reduce risk of corruption, and the compensation of course would be a very generous salary and pension so they never have to worry about their financial situation during or after leaving office.

I would also constitutionally eliminate the ability to take away someone's vote, and to demonstrate why, I'll copy-paste an old comment of mine from my reddit days:

What people like this miss about democracy is it's more than just majority rule; democracy depends on minority rights, so the majority can't just vote to trample over the minority.

This is not only to protect the minority (as you point out), but to protect democracy itself. An example:

There are 10 people. 4 of these people want to ban all fruits except mangos. 6 of them don't want that.

So the 4 people scheme. One of those 6 people is really frickin ugly, and everyone can agree on that. So they propose to strip that ugly person of the right to vote (or just kill them or something). That vote passes 9 to 1. Ugly person is out of the equation.

The 4 people are still the minority, so they try again. One of those 5 other people likes to dip their pizza in marshmallow fluff, and everyone else agrees that that is absolutely vile. So they propose to strip that person with horrendous taste of the right to vote. That vote passes 8 to 1. Marshmallow pizza eater is out of the equation.

Now the 4 mango purists see they're half the electorate. They just need to boot out 1 more pan-fruitarian. Fortunately for them, one of those remaining 4 pan-fruitarians always unnecessarily explains the punchlines of obvious jokes, and it really annoys everyone else. So they propose to strip that annoying joke explainer of the right to vote. That vote passes 7 to 1. Annoying joke explainer is out of the equation.

And now the mango purists have a majority and can ban all other fruits, counter to the true majority.

If this all seems abstract and unlikely, consider fascist movements and their tendency to start as big-tent to gain allies and gain power and then, once they're in power, start trimming down who counts as the protected in-group until it's only the core group they cared about in the beginning, producing lots of r/leopardsatemyface material in the process.

Yeah, and it's really not hard to imagine why strict term limits increase the effect of lobbying. Consider this thought experiment:

You're a relatively young 30-something hoping to make a change in politics. You run for office and somehow get elected! Great, right?

Well, now you have to actually do the job. Most of your time is not sitting in the hall of Congress, Parliament, etc. voting on bills; it's much more mundane things like writing bills, meeting with constituents, discussing draft bills in committees and subcommittees, etc.

The thing is, however, there are no real job requirements to being an elected legislator. No job posting saying "minimum 5 years experience with drafting bills". Here you are in office now, zero experience with actually legislating, and you have to actually write bills.

Suffice to say, you're probably swamped, struggling, and have no clue how to actually do your job. And along comes some guy from a group like ALEC, and he's got a pre-written bill for you! Great, right?

Well, you're not totally lacking in dignity, so you're a little suspicious, right? He's a great salesman, though, and really tries to reassure you that the content of the 200-page bill he just handed you only does things you actually like. Further, he tells you that the things in it that do help him aren't so bad, and they're good for you and for the people at large, too.

You walk out of that interaction not totally comfortable, but hopeful that maybe it really is a decent bill. After all, he seemed like a nice chap, representing what seems to be just a group of concerned citizens... Anyhoo, you decide to give it a skim to make sure it seems legit.

You crack it open and see hundreds of pages of legalese and countless appendices full of definitions and edge cases. Further, it's discussing some economic or industrial matter, and you're just some guy, not an economist, and you're not equipped at all to understand the nuanced impacts of the proposed policies on the market or wider economy. Or maybe it's sociological and you barely know anything about sociology. Or maybe it's technological and you know little more about technology than how to use Microsoft Office and what you read on the news.

You think about asking someone for help with understanding this bill, or perhaps drafting your own, but you realize you have no connections. You don't know any federal judges or constitutional scholars who can give you off-the-cuff constitutional advice. You don't know any fellow legislators well enough to feel comfortable asking them for potentially months of mentorship as you find your footing. You don't know any economists you can call up and ask economic matters. You don't know any experts on the Iowa pig farming business to tell you frankly about how that industry operates.

But what you do have is a lot of lobbyists willing to pretend to be your friend, willing to pretend to be a mentor of sorts, to sell you biased information on their particular brand of snake oil.

And maybe you think for a moment that you'll just tough it out and ignore the lobbyists! But you realize another problem with that: not all of them are sleazy snake oil salesmen trying to earn special favors for their political or industrial agenda. Many of them are actual legit people representing actual organizations just trying to advocate for good policy.

Trouble is, you don't know who is who. The sleazy guys will try their hardest to appear legit, and the non-sleazy guys will of course also try to appear legit. Both kinds of lobbyists know you won't listen to them if you think they're the sleazy kind.

So you take a chance on this particular lobbyist, do your best to make sure the bill they handed you wasn't completely terrible, and submit it. You're too tired and stressed and unsure in yourself to do much else. You tell yourself you'll try to tough out the beginning and become a better legislator in the future, once you get the hang of it. You know accepting the lobbyist's pre-written bill ain't the best, but it's probably not too bad, right? It's just one small bill, affecting one relatively small issue, and at least it doesn't affect you, right? There'll be no media firestorm over this, you and your family won't personally be impacted by some minor changes to the hog industry regulations. And besides, you'll get better at this job and do better next time, right?

Anyhoo, long story short, legislating is a profession like any other. It takes real skills, knowledge, and experience to do well, and you need to be able to balance the ability to get rid of old do-nothing geezers and the ability for more junior folks to actually be able to gain experience and institutional know-how. A company run solely by junior engineers would be a disaster, but a company run solely by complacent do-nothing senior engineers would also be terrible.

Maybe it'd be easier to pick just one had you picked a different week to quit sniffing glue.

Going and meeting with the wedding officiant with my fiancée. Also meeting her aunt and uncle and cousins from another city. Probably playing some Cities: Skylines as well.

Depending on what your level of experience is, it might just take more time and practice. When I was doing my degree, it took two years, an internship, and multiple serious programming courses before I truly felt comfortable programming.

This is an unpopular opinion, but I actually thought the show was very well done (until the plot twist at the end; it had zero foreshadowing and just kinda cheapened the whole show retroactively).

Extremely difficult and uncomfortable to watch? Absolutely. Objectively bad quality show? I don't think so.

As an example:

Imagine, for the sake of argument, both white people and black people have a 50% chance of possessing weed (not that weed should even be criminalized, but you get the idea).

Now also let's take a group of 100 people, assuming 80 are white and 20 are black. Given the above weed possession rate, we can say there are 40 weed-carrying white people and 10 weed-carrying black people.

Now imagine cops last year searched 20% of the total population, 90% of those searched being black and 10% being white. Thus, last year, 18 black people were searched and only 2 white people. Of these searched people, 9 black people were caught in possession of weed vs 1 white person.

Thus, the newspapers can now publish "9 black criminals for every 1 white criminal!", and so the police decide to continue mostly searching black people this year.

Same underlying crime rates, but searching one demographic more skews the resulting arrest record and seemingly justifies further discriminatory enforcement.

And thus the question becomes how we can craft a fairer legal system that isn't so pay-to-win, but still maintains the core principles of property rights that allows business to, ya know, happen. Sure we could do what many naïve people on the internet want and seize the means of production, but who on earth would want to start a productive business or make productive investments in a country where the government can just up and seize your assets without justification? Just as we need protection against businesses screwing us over, we also need protection against government screwing us over. Anyone who says we should just seize assets and nationalize industries willy nilly should ask themselves if they wanna risk some ghoul like Ron DeSantis being the one with the power to do that.

As to actual answers on how to make such a system that isn't pay-to-win but still maintains a stable system and rule of law, I don't actually know. I'm no expert in the legal system. But I'm sure there are experts out there who have spent a lot of time thinking about these sorts of questions and have ideas on how to improve/reform.

I definitely understand, as I was on reddit for several years as a lurker, then I started to occasionally comment, and then occasionally post. It was really only in the past 2 years that I became a pretty big poster and commenter on reddit. I think I actually post and comment more here on lemmy than even on reddit, if for no other reason than to help produce content and engagement here. Becoming a prolific poster and commenter ain't a quick or easy transition, but I think even just upvoting niche stuff helps regardless. Like some of the smaller communities I've made here and been posting largely into the void, I still notice when I get like 3 upvotes instead of none at all. Every tiny bit of engagement here helps encourage others to keep on doing the same.

Yeah, I get the same thing as you. What I've done so far is I made a few communities here and am trying to fairly reliability populate them with content. Some of those communities are niche and I feel like I'm posting into the void sometimes, but occasionally I've gotten someone else actually posting some content in them. It does definitely take some commitment to bootstrap a new community, as people just won't start posting on their own there until there's a critical mass. So you just gotta take the hit, post into the void a while, slowly increase that subscribe count, until finally others start to join in.

It's easiest with communities focused around memes or links, but I think it'll take more effort with more niche hobby or technical communities, e.g., for programming languages or niche hobbies.

You were right; we already got a salty lemmygrad user elsewhere in this thread now

I agree also by rules-based utilitarianism. It's important not just to consider the immediate, short-term utilitarian outcome, but to consider the utility of a world whereby we regularly make the same type of decision.

In a world where a riot is all it takes to sentence unpopular people to death, you create a perverse incentive for people to riot -- or threaten to riot -- in order to pervert the proper carriage of justice. Who knows how much net harm would be done in this world ruled by mob justice.

But the alternative is a world where rule of law exists, which I think is a far better world to live in.

I don’t understand why people have to make up new terminology

I used google trends to show you they're not; the term has been in common use for literally decades.

Further, you've been stating repeatedly in this thread that "homophobia" is incorrect semantically because it's not a literal fear of gay people. But the literal dictionary definition of "phobia" proves you wrong on this.

Repeating the same alternative facts over and over in this thread doesn't make them true.

Further, even their efforts to portray it as "silly SJWs constantly inventing new terms for things" falls flat on its face because "homophobia" has been a widely used and accepted term for literally decades. It's a pointless (and incorrect!) diversion in pedantry. Plus, it ignores the fact that there is value in actually having specific terms for common things, actually. The reason we have a specific term for anti-gay bigotry is because it's a concept we as a society talk a lot about, so it's simply useful to have a specific term we can use to specifically address that phenomenon. No single person gets to play pedantic petulant child and dictate how the rest of us use language. Language is perhaps the single most democratic thing humanity has, as the meaning of words (and what words there are!) is solely determined by everyday participatory democracy.

It's just the difference between your actual username and your display name

Except "phobia" doesn't solely mean "irrational fear". As @pizza-bagel@kbin.social pointed out, "hydrophilia" and "hydrophobia" do not refer to chemicals that are literally in love with or afraid of water.

"Homophobia" has been the accepted and predominant term for anti-gay bigotry for as long as I can remember; no one's making up new terminology here.

Others have covered the details of labor laws in the US, so I won't touch on that, but your question does make me think about why those kinds of labor protection laws are even seen as a necessity. And I think the answer to that is we (most people, not just Americans) view jobs as equal to livelihood.

But it makes you wonder what the world could be like if we had a universal basic income, where getting fired wasn't actually the worst thing that could happen to you. It might still suck, but you'd still be able to have a roof over your head and food on your table while you searched for new work. This, critically, would give you more negotiating power when finding new jobs, as you'd likely be less desperate for a job, meaning you could credibly insist upon better pay and better conditions.

But we could take this one step further. In economics, there's this concept called an externality, which is when you do something that affects someone else as a side effect. When you do something that harms someone else as a side effect (e.g., pollution), that's called a negative externality. Negative externalities are actually a major problem in completely unregulated economies, because they cause the "invisible hand" of the free market to fail to achieve optimal distribution of goods, i.e., a market failure. The classic example of this is carbon emissions -- the true cost to society of carbon emissions (from climate change) is not reflected in the cost of providing carbon-intensive goods, thus we have a tendency to over-produce and over-consume carbon-intensive goods and services. That is, the economy would be better off in the long-run if we emitted less carbon than we currently are, despite the short-term profits of polluting. Anyhoo, this mismatch between sticker price and true cost to society is why carbon tax is almost universally regarded to be the single best climate policy: by accounting for the costs of the negative externality, you can fix the market failure, and the invisible hand can once again work as it's supposed to.

But where this relates to where I was going is there are also positive externalities, where you have a positive impact on someone else as a side effect of your activities. An example might be doing regenerative agriculture or rewilding a patch of land -- the pollinator habitat you provide or the carbon you sequester has positive impacts on other people. And like how negative externalities tend to lead to overconsumption, positive externalities tend to lead to underconsumption. I.e., the economy would be net better off of more people did rewilding and regenerative agriculture, despite the short-term immediate costs they incur. And much like taxing negative externalities (e.g., carbon emissions) is a good way to correct those issues, subsidizing positive externalities is a good way to fix the issues of insufficient good activities.

So imagine if we not only had a UBI, but if the government also would pay you to plant trees or develop/maintain open-source software or any number of other activities that produce positive externalities. If we had these alternative means of maintaining a basic level of livelihood, then maybe we could decouple existing from jobs, and we wouldn't feel a strong need to coerce businesses into holding onto people, nor would we need to coerce them into paying people enough or giving good enough working conditions -- companies would have to pay well and offer good conditions and not fire for unfair reasons, else they'd struggle to fill vacancies.

We all saw how companies begrudgingly had to pay more during the "great resignation". Or look how the professional class (e.g., doctors, engineers) get good pay and good conditions, precisely because they're hard to replace. Give workers more options, make them less desperate, and they'll be empowered to negotiate better pay and better conditions for themselves. Sure, some regulations would still be necessary, but I think there's a lot of elegance in a bottom-up approach to labor relations.