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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)HH
Helmic [he/him] @ Helmic @hexbear.net
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Joined
5 yr. ago

  • And the absurd thing is that we probably should use natural diamonds for jewelry, as it is a waste to synthesize such a common rock. If they weren't hoarded and aggressively marketed as something you have to have, they could just be a neat rock some people are into, there wouldn't be child slaves dying to dig them out of the ground.

  • If it's wedding ring, the marketing has been about how the purity of the diamond is symbolic of the purity of one's love. So picking an uglier, but purer, diamond then coild be about prioritizing love over beauty or whatever in that person's head.

    So not necessarily exclusive to people wanting to present themselves as wealthy, that sort of emotional manipulation convinces broke people to blow their savings on a ring all the time.

  • It's the lack of hardware AV1 that concerns me, as well as droppong h.264. Raw CPU means it'll still handle the latter, but since streaming will be moving to AV1 it's kind of questionable whether this will be a reasonable media center.

  • Worse. The game is Pathfinder 2e, the GM is following WBL, and if you use that healing potion - or literally any consumable ever - you can't sell it to get your +1 striking rune a little earlier.

  • I mean, it works by your logic. Carbon caps are very easy to game and continue to fail to change behavior, as shell companies simply "sell" their credits to others. Meanwhile, sabotage materially - as in not on paper, but physically in rhe flesh and blood world - makes polluting more expensive, because equipment gets damaged, needs repaired, and might not get repaired. Even supressing it isn't free, because cops and bribes lobbying costs money and as we saw in the 2020 uprisings the cops cannot be everywhere at once.

    Were there a protacted, popular campaign of sabotage that called the state's bluff, there simply wouldn't be enough police or resources to actually make any of this profitable. Actual concessions would have to be made by governments and corporations. This is why the state has been so spectacularly violent against climate acticists despite even green scare "ecoterrorists" simply tying themselves to trees - it actually works. The state belongs to corporations and corporations aren't going to just let us do shit that meaningfully undermines them, if they are actively suggesting the solutions themselves then it's because they know it won't require them to do something they don't want.

  • The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money "earned" through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it's still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.

    The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any "good" a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren't just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.

  • I have some deeply tech unsavvy people in my life who will fuck up their phone trying to "uninstall Google" - and thus disable all their keyboards - that would probably benefit from a "just works" degoogled phone. I love GrapheneOS, but it assumes the end user is the sort of dork that is capable of installing it in the first place - people who struggle with tech deserve privacy too.