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606
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2 yr. ago

  • That’s what externalization looks like. In the fossil fuel industry, it’s creating polluting products without having to bear the costs. In chemical companies, it’s physically polluting the environment. Same with mining companies, etc.

    In social media, it is a refusal to manage content in a responsible manner, whether it’s CSAM or disinformation campaigns or hate speech. That externalization is what allows them to pay the salaries that they do, and invest in r&d, and increase their stock values to ridiculous levels. Meta is a trillion dollar company and it needs to rebalance its priorities.

  • I’ve actually run a computer model for this exact problem (overfishing in general, not tuna in particular).

    The problem with a market based solution is that the feedback loop is too delayed. By the time the catches start to drop enough to affect prices, you’re already driven the ecosystem to the point of collapse. The same is true for many natural resources and systemic effects like climate change. And all of the market dynamics that come into play push the players to maximize resource extraction/profits in the short term. That’s why we need to limit harvests and pollution via taxes and other regulations. It’s not a problem that a market can solve - it’s a problem that a market creates.

  • Exactly this.

    You can’t sit there and vacuum money out of a country via decades and centuries of the virtual theft of natural resources and labor, and then not expect the people living there to go to where their money went.

  • gottem

    Jump
  • I am going to try this, but I’d really like to know why it works. Someone else suggested cold water on the knife. Do the irritant molecules from the onion react with the water on your hands/wrists/knife before getting up in your eyes?

  • gottem

    Jump
  • I am especially sensitive to this. I’ve found that using a very, very sharp knife can help, but some onions are especially strong. At that point I’m breaking out the swimming goggles.

  • It’s actually remarkably difficult to get officially excommunicated from the Catholic Church. You have to track down where you were originally baptized, and if they don’t have your records because of churches closing or because it was just too long ago, you won’t get a response from your local church.

    The standard response is that once you are baptized, it cannot be undone. You can “self-excommunicate” but you can’t get a certificate saying that you’re no longer a member. I think it’s easier to get kicked out by the Mormons or Adventists, but the Catholics are weirdly clingy.

  • All too often, taking the “evil” path in RPGs just locks content. Most of the NPCs end up against you and you lose side quests rather than getting additional ones to compensate.

    I think the Elder Scrolls games did well with the Thieves’ Guild and Assassins. There was a fair amount of content that was unlocked, and depending on your playstyle (and how much you roleplay in single player RPGs) you could still do major quest lines.

    It’s just that, after decades of playing computer RPGs, I will tend to default to an paladin type character until I get the lay of the land.

  • I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.

    It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.

    In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.

  • Okay, I’m not a believer of free will, and so I’m not in favor of a justice system that’s used to punish rather than rehabilitate.

    However, given the current system, it seems odd to me that they give credit (if we can call it that) for pretrial detention based on detaining the person attempting to flee. It recalls Jean Valjean, who got a tremendous amount of extra time in prison for his attempt to escape.

    On the other hand, I believe that Germany has a legal policy to not consider attempting to escape from prison a crime, because wanting freedom is a very natural state of mind and shouldn’t be criminalized. I am, not surprisingly, more in favor of Germany’s philosophy on this.

    But its examples like this that make me appreciate Robert Sapolsky’s position that it’s really challenging sometimes to have to keep your scientifically derived ethical position in mind when faced with a crime that really gets to you.

  • I can’t say what their corporate culture is like now, but they’ve had a pretty poor reputation in the past, including the notion that the lowest performing 10% should be fired every year. The Amazon folks I’ve known have been great people - not at all the Gordon Gecko types you’d imagine from that - but culture in large corporations varies a lot by the team you’re in.

    I came up with a saying back in the 90s when I was doing the startup scene - “Do you want it right, or by Tuesday?” Sometimes they do indeed need it by Tuesday. More of the time they have no idea why you need the extra days to get it right. But it’s really important for those in a leadership position - whether they’re managers or senior engineers - to push back and set expectations.

  • I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not a new idea. What you’re proposing is (as far as I can see) the Platonic philosopher-king. They would rule fairly and wisely - since they agree with me and I am fair and wise.

    But let’s make sure we are being fair here. It’s not “democracy” that allowed for an armed insurrection against the government. Armed insurrections against governments occur in totalitarian regimes all the time. I can recommend a 400 page biography of Che if you want a reference. British democracy allowed the IRA. Iranian dictatorship allowed for the Islamic revolution. There are multiple civil wars going on right now around the world under multiple systems of government.

    I absolutely don’t believe that all people have equally valid opinions. I don’t even believe that people have free will. I agree with Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky that everything people do is predetermined. I’ve gotten very deep into that in other conversations on here so I don’t want to repeat all of that, but I can say that democracy allows for more dynamic adaptation. My position on free will makes these discussions more nuanced - human behavior is determined but not predictable - so I prefer to think of it in terms of information flows.

    So let me do my thing as a theoretical biologist. Do ants have democracy? I’d argue that they do, in a very real sense. Emergent behaviors - where each ant’s activity influences others’ activities - is a coordinating action. The queen ant isn’t the brain of the colony. She’s the reproductive organ. The brain of the colony is the ants themselves, the ants whose genetically driven programs respond to their environment and peers in a way that is responsive.

    It comes down to information flows.

  • The reason people are terrified of an authoritarian regime isn’t because a dictator Republican is going to force lower taxes on people. It’s because of the state and private violence. I may have hated Reagan and W because of their policies, but neither of them would have tried to overthrow the government of the US and replace it with a dictatorship. If either of them lost their election, they would have conceded. Neither of them promised while running for office that they would enact a dictatorship.

    The problem with your question is that you’re assuming that what we have an issue with are republican policies. It’s true, we do. That’s not the biggest problem with Trump, though, and the linked article makes that quite clear.

    To be honest, I wish Obama had been more successful in passing a national healthcare program. I hated that he had campaigned for Lieberman (because the default position is to support the incumbent) rather than his from-the-left challenger in the primaries, and that L went on to tank the public option. But I wish that Obama had used every ounce of political power to ram it through, or had thrown L to the dogs and went all in on getting a more liberal senate. I don’t wish Obama had dictatorial power.

    I don’t even particularly favor having an executive branch that’s separate from the legislature. I think that parliamentary democracy is a better approach (although it has its issues too).

  • Shark, as long as we are on land. I’d just outrun him then call coup by hitting him with a stick while he’s gasping for air. I guess at that point I could take on a blue whale, but that would just make me feel like a dick. I’ll stick with the shark. Any shark, any time, 1.5 miles inland.