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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Would switch. Prolly because I'm currently somehow straddling being transfemme and egg. Might depend on the time period though Not keen on being a woman in... most of history. Not really keen on being a man in general though.

  • God I hate the panic button on my fob (Toyota Corolla, 2005). I've never had any use for it, and accidentally press it a few times a month.

  • Beautiful work! Very kind thing to do.

  • Do you know how much work it is to live unhoused? How uncomfortable and dehumanizing? If you are completely without shelter, how it is after it rains, or the air is choked with smoke during fire season?

    It seems like you have just one explanation for everything here. When there's a problem, it's because of some moral failing that has to be punished. The publication you reference is telling.

    Your attitude toward both Roma and unhoused is an outside look in, entirely through the lens of criminality. There is no understanding there. You are missing the big picture, the why behind all of the things people do.

    If you really want to scam people, you start an LLC and live comfortably off of other people's work, like, you know, rich people do.

  • You are completely divorced from the reality on the ground.

    A good chunk of the unhoused (at least where I live, US CA) have jobs, it's just not enough for rent or they can't find a place because of poor credit, which means the places available are even more expensive. Rent has increased faster than median income, and way faster than low income.

    Most unhoused are there temporarily. Anything nice they have may be from before they got into their present situation. And what are they supposed to do? Pawn off their cell phone for pennies on the dollar?

    The explosion in number of unhoused people is not just a bunch of people happening to have some sort of moral failure all at once. The simpler explanation is that our economy and society is failing. And what do we expect to see as resources are hoarded by the powerful at exponentially increasing rates? Where do those resources come from?

    Also self report on your attitude toward Roma people.

  • Job elimination is a problem in capitalism because workers need jobs to survive. In a socialist society, job elimination can be a good thing, as it allows us to either increase access to resources or reduce how much time people need to work without dispossessing the people whose jobs were eliminated.

    The difference is that, in capitalism, workers only survive by proving their usefulness to capitalists making money. Automation is thus a threat to worker bargaining power. If the means of production were socially owned (through for example government run utilities or worker coops), worker bargaining power is then through a vote or through ownership. It is possible to by default distribute the spoils of automation rather than concentrate them in the hands of capitalists.

  • The system rewards ownership, and owners sometimes are forced to distribute some value back to the creators of value to get that reward. Sometimes owners are forced to or benefit from sharing some ownership (like in the case of IP on YouTube).

    It's not unique to software, though the potential to infinitely copy software makes the relationship starker. For example owning a parcel of land is similar to owning a peice of IP, in that the creation/purchase potentially happens once, and rent can be extracted over time from everyone who utilizes it. The number of renters you can fit on a peice of software is theoretically infinite, but in practice limited by the number of potential customers, the availability of their attention, and your distribution Infrastructure, while the number of renters you can fit on a parcel of land is limited by its size and the structures on it.

    Note that most owners did not personally create and do not personally develop what they own. Most software is not owned by programmers (who often make good money, but nowhere near the rent that is extracted from that software), and most homes are not owned by builders (who sometimes can't afford the homes they build). It's ownership which is primarily rewarded, and which spawns most further ownership.

  • I mean, plenty of Gen Z end up on the streets too, just like any generation, because housing availability and income is just getting worse for poor people. Anxiety issues are fairly associated with poverty.

    Most the young people I know (California, USA, I'm a young millennial) are precarious, and most feel precarious. They are also watching baby boomers (sometimes their parents and grandparents) end up on the streets in high numbers, but also don't have the extra income to put into retirement or get a healthy savings to secure a future for themselves, much less help their ailing family members. Their health issue incidence is high, and the availability of care for those health issues is low and very expensive. People living off of Gig apps and part time jobs (because jobs with benefits are unavailable without a college education, and sometimes even with). If they live separate from their family most of their income goes to rent.

    And climate change isn't something that affects people 100 years from now, it affects us right now in certain zones. The number of homes destroyed/damaged in various disasters each year where I live has gone way up, and a lot of the people who are displaced end up on the streets or in ever growing slums/camps. There's a general sense that the future will be worse than the present, which makes present struggles feel worse. People turn to drug use, sometimes to self medicate for physical and emotional issues. People don't want to have kids, because they don't see a future for those children, and don't have the resources to provide for them.

    I agree there needs to be more solidarity, especially with the most impoverished. Part of the struggle is worsened by atomization and individualism, and propaganda deriding the impoverished.

  • Gravity (phenomenon) is neither a theory nor law, in a similar way that a cat is different from a picture of a cat or a dictionary entry describing the word cat or our collective understand of what a cat is. At the same time, gravity is also BOTH a theory and a set of laws in the same sense that you could point to a picture of a cat and say "that's a cat right there", and no one would correct you. The distinction seems silly, but it is important. Theory, law, etc are structures/lenses through which we understand and predict things. A sort of formalized collective metacognition is the basis of science, and this is why we have these terms and distinctions. And theories and laws are fundementally different things in a way that's may be best expanded by critically reading the resources provided by the other commenter.

  • rip:(

  • I think the meme is fairly clearly making fun of American conservative/fascist discourse. Like the whole watering down of any semblance of a working definition of CRT when referenced by right wing pundits and moral panic board meeting parents, where right wing people call every call to be somewhat decent human beings "CRT" or "wokism", and then have no actual working meaning for those words except as something that seems left wing and makes them uncomfortable.

  • It's an interesting grammatical thing. In English, proper nouns are generally capitalized. Where proper nouns are names of specific things, not generalizable ideas. Like Bob, England, The Tribune, Christianity etc are proper nouns, while cat or guitar or car are not. This is extended to proper adjectives, which are generally derived from proper nouns but not always. So like "the man was English". We capitalize English because it isn't just a descriptor of a trait, like fat or green, but because it is describing membership to a nation, and nations are proper nouns. Blackness describes a nation type relationship, and when you say someone is Black, you are not saying that the are literally the color black, but rather belong to a Black identity or nationality. In the same sense that you say someone is Jewish or Protestant or Welsh, not jewish or protestant or welsh. Idk English is weird.

  • Oh neat! Thanks for pointing me toward that. Will definitely check that out:)

  • I started using y'all years ago due to its ungenderedness, in part from being in queer spaces. Walking into a room of trans women and enbies and saying "you guys" felt weird.

  • Heh no that's the mushroom forager's bible right there, going back many years, it's assigned reading for mycology students and very reputable. It's funny how much it looks ML generated, but it well predates ML image generation. For reference, he's holding a flesh colored mushroom and a trumpet.

  • Why not call someone what they want to be called? It ain't new. Just like it's polite to ask someone "can I call you x" or "do you prefer x or y" when you start to call someone a nickname or more personal name, someone can ask to be called x, and it's polite to do so. Names are arbitrary things, but at the same time often deeply meaningful to people.

  • More heat efficient processors and more energy efficient processors are one and the same. Which is huge. Energy usage is a large portion of the cost of computational infrastructure, and things like training neural networks. I suspect a thermally more efficient processor would also potentially last much longer too, with less intense thermal cycling.

    A lot of data centers are limited by the energy infrastructure where they are constructed.

  • There's a decent chunk of google workers who rely on H1B visas, so that's another thing that can remove some agency. I think that the level of coercion and control H1B visas give companies over their workers allow them to do even crazier shit. Part of how Twitter was able to retain some good engineers despite... everything.

    I don't know whether that actually applies in this case. But it's not just money tethering people to their jobs.