alyaza [they/she] @ alyaza @beehaw.org

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people.

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3 yr. ago

Moderating

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our previous fiscal host is dissolving at the end of the year--most of the details are over in our previous announcement post; all contributions go toward keeping the website up and paying for any labor associated with it outside of admin work

to be honest with you i have no clue what the logistics are for donations themselves. my intuition is... no, having managed our finances for the reports? but Chris almost certainly has a better idea of this than me.

no, everything is still in USD (although i think the switch means we're losing slightly more to payment processing)

pretty quiet week so far, i think it's supposed to snow later which will be moderately annoying because i'll have to shut my window for awhile if so

it's on the big list of possible alternatives that we're investigating

With approximately 600 members, Activision Quality Assurance United-CWA is the largest group of union-represented workers at any U.S. game studio. Workers in the new unit are located in California, Texas, and Minnesota. Over 1,000 video game workers at Microsoft now have union representation with CWA.

this is very cool, and hopefully more workers leverage the Microsoft neutrality agreement.

Hamas lied about 500 dying in al Ahli hospital blast and blaming the IDF. They didn’t even try to offer evidence.

even granting this, this seems like the obvious exception to the rule. as the commenter you're replying to noted, the UN and WHO have generally supported (with a handful of discrepancies that are unsurprising given the circumstances) the Gaza Health Ministry's death tolls. Israel's counts have also not historically diverged strongly from the ones the Gaza Health Ministry gives. take the 2014 war where the Gaza Health Ministry said 2,310 killed, the UN HRC said 2,251 killed, and Israel said 2,125 killed. that's only a 10% difference which, if we're being honest, is not really much of one in the context of an armed conflict.

mostly, where the Ministry and Israel meaningfully differ is in who they consider civilians and on what bases--the Ministry claimed about 70% civilians killed in 2014, but Israel claimed 36%. and that's a much harder question to parse out than whether or not the Gaza Health Ministry is lying about casualty numbers--which by all accounts we have it does not seem to be.

this was vetoed last year after it only passed 7-5 (majority to override a veto is 9); but this year it seems almost certain to pass. it has 9 votes this time and it seems even one of the four members in opposition might waver if it's actually vetoed.

The right choices are generally more expensive (in terms of up-front costs, even if they’re less expensive in the long run) and/or require more time investment, both of which are lacking for the poor.

or just the non-technologically savvy. a lot of the issue here is a technological hurdle, fundamentally—it takes a certain level of technological knowledge for someone to, say, pirate ebooks versus just buying them legitimately and that's a big point of friction for people in making the "right choice". we have to keep in mind that for a lot of internet-using people nowadays, knowing the ins-and-outs of Facebook or how to download a browser add-on is probably a legitimate technical skill and on the upper bounds of what they'd know navigating spaces like this. and we don't make it easy necessarily for people to acquire and advance the technological knowledge we're talking about here either.

i don't care about debating this with you. i will, as a concluding remark, just note incredible irony in lecturing about entitlement while simultaneously demanding gratitude for your work from people you literally just told to fuck off from this service three replies ago. in very blunt terms: i think you are getting the exact level of gratitude you deserve from us after this exchange, which is none. my experiences with you have been thoroughly unpleasant, unkind, and paint you as a toxic person and it is my view that your "years of work put into this software" are meaningless in the face of the blatant disrespect you show members of your community.

A schizophrenic person in one culture may be a cleric in another.

yeah there are some zany established differences in the manifestation of schizophrenia between cultures and how it's treated—religious visions, interestingly, tend to be a rather Christian manifestation of schizophrenia and apparently are not so common even in other Abrahamic-dominated countries

How could less leaves lead to less carbon sequestration? I would love to read more about methods to maximize this.

my understanding--which is admittedly limited--is it's a complicated issue but that the two biggest variables for the purposes of conversation are health of the things that you plant and what kinds of things you plant (since not all are made equal for carbon sequestration). the second point is mostly a function of location obviously, but on the first point this article seems to cover a lot of the basic principles (even though it's about forestry and not exactly what Medellin is doing)—in short a well managed greenery project can probably sequester more carbon than one left to its own devices, because you can effectively "speed up" natural processes of sequestration and (in the very long term) turn over the carbon more easily when the plants start losing their capture efficacy. (and obviously, healthy plants with proper maintenance would be in a better position to thrive and sequester carbon than improperly tended to plants)

i mean, if your response to a community which has stuck by your software for over two years now and hasn't even publicly committed to leaving is "fuck you" because you don't like that we are vocally opinionated on our problems, frictions, and perceived deficiencies with your software—yeah, why would we ever do anything to help you guys? you're strongly vindicating us here in supposedly "never ma[king] any code contributions" or "donat[ing] any money" (and i'm just going to grant you that for the sake of argument, i'm not even sure it's true). i'm not going to contribute to someone's software when they're openly contemptuous of me for trying to make their software better.

if i was on the fence previously about the upthread critique that you guys are kind of assholes to anybody who dissents about what you think should be the way forward, i am no longer. all i can say further is that you are acting severely out of pocket here as a spokesperson for the software and as a community manager and i would strongly encourage you to log off at this point before you say something that make your community relations even worse than they already are.

I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else.

respectfully (and as someone who has not paid attention to this thread outside of my one comment): i am continually failing to understand how asking you guys to give us better moderation tools to do our jobs--which is our primary reason we're even looking elsewhere and, if resolved, would likely placate about 90% of the problem we have with continuing to use your software--is entitlement. we're basically handing you a silver platter entitled "hey, here is our problem, and here is how you can keep us on Lemmy in the long term" and you guys seem to just not take that seriously at all? and now you seem to want to debate us out of thinking it's an issue while simultaneously telling us to fuck off for investing in your software at all!

Seems like overgrown green corridors would sequester even more carbon and clean even more air, no?

overgrowth probably has the chance to damage adjacent infrastructure and create pockets of public safety issues. also if these are anything like the usual tree-planting projects, not maintaining them properly likely leads to less carbon sequestration

if the social prescription to harassment of moderators is "quit because you're a baby" then you're going to have many fewer pleasant spaces on the Fediverse in which to exist—because yeah, a lot of people will just quit. i am agnostic on the public modlog overall, but this is an obvious concern with it that i'm not convinced can just be dismissed idly. i obviously have better things to do than a thankless, payless job in which harassment would be dismissed like that.

the ultimate consequence of this approach:

The project’s wider impacts are like a breath of fresh air. Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change. In turn, City Hall says this will minimize the need for energy-intensive air conditioning.

pretty significant; this would make a huge difference in a lot of cities if replicated with care

for what it's worth we have quite a few communities in dire need of some love and posters willing to give them some life--betterment and praxis was a good idea for example that's unfortunately not been able to sustain itself recently

chill out

yeah, maybe they're visible on other Fediverse projects? but i've only ever seen them on posts when they're crossposted through those other projects, not when they're posted here through Lemmy.