jeremyparker @ jeremyparker @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

Counterpoint: losers of presidential elections have been president as often as not in the past 20 years

If she's the one that breaks him we will finally have proof of the inmate goodness of the universe

Why can't they just flip burgers from the age of 16 till 65? What if they don't mind the work, they have a full and fulfilling life outside of work, and their job is just what they do to make ends meet? Does that mean they deserve to live in debt and working 100 hours a week? Are you so ignorant that you don't understand that, in any economic system, capitalism or otherwise, not everyone can move up?

It's literally not possible. There have to be people flipping the burgers. That's a fact of the system; there's no way around that. And it's ok -- not perfect, but acceptable -- as long as we treat those people with dignity and respect.

And that means paying them enough to survive -- and thrive -- on 40 hours a week. No one's saying they should have enough money to buy megayachts -- or even regular yachts. But they should be able to buy a shitty canoe -- and still be able to pay all their bills, and not have to work more than 40 hours.

If you're concerned about the possibility that, if they earn more, you'll earn less, that's just not true. There's no scenario in the USA where a company is charging customers any less than the most they possibly can, and paying their workers any more than as little as possible. That's literally the law. There is plenty of extra money that can be used to cover the needs of our poorest people -- and to raise the salaries of more scarce labor who would otherwise turn to flipping burgers if burger-flipping salaries went up.

Literally every business that's even a little successful has extra money. ("Extra money" is also known as profit.) There is no reason why one person should have to work more than 40 hours a week while another person has more money then they can possibly spend in a lifetime; it's illogical and irrational, and cruel.

If everyone who flips burgers gets a "better job" are you going to stop having burgers?

The issue is that while there is work that needs to be done, then there will be a need to pay people to do it. If you're a business owner and you have work that needs to be done, and you can't afford to pay your employees enough for them to pay their bills and lube decent lives, and you can't personally take the hit to your own income to cover the difference, then your business should fail.

Right now, the arrangement forces people to work more than 40 hours a week -- which is illegal, but companies get away with it because they don't work at the same company for the whole time. In fact, many people with multiple jobs don't even have full time jobs -- they have 3 part time jobs, all working them less than 40 hours a week, so they don't have to give them the benefits they're required to provide for full time employees.

(Personally, when I was young I had multiple places scheduling me for 39.5 hours a week. Now I'm a white collar FTE and I work 35 hours a week.)

So, next time you call someone who's flipping burgers "lazy," think about how lazy a person must be to work 100 hours a week. Is that what laziness looks like to you? How many hours a week do you have to work too not be considered not lazy?

Because, the thing is, you know they aren't lacy. They're working their fingers to the bone, and have much shittier and shorter lives than middle class people. Calling them lazy (or stupid or unlucky or whatever) is how you rationalize the fact that you're unwilling to accept any inconvenience it might cause you to help them.

In this scenario -- aka, the real world, the world we are in right now -- they are working harder than the rest of us are, for less money.

It's not just the trivial things themselves -- it's also the idea that admins will have to police their users for trivial missteps, under threat of defederation, so no one will want to run a server.

Ex-list and inc-list are a lot more intuitive too.

Just to make we fully exhume the original argument -- I hang out with a lot of trans and nb people and I've noticed people just saying "they" to everyone, and I kinda love it. If everyone's just they then no one needs pronouns. The first part of the long term mission, to destabilize gender completely, starts with shit like that - taking all gender out of language.

I'm not sure if I understand. Isn't this a normal thing, Amazon just made it look like you're normal one, plus "Amazon"? I could be misunderstanding.

edit judging by the down votes I guess I misunderstood?

You've been able to capture and replace context menus in browsers for years. I don't use them in my development because they're annoying but this is one that I played with one time:

https://carbon-components-svelte.onrender.com/components/ContextMenu

(The feature has been Dollar Store DRM for years - that's how you just disable the context menu altogether. "We have DRM at home"- type DRM.)

To be clear, the reason this isn't common is because of OP's response -- it feels intrusive and the more "value" it adds (ie how customized it is) is proportional to how intrusive it feels.

To make matters worse, as far as I know, you can't replace the context menu just sometimes, like, it would be cool to just customize options on images for example, or links -- but it's whole page or nothing -- so using the feature at all means using it everywhere, and, for me anyway, it's kind of a lot of effort, which sits on the scale with "intrusive and annoying" to outweigh the value add.

Oh I pirate the shit out of everything -- and partly it's a boycott, but I think mostly it's the convenience. "Owning" things and enjoying them on my terms (no Internet? No problem) is just better than subscriptions.

And I block ads, 100% for sure. I would literally give up most of the Internet rather than subject myself to ads -- I'm "on the spectrum" and I have a very hard time with overstimulation and distraction, so ads substantially interrupt my ability to read (which I already have trouble with).

Like -- I love lemmy and everything, but I'm here because Reddit disabled the ad-free app I used to use. I was a daily reddit user for like 13 years. if I could still use Relay, my ethical resolve against their anti-user practices, and my personal commitment to foss, probably wouldn't have held up.

My feeling is, if I behave in a way that's conducive with good mental health and life satisfaction, and what I do is also a political statement, then the universe is in harmony.

It's really just the "voting with your wallet' perspective I mean to illuminate and undercut -- it's a very tempting idea, but I would rather we (as a resistance movement) remain sane and comfortable than ascetic and underengaged.

Voting with your wallet is literally plutocracy -- those with more dollars get more votes.

Not only is our theoretically bad, but it's practically bad: the impact of a boycott is negligible, but the impact on the people doing the boycott is huge: not having access to the conveniences everyone else has puts us at a significant disadvantage compared to our peers.

And finally, it's not just practically bad, it's actually contraindicated. The executives of a corporation are legally required to maximize immediate returns to their investors. It's literally illegal for a CEO to move a company in the direction of civic responsibility over profit. And it's not just "profit" -- it has to be increasing profit. Line has to go up; they can't just keep it flat, even if "flat" is hugely profitable. To withdraw our financial support will just cause them to squeeze harder on everyone else.

(There's an argument that there might be more profit in social responsibility, but unless you have numbers to back that up, and it demonstrates immediate returns in addition to long term benefits, then it's just a guess, and a guess is never going to be more convincing to shareholders than facts.)

The only way to change this is with regulation, and a cultural shift away from "line goes up" mentality. And you can't effect political change when you're spend 3x as long making dinner because you're boycotting processed food.

Suggesting that we just give up all the conveniences that our labor, our creativity, and our cultural contributions have enabled, for the sake of convincing a CEO to be nicer is just ineffectual.

Counterpoint, the only way you'll be able to write efficient and clean code, that's both terse and readable, that earns the respect of influencers and CTOs alike, is with the Happy Hacking Keyboard, Type S. It's $300, but you're serious about coding, aren't you? And you'll need some after market keycaps; the stock ones are decent -- dye sub PBT -- but you'll look like a noob, you'll need to get a few sets of colorful blanks and create a pattern from them that defines your coding aesthetic. You have a color scheme that defines your coding aesthetic, right? If not, you need to take care of that, before you even write a single line of code.

I'm just kidding, literally anything. I don't even use one, I just use a mouse, since I'm just copying and pasting from chatGPT anyway -- or, I used to, back when I was a junior dev. Now I just use a magnetic needle and a steady hand

Yeah I think my final point about Ashton should've been more prominent - he's just a TV star, he shouldn't be our moral compass.

It's great he's contributing to this cause but his efforts are a tiny candle when compared to the efforts of the people his money is going to. He sits on a stage, looks handsome, and talks into a microphone about how you shouldn't kidnap people and sell them into sexual slavery. He's not holding anyone's hair back while they vomit.

I'm not going to read what you wrote, I'll just assume I know what you've said based on the first part.

Thanks.

My example was murder, which can be one bad decision. I talked about serial crimes and remorse and all that later - but none of my post was about forgiveness, it was about, specifically, why Ashton Kutcher might say what he did about Masterson.

What interests me about the topic, and why I made that post, is the interplay between redemption (eg Scrooge) and ... whatever redemption's opposite is (eg Masterson).

This is digging into pretty legal territory and copyright law is (arguably unnecessarily) complex -- but licenses are things that you use to let people use your patents. I think that's what they were initially and mainly; but then software and the copyleft movements kind of detached the concepts of licenses and patents.

The fediverse protocols could definitely be patented and licensed, but, like you said (or implied, really), that's... sketchy af. Like, anyone we could trust to patent it would probably refuse to do it -- Linux Torvalds would probably curse me out for even suggesting it, and the lecture rms gave me would probably never end.

Let's have some devils advocate! Everybody loves devils advocate. Just real quick before I start cooking, I just want to say that rape is bad and there's no excuse. That's important and I'm not going to use it in my examples. Murder though - that's basically fine, I think.

A lot of crimes amount to one bad decision. A life of being a really good person and then one time you murder someone, then jail forever? (Well, yes, but actually no - first time offenders don't get life in prison, even for murder.)

Even if you have a dark side that you've been keeping under wraps, that's actually good! If there are people with dark sides, what we want is for them to not act on it - sociopaths, pedophiles - like, if we take for granted that these are conditions which occur in people and there's no cure, what we want is for them to not act on it.

But, one day, you fail, your dark side gets out and you do one of the horrible things you've been trying not to do; then it's easier to do it again, and again, and suddenly you're a serial killer. 40 years of being good despite a very difficult challenge, to suppress that darkness, but the rest of your life, you're judged for the few bad decisions you made in moments of weakness.

Let's talk about Ebeneezer Scrooge. Tis the season after all.

That dude was a total dick for like 60 years, but, in the end of the story, he's changed - it's a redemption story. But his name, Scrooge, is a commonplace synonym which characterizes him as a villain; fuck his redemption, he lived most of his life as a dick, and we remember him that way.

So which is it? Do we judge based on most of their lives, or do we judge based on a recent set of decisions which severely depart from that? Or do we just go with whichever was worst?

When it comes to Ashton Kutcher, like, even a serial killer isn't murdering literally every moment of their day. They have jobs, they go to the store. All that time, that person is being a good person, they're suppressing their darkness. It's easy to see a person in that light when that's how you've seen them for basically your entire adult life.

That said, Ashton Kutcher is a rich TV star so basically all his opinions are invalid. He probably only helps victims of sex trafficking because his PR team thought it would be a good fit for his brand. Not to say he doesn't like helping - I'm just saying fuck that guy. Fuck all those guys.

I'm guessing you mean the diabetes and celiac will be cured, not the autism

WE GOT BALLISTAE FOR YOU TOO, BUDDY

Where's the button I can press to project this comment onto the moon

One of the things that I thought of to help with this problem is, like, what if we figured out how much it costs to meet like all the basics in life - a house (not a rental!), food, soda, internet, heat/hot water - all that stuff. Then add some more, so that people could do nice stuff and enjoy their lives, save for retirement, go on vacations, etc.

Then - now here's the crazy part - we make a law requiring that everyone in the country needs to be paid at least that much money. It would be like a "Floor Wage," or, like, a "Minimum Salary."

If the increase in the cost of doing business didn't eliminate billionaires altogether, I bet people would at least stop giving a shit about billionaires and their gold piles because the rest of us aren't living in debt while they build yachts for their yachts.

I'm not being obtuse, I'm pointing out that that person is full of shit. His/her "contribution" is just as garbage as the posts they criticized.