jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

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537

Joined

2 yr. ago

I had to leave my phone for 6 hours to get the battery changed and was twitchy the entire time. Not because I needed it, but because most of my "waste time" stuff was on it. I used to carry paperback books for instance, now ebooks. I can imagine it's torture, as I get bored easily and in situations where "nothing" is happening I really want to start reading something... No one I know likes to just sit, even around other people (heck, it's hard to get them to talk to other people) without scrolling on their phones. And I'm guilty too - I have no interest to sit watching other people play on their phones or eat silently...

I'd bet that older workers tend to have more seniority, so more autonomy and less bullshit, at least in my workplace. Also, many have the "half retired" mindset of "I don't want to do X, what are they going to do, make me retire / fire me?" and so have some more leverage if the employer doesn't want them to quit.

I honestly don't see the problem with video ads embedded in the video stream. It seems like it'd be far harder to slip something malicious to the computer in there than banner ads served from somewhere else. It's a system that worked for broadcast TV for decades.

To the extent they offer a paid service with no ads, that also seems ethical to me.

The part where Youtube kind of falls down for me is unlike TV shows where the broadcaster is paying for the content, youtube content is basically free to Youtube. So them collecting money seems unfair and leaves the content creators to do sponsored / ad breaks themselves to pay for the content.

Indeed, it's useful to China for blackmail, but they'd have a much harder time rolling me up in the US than the US government. And it's likely hardly worth the effort to the extent they might try.

I mean, the US did expel George Santos just this month. It was kind of amazing I have to agree, it really should be more common if you are found to break the law.

Honestly I'm constantly amazed it was on this long. I think not having ratings or traditional competition lets streaming shows go longer than they should.

It was never that good, and it just started declining from the pilot. I slogged through S3 due to "giving it a fair chance", and I regret that every time I think about S3, which I've mostly forgotten. ANY other sci fi show and I would have dropped it probably in the first episode, or at my most tenacious in the first season.

Oh, online IDK, I think it'd be hard to miss, but people do still end up in echo chambers. At home or in person? Who's doing the questioning matters too. What your friends think can matter a lot - if everyone is quiet because they don't want to become "part of the problem", no one is part of the solution. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk". I'd say that might well apply to at least try to "Friends don't let friends fall down conspiracy theories", "become neo-nazis", etc.

But given Daryl Davis, maybe we agree - the in person is way more important than online. But I will also say a lot of people report finding likeminded people online (in multiple contexts like religion, LGBTQ+, nerds, whatever) helpful in realizing "not everyone is different from them" and "not everyone thinks one way". And if only the loudest voices are left online, then we only see extremes. If representation matters, so does moderate representations.

I'd argue that it's pretty obvious that man and woman are socially constructed, and as such - there's just no fact of the matter to get down to. I also find that most things of strict self-id basically become just a place to have "no true scotsman" arguments, and therefore we'd be better served to stop using the terms for policy making at the very least.

I agree that I've heard a lot of the same studies. I wonder though about the nudge and shame effects however. By this I mean, we're pretty sure peer pressure is a thing (or at least I haven't heard of anyone disputing that in recent research). I've seen self-censorship and studies that seem to also show that works.

I don't know if the world would be better overall if we went back to 1990s levels of people not taking conspiracy theories seriously, and it being a negative view from "the average person" if you were ranting that the earth was flat. That happened somehow - those were tamped down, and I'd argue it's plausible that it was basically peer pressure.

The means might well not be to convince the MAGA uncle, but to influence his kids, your kids, and the rest of the family to treat him as "the crazy uncle" rather than a person to emulate. Similarly, while you'll never convince hardcore woke or MAGA people they're wrong, you might affect the wider view of what's "normal" for others watching. We've all seen the alternative of not engaging / leaving leave the space to become a self reinforcing echo chamber.

I wish gas was that low. It's still at about $3.65 here and has been for years.

Given that I find the economists roughly on par with weather forecasters, I really think we have to treat it that way. Like Climate change has thrown a huge wrench in existing weather models causing the forecasts to be much worse - I think if the models ever worked(and that's a big if), things have sufficiently changed to break them pretty badly now.

if you like apples (or whatever) you should pay more for them than other goods, comparatively

I just don't think this happens that much necessarily though. Mostly because of necessities taking up such a huge percentage of peoples budgets.

I also find myself and see others kind of have a "I Like X more, but not enough to spend Y for it". This doesn't necessarily imply it's a utility curve, I often find myself thinking it's more of an anchoring psychology effect. I.e. you at age X get used to a Combo meal at the local fast food place costing $10. If it "frog boils" over say 20 years to $20, you'll bitch about how "back in my day"... If it doubles in a year, like many things have - it just seems way more like overcharging and the utility curve is all out of whack.

I'll tell you one thing, the service at fast food places has fallen so much where I live that if I can't get their app to work to pre-order so I can waltz in and just grab it, I'll go somewhere else. And the cost has gone up so much that I've been actively comparing to fast casual app based pick ups or hell, sit downs because the food is usually somewhat better and they're often no longer massively more expensive or slower.

Honestly, if people were rational actors about economics, they'd stop thinking the President can do much about how they feel about the economy. And using Gas prices as the measure is one of the most asinine things I've ever seen.

I'm so sorry this all happened to you. I will say the cost of kids is one reason I'm never having them. It's too unaffordable.

One thing I might suggest going forward is look into if you can get a house insurance rider to cover appliance breakdowns. More offer it, and it's a big help caping things at ~ $500 or so, for ~$45 a year on the policy. My coverage would have paid out on the furnace and washer/dryer stack replacement.

I would guess America is so wildly diverse, like most countries, that there's no real "Average American". Sure, median income isn't great and recent inflation has screwed with poorer people all the way through to probably upper middle class.

However, I don't think there's "one reason" for people being / feeling poor. It also depends on what you mean by "life changing".

Anyway - I'd say there's are very poor people. Some of this is generational poverty, some of it is no family support, some of it is addiction, some of it is mental illness, some of it is bad choices. A social safety net would really help here. For whatever reason the US is against much of one.

There's working poor, where supposedly the value they bring to a company isn't sufficient to pay a living wage. I guess elsewhere this is government forced to be a higher minimum wage way more than in the US. This I think is also leading to lots of apathy now in service workers, which means atrocious service at most places, which is finally starting to impact people higher up the income chain. Though it's usually scoffing that no one is doing a good job anymore.

Middle class people get squeezed by inflation a LOT, and children are incredibly expensive. As you get into middle middle and upper middle classes there's also the spending problems. This is either driven by lack of or failures of public options, so people are paying for home schooling / private schooling, paying ever more out of pocket to get access to medical care at ever higher rates, and really any service needed can be astronomical or else often worse than doing nothing unless you know a guy. There's also all the credit card debt that with higher interest rates are squeezing people even more. Some of this is unnecessary spending running out of control, but some of it is lack of wages keeping up with inflation mixed with many things having way more ongoing costs than they used to. Either they have planned obsolesce (Back in the 90s no one had to buy a new landline phone, or wireless phone every 2 years), they have subscriptions (again, in the 90s you bought a car or a radio, you bought a computer, you bought a game, whatever - it lasted with no ongoing payments), and many things just don't last at all. Then there's the interest in experiences - which is a transient thing, so you're always paying for a new one. I'd also say there's a huge burden on everyone related to college - and it is getting less obvious by the year if that hit in loan payments "forever" is worth the supposed economic boost. My parents grew up when college was like $8,000 max for 4 years and room etc - you could work your way through it, and the boost to lifetime expected earnings was pretty easy to overshadow the effort or loan if any needed. I might have been the last generation to get through with $20k in debt from 4 years, which while I'm still paying on isn't enough to overshadow the earning benefits. Today (and for the last 15 years or more) it's more and more for a 4 year degree, while the expected positions aren't going up in pay very much at all. But if you do go to college that's going to hit you and your parents for a long time also.

As you get to upper middle and upper class - upper middle is scared shitless by the inflation, wage increase demands, etc that might cause them to fall out of that class, so they can feel "poor" even though they're far from it.

TL;DR: there are a lot of poor Americans, and many who are "doing OK" either drowning in debt or just feeling insecure even if not technically poor.

But when it comes to learning the tech… Isn’t it the same for proper privacy, anonymity and safety in general? Instead of proclaiming it as a “lost cause”, I think we should lend a hand to someone who needs protection but has trouble figuring it out.

I've gotten cynical over trying to lend a hand to people around using Linux. Masses don't want to be taught things. Heck, look at the lemmy adoption issues. Yes, idealistically maybe "digital cash" has a use, but practically people don't see it. At this point, it's not a lack of knowledge - there were super bowl commercials. It's a lack of interest. It's like the laser keyboards "of the future" circa 2010. They didn't solve an actual problem enough people had to be worth learning how to use them and deal with the clunky parts.

Yes, everyone has nothing better to do than go shopping daily for anything they need. Nevermind having stores on hand in case you can't go to the store daily, like when we had a pandemic. Plus, we should all pay the maximum "bodega" price for everything, no buying in bulk for things to be cheaper, or just buying at a larger central location where things are cheaper.

This just seems asinine to me.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. You'd need to define terms better at the very least. What do you mean by true, what do you mean by believe etc.

As to the psuedo code, as far as I know, the boolean equivalence to 1 in many programming languages is just a convenience and not some law of nature or core basis of philosophy.

So the thing that stands out to me is I had a summer job for 2 weeks in a grocery store. We all had to join the union (I forget what union it was). I had to pay union dues on a temporary minimum wage job. The great union actually caused me to be paid less than minimum wage. I don't know what they were bargaining for, but they suck if their negotiations leads to less pay than just working literally anywhere else without a union. I left after the 2 weeks because I got a non-union job paying 1.50 more an hour back in the early aughts.

My dad always told me stories about the union construction or maintenance people where he worked. Carpenters would come in, look at the storage area for raw materials and walk out saying, we can't get to the wood because the electricians put in wire spools in front of it when filling the room, and we can't touch the wire spool, we can't move it, we can't set up a ladder and climb over it. So they'd get paid for a day for sitting there, till the electricians came and moved the spools. And vice versa.

In my current job the facilities people are all union, which is fine, but it takes them forever to get to stuff, and because we have some areas that are scientific in nature and have radiation in them, they won't enter. We get some sort of pass to have non-union people who can do the work and will enter the areas and they show up much faster and do the job. The Union regularly complains about this until they're reminded that they refuse to enter the areas, or commit to the SLA that is required to run the facility.

I think all of this is bad for unions. I would want unions to be the best people and the most willing to do a good job within treating the employees like humans. But that's too often not what happens. The best things I've ever seen unions do is basically show up like a psudo lawyer or pay for a lawyer when my dad or mom (both were in a union) were being unfairly fired (both were allowed to retire with full benefits instead, but still didn't get to keep their jobs).

I'm not saying I don't think unions can be good - they got us the current work week. I'm saying they're earning some of their reputation, which lets the propaganda from the right wing work much better.

Normal things might turn into “highly illegal” overnight - first thing that comes to mind is what happened with abortion laws. There are always vulnerable people who aren’t criminals, and saying they shouldn’t have such a payment option is kind of close to “only criminals would need end-to-end encryption”.

I'm not saying people have nothing to hide, or making that case. I'm saying the ask is so high that people who don't feel like they must use crypto don't, and this is one of the hills it would have to conquer to be taken seriously. There are obvious negatives like the environmental impact, the PITA complicated tech that is hard to understand, the slow transactions, and the difficulty of getting usable money into and out of crypto. And the vast majority of purchases, the mass adoption, aren't stuff that people care to hide or they would already be only using cash.

I'd love to pay for my VPN with crypto, but I'm not willing to spend the hours it would take to figure it out in the current form, not to mention actually make it at all actually anonymous, plus pay roughly 2x in payment fees.

Now think of people who don't even care about privacy to use a VPN...