zaphod @ zaphod @lemmy.ca

Just this guy, you know?

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Modern Republicans are like George on Seinfeld when he decides to do the opposite.

Everything they do, everything they believe, is purely in opposition to the Democrats (and the establishment consensus more broadly).

It's pure, kneejerk obstructionism.

Everyone else says Putin is bad? Well shit, he must be good.

Everyone else says Ukraine is good? Then they're evil.

Folks say Biden won? Nope, he lost.

Honestly, the left should just start using reverse psychology to get things done. If Biden came out against the trans community, you can bet the next day Trump would do a rally in drag.

That's a goal, but it's hardly the only goal.

My goal is to get a synthesis of search results across multiple engines while eliminating tracking URLs and other garbage. In short it's a better UX for me first and foremost, and self-hosting allows me to customize that experience and also own uptime/availability. Privacy (through elimination of cookies and browser fingerprinting) is just a convenient side effect.

That said, on the topic of privacy, it's absolutely false to say that by self-hosting you get the same effect as using the engines directly. Intermediating my access to those search engines means things like cookies and fingerprinting cannot be used to link my search history to my browsing activity.

Furthermore, in my case I host SearX on a VPS that's independent of my broadband connection which means even IP can't be used to correlate my activity.

I played D2 on the deck and it worked fine after tuning the graphics settings. Though I fully admit when things got tricky I docked and used kb&m.

Just started finally playing through Manifold Garden and after switching to kb&m emulation with the stick and touchpad, plus some tweaks, it's played extremely well.

Meanwhile I've also put a distressing amount of time into Rimworld, which works great with the Deck's suspend mode since it's very amenable to dropping in, doing stuff for a few minutes, then dropping out. Well except that a few minutes always turns into a few hours...

Solution is simple: tax and regulate. These large vehicles come with externalities including contributing to global warming, increased road wear, increased use of road and parking space, and higher rates of pedestrian injury and fatality.

So, tax them so the owners pay for those externalities, and/or regulate to prevent them in the first place. This is an entirely solvable problem if governments, and the people they represent, really care.

Oh sure, on the like paragraph five. That's way more than a single tweet. How do you expect anyone to read that much all in one go?!?

And the first paragraph of the article uses the word "believe", which has a much softer connotation.

The subject line strongly implies that Canadians did the math and "expect" to need $1.7M for retirement.

When you look at the actual article, it's simply an opinion survey reporting what people said, answers for which could be the result of anything from a rigorous financial plan all the way to a finger in the air guess.

So the headline implies a great deal more certainty in the quoted figures than is actually indicated in the article or supportable by the data.

In short: no, I stand by my claim the article headline is absolutely misleading.

Agreed. The headline is extremely misleading clickbait.

This piece is reporting on what people think they need, not what they actually need (which is highly context dependent), which by itself isn't very interesting.

The real story is the huge divergence between what people say they need vs what they're actually targeting, but that's not news, we've known about it for decades (basically every since the defined benefit pension plan ended).

Code for, "my children are my property to do with as I see fit. "

Well, unless you decide you want to let them access gender affirming care, in which case you as a parent have no rights at all.

This was never about parental rights. It's about using the trans community in the same way the right used the gay community in the 70s and 80s: as a moral boogieman they can use to gain power.

Bruh, do you really think the author doesn't know who one of the largest IT agencies in the world is? Could it be, rather, that they were dumbing it down for the audience, since it's, you know, not an article about Accenture, and ended up with some slightly odd phrasing as a consequence?

You don't see a financial opportunity in delivering tools to dramatically speed up the creation of emails, reports, presentations, boilerplate graphics, etc?

Tell me you've never held a corporate job without telling me you've never held a corporate job.

There are people who literally live in Word and Excel every day. For them these tools could be life changing.

And that's just one obvious userbase.

Fascism is also an ideology of fear. It requires an enemy that's both weak and existentially threatening in order to frighten and divide people.

For the modern right that enemy is now the trans community. And make no mistake, it's cynical and deliberate. Alt right figures sought and found the enemy they needed to galvanize voters, and now they're stoking that fear as best they can.

A lot of great speculation that has absolutely nothing to do with how the economy is doing right now, which is what I thought we were talking about.

Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough: the stock market is correlated with economic health but does not measure it directly. In the first half of 2023 the stock market was erratic due to rising interest rates while the real economy--measured by unemployment rates, salaries, etc--was quite healthy. Conversely, the post-2008 recovery was anemic at best for the non-rich while the stock market rallied to all time highs. There's a reason I've never once mentioned the stock market while making the case that the economy is healthy.

Put another way: your predicted future slump in tech stocks does not therefore mean the economy more broadly will suffer.

And that's assuming your prediction plays out, and that remains to be seen. After all, I'll bet you were predicting that Facebook is on the decline, and yet they announced a truly astonishing quarter.

And again, none of this is relevant to the state of the economy right now.

I'll be honest, I don't understand your point.

What does the value of those company's stocks (which it's worth noting are rallying in response to those layoffs) have to do with my point that the underlying causes of the layoffs in tech cannot be extrapolated to the broader economy, and thus action in that sector should not be used as a proxy for overall economic health?

It's almost like they cherry pick data that fits their preconceived notions...