This is the material analysis we need to be doing. During COVID I saw farmers shredding crops instead of selling them because we lacked the transportation capacity to get food to market. “How the fuck is that even possible?” you ask? We rely too much on individual truckers when we should be using rail… And that’s kind of an analogy for the whole market.

No system in place to ensure there is enough energy, water, food, steel, concrete, lumber, etc. to go around, just this vague hope that “the market will respond to price information as it always does”.

Well now that price information is telling people to invest in space mirrors to send sunlight to their AI-powered saffron gardens, employing cheap foreign workers rather than local labour so that they can sell the spice to wealthy people. So yeah I think that mechanic is busted now and needs a rethink.

You’re right, and I’ve learned to ignore most advice I read from enthusiasts. I bought a cast iron pan 20 years ago for $15 and I still use it to cook almost everything, including eggs.

I did splurge and buy a nice dutch oven to make baking bread easier, but it’s not necessary.

Multiple times now I’ve been mocked relentlessly for PC building advice or opinions on software development I had that became commonplace within 3 years, like when I said noSQL databases were overrated as hell but they had their uses. Made enemies on both sides lol… And now that’s the common opinion.

conservatives fucked that up

That was a Conservative + Liberal special, both of them selling off our assets all over the place.

Look up the drama around “leftpad” and Node.js. One day thousands of packages broke because of their dependence on someone else’s package. If a global army of software developers can’t deal with a mundane failure like leftpad, how is Valve supposed to manage against a targeted spearphishing campaign like this? Its not reasonable to expect Valve to comb through (or even be allowed to comb through) the source code of every game that hits the store.

I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.

The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.

I get your point about sexual attraction not being necessary, but you’re still kind of making the other user’s point for them. Deep Rock Galactic works because of a cohesive aesthetic with characters that actually fit the world they’re in. Concord was like a cast of soulless GI Joe toybait characters who went through a corporate intersectional diversity blender.

I just personally wish the COVID lifestyle was more accessible.

Same, it suited me quite well and I feel bad saying I missed it because so many others, including some of my own family and friends, suffered. Now that I’m back in the office 5 days a week, I lose >2 hours a day with my kids. I had my own parents say “i don’t get why you’re complaining, we got by before COVID” while refusing to acknowledge it’s different because one of them stayed home with us, while my wife and I must both work to survive.

I grew up in a religious conservative family. These and other experiences drove me to the left in a big way. I see now that thinking we can solve systemic issues with individualism is bullshit. I want a world where my wife or I could stay home (or some communal solution) to raise our family right rather than having a bunch of latchkey kids and being stuck doing chores from the moment we get home until the moment we lie down. Some people say “well that’s how I was raised” but it isn’t right.

Now that would be a funny headline.

No sadly COVID lockdown isolation did them in. I’ve never seen minds and bodies decay so fast. I have another friend who developed full-blown psychosis from it too, and at this point it looks like he’s never coming back. The lockdowns were harder on some people than we were/are ready to talk about I think.

When my wife’s grandparents had to get a new computer they got upset about the new windows interface and the fact their old games didn’t work, so I set them up with Linux and a DE that resembled XP (it’s what they were familiar with), and I was able to get most of their games going.

They used it without issue until they died.

Your OS isn’t getting regular updates!!!

This is a feature imo.

It aligns with Democratic Socialists well enough, but not the seize-the-means socialists.

That’s a fair observation I think: UBI doesn’t put the same pressure on financialization that worker- owned industry does. Ultimately I think eliminating work is a terrible idea, but reducing work, focusing on actually productive work, and ensuring we all collectively benefit from it is ideal.

A system is what it does. If it costs us jobs, enriches the wealthy at our expense, destroys creativity and independent thought, and suppresses wrongthink? It’s a censorious authoritarian fascist pushing austerity.

Show me AI getting us UBI or creating worker-owned industry and I’ll change my tune.

I’m in Canada and it’s only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the “don’t go to school on X day” message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.

Police investigated the home and found:

• 5000 rounds of ammunition
• body armor
• explosives
• only thing he couldn’t get was legal firearms because of his history of mental illness, but he had been working on connections to acquire illegal ones

Point being we couldn’t get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a “normal” school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.

I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.

Imagine it’s 1995 and you’re an average person. You don’t know all that much about separation, you just know that the coming referendum is about it and you don’t want to separate. You likely are not a college/university graduate and a significant amount of the people you know haven’t even graduated high school. You probably don’t have a personal computer or internet access even if you do. Your primary news source is likely the odd updates you get on the radio while driving to or from work, and you haven’t been following and aren’t familiar with how people talk about separation. You show up to vote and you get this question:

Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
French:
Acceptez-vous que le Québec devienne souverain, après avoir offert formellement au Canada un nouveau partenariat économique et politique, dans le cadre du projet de loi sur l’avenir du Québec et de l’entente signée le 12 juin 1995?

What the hell are you even voting for or against here?

The Québec referendum on separation was so confusing people remarked they didn’t actually know what they were voting for. The situation resulted in a law (Clarity Act) that forced all secession votes to pass some tests to be considered valid, and also indicated that a secession requires amendment of the Constitution of Canada, which makes it incredibly difficult to actually do.

I really don’t want to give Québec undeserved credit on this, they handled it quite poorly tbh and the whole thing felt like it was exploiting the ignorance and anger of a minority population that had even less education and literacy than the average Canadian at the time. That said, Canada has since devolved further into being a neoliberal anglosohere shithole so perhaps they were on to something.

That’s not a no.

Knowing full well you are leaving to find a man in another town, you accepted another man’s request for a date and now you want it to be platonic?

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100% a change.org petition makes news which is useful but won’t otherwise do anything. What you need to do to back that up is cost Visa/Mastercard money, and the way to do that is to call them and tell their ethics teams that what they’re doing is deeply wrong.