The event was organised by the International Foundation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice – a London-based company that says it is a 'home for the once-gay'
This is basically what he was saying. Open source tends to be a much less plug-and-play out-of-the-box experience, and usually requires at least some IT know-how for it to not be an infuriating experience. A lot of FOSS advocates compensate for that by kind of being that over explaining bro meme and get kinda pushy about getting people over the technical barriers because they want FOSS to be widely adopted and be a real alternative, and for good reasons. But most people don’t have the time or patience to stumblefuck their way through IT issues, they just want the shit to work.
It’s a fair criticism, accessibility is a big problem in FOSS. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.
Well, it’s mastodon. You’ve got a little over 400 characters to say what you’re going to say in the most shocking, attention-getting way possible. Yes, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no metaphor is perfect or else it wouldn’t really be a metaphor, would it?
Anyway, it’s a time and convenience cost that becomes extremely significant as your IT proficiency decreases, and you’ve got another think coming if you think those costs don’t matter to people.
Okay, I guess. This isn’t really a hill I’m prepared to die on. The point is that it’s still a cost that’s real to the user, even if it’s not a direct financial one.
I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.
I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.
And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.
By all polls and sentiment, it seems like it’s going to be a goddamned bloodbath for the tories. I’m actually kinda pumped, I hope they get everything that’s coming to them.
I don’t know how to feel about this election as an ameribro.
I’m left-libertarian (upper case left, lower case libertarian) on the political compass, which is practically not represented in US politics, so I’ll take whatever I can get. Biden is, realistically, the best I can hope for this election cycle. He’s not great, there’s a lot of big policy issues I diverge with him on pretty sharply (both on left and libertarian), but the other candidates for the DNC are a hot fucking mess. As for the libertarian party, it’s actually insane. Gary Johnson got booed for saying he’d want people to have driver’s licenses to drive. That’s a no go for me. And as far as the conservatives go, they run the gamut from not an instant disaster (I guess) to the loud, proud, and complete end of the republic.
Biden has at least done some things that I kinda like, and doesn’t seem keen on destroying the republic. I’d love to get a reformer in and sweep Reaganism out on its wrinkled, swampy ass forevermore, but I don’t think that’s realistic at this point. Where I start getting worried is that the Biden campaign seems dead set on repeating some frankly terrible HRC '16 strats, which, well, we saw how well that worked for her, but the pro-Biden response is “Trust me bro, Trump is actually unelectable this time”. I’m also concerned because, let’s face it, Biden’s old enough that he could get struck down with a stroke or what have you at any minute.* Every day, the cosmic dice are getting more and more weighted against him. The democrats have done very little to make a case for a possible candidate/president Harris, where the republicans have laid a LOT of groundwork against her. If Biden bites it or gets incapacitated, Harris is going to have a huge uphill climb in front of her.
I guess where I get uneasy is that it feels like the democrats are making a lot of avoidable and predictable mistakes, and they’re just banking that it won’t blow up in their face this time because, uh, what, that was that time, this is this time? They could do better, but they’re just going to choose not to, and be shocked if shit goes sideways.
*I mean, so could Trump, but I’m not hoping that he wins.
Well, typically other libertarians like to pretend we don’t exist and invoke the magic phrase “you’re not a real libertarian”, whereas left libertarians prefer to pretend that there’s more than one of us. The tl;Dr is that it’s more of anti-authoritarian take than a pro-free-market take that you’d get from right lib.
On the matter of economics, I believe that free markets work and work well where they exist, which is certainly not everywhere they’re imagined to. In other words, I’m not willing to imagine that markets with baked-in coercion (like healthcare) are free. Free markets require choice and, ultimately, the ability to say no without coming to harm. If I can buy a widget from Bob, a widget from Sally, or not buy a widget and suffer no cost or harm, that’s a free market. I also generally don’t believe in rugged individualism; poverty is, itself, a coercive force in economics. This sort of view is partly how I wholeheartedly endorse mass transit and good urbanism as a libertarian, because being functionally coerced into car ownership isn’t economic freedom.
I also believe that the government does have a right to interfere with gross negligence. That is, if you’re drunk driving, if you’re having a bonfire and there’s a high wildfire risk, or you’re doing something that any reasonable person would understand is an imminent danger to the safety of others around you, the government has an absolute right to make you stop. Most right libertarians think that the government should only interfere with direct violence and that everything else can be settled in court; so basically, if you’re a drunk driver, make sure you kill whoever you hit so they can’t sue you. I also think that this applies to companies and organizations, not just people.
Those are, probably, pretty uncontroversial takes, and you might be thinking “so where’s the libertarianism?”. Well, I also think that the government has massively overstepped its bounds, especially in the last forty years or so since Reaganism. Ready? Here we go. The war on drugs and the war on terror has seen the government giving itself ridiculous powers that need to be culled immediately. The NSA mass surveillance program (which was ‘killed’ by the SCOTUS and resurrected by Obama and the Republicans under the cynically-named USA FREEDOM ACT later that same day) should be erased in totality. The government should not be collecting any data from any tech company on anybody without consent, a warrant, or the data being anonymized (if it’s, for example, for research purposes). The patriot act should be repealed yesterday, and gitmo should be closed because holding anyone without trial is wrong, full stop. No-knock raids should not happen, period, and we desperately need police reform. The entire country is a free speech zone, and protests should not be met with brutal crackdowns. I also think that what happens between consenting adults or what a consenting adult does to themselves is nobody else’s business, as long as it’s without coercion. That’s maybe 5% of the rant I could go on, but I don’t want to write a book, and I don’t think you want to read one.
Also:
-What happens between consenting adults is nobody else’s business, least of all the church or the government. I’m pro sex work and pro LGBT rights.
-I’m pro-abortion rights.
-The government needs to leave the native Americans the fuck alone. 2023 and we’re still fucking with them. The government needs to leave everyone alone, but they particularly need to fuck off on native Americans. That said, I think we should still financially support their recovery as a people and culture from what we’ve done to them, but they should get to decide the shape that takes, not us.
-I’m firmly against borders. If it was up to me, I’d Thanos snap that shit. No more borders. I know that’s an extreme position, and I’d be willing to compromise for an EU-style open borders arrangement.
I’m more anti-authority and further left than your average US liberal. You’re not wrong, though. I once melted a Republican colleague’s brain by explaining that libertarian is different than liberal.
That’s a tricky one. The problem is that power is, more often than not, a one way street. Once organizations or people have it, they tend to not want to give it up. It takes a LOT of effort over long periods of time to walk that power back, and particularly when the money’s against it. The US is already practically a fascist (and I mean this in a textbook, unsensational sense) economy what with how tightly the public-private partnerships run, so you’re fighting a three way battle between getting the government, the investors, and the corporate leadership to all agree all at the same time to decrease their power. The corporates and investors have been getting some really sweetheart deals put of this arrangement, and they’re not going to want to walk away from easy money guaranteed by market coercion.
I think the path of least resistance here is going to be widespread local action, at the level of the state or below. It’s not unprecedented, this is more or less how marijuana legalization went mainstream. If we waited for the policy to change at the federal level, well… [Gestures wildly at the house of representatives] maybe your grandkids will live to see some moderate change. But the states and especially local government have a frankly shocking amount of power, and they beat the feds in legal battles a surprising amount of times when their laws come into conflict, though this is largely dependent on the views of the circuit of appeals court that presides over your area. The fifth circuit are a bunch of authoritarian whack jobs that once heard of the constitution but think it sounds like a pinko hippie, for example. But we’ll never get there if we don’t try, and effecting change at the local level is both possible and realistic. For my part, I’m working on creating the first YIMBY group in central California, and I want to work with others to pressure central valley urbans to have better urbanism, cheaper housing, more public transit, and all around be more livable and affordable.
My views align much more closely with Anarcho-Communism than US conservatism. I’m not an Anarcho-Communist because all evidence I’ve seen thus far suggests that truly functional Anarcho-Communism (which has existed historically) is dependent on small enough communities that there are few to no truly anonymous interactions and/or a strong social cage of norms that ends up being morality police with extra steps.
Basically, yes. Speaking as someone who’s voted third party before, there’s no hope of changing the system by voting third party at the federal level. Game theory on first-past-the-post elections and the absolutely insane amount of money in our elections practically ensures it. The best way to effect change there is to go to some form of transferrable vote or ranked choice vote at the state and local level. There are already some states whose electoral college splits its votes in this way, and the two main parties (and their big donors) hate it because it erodes their ability to take a state’s vote for granted and weakens their duopoly.
“Wait, so they just stopped in the middle of killing everyone and went to sleep?”
“Yeah, damnedest thing. The wizard blew up bill, then asked the others if they wanted to rest and they all just started pulling out tents and shit.”
NGL, I play BG3 like D&D, I don’t trust the game (DM) not to fuck me over and tend to death march my characters. “Shut up and drink the health potion, you’re fine. You still have two first level spell slots, you’ve got this. Do you really need that short rest?” Etc.
When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very...
Tbf, long term goals are a good thing. National planning having a lifespan of 4-8 years is fucking insane, and probably contributes non-trivial to federal expenditures and waste. We’d be better off if we could follow long term goals. But you’re right, though, it was performative planning by and large.
I’m noticing an influx of Reddit users today, maybe revolving around their weird bug they had today. I know this question pops up semi regularly, but for those just getting their foot in the door maybe we can help show them what else is out here on the Fediverse to help them get started....
2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision...
Unless you’re in a big big city, mayoral and council races can actually have a lot of diversity in terms of political outlooks. Never forget that a town elected a dog as mayor. Nobody that pure would ever make it to federal office.
I was trying to use a funny example to illustrate the point that a lot more things are possible at the local level than the federal level, particularly in terms of electing a candidate with more diverse political alignment. Anyway, most of the time when an animal wins a mayorship, it’s in an unincorporated area where mayor is more of an honorary title than an actual political position. The point is that local races are still worth voting and participating in.
Idk, man, I found a HAMAS tunnel in my kids’ candy Halloween night. You gotta watch out, those things are everywhere, you never know when you’re going to call an ambulance and actually get a HAMAS tunnel instead, or pick your kids up from school but they’re actually a HAMAS tunnel, or sit down on a park bench and, believe it or not, it’s a HAMAS tunnel. I’m pretty sure that the real reason cops shoot people pel mel here in the US is because you can just never really be sure that somebody isn’t hiding a HAMAS tunnel in their pocket.
I think the average person knows something like sixty or seventy other people, IIRC. Israel flat out killed that many to get one guy; imagine every single person you know getting deleted instantly but the government saying “don’t worry, we got him, so it’s all good.” That’s without talking about the injured, that’s just the people who got immediately killed. Spree shooters have better target discipline than these fucks.
Former democratic party activists are organizing Muslims and Arab-Americans in Swing states to vote against Biden with the demand that he support a ceasefire in Gaza....
Good lord, so the plan is to vote for Trump? The guy who has a pattern of simping for right wing authoritarian fuckheads like Nettanyahu?
Honestly, their efforts would be much better spent trying to get election reform like ranked choice voting up as local election issues in order to break the two party system’s kneecaps.
Fuck em, die mad, they had their chance for the last forty ish years since Reagan and Thatcher. What we got was a world of dizzying inequality, endless grift, isolation, injustice, and exclusively bullshit solutions to real problems.
We had the technology to start. Photovoltaic panels, windmills, etc aren’t new technology; the Carter administration actually installed photovoltaics on the white house and they stayed there until three guesses which president (yep, Reagan) took them down. Florida voted to start building a high speed rail project in their state (which would have decreased interstate and short-haul airline dependency, thereby decreasing oil dependency) and it was going to happen until Mr. State’s Rights himself, Ronald Reagan, blocked any state from launching a high speed rail initiative. More people believed in global warming and climate change in the 90’s than now, but in the 2000’s, the small government W Bush administration forbade government officials from talking about climate change, gutted government research on climate change, and collaborated with big oil lobbyists on pivoting to using softer, more nebulous terms to address global warming (this is actually where the widespread use of ‘climate change’ comes from). We’ve basically kicked the can down the road for forty years and only started taking it kinda seriously in the last ten or fifteen. If we’d been developing and implementing these technologies gradually over the last fifty years, it would have been a lot less painful and we’d have made a lot more progress for a lot more value on the money spent. Since we’re trying to speedrun the last fifty years of implementation and development into the last decade or so, that’s going to be really economically painful and not nearly as smooth as it would have been under the long implementation. But, it’s gotta get done, or we’re going to keep fucking up the same ecology we depend on to stay alive, getting in endless wars, and giving money to jackass countries to feed our voluntary fossil fuel addiction.
As for storage, that’s not an unsolvable problem. Probably the most practical solution is a nuclear fission backbone, imo, but there’s several approaches that are in various stages of development and viability.
Gosh, these guys really are following the big tobacco playbook, huh?
“Oil isn’t evil, it’s just a material, it doesn’t have will or consciousness.”
He’s right of course, the oil itself isn’t forcing anyone to use it. It’s the decades of collaboration between the fossil fuel lobby and the government that’s entrenched our fossil fuel dependent infrastructure, along with the resolute refusal of all fossil fuels companies to turn their backs on making as much money as they possibly can right this instant (because smart long term growth is illegal, brain dead quarterly growth is now my friend) and make good on their promises to pivot their energy portfolios.
In so many words, oil isn’t evil, but the people running the oil companies are.
Carter also embraced nuclear energy, IIRC. Meanwhile, you’ve got California trying desperately to shut down Diablo Canyon but kicking the can down the road every two years because, surprise surprise, energy demand went up and they can’t afford to take DCNP offline. As I recall, DCNP’s reactor core was due for decommissioning twelve years ago, we just keep stringing it along like “c’mon bro, just two more years, I swear I’ll shut you down then. We won’t need your 2,000 gigawatts by then, bro, I promise, c’mon bro, please don’t fuck up on me, just hold on for two more years”. It’s stupid. We could’ve replaced the goddamn reactor by now, but we gotta play stupid games and win stupid prizes.
OTOH, demand for something generally increases the amount of funding available for developing the technology associated with that thing. Yes, we’re more advanced now than we were in the 70s, but we probably lost a solid twenty-thirty years of demand-driven gradual progress due to regressive administrations prioritizing and subsidizing fossil dependency.
Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Friday sued to stop a state board from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school after the board ignored Drummond’s warning that it would violate both the state and U.S. constitutions....
Bro, please, trust me bro, we just need a little more carbon and it’ll start getting more green. C’mon, bro, just burn a few more gallons of gas, and I swear we’ll green the Sahara, bro. Listen, bro, we’ve never had such dangerously low carbon levels, bro, c’mon you’re actually helping the environment with my profits, please, bro.
I once heard a woman say that dating apps basically turned dating into shopping. To be clear, she was criticizing the effect that the apps have had on dating and society. It takes something that should be deeply personal and basically commercializes it to an experience no deeper than choosing your next purse, and if that purse has issues with being treated like stuff, well, guess I don’t need that purse. Ofc, I’m a dude, and was lucky enough to avoid all this bullshit, so I can’t speak from personal experience.
Ex leader of Germany confirms revelations by ex Israeli PM & Ukrainian media: "At the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022 with Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans. I had two talks with Umerov, then a...
Ameribro here. According to Wikipedia, BILD is a German right-wing tabloid. So, this is a little like somebody citing Breitbart, maybe? And then there’s other points here that seem like they may have been deliberately taken out of context.
The Ukrainians don’t want war with Russia. Only insane people or people who don’t know war want war. Zelensky (and many Ukrainians) didn’t believe Russia was actually going to do it, and the Biden administration was desperately trying to convince him that all of our intel said it was happening right up until it actually happened.
But Russia didn’t just um… What do they say? De-nazify? Donetsk and Luhansk. They tried to push all the way to Kiev, they tried to take the whole damn country. It’s not like Ukraine invaded Russia, it’s the other way around. Is it possible that the Ukrainian state is being coerced? Could be, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. All of the Ukrainians I’ve met from well before this conflict started seemed pretty adamant about having a distinct cultural and national identity from Russia. I find it hard to imagine that they’d be happy about joining the new Russian imperial project any more than Iraq was (our Mexico would be) about joining the US imperial project.
So they drove the 40 km armor column to just outside of Kiev on a, what, sight seeing tour? I expect the plan was to try and make the Zelensky govt shit their breeches and run so that they could install a friendly government and put a bow on the operation.
Average retail net margins (profit margin as share of revenue) are about 3% on a good year. Pfizer’s was something like 30% last year. They cleared 100 billion in revenue, meaning 30 billion in straight profit (the 11 billion came out of the other 60-odd percent, because it’s not an even 30). In one year, they made almost enough money to buy Twitter. They made enough profit to cover Kansas and Oklahoma’s entire 2022 FY budgets. I’m trying to drive home the absolute ridiculous enormity of those profits, because it’s not easy to really grasp. The point is, it’s not like they don’t have a lot of room to breathe.
Some other things to consider:
-Of that 11 billion, how much is government funding and grants? IIRC, Uncle Sam pays for the development of a whole lot of what ends up being private products in healthcare.
-Of their 60-odd billion in costs, how much was advertising? Look, I know you gotta sell to make money, but advertising to patients is annoying, expensive, and (in terms of medical ethics) icky. It’s not like they can’t save some money there to do R&D.
The point is: Pfizer could easily cut their prices on life-saving medicine and still have tidy profits.
It's been a stressful week in Engineering (startrek.website)
'These LGBT Freaks – Do We Have Them Castrated?': Inside Europe’s Invite-Only Conversion Therapy Conference (bylinetimes.com)
The event was organised by the International Foundation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice – a London-based company that says it is a 'home for the once-gay'
California in a nutshell (lemmy.today)
TC on open source evangelists (lemmy.ml)
[email protected] - Oh my gosh I just figured it out....
America: Getting ready for another election. Rest of the world: (lemmy.ca)
A downside of being a party of narcoleptic adventurers. (startrek.website)
EU court rules people can resell digital games (www.gamingbible.com)
Finally some good news! I’ve been waiting for quite a while for such a ruling....
The AC-130 also had it's transponder on the entire time lmfao. (sh.itjust.works)
U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050 (www.huffpost.com)
When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very...
What Lemmy communities would you like to share that we may not know about?
I’m noticing an influx of Reddit users today, maybe revolving around their weird bug they had today. I know this question pops up semi regularly, but for those just getting their foot in the door maybe we can help show them what else is out here on the Fediverse to help them get started....
Americans of Lemmy, what is your approach to next year's election?
2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision...
Wonder Woman Game to be Live Service Hints Job Ads as WB Vows to Double Down on GaaS (wccftech.com)
Turns out it was just a hospital... (www.aljazeera.com)
Not that anyone in the West cares
Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren't working (www.businessinsider.com)
US crude output reaches monthly record in August at 13.05 million bpd -EIA (www.reuters.com)
CNN Host Left Stunned As IDF Confirms Israel Hit Refugee Camp With Airstrike (newrepublic.com)
NewRepublic.com
reading is hard (social.photo)
Headlines have never made me watch ads or accept cookies
“I Am Done Voting for the Lesser of Two Evils. I Will Not Vote for Joe Biden in 2024.” (inthesetimes.com)
Former democratic party activists are organizing Muslims and Arab-Americans in Swing states to vote against Biden with the demand that he support a ceasefire in Gaza....
Country Rule (sh.itjust.works)
BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over fear of ‘rightwing backlash’ (www.theguardian.com)
Chevron boss says the $300 billion oil giant has changed life on Earth for the better: ‘We’re not selling a product that is evil’ (finance.yahoo.com)
Says exec of company that has objectively caused more environmental harm to the world than any others
Oklahoma attorney general sues to stop US's first public religious school (apnews.com)
Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Friday sued to stop a state board from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school after the board ignored Drummond’s warning that it would violate both the state and U.S. constitutions....
Earth Stopped Getting Greener 20 Years Ago (www.scientificamerican.com)
Love Burnout (lemmy.world)
Ex-chancellor of Germany confirms that the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans. (www.berliner-zeitung.de)
Ex leader of Germany confirms revelations by ex Israeli PM & Ukrainian media: "At the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022 with Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans. I had two talks with Umerov, then a...
Pfizer says it will price Covid treatment Paxlovid at nearly $1,400 for a five-day course, which researchers estimate only costs Pfizer $13 to produce. That's a 10,000%+ markup. Shameful. (mastodon.world)