zaphod

zaphod, 6 months ago

Cool, so pick an instance that plans to defederate with them and you’re golden.

Personally, I think all the anti-Threads stuff is paranoid rhetoric and I’d rather see how it pans out. My instance admin agrees so we’ll see how it goes.

Point is you can choose because that’s the entire point of the fediverse. And it’s why I don’t understand why folks are expending so much energy writing paranoid pieces on this topic when they could just defederate and move on.

zaphod, 6 months ago

No, that’s literally how this works.

If you don’t like an ActivityPub participant you block it. It’s in the architecture.

And given the current fediverse is already a tiny fraction of total social media activity, if a bunch of anti-Threads instances hive off to form their own fediverse subgroup, it’ll basically be a no-op from their perspective. They’ll just keep talking to each other off in a little corner by themselves just like they’re doing today. That’s kinda the whole damn point of a federated architecture.

zaphod, 6 months ago

Honestly the franchise is all over the place on this topic. Go back and watch S02E08 of ST:TNG, Unnatural Selection. No one getting arrested for genetic engineering there. My head canon is that by the time TNG is going genetic engineering has gone from truly taboo to just discouraged/not well accepted.

zaphod, 6 months ago

Doesn’t help that an entire political party and their associated generation is allergic to paying for the infrastructure needed to care for their elderly asses. Elder care is first and foremost a funding problem, but no one wants to actually pay for it, elders included… until, that is, they suddenly realize that, fuck, no one else will pay for their mobility aids and home care.

zaphod, 6 months ago

So we’re just going to ignore that debt dropped and savings rose substantially during COVID thanks to stimulus payments and this might just be a rebound?

Hell, they even bury this pretty damn important detail at the end of the piece:

Overall, missed mortgage payments are still lower than they were pre-pandemic

Also a) inflation has come back down and b) the economy is broadly healthy (minus the obvious and looming problems in housing and mortgages).

But just keep telling those doom and gloom stories, media. You’ll be right eventually. Broken clocks and all that. #permabears

zaphod, 6 months ago

I honestly don’t know.

But the point is missed payments are lower now than 3+ years ago. That they’re increasing again is an interesting data point but it’s a bit much to be setting off alarm bells. For all we know this is just part of the generalized ongoing reversion to the pre-pandemic mean.

zaphod, 6 months ago

Stuffy and a thinly veiled metaphor for racists who object to mixed race relationships…

zaphod, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I just can’t afford it.

I’m poor and I listen to a lot of things. Buying all that isn’t possible for me.

So basically: you can’t afford the volume of product you want to consume at a price that’s sustainable for artists, but want the product anyway and you see that as some unsolvable dilemma? Have I got that right?

Look, it sucks that you’re in that financial situation. Not here to downplay that struggle. I’ve lived like that and it fuckin sucks.

But maybe the answer is to value the effort of musicians and either pay them for their work or consume less?

zaphod, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

So then why post about it?

This isn’t a utilitarian argument. It’s a moral one.

They want to believe there’s some moral dilemma here and they’re, by gosh, trying their best to navigate it.

But the reality is: they want music, but they can’t afford to pay artists in a way that’s sustainable, so they’re just taking it however they can get it and paying a pittance to make themselves feel a bit better.

So quit pretending. They’ve made their choice. Their priorities are clear.

zaphod, 6 months ago

By your definition of harm, no artist creating non-material goods (books, movies, music, etc) could ever experience harm due to any one individual’s actions. “I was never going to pay, so taking it without paying is a victim less crime,” etc, etc.

The problem is this is clearly harmful in aggregate.

There are countless actions that, on an individual level are relatively harmless that we deem immoral because they’d be harmful if everyone did them: e.g. polluting.

But setting aside issues of harm–which is absolutely utilitarian–there are also many actions for which no objective “harm” can be identified but which we still deem inherently immoral. For example, if someone cheats on their spouse, and the spouse never finds out, most people I know would say that action is immoral irrespective of the lack of direct harm.

As for your last question, tbh I have no idea.

zaphod, 6 months ago

The article was published today so: no?

zaphod, 6 months ago

Yup you’re right. Meanwhile Newsweek (as reliable as they are…) reported on it but their dates are even less coherent.

zaphod, 6 months ago

Yeah, but… think about it for a second: we’re now in a world where a Linux-based OS is, in certain contexts, better for playing games built for Windows than Windows.

As a person who’s been running Linux on his devices for almost 30 years now, that’s incredible and I absolutely understand why folks would’ve initially been skeptical.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Or pass new legislation. The government tried to use existing environment legislation to ban single use plastics by listing them among other toxic substances. That that didn’t pass judicial review isn’t actually that surprising (depending on how the original law was drafted).

The alternative is just to amend that law to add additional powers to ban bioaccumulating and/or biomagnifying substances, of which microplastics are just one example.

It’s just more work, obviously, than using an existing legislative tool.

zaphod, 7 months ago

100% agreed. Minority governments ensure far more Canadians are represented since the aggregate population represented by a minority coalition will almost always be larger than that represented by a single majority party.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Of those who say they receive more than they pay, support for the carbon price reaches 79 per cent. Among those who believe they spend more than they get back, the results are flipped: 82 per cent oppose the tax.

Got it. So people who don’t understand the policy don’t support it, and people who do support it do. That tracks.

Fix the messaging and the problem is solved. This isn’t rocket surgery, but for some reason both the NDP and Liberals are piss poor at messaging (to wit: the Alberta UCP going on an advertising spree about their assinine Alberta pension plan idea while the silence from the opposition has been deafening).

zaphod, 7 months ago

Both Saskatoon and Regina are around 250k people and have reasonable CoL.

Also worth looking at Edmonton, which, with the surrounding areas, is well north of 1M with a sizable Ukrainian population, while being comparable to Saskatoon in affordability.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Update went smooth here, both Deck and Dock. Sorry to hear you’re having so much trouble.

zaphod, 7 months ago

I know this is the internet, but you don’t actually have to share every snarky little thought that comes to mind.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Those are adorable! I am very curious about that stitch pattern. At first glance I thought it was crochet!

zaphod, 7 months ago

Honestly, the multiple profile feature seems like a total afterthought to Google. Even before 14, I experienced endless bugs running a second (work) profile, including the inability to receive incoming phone calls and text messages, odd crashes and freezes, and the launcher hanging fairly regularly.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Damn, those look great! Fantastic job! Socks are hands down one of my favourite projects: quick, practical, lots of room for creativity, and you can never have too many. Welcome to the sock knitting club!

zaphod, 7 months ago

Oh let’s not forget the “Vulcan Neuropressure” scenes, oh and also the entire “T’pol Pon Farr == sex maniac” episode…

zaphod, 7 months ago

It’s open and shut. On the one hand, we have a birth certificate. On the other, we have Sainte-Marie’s vague recollections and shifting narrative.

It fucking sucks. But it’s pretty clear the reporting is accurate.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Chop, freeze, eat! Frozen mango is amazing.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Yup. I put the thing on or in my shoes.

zaphod, 7 months ago

Oh my…

zaphod, 8 months ago

Neti pot/nasal rinse bottle, twice a day on the recommendation of my asthma specialist.

zaphod, 8 months ago

I manage my library on my laptop with Calibre, then replicate that to a server with Syncthing and serve it up via OPDS with COPS:

github.com/seblucas/cops

I like this because COPS is simple and easy to set up. It does just what I need and nothing else.

I read on a old jailbroken Kindle Paperwhite running KOReader.

zaphod, 8 months ago

Well yeah. The cost of damage resulting from rising sea levels are one of the negative externalities that result from burning fossil fuels. Insurance premiums are effectively passing that cost on to future flood victims.

That means the right market-based solution, which both parties claim to love, is to apply an appropriately sized carbon tax, thereby internalizing those costs in the price of fuel, and using the funds to pay for flood mitigation and future damage, but that looks too much like socialism…

zaphod, 8 months ago

Anthropic principle

zaphod, 8 months ago

Beat me to it. It’s astounding that the BDC doesn’t note the most obvious reason folks won’t start a business: if you’re already in a financially precarious position–as are many particulaly among younger cohorts–then starting a business looks like madness.

zaphod, 8 months ago

If you can find an old Kindle Paperwhite that can be jailbroken, you can run KOReader on it and leave the Amazon ecosystem behind while still using the hardware.

zaphod, 8 months ago

Translation: Israel is definitely gonna open a second front with Hezbollah…

zaphod, 8 months ago

You mean the economic uncertainty that’s led to another quarter of huge wage gains and job growth? That uncertainty?

reuters.com/…/canada-job-gains-triples-expectatio…

Canada’s economy more than tripled expectations by adding 63,800 jobs in September and wages continued to soar, data showed on Friday, upping the chances for another rate hike.

The jobless rate stayed at 5.5% for a third consecutive month, Statistics Canada said. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast a net gain of 20,000 jobs and for the unemployment rate to edge up to 5.6% from 5.5% in August.

Please. This is yet another corporation using economic fear mongering to justify cutting jobs to goose their quarterly earnings. Nothing to see here.

But, I’m sure that recession is right around the corner!

zaphod, 8 months ago

Now that is a damn fine use of hue shifting. Perfection, Lydia_K.

zaphod, 8 months ago

Seconded. Precisely how I organize things. I use MusicBrainz Picard to clean up metadata before adding music to my collection.

zaphod, 8 months ago

Well, I can say Picard has been pretty well flawless for me. And in those few instances where it misidentifies something, you can always do a manual search and match.

Nine times out of ten my process is to load the tracks into Picard, cluster them, look them up, do a quick scan to confirm it looks good, and then save the updated metadata. For those few times it messes up, I just reload the files, cluster them, then do a manual search to find the appropriate release. It really is very good at its job.

zaphod, 8 months ago

It’s called a distraction. Give voters something meaningless to be mad about and they won’t notice the things they should be getting mad about. Smith is doing the same thing in Alberta with this whole APP thing. It’s 100% a distraction so voters don’t notice the crumbling healthcare, overpriced heating and electricity, etc.

zaphod, 8 months ago

I couldn’t agree more, but it’s very clear that right-wing parties in both the US and Canada have decided to turn trans rights into a wedge issue they can use to divide and distract voters, just as they’ve always done with marginalized groups in the past. It’s a playbook as old as time (just ask the gay community, or the black community, or the Jewish community, or…), and it’s always been incredibly disgusting and very successful: pick a group that’s too small to be an actual danger and pump them up into a threat that only the right wingers can save us all from. And if you’re thinking “huh, didn’t I hear somewhere that that’s what fascists do?”… well… yeah, exactly.

zaphod, 8 months ago

Beat me to it. Here’s the quote in context:

I think we’re on the right path in terms of ensuring we’ve got a work environment and culture that allows people to be productive, to have balance in their lives, and to grow within the company. Everyone has the right to form a union, and certainly in the future, wherever it takes us, we’ll respect that. But we’re very much focused right now on how to create the best work culture and environment we possibly can.

We’re always listening to our workers and we want to make sure we have both formal and informal ways of getting worker feedback and understanding the needs of our employees and where we can improve. And we always act on that feedback. And, as I said earlier, there is always a right to form unions and we respect that.

Well, yeah, congrats, he basically just stated the law: yes, everyone (in the US and many other countries) has the right to form unions. To “respect that” is to acknowledge that right.

I know the bar is damn low for good corporate behaviour, but man, it’s apparently way lower than I realized…

zaphod, 8 months ago

Oh please they don’t “fall apart”. I’m not gonna claim the second two trilogies are as amazing as the first, but the entire series is damn good.

zaphod, 8 months ago

Rarely have I struggled more with art vs artist. On the one hand, The IT Crowd is hilarious (if a bit… problematic at times). On the other hand, Linehan is a truly horrible human being…

zaphod, 8 months ago

Good to see at least someone around here has some fucking clue regarding the purpose of this law…

1. Just “feeling mentally unwell”, as another commenter put it, is not enough to qualify. The law specifically requires the applicant “experience unbearable physical or mental suffering from your illness, disease, disability or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable” and "be in an advanced state of decline that cannot be reversed"
2. If someone makes a “request for medical assistance in dying, 2 independent medical practitioners (physicians or nurse practitioners) must assess it.”

From: www.canada.ca/en/…/medical-assistance-dying.html

And that’s just a couple of the high bars one must clear to qualify.

But, I can say this about Lemmy: given the quality of the discussion on this post, this place really has turned into an excellent replacement for Reddit!

zaphod, 8 months ago

Getting from there to here…

zaphod, 8 months ago

Brussel sprouts are delicious. Modern versions have had their bitterness bred out. Roasted until crispy with olive oil and garlic and salt and they’re fantastic.

Problem is the fools that boil or steam them. That way lies little green brains.

zaphod, 8 months ago

Ah, I see you skipped the “tyranny of the majority” section during social studies…

zaphod, 8 months ago

Some people don’t. That’s why air sickness bags exist.