I love this take. It reminds me of like that picture of a guy in a hoodie and sunglasses from the early 20th century, or when an older show or movie has a line that seems to refer to the name of something that hadn’t been invented at the time, but it’s actually referring to something else.

Or like when they fix time travel paradox in a story by faking an ‘inescapable’ event.

It’s perfect.

I spent like half my time on Lemmy today just blocking bot accounts, bot communities, and chuds. The all feed looks about as bad as Reddit did now.

That didn’t take long.

I don’t know, a lot of people are pretty shit to their cats and the cats don’t seem to have much say over the situation.

If you’re like a happy cat with a nice place to live and freedom to explore or hang out at home according to your whims, that’s probably a pretty okay life for the most part. But if you’re an ‘indoor’ cat spending your entire life locked in a small space that may be cramped, dirty, or scary, that’s a pretty different thing.

The contradiction of pet ownership is kinda fucked. Like, how are you going to try to keep a cat who desperately wants to escape trapped inside and pretend it’s your buddy rather than your prisoner?

Same with people who have dogs that they just leave penned up or tied to a post all the time. How can anyone think that’s any kind of life?

Humans are monsters.

Out here desperately hoping that the fake leftists propping up Trump are mostly Russian trolls or just a pocket of internet children. I think actual real life people on the left in the US largely get how dangerous this could be.

We spent the five years training the model. Manually. With Captcha data.

Now we’re teaching it not to run traffic signals, hit motorcycles or busses, or try to drive up stairs.

Look, just one more. And then another after that. And like two more because I had a ringer and I want to keep it going.

Right, but this is fundamentally at odds with the ‘Linux for everyone’, ‘Linux for gaming’, and ‘Linux can replace Windows for most use cases’ rhetoric.

If you enjoy Linux for its own sake and you like fiddling around with it and learning its ins and outs, it’s fantastic. But if you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can get back to what your were doing, it leaves some room for improvement.

We can’t have both, and that’s fine. There’s also an argument to be made for people getting used to dealing with a command line because it’s something of a prerequisite for getting away from increasingly shady corporate overreach. But that doesn’t help me when the solution to getting my extra mouse buttons and precision mode is to create a well documented bug report for Solaar and then wait. I just want my push to talk to work, you know?

That gap is definitely shrinking as time goes on, but it’s still an obstacle and it’ll always be part of the conversation around GNU until it’s no longer a concern for one reason or another.

Why do so many Europeans seem to think the whole country is Texas?

Literally money. More specifically, the financial need under a capitalist system for businesses to constantly grow and increase profits, and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product. Most businesses on any sort of large scale today aren’t in it to do a good job at making whatever it is they make, they’re in it to make money. Their actual ‘business’ is just an incidental stop on the way to making more money.

You see this literally everywhere. Remember Odwalla? They made these great, super-thick bottled smoothy-like juices. Easily the healthiest thing you could find to drink in most of the places they were sold. Then Coca-Cola bought them out, changed the name to Naked Juice, and watered them all down. What we have now, as a result, is a pale imitation of what we once had.

Why? Because Odwalla was profitable, so it was profitable for Coca-cola to buy up a competitor for shelf space. But once they were bought up, there’s no incentive to deliver the same quality of product. They have no remaining competition, so they can release a shittier version and we’ll basically just suck it up because it’s still healthier than soda.

Our reward for worshiping currency is for everything ever made out of love of a craft or an art to be exploited and turned into a shittier version of itself.

The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.

Apparently it’s pretty easy to make up conspiracies about bricks regardless of which end of the political spectrum you’re on.

Sounds about right.

Lenin loses me with his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Personally, I think that demonstrating such lack of faith in humanity and in the power of workers to take things into their own hands is fundamentally at odds with the sort of organically arising communist-style models Marx and Engels are talking about.

It’s perfectly possible to create a law enforcement arm of government that’s actually concerned with protecting vulnerable citizens, but that’s not what the institution of policing actually focuses on.

To suggest that we can’t have law enforcement without propping up a toxic system of professional predators is exactly the presumption they want you to make in order to preserve their jobs. We don’t need to capitulate to a lawless fraternity to enforce our laws, we can replace it with something that isn’t built on principles of oppression.

That said, their main job at the moment is to protect hoarders of wealth from the social consequences of wealth hoarding. Personally, I don’t see that as necessary.

Apparently the group heads on the Smeg machines are particularly sturdy, and tend to get fewer gasket leaks as they wear. Which is good, because the last thing you need while you’re trying to have your morning espresso is some bleeding Smeg head getting in your way.

I’ll see myself out the airlock.

I’m all for unionization, but sometimes bad actors need to be starved out. The whole time you’re working to unionize a workforce, you’re still working at that company under their terms, making them profit.

If you work at Starbucks, the company is banking on your labor. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the process of unionizing, they’re making money. If you do successfully unionize, there’s a good chance they’ll kill your store, like the recent one in Boston.

In the mean time, the sale of your labor still affects labor’s market price. When you keep working for them under the standard conditions for the standard wages and perks while they squeeze as much labor as possible out of you, the act of selling them labor at that price impacts the market. It tells Starbucks that their current model works, and it signals to other business owners that they can follow suit.

All those little bullshit greedy business practices trickle down from scumbag to scumbag and if there’s someone to swallow it, they’ll keep it up.

What will stop it isn’t unionizing one store. It’s changing your standards of what you’ll put up with.

The demand for remote work after COVID terrifies employers because it’s a demand their workforces made spontaneously without any organization, and that those who failed to meet have paid dearly for.

Change your standards. Change the deals you’re willing to make and encourage others to do the same. Complacency will give you a bad deal whether you have a contact or not.

What’s it going to take to actually do something about these ultra-rich leeches literally destroying our planet and everything good on it to inflate a number in a bank somewhere? How do we actually build up the initiative to stop it?

All our other problems seem largely centered around our inability to appropriately respond to extreme greed. Not only in actually actively stopping it, but in even identifying it or being able to properly censure it in the first place. The moment you start talking about the rich being the cause of our problems, there’s a section of society that starts tuning you out. I definitely feel like as things get worse people are starting to catch on, but even once we’re there, where do we go?

If we actually get to the point of agreeing that excessive wealth is inherently misanthropic and should be a crime in and of itself, how do we make it a crime while so much power sits in the hands of those who’d be on the losing end of that decision?

I hope the WGA and SAG can spark a change in people’s consciousness around labor. I’d honestly love to see a lot more interviews and independent podcasts coming from the picket lines. If there’s anyone who can convince Americans to fight for the value of their labor, it’s the people write and play the parts in the stories they love.

So as a taxi driver with asthma and horrific allergies, I’ve found dog owners are not typically terribly understanding when I tell them we’re going to have another cab come pick them up. I’ve had several people insist that their animal is a service dog as if this somehow changes my own health condition.

I’ve often found that my own access to public spaces is limited by the use of service animals and straight up pets in public places. I don’t even try to go to breweries anymore. I wouldn’t bother trying to get on a plane. Even hotels are basically a no go for me unless i want to get sick more often than not.

I don’t pretend to have a solution to this, but access to public spaces for animals and for some allergy sufferers is mutually exclusive. It makes it a lot more complicated than ‘service animals should be everywhere’ or ‘allergy sufferers should have access to public spaces’. The two are kind of in conflict. It sucks.

Nobody pays any mind to air quality and it’s made my life a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Anyway, i feel for her, but i think the service animal stuff is way over simplified and people forget that other people with disabilities also pay a cost.