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stickly

@ stickly @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
287
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Accelerationism

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  • For the same reason they're happy to burn the only habitable planet humans will ever have: they're going to play with fire in search of optimal profit, even to their own eventual detriment.

    People act like raw, naked, decayed capitalism is a totally stable system where all actors work perfectly together to rationally suppress the proletariat in perpetuity. But it's not that. Capital has accumulated to the point of a handful of individuals butting heads over all of the earth's resources.

    There's no longer a cabal of dozens of cartels coordinating in abstract lock step. There's like 10 dudes that can meet in a room. Applying dialect-materialism to that is using Newtonian physics on a quantum scale.

    Petty grudges and irrational emotions take control at that scale. A few of them get the idea that they can eat the others by leveraging the proletariat and all bets are off.

    Will it certainly happen? Not necessarily. But more individuals have deposed through creative leveraging of legal mechanisms than those spontaneously pulled from their beds and shot. There's no reason to not be prepared if the opportunity presents itself.

  • Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s governing body

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  • IIRC the supreme court recently decided that federal employees had no protections because firing people for partisan reasons is ok even if their performance is fine

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • It's crazy to me that there isn't some kind of scientific review process when they write these things up. Formal logic has been worked out for centuries and you can just look at the math to confirm what they're saying makes any sense at all.

    It wouldn't solve all problems but some of these recent rulings are so divorced from reality that they've left logic in the dust.

  • Borders

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  • "Unnatural" in their argument just means "adapting my idealized personal philosophy to accept this is too hard"

  • Borders

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  • Now imagine that 8.3 billion people are trying to pitch their tents all around you. You're going to have to work out something formal with your neighbors to make sure all these tent groups fit.

  • Borders

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  • If we were hunter gatherers I might believe you. People are just as rooted as trees. Almost nothing that sustains our civilization is mobile. Crops, forests, water supplies, minerals, etc...

    If a freak famine (wind) causes a mass migration (swaying branches) onto your finite and fixed resources (canopy space), someone must lose fingers.

  • Borders

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  • Only a half truth. Borders may have been loosely defined but they were absolutely defended with violence. You couldn't wander in and hunt in your neighbors woods, take their timber or set up a farm too close. Hell, sometimes they even had well defined natural borders or walls (see: Hadrian's wall, the great wall of China)

    Moving through an area in large numbers might draw a violent response and you might be coerced to leave if you spoke the wrong language or dressed the wrong way. If you were an unknown group of strangers they may well let your boat sink or leave you to starve outside their walls. Modern states have simply codified these reactions into law.

    Proto-states and the associated mechanisms developed extremely quickly once sedentary agriculture became dominant. If your entire livelihood is tied to a field of grain you no longer get to run or hide from conflict; controlling who can and can't get near it becomes imperative.

  • Discomfort with modern technology shapes Gen Z's desire to live in the past

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  • Cheap mass storage and a home network connection with upload speeds that make hosting media streaming and 'cloud' storage out of your closet an affordable possibility.

    My closet could already hold DVDs and I could have bought a slightly pricey flash drive to carry around a good chunk of media without getting networking involved. Now I can get the data from those DVDs without leaving my couch or carry around more than I have time to consume. Do I truly benefit much more?

    Access to large, quality, high resolution displays that don't cost multiple thousands of dollars.

    Larger and higher quality to show higher resolutions of the same basic media tech from 20 years ago. It's certainly novel to see a movie at home in HD/4k, but it didn't fundamentally change the experience of watching a movie in 720p.

    High performance portable computers that draw significantly less power.

    Power draw wouldn't be as much of an issue if we didn't require digital access 24/7. A blackberry w/ voice mail and an iPod drew significantly less power and gave me all access to portable messaging and non-video media.

    In exchange for gaining that video media, everyone assumes I will download their app or pull up their QR code menu.

    Mobile data networks with orders of magnitude more data bandwidth.

    Which still can't match the sneaker-net bandwidth of me carrying some flash drives or DvDs. Only necessary because the raw size of data has exploded. Though I supposed I gained the ability to scroll memes on the bus.

    The ability to own and control all of the technology that you depend on without needing to rent services from a corporation.

    We had nearly as much control 20 years ago. Linux was just as available if you didn't want a mainstream OS.

    Technology is so much better, more private, safer and more affordable now

    Don't worry, I'm sure legislation will catch up. Our dependence on convenience tech has allowed Apple/Microsoft/Google et.al. to purchase control of their own regulation. Your OS requires age verification today (because of this ocean of data kids can access from their pocket) and tomorrow all hardware sold will require a DRM heartbeat.

    Looking back on it all, the cheap tech has basically unlocked consumer video media. It wasn't feasible to create and store significant digital video for anyone in the 00s, but now people can make professional quality movies with iPhone. Was that worth the externalized costs?

  • Discomfort with modern technology shapes Gen Z's desire to live in the past

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  • Modern technology is great. It's massively cheaper and more performant for orders of magnitude less money.

    Performant and cheaper are not inherently good things. LEDs perform a shit ton better than incandescent bulbs and are cheap as hell. But we fundamentally didn't need more cheap light for 95% of consumer use cases. Now light pollution is climbing exponentially, 10% per year.

    Consumer compute was atrocious to start, but reached a useful level where it unlocked a ton of value for people. Graphics at a legible fidelity, replacing paper documents, data over networks, responsive input, portable-ish laptops, etc...

    Now we've got more compute than we'd ever reasonably need as a species. Landfills full of IoT waste, datacenters filling up with cheap bytes where only 1/10 will ever be read, drones dropping bombs and gearing up to monitor our every move, trillions of Kw/hr spent driving it all every year...

    And what novel value has been unlocked by this glut of compute that we didn't have before? On-demand AI meme videos?

    Sure I can spend a few hundred bucks on a personal LED lightshow that would have cost tens of thousands a few decades ago. And sure I can spin up a home lab with more functionality and power than was even available 20 years ago. But what have I actually gained?

  • xkcd #3237: Husband and Wife

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  • Always sounded weird and corporate to me. Easiest to just ask what your SO would prefer to be called and not worry about what people might think when you say it

  • Until it affects me

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  • I try not to get bent out of shape about it but formal safe spaces never made sense to me conceptually. Yes, everyone should have a space to feel safe and accepted but we're doing piss poor as a society when your arbitrary membership in a marginalized group is the best shot to find that.

    They're a weak imitation of proper tight knit communities and 3rd spaces. They just happen to have some benefit because the membership self selects for similar life views. There's nothing there that people weren't getting at, say, a Victorian tea party, a laundry group or an AME church.

    Neither side of the debate in this comment section is wrong but they're talking about two sides of the same coin. Marginalized groups feel modern isolation much more acutely because they had fewer spaces to begin with. Cishet guys feel the isolation as well but can't voice it in these discussions because "they're accepted everywhere" and "power dynamics make it different".

    Those statements may be somewhat true but that offers no solution to the problem, not in the way that a safe space offers a simple constructive answer. It's unfortunate because manosphere and fascist spaces capitalize on those vulnerable men with the same messaging and terminology.

    These conversations shouldn't be about defending one group's right to create these spaces while delicately limiting that right for another group. They should be about why we fundamentally feel the need for these formal spaces at all...

    ...

    it's always material conditions and resource distribution

  • TIL mosquitos can bleed animals to death if there are enough of them.

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  • Very interesting read, aside from the blood curdling close up of those patches of engorged ticks. Also...

    At that stage, the bloodsucking arachnids are the size of a pencil tip.

    That has to be one of the least precise measurements I've seen. Might as well say "as deep as a cup of water" or "as bright as a light"

  • i made this

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  • Facebook and Instagram Tighten Censorship Rules for Saying “Antifa”

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  • No no officer I didn't say antifa. I said I was a fashopp (Fascism Opponent)

  • US edges closer to popular vote deciding winner of presidential elections

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  • Unless they strongly protect the compact (such as putting it in the state constitution) they can just as easily repeal it. And honestly it would be downright negligent to not add an escape hatch.

    Someone from an offending state can sue their state for ignoring a law they passed.

    I'd also expect a bunch of lawsuits the first time a candidate wins a state but the compact flips the result.

  • US edges closer to popular vote deciding winner of presidential elections

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  • What about recent American politics gives you the impression that states will act in good faith? Hell, look back even farther at the slave state collusion for Mexican territory, secession, Reconstruction fuckery, Jim crow, etc...

    The only limit to states acting in bad faith has historically been the federal government. When states start fucking around too much, laws like the Voting Rights Act get drawn up to claw more power away from them.

    IMO the state-federation experiment has all but failed and the majority of good faith states need a proper convention to build a modern government. Choosing now of all times to put your faith in those anti-democratic, Christo-fascist slave states is the dumbest option possible.

  • US edges closer to popular vote deciding winner of presidential elections

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  • So, as in my original comment, you would expect the blue states to graciously allow Texas + Florida + a few other deep red states to unilaterally declare the winner by leveraging the compact's EC votes? When push comes to shove this compact will either be kingmakers or fall apart.

  • US edges closer to popular vote deciding winner of presidential elections

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  • It can't enable anything without federal oversight via a constitutional amendment. Voting is within the purview of each individual state, so the states in this compact have no oversight on their peers (let alone the powers to demand a recount or rerun the election).

    For example, let's say 20 states make up exactly 270 EC votes. The popular vote within those states (if allocated proportional to votes) ends up as 136/270 to candidate X. The other 30 states report universal support for candidate Y.

    By rights, Y should win with 402 EC votes and 74% of the popular vote. But if the compact chooses to ignore those states as fraudulent then candidate X wins with a mere 26%.

    Similar fuckery can happen with late reporting of votes or a state in the compact reneging on the agreement and voting against the rest. There's absolutely nothing binding about this, it's just a pinky promise among these states.

  • US edges closer to popular vote deciding winner of presidential elections

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  • Not necessarily good or bad. There's nothing binding here, just based on good faith reporting. Best case scenario would be all blue states and a few less-red swing states signing on, effectively disenfranchising red states.

    Of course I'd bet any amount of money that SCOTUS would rule that a plan like this can't leave out any state's reported result. From there it's a simple step to say "Texas and Florida are reporting 99% votes for Trump", allowing their large populations to rig the results.