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NateNate60

@NateNate60@lemmy.world

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NateNate60 , (edited )

My home state of Oregon mandates a minimum wage of $13.20 in rural areas and $15.45 in the Portland metro area, and it adjusts to inflation. Oregon has been governed by Democrats for years. Thanks to these and other laws, I can go down to a McDonald's and get a job that pays $16-17 an hour to start in my city. TriMet in Portland is always advertising a $28 starting wage for bus drivers (no CDL) up to $37 after three years. Rent in my city is $800-900 for a one-bedroom flat with excellent free public transit and fair bikeability. Fuel prices are reasonable. We have strong protections for tenants against abusive landlords. Strong anti-discrimination laws. Everyone has paid sick days. No regressive sales tax. Working-class people can afford a roof over their heads and decent food on the table.

Check out the neighbouring state minimum wages.

  • Washington (Democratic government): $16.28
  • California (Democratic government): $16.00
  • Nevada (divided government): $12.00
  • Idaho (Republican government): $7.25

But yeah, keep harping on about how both parties are the same and that Democrats don't do more to help the working man.

NateNate60 ,

Arguments against electoral democracy by so-called socialists always boil down to "it's not perfect so why bother".

Okay, so keep complaining. Your vision of a better tomorrow isn't going to magically come true if you complain hard enough. You can help make it come true only by participating in the political system we have today. Even if you think it doesn't work, you have no choice but to participate anyway and hope you are wrong.

This is how I got banned from Hexbear. I told someone "You can either participate in the current system or plot to overthrow it. Are you working with the next Lenin or Mao, or merely fantasizing about it?"

So what about you? What are you doing to build the future you want?

NateNate60 ,

You use the word "liberal" like it is supposed to be an insult

NateNate60 ,

What you've said is that someone who agrees with you 50-80% of the time is as bad as someone who thinks you are the devil incarnate and doesn't agree with you at all.

NateNate60 ,

I make these assumptions because the type of people who use the type of language that you do and espouse similar views to you tend to also do these other things. It's called "generalisation", and although I apologise if I've made an incorrect one, it is a part of human thinking and everyone does it, including you.

It is my belief that the terms "good" and "bad" are poor labels and not suitably descriptive, especially for most political ideologies. I can only say that Democrats tend to enact policies that I agree with more while Republicans do not. That is why I say that Democrats are "better". Whether "better" means "good" is irrelevant. I don't like the two-party system and I work to change it by circulating ballot initiatives to move us toward proportional and ranked-choice voting. But when we only have two choices, it makes sense to vote and campaign for the one you disagree with least, then criticise and exert political pressure as necessary to nudge them in the right direction. Note that political pressure comes only collectively as a voting bloc, and a voting bloc that doesn't participate isn't going to be effective at exerting political pressure and having their demands acceded to. I understand that you vote, but not everyone who thinks the way you do does.

NateNate60 ,

I think that's why it's important to encourage participation in the primary process. There are the neoliberals mixed in with the social democrats and actual socialists. We should be voting for and supporting the latter in the primaries if we want to influence the party in a leftward direction.

NateNate60 ,

Good news doesn't spread as quickly as bad news and rage bait. "McDonald's Workers Can Afford Flat on 1/3 of Income" isn't a good headline but "Families Increasingly Priced Out By Red-Hot Housing Market" does.

NateNate60 ,

Yes, and that's because the progressive and left-wing of the Democratic Party is losing a power struggle against the centrists and neoliberals. If you want to change that, be sure to vote in the party primary elections and to encourage everyone you know to do the same.

Register to vote

NateNate60 ,

For what it's worth, the minimum wage in LA will rise to $17.28 in July of this year. I get that's still not very high by LA standards, but I stress that progress is better than stagnation.

NateNate60 ,

Your other comment says—

So pathetic how you claim to support democracy but shit on anyone who criticizes your precious political party and then make juvenile excuses for doing so.

I don't. But it's undeniably true that one party is much better, in my opinion, than the other. They aren't a perfect party but to equate them with the Republican Party simply because they aren't doing a perfect (or in many cases, even a good) job is stupid.

Right now, the choices are "bare minimum" or "nothing at all". These choices are not the same. One is clearly better.

If you would like a more nuanced opinion then read carefully the rest of my comments in this thread. I'm not going to repeat my points for every person who comes along with the same retort and insult thinking they've "got" me.

NateNate60 ,

I don't realistically view deepfakes in court as a real issue. Video and photographic evidence on its own is hearsay. You need to summon the person who made it as a witness to testify.

NateNate60 ,

People aren't storing massive amounts of data on cloud storage. For text document storage or even a moderate number of images, 10 GB is enough for many people.

NateNate60 ,

It is a loophole in the current Federal Communications Commission's regulations, where these kinds of deals are supposed to be forbidden. The Commission doesn't seem to like it either and may close the loophole in the future, but the regulatory process takes time.

NateNate60 ,

The FCC banning AI robocalls won't do anything. Enforcement action can't be taken because it's so difficult to trace where these calls are even coming from. What really needs to be done is that carriers need to be required to verify any caller's identity in order to trace them and prosecute illegal calls.

Right now, overseas scammers can pay to use VoIP services that place hundreds of calls a day to victims in the US and do so in complete anonymity, beyond the reach of the law. That needs to end. No more anonymous VoIP calls. If your identity isn't verified, your call gets filtered, end of story.

NateNate60 ,

There are many legitimate reasons why someone might need to make real robocalls. The issue isn't robocalls in general. It's unwanted robocalls and scam robocalls. There is no way to tell these apart at the time they're made. The only thing that can be done is to make identification easier in order to prosecute those who make them.

You need to accept that the telephone network is not, was not, and will never be a privacy-respecting system. Whenever you place a telephone call, your identity is known to your phone company. They know who you called, how long you called them, when you called them, and in all likelihood, what you said. The Government can intercept and record your calls. Your phone by default discloses your identity to the caller. Nothing is end-to-end encrypted. Telephones as a technology date back to before encryption was a thing, and at this point, to turn it into a privacy-respecting system where that privacy is enforced cryptographically or otherwise would result in the need to replace almost every non-cellular telephone in the world (which is a lot!). The best we can do is to forbid eavesdropping, except by law enforcement, and control what can be listened to by law.

If you want to use a privacy-respecting system, look elsewhere. True privacy on the telephone network will never exist, nor anything close to it. The best we can do is take advantage of that lack of privacy for the common good instead of desperately trying to pretend it's private.

The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes (www.businessinsider.com)

The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes::Biden's AI advisor Ben Buchanan said a method of clearly verifying White House releases is "in the works."

NateNate60 ,

Very few people understand why a GPG signature is reliable or how to check it. Malicious actors will add a "GPG Signed" watermark to their fake videos and call it a day, and 90% of victims will believe it.

NateNate60 ,

No, it's not. People don't use VLC to watch misinformation videos. They see it on Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok.

NateNate60 ,

if a contact has it set up

Well, there's your problem.

The most commonly-used mail client in the world is the Gmail web client which does not support it. Uploading your PGP key to Gmail and having them store it server-side for use in a webmail client is obviously problematic from a security standpoint. Number 2 I would guess is Outlook, which appears also not to support it. For most people, I don't think they understand the value of cryptographically signing emails and going through the hassle of generating and publishing their PGP keys, especially since Windows has no built-in easy application for generating and managing such keys.

There's also the case that for most people, signing their emails provides absolutely no immediate benefit to them.

NateNate60 ,

There is, but only if you can implement a layer of abstraction and get them to trust that layer of abstraction.

Few laymen understand why Bitcoin is secure. They just trust that their wallet software works and because they were told by smarter people that it is secure.

Few laymen understand why TLS is secure. They just trust that their browser tells them it is secure.

Few laymen understand why biometric authentication on their phone apps is secure. They just trust that their device tells them it is secure.

NateNate60 ,

Yeah, almost nothing has good PGP integration.

Except Git, apparently.

NateNate60 ,

That's not the point. It's that malicious actors could easily exploit that lack of knowledge to trick users into giving fake videos more credibility.

If I were a malicious actor, I'd put the words "✅ Verified cryptographically by the White House" at the bottom of my posts and you can probably understand that the people most vulnerable to misinformation would probably believe it.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    NateNate60 ,

    My friend, it seems like your anxiety is nicotine withdrawal. That explains why smoking makes your anxiety go away; you're getting another hit of nicotine to ease off the withdrawal.

    Vaping isn't harmless. Especially since you're 18, it will inhibit your brain development and the chemicals in the vape are chronically toxic. Nicotine is extremely addictive. Many people get addicted after just a few goes.

    NateNate60 ,

    Smoking, whether electronic cigarettes or tobacco, is never going to be only your problem. When you suffer these negative health effects, you become a burden on society. Not only is a sick person less economically productive, but they expend public resources in the form of additional healthcare expenditure (even in countries without universal healthcare, it is still highly Government-subsidised), increasing the likelihood of needing welfare, increasing the burden on already-strained public welfare programmes, and it,, of course will damage your interpersonal relationships too.

    Addiction is progressive. It happens with tobacco too. Over time, the same amount of vape fluid will no longer "do the trick". People who smoke tobacco will smoke larger and larger amounts for it as their body builds a tolerance to nicotine. Vape users will start needing stronger and stronger doses to ward of withdrawal. I personally know people who started vaping at 16 who are now 19 and need to vape every hour or they start experiencing withdrawal. This can and likely will eventually happen to you!

    I don't mean to offend, but this is destructive behaviour. You are trying to tell me that you want to continue down a spiral of addiction instead of getting the help you need.

    Quitting is very hard. I'm not going to pretend that you're a bad person for not being able to quit, because you're not. But you need to force yourself against your will to help yourself. "I don't want help" is ultimately going to lead to your own demise.

    You don't need to defend your thoughts to me. I'm just some random person on the Internet, and untimately, I have no control over what you do. But you do need to defend them to yourself. Don't cheat yourself out of a fulfilling, addiction-free, anxiety-free life. Plus, you'll save a lot of money on vapes over your lifetime.

    0% of people who quit smoking or quit vaping regret it, but nearly 100% of those who don't quit and get even more addicted wish they could have stopped sooner.

    NateNate60 ,

    Bitcoin mining is a multi-billion-dollar business. The block reward along is 900 BTC = 38.7 million USD a day (at 43,000 USD per BTC as of writing), shared between half a dozen big mining pools. Bitcoin mining equipment costs thousands of dollars.

    Mining bitcoin is solely a game for men with means.

    NateNate60 ,

    The argument on the other side of the coin is that renewable electricity is often produced in excess, and when it cannot be stored, mining bitcoin is an effective way to convert that excess electricity into money. Normally, that energy would just be wasted, reducing the efficiency and economic viability of renewable electricity sources.

    This argument is sound, but the problem is that it doesn't describe reality. The reality is that Bitcoin miners set up shop wherever electricity is the cheapest and consume inordinate amounts of electricity whether that electricity is in excess or not, and whether that electricity was generated renewably or not.

    NateNate60 ,

    40 million USD per day. That's 14 billion USD annually.

    NateNate60 ,

    That's not a solution. It's a way for you to avoid the problem. It does nothing to help the millions of people who are already deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem.

    NateNate60 ,

    No, it's not a sunk-cost fallacy.

    If you already have a bunch of Apple stuff, it makes more sense to continue using Apple stuff, because switching would cost money and effort. You'd also lose access to the software library that you paid for.

    Having a bunch of Apple stuff also makes buying more Apple stuff in the future a better value proposition because you gain access to features that you wouldn't otherwise have. Platform lock-in is not a sunk-cost fallacy. You're just uninformed and being smug about it.

    The sunk cost fallacy only applies when stopping is free or the cost is low enough (in money or effort) that it makes more sense to quit than continue.

    NateNate60 ,

    For most people, time is not regarded to be free (i.e. not a cost). As a devoted Linux user, the adage that "Linux is only free if you don't value your time" is absolutely true.

    NateNate60 ,

    Not a solution.

    This not only has a time and effort cost attached to it but selling your used hardware to buy new hardware is always a bad value proposition.

    NateNate60 ,

    Learning Windows is still a time cost. You're also losing your library of Mac software and quite a few interoperability features between your other Apple products.

    NateNate60 ,

    No. My argument is that if Apple isn't going to open up their ecosystem to genuine competition and genuine interoperability then they need to have their hand forced through regulation.

    Telling people to just stop buying Apple products is a lazy, knee-jerk self-righteous response that ignores the realities of platform lock-in.

    NateNate60 ,

    I'm not the parent commenter, but Apple Silicon has much wider app support than ARM on Windows. There's also Rosetta, which works alright, I suppose. Not spectacularly and usually not anywhere near native performance but it's at least okay.

    NateNate60 ,

    You seem to think that regulation doesn't work. Luckily, we have a test case set up for us in real-life.

    In the United States, consumers relied on voting with their wallets. In the European Union, regulatory agencies forced Apple to take pro-consumer moves through regulation.

    Now take a look at which approach produced results and which approach left consumers continuing to complain about the lack of interoperability and the lack of competition in Apple's walled garden.

    NateNate60 ,

    AI Intelligent Humans Who Programmed a Computer Discover New Material That Could Slash Lithium Use in Batteries

    It's not like they told an AI "Go find a cool new battery material". This was a targeted, human-led endeavour that used the same computational techniques that scientists have been using for decades. This headline is like saying "Hammer Builds New House". It wasn't the hammer. The hammer isn't intelligent enough to do anything. Intelligent humans merely used it as a tool.

    NateNate60 ,

    What does BTS stand for, outside of K-pop?

    NateNate60 ,

    YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A PURSE

    NateNate60 ,

    Texas and Florida are pretty well-known as the shitholes of America. Run by populist idiots who cater to the uninformed and gullible voter. I'm sure there are places like that in every country.

    NateNate60 ,

    There is no data loss on Google Drive, and there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

    NateNate60 ,

    Kubuntu removed Flatpaks in favour of Snaps

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