uriel238

uriel238 , 1 day ago

For most of us (like around 88% of the US population) you're closer to being homeless than you are to ever owning a home even a crappy apartment in the waste shadow of an industrial zone.

uriel238 , 1 day ago

I remember uneven wealth distribution was a bad thing even in pro-capitalism Economics 101 (macroeconomics), like this is the thing that will collapse your economy and cause death, disasters without response and eventually popular uprising.

FOX NEWS has, for decades now, been showing us our oligarchs don't care.

uriel238 , 1 day ago

This to me, feels like a cute proposition for sex (as in getting freaky).

uriel238 , 1 day ago

I only smile in the dark
My only comfort is the night gone black
I didn't accidentally tell you that
I'm only happy when it rains
-- Garbage

uriel238 , 1 day ago

Ten dimensions plus time in string theory.

uriel238 , 1 day ago

If there are higher dimensions, say the extra seven asserted by String Theory, then we have breadth (thickness?) along each axis that is non zero. The higher-order string theory dimensions (which communicate particle information like gravity) are tightly rolled up.

Brian Greene uses the metaphore of an ant on a wire who can move along the wire freely, but can't go far laterally. They may be so small that our quantum bits can't drift anywhere, so our liver doesn't abandon us drift along a high-level axis.

If there are flat higher level dimensions, then either a force or some kind of membrane would have to exist to keep our blood from leaking.

That said, when we have pure elements, or even pure minerals or chemicals, they retain the same density (mass to volume, sometimes affected by temperature) which suggests nothing is hiding away in other dimensions whenever we take measurements. If there is room along higher axes for unseen activity, it doesnt bug us enough to work out consistent properties.

uriel238 , 2 days ago

That's why cat ears are mandatory when you're computer hacking.

uriel238 , 2 days ago

So far! no-one has ever died from loaded halloween candy. (The few incidents have all been inside jobs, like a parent poisoning their own kid).

The fentanyl candy scare came from brightly colored Oxy tabs that looked like packed-powder candy such as Sweetarts. It was a non-issue, but made for a scare piece to frighten conservative people who believe in teen rainbow parties.

uriel238 , 1 day ago

None of the girls were willing to be the one that wore green lipstick.

uriel238 , 2 days ago

To be fair, Jesus' message (some of it, scripture is not univocal) is that divine power is within the grasp of us mere mortals. That everyone who follows him would be able to do miracles like his.

(Apologists suggest he was referring to just the apostles to explain why the rest of us are bound by naturalism, but there are implications that's not what he meant.)

Note that Gospel Jesus was big on direct evidence.

That said, the cross was made of wood, and Jesus wasn't the only convict tasked with carrying one. The gravity is in being willing to die for one's principles which all of these characters would do unflinchingly.

uriel238 , 2 days ago

Is the guy in the second panel Quasimodo?

uriel238 , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

So my take is I should put a Croc on my dog's head and will be enlightened?

uriel238 , 2 days ago

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren't protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren't either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.

uriel238 , 3 days ago

This is why you have to run when you find a goose among your ducks.

I thought up Goose as a superhero for a street level setting, essentially she's a tough scrapper, easy to underestimate, and is really good at blending into crowds or workstaff. Mistique without the mutant shapechangey stuff.

uriel238 , 3 days ago

Are we absolutely sure it's real Bill Gates and not Robot Bill Gates? I mean he's had bad takes before but maybe it's best to be sure?

uriel238 , 3 days ago

To me, Sea Lions are cute and have a tendency in San Francisco to block rich people from their fancy boats by coming en mass to warm themselves on the gangways.

So even though I can't pet them (it's illegal and they will fuck a man up) i have nothing but love for sea lions.

uriel238 , 3 days ago

Inside me are two ranchers. I'm still trying to figure out a viable configuration for a third.

uriel238 , 3 days ago

I assumed I was already being spit-roasted.

uriel238 , 4 days ago

Thr bird is the word.

uriel238 , 4 days ago

We're dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

We're already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it'll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

And that's assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.

uriel238 , 3 days ago

I think you are misrepresenting the take. I'm only describing the situation, which, yes, may lead to some people giving up.

I'm skeptical of just doing something even if it's useless, but that's not to say there is nothing to be done.

When it comes to solving the rise of authoritarianism and movements towards autocracy, we don't know what to do. The things we usually do (protest, escalate to violence) either don't affect change, or can wreck society. But that means figuring out what to do, even if it means trying what hasn't been done before.

In the case of the US, ours is a huge society that teams with the chaos of complexity, so we will have plenty of opportunities to sabotage the transnational white power movement's takeover through local action seizing on this vulnerability. Think of the dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar breeding, migrating to the mainland and finding enough lysine to survive, despite all the efforts to keep them in control. (The infighting and brain-drain within the organizations trying to seize power may eventually drive them to collapse as well, but we have to give that time to fester).

In the case of the climate and plastic crises, we are fucked. The global food supply infrastructure will collapse and people are going to die. Few people like to look at those models (so most scientists just say this will be bad if it gets to here), so the few estimates suggest that if we act now to mitigate climate effects and drastically drop greenhouse emissions, we might be able to get the world to continue to sustain one billion people on the long term.

Do note that is seven billion people less than we have, and people who are alive today will get to experience this drop. Famine is going to become the new in thing, and it's the sort of death we don't wish on our worst enemies... unless we're Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sophie From Mars has a long form discussion video The World Is Not Ending where she discusses the range of outcomes, noting that the concentration of wealth and power to people who cannot think rationally about it, except to hoard it, decides whether we figure out better how to organize and cooperate, or exist in a Mad Max future with far fewer cars and more cannibalism.

I don't indulge in opinions, except to say I'm afraid of the cannibal famine future, and I'm afraid we might well kill ourselves, and not in a cool way like AI takeover or robot apocalypse. But I also recognize that we naked apes are not rational and have to be clever even to choose to govern ourselves by logic rather than feelings. We do tragedize any commons we come across, and that's a habit we will have to break. I don't yet know how.

It's not to say we're doomed. Rather it's to say the odds of us coming out of this are really bad, considering the path of least resistance. We better start figuring out how we're going to cleverly emerge from this fine mess.

uriel238 , 4 days ago

I'm preheating olive oil on the stove.

uriel238 , 5 days ago

That's not quite it.

Then thr 0.1% gets all the money, and the failing rich blame themselves for not being clever enough.

Then the 0.01% get all the money and fly around in golden zeppelins

And then the 0.001% gets all the money, and our elected officials tell us that if we charge them with crimes, the whole economy will collapse.

Now eight guys own more than half the population and we're feeling lean and hungry.

uriel238 , 5 days ago

That's just Russian propaganda, but who doesn't relish good Russian propaganda?

uriel238 , 5 days ago

I'm 56 and has to have the context explained to me when I saw it pop out of the meme-o-sphere.

uriel238 , 5 days ago

This was made clear in the Behind the Bastards two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity in which the industrialists thought the Great Depression was the good times, and were really resentful that FDR implemented the New Deal, which was a stopgap to prevent a communist revolution, since despite the troubles in the USSR, it had to be better than what we were contending with, and people were sharpening their hoes. (Those who still had hoes)

These days, yes, not only do they want you in tents, but they want you in tents in some other place, and they want you to starve even when you cannot commute to a jobsite.

I've noticed the guillotine memes have stopped and instead of saying how absurd violent uprising is, people are saying how this may result in violence whether or not that would fix things.

uriel238 , 4 days ago

We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.

The problem is we haven't figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism -- government by force -- became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.

Now there isn't a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.

But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.

I just don't know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we're already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren't waiting until July, but hitting in June.

My point was descriptive: I've noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm's book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I've noticed content creators and pundits who've been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.

It's not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls' schools, which I can't understand how they imagined that was a good look.)

I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I've also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.

I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.

It doesn't matter which. That does seem to be the way we're headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.

uriel238 , 6 days ago

We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website's TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you're a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

But here's the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they're sheepdogs, and you're now a designated wolf.

And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it's a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They're still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

Curiously -- and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand -- MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

(But Then -- and this does get into speculation because we don't have docs, just a lot of evidence -- Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can't absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they're not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people's histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it's easy to get lost in there.

So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.

uriel238 , 6 days ago

I spent a lot of time in the boywife kitchen, but the abortion pantry just has snacks. I guess we sleep in the Sex Before Marriage Lounge? I'd swap the Gay Room and the Estrogen Lab. I surf Lemmy and do more science in the Gay Room, and my sweetheart hangs out in the Estrogen Lab.

The bathroom is trans, yes. There's a second (cis) bathroom.

uriel238 , 6 days ago

It was the everyone has sex planet where tripping over a botanical hot tent was a capital crime, which the Enterprise crew thought was a tad extreme once a law was broken and Wesley had to die.

uriel238 , 7 days ago

Whenever essential functions (e.g. access) are powered, they're supposed to have manual overrides. I'm pretty sure this is a regulatory requirement even here in the States where we're stupid and regulatory agencies are mostly captured.

So WTF happened, Tesla? Where's the manual override for when the battery fails?

uriel238 , 7 days ago

Isn't there a cheetah bot that can burn a good clip. Dunno what its carrying capacity is, but I remember it could out run puny protestors.

uriel238 , 9 days ago

I'm reminded of Christopher Lee, who's awesomeness on the silver screen (and in Metal) was only the tip of his iceberg of accomplishments.

uriel238 , 9 days ago

If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed

From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh's work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh's art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.

There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

uriel238 , 9 days ago

Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.

Movie star isn't supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.

uriel238 , 9 days ago

Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.

So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that's a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh -- that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.

My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they're already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14

Do you have a source for that?

This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

That's rather dismissive. Also vague. Are you saying that the notion that wealth disparity is bad is just some guy's opinion, or that you're not supposed to be able to get rich being a movie star (or a private equity investor, or a hedge fund manager, or a California gold miner)?

Usually when people are vague and terse, I assume they're losing interest in the conversation. It's okay to walk away.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

When it comes to capitalist macroeconomics, as I understand it, wealth disparity is one of the big decay factors the government is supposed to monitor and correct for. Mind you, I learned MacEc in the mid 1980s but even after theory shifted from national economies to globalist economics (the free(-er) trade movement of the 1990s) wealth distribution, and the bow of that graph was supposed to be kept shallow.

There are a lot of ways to restore some balance, such as taxing rich people and investing in welfare programs and social safety nets. In the case of freelance musicians (and freelance investments, which allowed people of lower income classes to invest sooner) these are just paradigm changes that allowed more people to participate, with the expectation that more people would be moderately successful rather than a few people being ostentatiously successful. Fewer Bruce Springsteens, more John Coultons. This wasn't contrived by government though, so it's more of a happy accident.

And yes, Marx in Das Kapital notes that the ownership class invariably captures government and regulation which ends efforts to keep wealth more evenly distributed so we have situations like now (or like the Great Depression, a century ago) where a few people own almost everything and aren't willing to let it go, even though the only thing they can do by hoarding their wealth is accumulate more wealth. And history has continued to bear this out, and to show that a well-regulated capitalist system is only temporary at best, which has driven me to believe we have to figure out something better.

Post-scarcity communism would be ideal, but we haven't yet worked out how to get there from here, and really I'd be happy for anything that doesn't turn into a one-party plutocrat-controlled autocracy held together by fascism and a nationalist war effort.

And sure, economics is a soft science so this is all just someone's opinion, though the someones in this case are multiple smart historical figures who actually thought about it a bit. I'm not an economist, so I rely on experts who are.

PS: This is my attempt to either find common ground, or to lay plain what my position is and where it comes from. I'm not invested in you adopting it, but if you want me to consider a different one, I'll need cause to do so.

uriel238 , 7 days ago

Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they've paid you enough (which is much less than they're getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don't like it, they'll make sure it tanks or at least doesn't get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn't have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.

Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they've already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.

No, we'd get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.

Intellectual property is a construct, and it's corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.

I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.

But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it's confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we'll get culture out of it.

You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.

uriel238 , 7 days ago

The notion of the latter informs the former. The public domain is intellectual property rights of the people. Restricting the public domain takes that away.

uriel238 , 7 days ago

That's an extremely vague question, and presumes that any art is de facto intellectual property.

It also presumes that anyone has access to the institution that defines and enforces intellectual property.

Also, intellectual property isn't a real thing, but you don't want to read too many words, so you'll have to figure that out for yourself.

uriel238 , 6 days ago

Is it your intention to appeal to law? Here in the states, extrajudicial detention and torture by state actors is legal. Does that make it right?

Do you think the copyright term of life + 70 years is fair to the public? Do you know how we got here?

uriel238 , 6 days ago

Infringement of IP is a crime according to specific states, but if you make art, and I replicate it, it doesn't affect you.

If you write a story and I read it without paying you, it doesn't affect you.

The only reason IP is a thing is because short-term monopolies on media (or inventions or methods) were enshrined by specific states as law, and then spread through trade agreements, and they were expanded on without concern for their original purpose or for the good of the public. In fact, we're seeing fair use rights fade since states aren't willing to enforce them, and platforms like YouTube over censor.

So at this point, in the US, the EU and the eastern market, no IP law would be better than what we have.

So no, you have not demonstrated any reason I should have respect for your IP.

However, if you're going to insist, and be an IP maximalist, there is one thing I can do for you /to you (or Sony, or Time Warner, or Disney) that is worse than pirating your product.

And that, of course, is not pirating your product.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

I had no idea.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

And why not think about turtles? I ask. 🐢

uriel238 , 8 days ago

I said what I said.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

Well, the California example is about too many PSA warning labels. So many things are known by the State of California to cause cancer that no-one takes heed of the labels anymore. Similarly Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign (and Tipper Gore's parental advisory music labels) only encouraged kids to do more drugs and listen to angrier music.

So it's not that kids will smoke more (or much more) it's that the labels will be more easily ignored when the government fails to be sparing in their use.

In an non-government example, when everything is a sin, then nothing is a sin.