uriel238

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Woke used to mean aware of systemic mechanisms of privilege and oppression in society. I had to stop using it unironically because it turned into a white power derisive buzzword.

To be fair, it still refers to awareness and sympathy for those who suffer from systemic injustice. It's just wrong according to hate-driven pro-authoritarian movements to sympathize with outsiders.

Current use of woke as a term of contempt is an admission if bigotry.

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

『rant』

Abolish the police.

It's time to take a good hard look at how we approach wrongdoing and injustice, as very little of what happens falls into the realm of petty crime (a category that includes premeditated homicide).

Our current system focuses on detecting and seizing solvent assets and filling prison cells with warm bodies. It has a not-insignificant body count of its own, and completely ignores the elite deviance that costs society more lives, more suffering, more cost and more destruction than petty crime by orders of magnitude. (Such as the opioid crisis, PFOA throughout our water supplies and preventable industrial greenhouse emissions.)

『/rant』

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

For perspective, $30 billion would afford the food and freight to feed every human on Earth for a year.

Less than that would make him a god in Haiti (that is, elevate the nation out of crisis and put a bronze statue of Musk in every state park commemorating how awesome he is.

A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide. Curiously Musk considered this, but then wondered how to get everyone to pay fees for it.

ETA I got these values when we were discussing Bloomberg's wealth in 2019 when he was trying to Secret Hitler the Democratic party, and how much could be bought with the $500 million (at the time only 200 million was declared) he spent on his campaign. The $30 billion to feed the world value came up in in one of the news articles.

Well, the economy is much different and we're dealing with considerable inflation (and our billionaires, including Bloomberg are much richer.)

uriel238 , 4 months ago

There are eight billion people on earth, so it's even cheaper. Internet access is one of those things that requires infrastructure that gets cheaper per user as it scales up. At a global level, yes, internet should be ridiculously cheap per capita.

The cost we pay here in the US is mostly profit for the oligopolies that control the last mile. Licensing fees because they control access via legal obstruction. If I were to create a community server, it could be much cheaper as a non-profit cooperative, but for the cost defending from litigation from the established chains.

In other words, cost of the internet is inflated by force, not because internet access is expensive to construct and maintain.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

That the costs scale down the more massive the production. If you're in the industrialized world, the money you pay for food is almost all profit. Not the cost of agriculture, not the cost of harvesting and packaging, not freight time, maintenance and fuel, not logistics and accounting. Profit.

Most of our money spent is bribes goes in the pocket of each of the capitalists along the way taking their bit of rent.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

You do make a relavant point. Prices have doubled in the last couple of years and I think the statistic is from the early 2010s.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Law enforcement isn't interested in solving crimes. It's interested in securing convictions. False convictions do nicely to advance police and DA careers. And innocent bystanders are fine for putting warm bodies into empty prison cells.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Just tell Microsoft we know they're using personal user data to train AI, and they should stop.

It would be off brand for Microsoft to do otherwise.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Microsoft totally has plans to deport us all to Mars.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

1.2 MW so (thinks in Satisfactory) sixteen coal turbines or eight fuel generators.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

But would I be cute in thigh-high socks?

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Wasn't there an anti-privacy ad about Apple products being used to distribute CSAM as well? Rebecca Watson did a recent counterpoint to the ad. Privacy invasive tech is not good when large social movements are seeking to purge undesirables within the public

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

And the Gorgoneion amulet (Medusa's face on a plate, and on the shield Aegis) adorning every door in Athens to scare away evil spirits predates all the Perseus stories.

From OSP, I learned about Dread Persephone predating Hades in running the underworld and Aphrodite washing up on Kythira as Astarte (Ishtar) and bringing the alphabet that would replace Linear-B. The Hellenic myths go deep.

Oh and Ishtar might be Asherah, consort to Adonai, id est Yahweh.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Allegedly she was so hideous that anyone who gazed upon her would be petrified. It was her contrarian personal aesthetics that killed. Lethal vanity.

It's very Lovecraftian. Maybe its a Color Out of Space sort of thing.

Basillisks sometimes had to lock eyes to petrify, though the cockatrice version spit extremely corrosive acid. I suspect there's a link by storytellers unifying their world building.

I know of some women who have practiced a withering stare that can paralyze with fear or shame. I seek to master such techniques.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Since the Great Depression (about a century ago!) The US government has been fudging the numbers so that the economy looks better than it is. Inflation, unemployment, wages, etc. are qualifed with modifiers (because why count anyone who stopped looking for work?).

The system intends to gaslight us and convince us the economy is doing great. We're down on our luck, or we suck and deserve to be on the brink of homelessness and starvation.

After all, if our government was transparent with us, we might see it's not all because of corporate greed and anticompetitive markets. We might realize regulatory capture has real consequences. We might pressure the government to actually serve the pubic and install some effective social safety nets. And then the companies would have to pay us living wages for short work weeks and provide a non-toxic, non-hazardous work environment.

And our plutocrats won't have that.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Two brekkies!

uriel238 , 4 months ago

The scary part is realizing the part that is you is not the particles, but its momentary pattern.

You're a quasistable event.

You're a wave.

You're a brief song.

You're a vibe.

And then you're gone.

Most people aren't ready to deal with that.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I feed any wolf in me that makes itself known. They're hungry and valid.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

That raises questions about how the corpses are faring with the warming.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Oh, I think we're about to discover they're very much alive and teeming with activity, just not the kind we expect from pre-mortem mountaineers.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Off the top of my head, I can imagine a dozen or so industrial uses for scp-5140. The creepy pasta is sometimes in how society might respond to SCPs.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Of all the Obama-era conservative memes I've seen this one makes the most sense.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

🚫

uriel238 , 4 months ago

You can order footjobs at Applebee's? Is this on the secret menu?

uriel238 , 4 months ago

An editorialist got pissy that millennials weren't buying diamonds, and the take was millennials were lazy and not working hard enough to make boomer money.

So I'm cynical long before I read the take, since many of these kinds of articles are writteb to appeal to the insecurities of news agency owners rather than what the public is actually experiencing.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

We need a labor organization haiku generator the way we have an NSA haiku generator.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I dunno. If I were forced to toil in current typical toxic conditions, I might be inclined to leave a gross mess in a corporate HQ somewhere.

But then I'm literally crazy and am paid to specifically not do that.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

What's curious to me is the boy is refereeing the game, and the demon is playing. When I was desperate to play, I wanted to play.

So I wonder if this was an aware decision by the artist. Is the kid test-running his campaign to see how it plays?

uriel238 , 4 months ago

This reminds me of IMSI catchers, which governors and mayors don't mind if law enforcement has them, but when your neighbor makes one out of a mail-order kit and a soldering gun then suddenly it's an instrument of terror.

Oh and police aren't supposed to have them in the US, but no one punishes them for using one. It's inadmissible in court, so they have to parallel construct (id est, lie ) about how they got your location from an informant or through detection dogs or something.

In fact, a lot of security is lax, and we don't bother until it's private interests rather than law enforcement that are using them with malicious intent.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Relax. I am profoundly crazy, like over the rainbow or truly gone fishing crazy.

So probably not the craziest.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

To quote Robert Baratheon I'm not trying to honor you. I'm trying to get you to run my kingdom while I eat, drink, and whore my way to an early grave

This seems to be the approach of every billionaire or person of means, to the exclusion of interest in their own offspring or legacy. There are few Tywin Lannisters, and they can be dicks as well.

I was raised to invent / discover some science or useful art. My dad did some work with solar-synchronus orbits. Still, all of human society is expecting a major population correction (mostly famine) in the next half century, which is likely to wipe out all the culture and science we have. We'll be lucky if Relativity or Beethoven's symphonies survive as we get knocked back to the iron age, let alone space science. Maybe Rob has a point.

For now, I'm so depressed, I exist to pet my cat and walk my dog and tell people online they are valid, even if the human species has a tragedy of the commons glitch that may be its great filter.

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Fair enough, I was oversimplifying.

It's only a small portion of the climatology academic consensus that considers a massive population correction and civilization collapse. Specifically, if the average global temperature reaches pre-industrial mean M +4℃, (NASA page) our infrastructure will not be able to sustain support of a global population of one billion people (some scientists predict significantly fewer humans can survive.)

Granted, that's a big contingency. We're headed towards M+4℃ rapidly and we're watching as contingencies accelerate the rate the global temperature climbs, whether from massive methane releases from the Siberian tundra or the ocean heat absorption declining as it acidifies. (I'm not fully aware of the correlative relationship in that one)

And yes, a lot of factors might mitigate or reverse the process. Many nations are accelerating their response to global warming concerns, ramping up sustainable energy resources over those that produce greenhouse gasses. We may engage in one or more geoengineering projects which mitigate the global temperature rise.

But right now, the projected trajectories don't look great. Without some major push by the world's nations and companies (that is, our oligarchical elite) we're still going to see M+4℃ before the 22nd century.

But who cares? If it's just a handful of Cassandras wailing about the world turning into a Roland Emmerich movie setting, then the rest of the community isn't so bothered, right?

Well, here's the thing: The rest of the academic consensus just doesn't consider projections like that at all. They don't deny that this is the expected outcome, or suggest scenarios in which we can endure M+4℃ and be fine. They're not even imagining we'll imminently solve the CME problem with settling on the moon or Mars. They're just assuming that something amazing will happen between now and then and will postpone M+4℃ indefinitely, or at least to some future century.

They're also not looking to deeply into what that something amazing might be. We don't have think-tanks designing large geoengineering schemes. We are working on small steps that bring fusion energy closer, make solar energy and wind energy a little more sustainable. We are collectively doing a lot of not-big things that are definitely not going to slow down the speeding runaway train that is M+4℃

Furthermore it's not like everything will be peachy at M+3.99℃ and we have nuclear holocaust as the needle hits the +4℃ tick. We've long known M+1.5℃ is going to be a shit show, as the coasts get hammered by hurricanes, more of the equatorial belt becomes unlivable and nonarable, more of our vert and forests burn (or are stripped by industry -- that's still a thing), and these factors are going to make it harder to organize the large scale projects we need to offset the infrastructure we depend on. (Mom, in Flagstaff AZ just sent a picture of her porch last week showing Montana levels of snow.)

Then there's the sociology, which few people at all are thinking about, that it's much more profitable to exploit disasters than it is to prevent them, that our billionaires are more inclined to build shelters in which they can pretend to be safe or create secret missions to Mars (that are likely to fail Stockton Rush style) than they are, create huge projects that serve the whole of society. So we can expect charitable contributions towards climate crisis mitigation to spring up like charitable contributions towards saving Haiti. As I said, the human animal has a tragedy-of-the-commons problem that we have yet to solve.

As for sources, Wikipedia teems with discussion of these matters, and there are some insightful pop-science climatology series on YouTube that dives deep into specific issues, either how we're fucking ourselves, neat technology that might help, or how a specific situation can be unfucked. There are also ones on how shit is getting bad, is going to get worse and we really don't want it to get worse. The internet has a lot of resources even while our search engines deteriorate.

And yes, in most climate science, the ongoing consensus is we really don't want it to get worse and we're doing way, way, way not enough to prevent things from getting worse. They like to leave it up to the rest of us how much of Titanic has to be underwater before be decide it's actually going to sink.

I'd love, love, love, to be wrong. I'd like to imagine that humanity's finest hour is yet to come. But my experience of human nature is we tend to not solve problems and let them become no-longer problems anymore. And we really are waiting for Greta Thunberg to try harder.

The outcome of least-resistance of the climate crisis is projected to heat the world to M+4℃ by 2100, possibly as early as 2040 or 2034 in very-worst-possible-timeline scenarios (clathrate guns, and biodiversity extinction acceleration and stuff like that). Famine and resource wars and no small amount of cannibalism is likely to be the order of the day. At that point we're not going to be thinking about preserving Chopin and Shakespeare, but enough food to last the migration.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/9075849f-fd31-42c7-b399-7218377d639e.jpeg

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Regarding the Chad as Anarcho-Capitalist convo: I think we maybe shouldn't credit value to character archetypes rather than to logic and principles.

No one's actually a complete Chad IRL. Some look the part. Some look the part and walk the walk some, but plenty are still true believers of white power. Some look the part but are really Gaston, or ready to go Joffrey at a moment's notice.

Others of us don't look Chad at all, and may look doomer, or sad girl (or whoever she is. Maybe Female Of The Species) and still have a point or legitimate grievance.

What others classify you as doesn't make you or your feelings less valid. These archetypes are observer's perspectives of instances. Moments. They're not a complete picture of what is happening.

And being or becomming Chad (or Neitzsche's ubermensch) is not in having perfect positions all the time, but being willing to err and learn from our mistakes. IRL, its a process, and even Christian nationalist Chad can learn, recover, and walk an enlightened path. Chad is a process. And 72% Chad is still pretty Chad.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Apparently you didn't read the subtopics in the forum. Much ado was made about the Chad meme guy being used as thr anarcho-capitalist being hypocritical.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

It does look a bit French.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

PSA: Polls this early in the season are pretty meaningless. Also that election cycle was lousy with (preventable!) October surprises.

uriel238 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

The first Swift deepfakes I heard (currently the only ones) are the mathematical proofs (like this one on YouTube).

Hopefully, enough Swifties encounter them and are able to learn not just some sweet math, but that we have tech good enough to render anyone saying anything. Also that Deepfake Taylor has pretty solid math chops.

Then we get back to square one, where the authority or celebrity of a person is not enough to take their position as truth, but we also have to consider the merits of what argument they make.

For now, though, the Taylor Swift math proofs might serve to defuse Taylor Swift PSAs that might lead people astray.

ETA: Einstein adds a PSA to the end of this proof advising that yeah, we can't rely on who is saying something as informing its veracity. (Fixed!)

uriel238 , 4 months ago

If San Francisco informs, light rail streetcars are a gateway to underground subways. It gets the city in the habit of getting on a railcar to go places while the greater infrastructure (the tunnels) are built.

MUNI is mixed undeground and street. BART is over and under and being extended to this day.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

To be fair, I have lost my mind decades ago and it's an ongoing struggle to claw bits of it back while other pieces slip away again, often to dread of the world as it presents itself.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/52adcda2-df2f-43d4-b435-70a45505fbac.png

It's not a pretty picture. After 9/11 and the aughts, here in the states we learned to stop hoping for anything. If nothing else, the climate crisis continues to accelerate while plutocrats pressure nations to do fuck all about it. In our lifetime, we expect a population correction (mostly a lot of famine) and societies everywhere will just fall apart. And every day is realizing that the people who raised us and taught us and baptized us all betrayed us, telling us that their system is the one that works, that is worth defending, even as it heads towards inevitable collapse.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/de4ca13e-6acb-4fc6-89b8-d9bfafc59b47.jpeg

The same kind of existential dread informed Albert Camus, who watched WWII play out, which informed his own existential outlook, that we seek to find meaning in a meaningless existence. Imagine Sisyphus, happy he suggests. Whether we're lugging a rock, or seeking some kind of higher purpose, or fighting the ideological menace of hatred, we might as well get good at it. Curiously, this means by waking up every day, you're doing the thing. You're taking on the challenges of the absurd and not losing. And to be fair, many people choose not to take this route, if not killing themselves, then commuting philosophical suicide -- that is taking a leap of faith, whether in Jesus' heaven, the shiny and chrome Valhalla of V8 or seeking to evade the torments of Roko's Basilisk.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/cf6a654a-f131-43fe-b0b8-a95d811db37b.jpeg

uriel238 , 4 months ago

More importantly I grew up without the internet, and no real parenting, and ended up with lifelong major depression. And I manage suicidality on a daily basis.

We blame social media the way we blamed video games, and CCCGs the way we blamed violent movies and Gangsta Rap the way we blamed Rock-＆-Roll and Dungeons ＆ Dragons. What we're not willing to look at is how we force both parents to work, so they aren't around to parent and when they are they're too exhausted from working.

In fact, no-one is okay. We have intergenerational mental illness and our healthcare grossly underserves mental health interests, which figures into why our suicide rates are creeping higher every year while Japan's (where suicide is more culturally accepted) is lowering. It figures into why the Christian nationalist movement and transnational white power movement are lousy with new members.

It doesn't help much that the old myth of upward mobility has been thoroughly debunked, that we're anticipating a global population correction in the next century and our leaders are all inheritance aristocrats who act childishly on the House and Senate floor (or in Parliament). The society that demands we do better and give 100% can't help but do everything half-assed.

So no, we can disregard this given we can't be bothered to give our kids school lunches or even a daily wellness check-in.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Responsible parents

And I submit we don't allow such things, at least not often, not without above-average household income.

In the meantime, it took into the 1990s before we realized it is not enough just to let parents do their thing. Family dysfunction, child abuse, child sexual abuse ran rampant not just within homes, but in schools and churches. The Satanic panic was part of our recognition that these are things that actually happen.

So, I submit that the first step is not to block kids from the internet (at which point you have to decide when you're going to decide when they should be allowed to make mistakes about dangerous things, knowing they're going to get into trouble and cause harm) but to provide for a society in which parents can be enabled to parent. Because they are not, and haven't been before I was born.

Besides which, when a kid is stuck in a dangerous home, the internet is one of the resources they can go to in order to get informed about the danger they are in, and maybe how to escape it. Of course, SESTA/FOSTA killed some of those information sources, and KOSA is going to kill even more of them, since it's not about hiding porn from kids but LGBT+ information, even when it's educational.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

You know what's also nice? Bribes to the regulating officials. Junkets. Free samples. Fancy dinners. Golf games. Promises of no-show jobs if their political career tanks.

Some doctors gladly overprescribe opioids (or bad SSRIs like Seroquel) for a few free lunches from a pharma spokesperson hottie.

People with political power are cheap.

It's why the rest of us have that lean and hungry look.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

You're not most doctors. Your a doctor. Also bribes and propaganda can affect you whether consciously or not. My own doctor of twenty years (now retired) only took pharma submissions through regular channels.

Seroquel came to mind because I personally witnessed someone who suffered from dystonia as a side effect of Seroquel, months before the class action that the side effect was understated (or misrepresented) when it was being tested for FDA approval.

That said, the lunches-for-overprescription pattern was discovered and highlighted during investigations into the opioid epidemic in the United States, in which, yes, a lot of lunches were bought by Purdue pharmacy representatives, and yes, a lot of correlating doctors over-presribed OxyContin, and whether or not it's a matter of neglect, laziness or willful malice to exploit the inflated medical market and poor Americans, the opioid crisis continues to this day, with 109,600 Americans dying from opioid overdoses in 2023.

I can cite plenty of other industries in which good press is bought and regulatory departments are captured with bribes, in pay or in kind. I'm personally familiar with the game industry and photography industry. But I can't help but be bitter about the medical industry, having seen the effects of bad medicine on friends and family, when not experiencing it personally.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Sane Green appears more blutone the more cumulatively cromulant your stress inventory.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

I really like my Ninja dripper. My wife got it for me when we moved in together seven years ago.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

It absolutely is today.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

That seems to be a pretty great idea for a mutual aid project: Make a community coffee dispensary whose mission is to brew the best coffee and give it to anyone who wants a cup. Large-scale production should be useful in controlling the factors of coffee production, hence only a short time of trial and error, the coffee dispensed should progress from bog-standard to half-way decent to pretty good to absolute best.

Stretch goals include a baked-goods dispensary that is attached.

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Posadism attempts to introduce elements of ufology into Marxist thought.

WTF?

...Arguing that only communism can allow the development of interplanetary travel.

I'd argue that the infrastructure we need to colonize other worlds is going to require larger organized population than capitalism can provide.

But as a reader that sees ideologies as starting points (that need to be developed so as to create a pathway to post-scarcity), I can't say what the corruption-light system is that will allow for interplanetary colonization and trade.

The fabricator IRL would be late-game magitech that manipulates huge amounts of energy. (A fabrication failure could annihilate a continent). Far, far, sooner, we'll have the food-printer / turbolift system of Star Trek TOS to deliver us our custom-made coffee.

Meanwhile, in 2024, we're having a tough time escaping the gravity of fascism-driven autocracy.