Quite possibly a luddite.
The good news is that the cheapest, most environmentally friendly and most privacy respecting cars one can find are all the same category - used ones. You also have decent safety in a decade old car these days.
The bad news is of course that car manufacturers are countering this the only way they know how - by producing products that don’t last for shit. But at least if you buy an old one you can make a more informed decision, as other people have years of experience already.
This is literally the definition of a liberal market economy. Bust unions and make it easy to hire and fire, and what you’ll get is a highly mobile and vibrant but unspecialised workforce. Great for quick innovation like silicon valley, less great for traditional manufacturing that requires specialized talents.
It’s all wanted politics - maybe more than anything, this is what they busted the unions for.
The headline “Pregnant lady caught shoplifting groceries; arrested” would already be telling of a society that has gone far over the edge.
An absolutely essential part of police work is to de-escalate situations. If someone is acting erratically and pose a potential danger they’re supposed to be trained to calm them down, control the situation, and get it under control with minimal use of force. In America the work of the police is, to be fair, made harder by the fact that firearms are everywhere - situations can escalate very quickly.
However, if what starts as a pregnant lady shoplifting ends with you shooting her dead, chances are you did not do a very good job de-escalating the situation. Rather on the contrary - you escalated it a whole fucking lot.
This has nothing to do with any functional notion of police work. This is just state sponsored terror.
To be fair, the current pope seems to be more hands on - err, in a good way - than at least Ratzinger was.
As we’re not going to get rid of Catholicism any time soon, at least we can appreciate that they currently have a leader who isn’t a complete enabler.
That said, I don’t disagree with you. Fuck it all.
Kbin is pretty good for this. Every magazine has two tabs: one for microblogs, and one for threads. The administrator of the magazine can choose relevant hashtags, and all federated posts from the fediverse containing the hashtags will show up in the microblog section. People end up in kbin communities just by making themselves discoverable with hashtags, they don’t even need to know what kbin is.
There are, as far as I can tell, two problems:
Still, both of these things seem like they could be resolved, and it’s a very neat solution. :)
According to Wikipedia it was introduced in 1898, so the flashlight was invented almost immediately after. I guess it’s the natural next step when you have light bulbs and batteries.
something something can’t hold a charge for a long period of time
Yes, like that! The British royals often have around $30 million at their disposal. It’s completely fucked, nobody needs that much money.
Good thing you don’t have anything like that in the US.
One billion is a thousand million, in case anyone forgot.
I’d rather be poor in Sweden than rich in the US.
No offence.
I’m doing a PhD, so hang out a lot with researchers - though not in natural sciences. Still, in my experience, the best researchers are often those who engage with other hobbies on the side. They’re often very specialized within the field, but can have all kinds of hidden talents and interests. It keeps your brain fresh.
So don’t feel bad about pursuing your interests! Sometimes it’s also unexpected combinations of knowledge that is valuable, not hyperspecialization in one specific field. :)
Too bad the court of public opinion is not semi-legitimate. They’re grasping for straws (her emails 2.0), but people are dumb enough that it works.
Trump raped children and undermined democracy? Well, (a) Biden tok drugs and avoided taxes!
I don’t know what is wrong with people, but somehow it seems to work perfectly on half the population.
Honestly, if he was running and I had the right to vote, I would probably vote for him over the two other guys. And I don’t have a problem with his father.
This is true - at the end of the day it’s just the age old struggle of maintaining humanity in face of modernism. Apollonian versus Dionysian, John Henry versus the steam drill.
What’s worrying me is that humanity appears to be losing ground fast, and that AI not only speeds up the process but makes fighting back even harder.
Good artists will keep creating good art; record labels will keep pushing increasingly cheap and braindead bullshit strangling any hope of actual innovation made by anyone who needs to make a living to survive.
Human culture gradually grows into an easily consumed, regenerative cheeseburger-like mess. A billion near identical five second snippets of unprovocative entertainment that satisfies nobody but the shareholders, but feeds endless masses of consumerist dopamine slaves until they slowly die of boredom without ever having thought an independent thought in their life.
And the world, indeed, carries on.
At least deleted_by_author makes for a neat comment on how nobody is obliged to host their content until the end of time. Sure, people can delete away, but it leaves a frustrating gap some times. :)
It’s rather the opposite, as it is the alternative to an algorithm choosing which content will be visible. Algorithms are easily abused - a curated list of real people you follow and trust to share interesting content less so.
On kbin it’s a little different thhough, as content widely boosted across the fediverse is given improved visibility by default. In this system we rely more on servers full of bad actors being defederated.
One thing I try to keep in mind when boosting content is that if (hypothetically) someone is following me from a microblogging platform, what they will get from me in their feed is a) my original posts and b) whatever content I boost. So it has the potential of affecting visibility of content beyond the original threads or community it belongs to. This is especially true if you make use of the microblogging function in kbin to interact with the broader Fediverse, in which case people might follow you from there.
In consequence, I try to boost content that I think has a general interest beyond the specific thread it is located in, and that I think calls for extra attention. If I merely agree with something or find it valuable in context I stick to just upvoting.
There is of course no problem with following a different philosophy - there’s no real reason to worry about whether your profile lends itself to being followed by Mastodon users. But it’s something to be aware of when figuring out how to use the function. :)
This is a really good blog post, with a lot of lessons to learn. I like how technical solutions are proposed to problems of platform culture.
At least some of the obsession over unwritten rules - especially content warnings - seems to me to have been a thing only around the time of the first Twitter exodus, and I never really saw too much fuzz about it before or after. Thank God, or I would probably have left too. People still make a deal about alt texts, but that’s generally less alienating.
When it comes to serendipity and finding content, I think maybe the solution should lie in alternatives to Mastodon - while I prefer Mastodon for curating my own feed, the microblogging integration on kbin is nigh better for discovering interesting content around the fediverse more generally. It does, however, give rise to a Matthews effect that’s intentionally absent from Mastodon.
It will be interesting to see how different federated microblogging platforms will deal with discoverability as they mature. And, not least, how Mastodon users will feel about their content suddenly being promoted by algorithms on services that are completely foreign to them.
Well, in theory social media platforms could be good. The idea is solid - you follow trustworthy people, they post valuable information, you see it.
I think for example journa.host is an interesting experiment in making social media actually valuable - everyone there is a confirmed journalist of some sort.
Of course, it can never be perfect. But it allows for greater variety of content: I often find myself reading just two or three newspapers regularly, and in the end social media posts are useful supplement that gives me stories I might not otherwise see elsewhere. That said, I have a pretty strictly curated Mastodon feed.