Pretty hopeful news actually.

MTG is among the most seemingly dedicated to being a horrible, bigoted piece of shit, and yet even she is recognizing that a platform of being a horrible, bigoted piece of shit is no longer serving her.

Fuck her forever. But I’ll take this specific brand of opportunism as a positive sign.

As a lifelong celcius user I have a very intuitive sense of how 23 degrees celcius feels. I have no intuitive sense of how 50 degrees Fahrenheit feels.

If you’re used to a system then it’s intuitive.

That’s a good point. It’s just kinda funny because my reaction to it is basically “wow. maybe he actually used to be a real human.”

I think probably this just illustrates that he’s not genuine. That said I like your reflection that past behaviour should not be used as evidence against who a person is currently. That’s probably a good baseline, even if the past evidence could actually be viewed in a positive light.

Anyways. Thanks for the thoughtful exchange.

I basically agree with you, but the subtext is a little different.

I don’t think this photo is damning in any way. It looks like some kids having fun in a pretty typical way. It’s pretty normal for kids to “joke,” and play around with gender. But this dude had some fun as a teen and now he’s trying his damnedest to ensure no one ever gets to express themselves in a way that is incongruous with their agab. It’s worth pointing out that that’s shitty for some specific reasons.

It is however a classic trope. Being “one of the good ones,” affords certain privileges until is doesn’t. It is also absolutely a despicable card to play.

Say that’s true. Do you then actually believe that if you’re not smart or you “don’t have drive,” you somehow deserve to be unhoused or starve, to be unable to access healthcare?

I’m all for people improving their lives, but as a baseline I just don’t believe that certain people deserve the consequences of horrible poverty just because they didn’t or couldn’t perform academically.

Also what’s the justification for having a system that allows employers to exploit workers by paying poverty wages while materially benefiting from that labor?

This is not a very good article.

It’s full of very weird qualifiers: “not a programmer,” “studied computer science,” “tech writer.” This person is not an average user, and they kind of do everything they can to make sure the reader knows that. Then, while trying to say Linux is for average users, the author suddenly is claiming to be just that.

Linux is easier to use now than when I started using it, a little over six years ago. But it does require at least a basic curiosity to learn.

I don’t really think it’s fair to get mad at someone for prioritizing meeting their own needs. It is however entirely fair to be furious about societal structures that place increased financial value on industrialization and privatization over community cohesion.

Your teeth are bared in the wrong direction. We do in fact have a common enemy here.

Yes. This on repeat.

I honestly don’t think we need to settle on trans oceanic shipping as a hard requirement.

Also, in terms of transportation-based emissions, personal vehicle usage accounted for 58% of the total emissions in the US in 2019. This number doesn’t need to exist. The fossil fuel industry has structured cities the way they are and lobbied against efficient transportation in order to make themselves more money.

Like even if we’re accepting trans oceanic freight as a given, which I don’t think we should on the scale we do now, emissions could be drastically reduced mostly by better planning of transportation.

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works

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All I’m trying to point out is that distinct cultures are worthy of respect and shouldn’t be glossed over.

But be real with me: can you think of a single effort for “planetary unification” that wasn’t a total nightmare? I sure can’t.

Fire pistons are so damn cool. Yeah, that makes sense then.

I’m really not “arguing against agriculture,” I’m pointing out that there are other modes of subsistence that humans still practice, and that that’s perfectly valid. There are legitimate reasons why a culture would collectively reject agriculture.

But in point of fact, agriculture is not actually more efficient or reliable. Agriculture does allow for centralized city states in a way that foraging/hunting/fishing usually doesn’t, with a notable exception of many indigenous groups on the western coast of turtle island.

A study positing that in fact, agriculturalists are not more productive and in fact are more prone to famine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/

But the main point I was trying to make is that different expressions of human culture still exist, and not all cultures have followed along the trajectory of the dominant culture. People tend to view colonialism, expansion and everything that means as inevitable, and I think that’s a pretty big problem.

This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.

Humankind isn’t a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.

It’s not that it took 1 million years to “figure out” farming. It’s that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don’t practice agriculture, because it’s not actually advantageous in many ways – stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.

Also where did you come up with the number 12,000 for “figuring out” the combustion engine? Genuinely curious. Like were we “working on it” for 12k years? I don’t get it. But this isn’t exactly a net positive and has come with some pretty disastrous consequences. I say this because you’re proposing a linear path for “humanity” forward, when the reality is that humans are many things, and progress viewed in this way has a tendency toward racism or at least ethnocentrism.

But also yeah, the point of this meme is “artists are valuable.”

Signal releases their own self-updating apk on their site, and this release doesn’t use Google services for push notifications. There are legitimate reasons why publishers sometimes avoid f-droid.

Also there’s Molly, which is a signal fork that allows database encryption; or Session, which doesn’t require a phone number for account registration and is decentralized. Both of these forks have repos that you can add to f-droid.

I do understand the hesitance to use a platform that has its infrastructure in the US, but I will say that international compliance with the US is a problem even if the infrastructure is located elsewhere. Session is a really promising option, since it’s decentralized, and I’d love to see more people using it.

I have no problem with creating drm-free copies of ebooks, and absolutely hard no on stealing from libraries.

But I wasn’t even saying that. I’m just saying borrow and read the books as per the usual method from libraries. Libraries are awesome and there to be used. I love that public and private funding still gets directed toward the free sharing of media in libraries, reducing (not erasing) the actual need for piracy through their existence, especially for books.

Now what I’m betting is that this is for an overpriced textbook, in which case by all means create copies and sideload them onto an ereader that allows this.

Getting an e-reader that allows for sideloading is probably the easiest and cheapest workaround for this problem. You can often get them used for quite cheap. It doesn’t give the physical copy, but is more than likely a better reading experience than trying to print out volumes yourself.

Then you can also “borrow” digital books from libraries, among other things.

Or, for that matter, you could just go to a library in person.