• 2 Posts
  • 163 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 25th, 2024

help-circle



  • ArchRecord@lemm.eetoMemes@sopuli.xyzSorry to be a bother...
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 days ago

    The most asinine, self-centered thing I’ve seen today has got to be you assuming that the emotional state of your employees, which the goods and services you offer depend on for sales, is something that they should simply magically suppress for the sake of customers.

    Do you think this employee is going to check the mood of each customer?

    Buddy, if every customer going through the checkout line at the grocery store I work for had this pin on, it would make judging how much small talk people want loads easier, and would save me, and them, a huge mental headache. That said, if only I were to choose to wear that pin, I don’t think indicating to customers how up I am for small talk would make me an asshole.

    If you were my boss, and wanted to deliberately disregard my mental state because you felt it would make you a few more bucks, that would make you the asshole.

    Get your priorities straight.


  • This headline is wildly misleading.

    From the study itself that was used to justify the ruling:

    there [was] insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ

    The determination about lower IQs in children was based primarily on epidemiology studies in non-U.S. countries

    Interesting, I wonder why they didn’t conduct these studies in the U.S, y’know, where this is supposedly a big issue for the EPA to take action on.

    There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts.

    Great, if we find out the total consumption is too much, we can simply have people not need to buy things like mouthwash, or certain extra-flouride toothpastes as much. Doesn’t seem like a water supply problem, seems like more of a “consumers buying too much of products they don’t need” problem.

    I can’t find even a single source online that mentions any area with a flouride level above the maximum recommended amount by the CDC and EPA. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the idea that this is something the EPA truly needs to take any action on.

    It looks like organizations like the “Flouride Action Network,” an anti-flouride organization, are celebrating this.

    The studies I could find cite differences in IQ with a few points maximum, and this is seemingly primarily due to heavy levels of consumption of flouride by pregnant women, not by the children themselves.

    To me at least, it seems like they should be recommending specifically pregnant women stop using mouthwash while they’re pregnant, and that very young children don’t use mouthwash. Not that they need to “take action” over drinking water flouride levels.


  • At least from my past experience observing the media sphere and demographics regarding crypto, it tends to just be newbies that are investing primarily due to the seeking of gains, but not for any sort of ideological reason, as opposed to the people who initially invested in crypto for its other freedom-preserving qualities.

    For instance, I had originally mined some Bitcoin years and years ago when I initially just thought the concept of a stateless, distributed-control monetary unit was an interesting concept. I held that bitcoin in a non-custodial (i.e. not on an exchange/company) wallet, because I believed in the actual values prescribed to Bitcoin at the time.

    Later, when my father wanted to try investing in crypto because he also thought it was interesting, he invested through an exchange, but refused to withdraw his money because he wasn’t that interested. It was just general intrigue, but not enough to overcome his apathy.

    In the Mt Gox days, it was just so early, and Bitcoin was generally so new as a concept, that people didn’t understand the point of self-custody as much. With FTX, it was the masses who downloaded their app simply because they saw it during the Super Bowl and wanted to give it a shot as an investment vehicle, but not because they had any clue what the original values were underpinning the technology.

    The people putting their money in the hands of these companies never cared about the ideological reasons for holding crypto (which I believe have now been totally overtaken by greed and wealthy VC firms), they just wanted to see if they could be the next person to get rich.

    In my eyes, that’s an ideology problem, not a problem with the technology, but I do see how we could very well disagree on this.




  • Which is why both sides have the right to protest, criticize, and argue over their respective viewpoints.

    If we attempt to ban certain forms of speech that don’t, say, immediately incite violence, then what we end up doing is allowing the intolerant people to force society to become intolerant by censoring opposing viewpoints, as long as they’re given any degree of control over the legislative process around what speech is allowed.

    We have freedom of speech, but not mandated respect for the beliefs you say with that speech. While they’re free to say it, everyone is free to say anything they wish against it, to not listen to it, and to drown it out.

    Society can already be intolerant of the intolerance without opening the door to legislation that could mandate intolerance of tolerant speech. We don’t have to legislate intolerant speech away to counter its usage.



  • I think the key point in the post was “If ‘unrealized gains’ can buy stuff-then they’re realized. Tax them.”

    Essentially, because the unrealized gains held in their stocks could be realized through a loan, all of their capital gains should be considered for taxation.

    As opposed to just the assets used as collateral, that is now effectively liquid, should be taxed as realized.

    I personally think we should do everything we can to disincentivize wealth hoarding, even if it’s an “unfair” or possibly somewhat broken system that does so, but it also doesn’t seem feasible as a kind of legislation you could convince anyone in the government to enact, since they’ll still be focusing on things like if it could possibly lead to a higher loss than the initial investment if they’re taxed on the gains for years, but it drops low enough to wipe out all the value they paid in tax and their gains, even if the actual price is higher than the purchase price.


  • I personally think it’s because a lot of people, to a degree, are still stuck in binary thinking.

    Sure, they might acknowledge that gender is a spectrum, and people can identify anywhere on that spectrum, but they can often still perceive the underlying traits often associated to that gender as inherently tied to it.

    So while someone might accept that trans girls exist, and are, in fact, girls, they might also carry with them the assumption that wanting your gender to be that of a girl means you also naturally want your body to replicate the stereotypical form of one.

    It’s sort of like a secondary wall that they have to break down. The first was regarding how gender itself is tied to identity, not solely to biological characteristics, but they’ve yet to break down the second of assuming that because you identify as something, you also want everything stereotypically considered to be a part of it.

    I’m no expert, nor am I trans myself, so take this with a large grain of salt, but considering years ago, I once had similar inclinations before getting closer with various trans people I now know personally, this is the best explanation I can come up with.





  • ArchRecord@lemm.eetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world"Freeloaders"
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 days ago

    Undocumented immigrants can’t file income tax, because they are undocumented. However, they also can’t utilize the majority of our costly social services, because they, obviously, don’t have documentation. They can’t sign up for welfare programs, utilize police resources for fear of being deported, etc.

    Overall though, they are also human. They produce similar economic demand to Americans. They pay sales tax. Their landlord pays tax on their rent. They are also often paid less than Americans because they have no ability to enforce the law through legal means (again, for fear of being deported), but still have to buy things like food, which is taxed.

    Thus, they tend to, at a bare minimum, take roughly about what they put in, leaving a mostly neutral effect on the economy.

    Immigration is generally regarded to boost innovation overall, lead to higher education rates within the workforce, and creates higher overall economic productivity., which is an effect on the economy that isn’t just taxes in, taxes out.

    Of course, the best option we have is to grant them amnesty, because that then means they can file & pay income taxes, can more easily be statistically measured and analyzed as a group, and can engage in class solidarity through union organization, which raises working conditions and wages for all workers.




  • This is kind of just a bad argument.

    Nobody is arguing that an abortion can save a woman from all consequences.

    Nobody is arguing that death is impossible as a result of abortion.

    But when somebody dies because something prevented them from getting a procedure that would have been highly likely to save them, that doesn’t come into conflict with the possibility of death from the procedure. It’s a matter of personal choice.

    Especially considering the maternal mortality rate (# of deaths per 100,000 live births) is 17.4, while the case fatality rate for abortions (# of deaths per 100,000 legal induced abortions) is just 0.45

    Now imagine how much higher that rate gets when abortions are performed illegally because legislation like this stops safe abortions from being possible, without curbing demand.

    Yes, people die from abortions. Yes, people die from pregnancy. Yes, this woman could have died from the abortion procedure even if she was able to get it.

    But her chance of death was significantly lower if she had been capable of getting an abortion, which she was not.


  • Wait, it’ll actually let you use local LLMs?

    That would legitimately help me out. I use LLMs a lot for simple data restructuring, or rewording of explanations when I’m reading through certain sources. I was worried they would just do a simple ChatGPT API integration and have that be the end of it, but maybe this will end up being something I’d actually use.