• 6 Posts
  • 2.06K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • I mean, there have been some of the largest protests in American history. There’s really no reason for the administration to care though. Public approval doesn’t get them anything. If a third of the country protested tomorrow they would just dispute the numbers and carry on.

    If your goal is to create a white Christian ethnostate and never give up power, people you already don’t care about asking you not to isn’t going to stop you.

    We need more people taking more action, but protesting is just how you communicate that there are numbers to make it safe to resist. The protests themselves won’t do anything.







  • That never actually says they’re selling at a loss, just that they’re not using the same market based pricing structure as American businesses.

    Looking at some other sources, it looks like they overproduced materials to keep prices low, since their primary potential competition refuses to use state money to fund production of critical resources.

    It’s manipulative, but it’s not selling at a loss.
    It’s difficult to feel sympathetic towards us when we refused to invest in the industry and shutdown the people responsible for helping develop the industry.
    If it was that critical we should have just spent to money to develop the industries domestically, which would have made lower prices moot.

    Being upset that a country that calls itself Communist doesn’t follow free market ideology seems foolish.


  • Cool. You wrote an opinion that perfectly matched the opinion of a particular demographic that’s common on the site, and are now very offended that no one knew you were someone less common.
    Which also entirely draws the conversation away from you saying it’s good that the government pulled funding from an organization that’s doing something good because government messes everything up.

    They’re already a non-profit. Why are you upset that they got money from the government? Wouldn’t the ideal to you be an NGO that got money without being under government control, and was therefore free from business influence as well?

    Linux is a great example. It’s backed by a non-profit foundation, under the direction of mostly corporate advocates. That’s what people talk about when they talk about a non-profit being beholden to corporate money.
    The shape of Linux has steadily been pushed towards being more and more focused on server and data center operations, since that’s what the people in charge of funding allocation care about, and that’s what they’ll direct their parent organizations to contribute developers to working on.

    Your government sucks. I get that. It doesn’t mean I don’t expect more from mine, and it doesn’t mean that I reject the notion that I should have say in the management of the things around me.
    The NGO that you envision will do a better job managing the drainage where I live doesn’t answer to me, and I have no recourse if they mess up and flood my house.

    I’d like something like the NGO you envision, but with public accountability. This is often called a “government”.


  • Yeah, the lobbying question is a complicated one.

    In an ideal world it would be much closer to how the standards committees work. The issue isn’t people sharing their opinions and desires for how the system should work, it’s when they use inequitable means to bias the decision. My industry, security, has lobbied for official guidelines on security requirements for different situations. Makes it easier to tell hospitals they can’t have nurses sharing login credentials: government says that’s bad, and now your insurance says it’s a liability.

    The problem is that lobbying too often comes with stuff like a “we’re always hiring like minded people at our lobbying firm, if you happen to find yourself in the position to do so, give us a call.”.
    It’s too easy for people with a lot of money to make their voices more heard.

    It’s not that the wealthy and business interests should be barred from sharing opinions with legislators, it’s that “volume” shouldn’t be proportional to money. My voice as a person who lives near a river should be comparable to that of the guy who owns the car wash upstream when it comes to questions of how much we care about runoff going into the river.






  • One of the benefits of it being such a widely used system is that we don’t need to make a special effort to do so. It’s already been aggregated and copied around as part of routine optimization by any number of security conscious engineers who aren’t trying to make the world a worse place.

    I’ve personally worked on at least three systems at two employers where making an automated copy of the data regularly was just an early optimization and matter of etiquette.

    It’s a good opportunity to learn how to do it though! You have or can get all the tools you need on your computer.


  • I mean, trains exist, they’re just not the best in the US.
    You also seemed to be okay with driving, which startled me but is definitively a viable alternative in almost all cases.

    Given some of your other comments, I think I’m gonna take it as a “no” on the “telling the difference between travel at any cost and being more mad at systems and those who control them than individuals” question.



  • you’ll agree that in the meantime people need to stop traveling then?

    You’ll have to forgive my confusion and understand why I might have thought you had an issue with travel in general. Writing off trains and boats didn’t help either, nor saying that people who wanted to focus on alternatives to air travel were in favor of destroying the environment.


  • How far is traveling? What means do you find acceptable? And until when do you mean?

    Do I need to wait until I have access to a totally renewable train to go to the nice beach that’s a 90 minute drive away? What about the 25 minute drive to the flooded salt quarry that gives everyone a rash due to the stunning population of migratory waterfowl? The 15 minute drive to the park on the river with a vaguely unsettling murk to the water?