JasSmith
@JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Concealed Handguns Create a Climate of Fear, Gun Industry Research Reveals 6 days ago:
When has the government failed to protect your or family members?
Just so I’m clear, you think I’m not allowed to care about others? I’m not even allowed to care about my own safety until my family has been attacked? Wild take. I’m glad society isn’t comprised of people like you. I care about others as well as my family. Most people aren’t murdered and raped and assaulted each year. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about murder and rape and assault.
- Comment on Concealed Handguns Create a Climate of Fear, Gun Industry Research Reveals 6 days ago:
If the government won’t protect citizens they have the right to protect themselves.
I’m not American and I don’t care how much you like or dislike the NRA. Your comment sounds like authoritarian bootlicking.
- Comment on Concealed Handguns Create a Climate of Fear, Gun Industry Research Reveals 6 days ago:
Good. An armed society is a polite society. Guns are the great equaliser. Larger and stronger people aren’t free to assault smaller and weaker people as they wish. There are societies like Singapore and China where crime is punished so severely that people don’t need personal protection. Sadly, today, that’s not how most of the West is run.
- Comment on UK | Man arrested in dawn raid after sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action 6 days ago:
The UK has been arresting people for saying offensive things for a long time. It’s just that most of the victims were on the right, and most people on the left were cheering for it. Now that the laws are being used against their side and their causes, they’re sad and outraged. It’s a tale as old as democracy: people don’t care until it materially affects them. Every time we give up rights or give governments more power, no matter how justified we think the cause today, those powers will eventually be turned against us.
- Comment on UK inflation rises by more than expected to 3.8%, largely driven by air fares 1 week ago:
Flights account for 0.51% of the CPI and 0.41% of the CPIH, which includes owner-occupied housing costs. They’re not seasonally adjusted, so they’re just averaged over the year. You’re right that there are some months which are heavier on certain items, but that doesn’t impact the calculation, just the realised inflation by individuals.
- Comment on Dairy farmers say worker shortage is threatening UK food security 2 weeks ago:
Isabelle Thiebaut, a co-author of the opinion and president of an European organization for dieticians, said that it is important to explain to parents about “weight-loss and psychomotor delays, undernutrition, anemia” and other possible nutritional shortfalls caused by a vegan diet for children.
- Comment on Dairy farmers say worker shortage is threatening UK food security 2 weeks ago:
Dairy and meat are important components of the diets of children.
Health aspects of vegan diets among children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analyses
Meta-analyses showed lower protein, calcium, vitamin B2, saturated fatty acid, and cholesterol intakes, and lower ferritin, HDL and LDL levels as well as height in vegan compared to omnivorous children/adolescents.
The evidence indicates that vegan, but not vegetarian, diets can restrict growth relative to omnivorous children and increase the risk of being stunted and underweight, although the percentage affected is relatively small.
Vegan diet in young children remodels metabolism and challenges the statuses of essential nutrients
Detailed analysis of serum metabolomics and biomarkers indicated vitamin A insufficiency and border‐line sufficient vitamin D in all vegan participants. Their serum total, HDL and LDL cholesterol, essential amino acid, and docosahexaenoic n‐3 fatty acid (DHA) levels were markedly low and primary bile acid biosynthesis, and phospholipid balance was distinct from omnivores. Possible combination of low vitamin A and DHA status raise concern for their visual health.
Both groups [vegans and vegetarians] had lower bone mineral content (BMC). The difference for vegetarians attenuated after accounting for body size but remained in vegans (total body minus the head: –3.7%; 95% CI: –7.0, –0.4; lumbar spine: –5.6%; 95% CI: –10.6, –0.5). Vegetarians had lower total cholesterol, HDL, and serum B-12 and 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] without supplementation but higher glucose, VLDL, and triglycerides. Vegans were shorter and had lower total LDL (–24 mg/dL; 95% CI: –35.2, –12.9) and HDL (–12.2 mg/dL; 95% CI: –17.3, –7.1), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, iron status, and serum B-12 (–217.6 pmol/L; 95% CI: –305.7, –129.5) and 25(OH)D without supplementation but higher homocysteine and mean corpuscular volume. Vitamin B-12 deficiency, iron-deficiency anemia, low ferritin, and low HDL were more prevalent in vegans, who also had the lowest prevalence of high LDL. Supplementation resolved low B-12 and 25(OH)D concentrations.
Adults are a little more resilient and some can survive on a carefully designed vegan diet.
- Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain 3 weeks ago:
I like it in theory but there have been no real world examples of it actually working. There are only supplementary implementations which exist next to representative democracy. One of the most cited reasons that it could not work is the mental and decision load expected of an average elected representative. They make many decisions each day, big and small. When agreeing on a Bill, they might read tens of thousands of words, negotiate with hundreds of other representatives, and make dozens of various deals to achieve their preferred outcome. In a direct democracy system, either those bills would be split into 10,000 constituent parts, and each would be voted on by the public; or there would be 10,000 ombibus bills proposed by citizens, each with subtle variations, and the public would be expected to vote on them. Or both of those scenarios, at the same time.
The outcome seems painfully clear to me: in both of those scenarios, 98% of the public would check out. That’s far too many words to read, far too many meetings to hold, far too much information to process and on which to provide reasonable judgement. The legislature would be controlled by a hyper connected and independently wealthy 2% who would lobby for their preferred bill using their fortunes and connections.
- Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain 3 weeks ago:
I’m not so sure. Humans are incredibly diverse by nature. We have evolved to inhabit every ecological niche in existence, and then we invented many more. We can’t get a population to agree that the sky is blue or that water is wet or the Earth is round or that vaccines are safe. There is always at least 10% who disagree on any subject. When you map each 10% group as a Venn diagram, it covers everyone in the population on some issue, big or small. In terms of governance, this means that any direction chosen will be opposed by a relatively large minority. There are only two options here and it is absolutely binary: majority rule, or minority rule. History has taught us that minority rule is horrific. It tends to create massive inequality, death, suffering, and eventually revolution. Democracy is the solution presented for majority rule, and I am intimately aware of the phrase “tyranny by the majority.” In fact I would categorise democracy as exactly that. Despite that, it is better than the alternatives.
So I think we are evolutionary bound to a best case scenario in which the majority chooses a generally agreed upon direction, while a loud minority gets really angry. Democracy ensures that that loud minority doesn’t get violent because they’re given a seat at the table and a voice, even if they don’t get their way this time.
- Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain 3 weeks ago:
It’s far from perfect but it’s better than everything else humanity has attempted.
- Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain 3 weeks ago:
Cap immigration at 2% a year. It’s very clear to me that immigration in recent decades has been far too high. It has undermined the labor market, the housing market, and it may undermine national cohesion.
Honestly, any party which achieves only this will win the next four elections. 95% of the Kingdom wants lower immigration. I’ve never seen an issue this unifying in politics in my entire life. You can’t get 95% of the country to agree on anything. Except this.
- Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain 3 weeks ago:
The Green Party wants to significantly liberalise immigration to the UK. This is at a time when 95% of the Kingdom wants lower immigration. For this reason (and many more), the Greens are currently polling at 9%. They reason they don’t get much airtime is because their policies are unpopular and people don’t like them.
- Comment on Starting out with Selfhosting 3 weeks ago:
I would build a cheap PC based on a G series Intel CPU. The G7400 is cheap and will handle anything you want to transcode, plus won’t get bottlenecked with IO and other processes you might want to run later like the Arr stack. You probably don’t need more than 8GB of RAM. This will give you lots of flexibility to choose the right OS which suits you, which software you want, upgrades, and especially HDDs down the road (if you get a case with HDD slots). I started small and ended up with 15 disks over the years.
Unraid ($250) is one option but it’s expensive and buggy. TrueNAS is a very popular ZFS based solution which is free. Windows is also a surprisingly good option. It’s your lowest effort option by far. You can replicate Unraid functionality with SnapRAID and DrivePool ($50).
- Comment on Starting out with Selfhosting 3 weeks ago:
ChatGPT can be surprisingly useful when tackling the endless bugs and weird and unexpected differences on each Linux distro. I think you’re missing out. It shaves off 30-40% of the time it takes me to arrive at the right solution. It’s obviously not omniscient, but it provides a lot of ideas which I had not considered. Usually one of those paths works.
- Comment on After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter 3 weeks ago:
In a capitalist system, that is what they are supposed to do. They are even compelled by law to maximise their return to investors. You are attacking them for stating a fact, believing that by merely uttering the fact, they are endorsing it.
- Comment on After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter 4 weeks ago:
I don’t think Microsoft has cared about people pirating Windows for decades. They still permit people to use the MAS. It’s like two seconds to activate Windows for free forever now.
- Comment on After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter 4 weeks ago:
They massively over-hired and over-acquired during covid. Demand spiked and they started poaching every studio and developer they could find. These layoffs were likely always the plan for when demand dropped again, and when they needed to streamline and consolidate the studios they purchased.
- Comment on After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter 4 weeks ago:
-10 downvotes for stating a fact.
- Comment on ‘Why the hell did we ever drop it?’: Labor should push for new carbon tax, ex-Treasury head says 1 month ago:
Well, making necessities more expensive is difficult to sell no matter how it’s packaged. Like it or not, oil is used in everything from transporting food, to growing food, to medicine and supplements, to commuting for work, to home insulation and building, to iPhones and computers. Making those things more expensive, no matter the righteousness of the intention, hurts especially the working classes and the poor. Targeted subsidies to compensate them for their loss is impossible to fairly calibrate, and usually results in even greater political turmoil.
Carbon taxes can work if the country is wealthy and can afford the productivity loss (and the citizens are willing to give up that economic progress and wealth). For a nation like the UK, with massive economic problems, a growing underclass, astronomically high housing costs, and spiraling costs for necessities like food, a carbon tax is nothing other than a direct attack on the poor and political suicide.
- Comment on I worked at an escort agency. This is how it changed my attitude to sex 1 month ago:
A transaction (like selling sex) requires two parties. If you make one side illegal, the act itself is illegal. The only distinguishing factor is who gets punished. Sex work can’t exist without people buying it, so sex work is illegal. Sweden has chosen not to prosecute people who sell sex.
- Comment on I worked at an escort agency. This is how it changed my attitude to sex 2 months ago:
Which makes it illegal. If you prosecute either the customer or supplier of a good or service, you have made it illegal.
- Comment on I worked at an escort agency. This is how it changed my attitude to sex 2 months ago:
While I agree, people don’t often think of countries like Sweden as very backwards.
- Comment on GOG now ask for donations when you buy games 2 months ago:
I’ll allow it. I like what they’re doing over there. No DRM. Download everything. Game preservation. I wish they had done a better job with Galaxy but it looks like Microsoft is about to do their own store aggregator now so maybe that’s moot.
- Comment on how are my fellow peeps hosting your music collection these days? 2 months ago:
Plexamp is mind blowingly good. Great UX. Perfect legibility. No discovery/ads up in your face. Just you listening to your music how you like it. Streaming is ROCK SOLID. Downloads work flawlessly. It just relies on proper metadata in Plex.
- Comment on Plex has paywalled my server! 2 months ago:
FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you’re happy with that (it’s not activated by default for security reasons).
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In your Plex server settings, go to Network, enable “Show Advanced”.
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Near the bottom, find the textbox that says
List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth -
In this field, enter the local IP address of any Plex client(s) you want to keep using if your internet (or the Plex cloud) is down.
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A example:
192.168.0.50 -
Save the setting, done.
#Important thing to be aware of:
What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.
Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP’s you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the “main living room device” plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.
If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:
192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:
192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255) 192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)
And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.
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- Comment on Plex has paywalled my server! 2 months ago:
Ditto. There is a crowd on Lemmy who seem to get angry whenever people are happy to pay for software and I do not understand it. Surely we want developers to be paid for their hard work? Don’t we want them to able to comfortably live?
- Comment on Majority of Australians think China will be world’s most powerful country by 2035, poll finds 2 months ago:
I agree that authoritarian governments have more latitude than democracies. The CCP displaced up to two million people when it built the The Three Gorges Dam. There was no recourse. No ability to object. People who had lived on the land for generations were simply told to leave. Some were lucky to be given meagre government apartments to live in elsewhere, but that was it. It’s much easier to build large infrastructure projects when you don’t have to worry about pesky things like property laws, health and safety, and human rights.
If your argument is that authoritarianism will win over democracy in the long term, it’s an interesting debate. Most of human history was some form of authoritarianism. Some form of might makes right. There have been small democratic experiements in history (see Greece), but modern democracy is a relatively new experiment. I hope it succeeds, because I like it a lot more than the alternatives.
- Comment on UK | Fewer than half of young men believe abortion should be legal, poll finds 2 months ago:
Telling people what not to do is far less effective than giving them positive and aspirational advice. Jordan Peterson literally told boys to clean their room and he became outrageously popular overnight. How sick is our culture when boys are so starved for wholesome masculine guidance that they’ll cling to the first man who gives them healthy paternal advice like “clean your room”? Something people on the left in particular do not understand about this issue is that telling boys to be more like girls doesn’t work. They need to be told it’s normal and healthy to be aggressive and competitive and physical, as long as it’s done in a way which doesn’t hurt people. Masculinity isn’t evil. Anyone who calls it “toxic” should be admonished and derided. We need Aragorn like figures in the real world to show boys what healthy masculinity looks like.
- Comment on Majority of Australians think China will be world’s most powerful country by 2035, poll finds 2 months ago:
This is an excellent question. I think the major question mark hanging over this projection is the role that automation will play in the future. Both in terms of physical production, and in terms of white collar or office work. One could argue that economies which are best positioned to take advantage of automation might feel the impact of a declining workforce less, but then those same societies run the risk of high unemployment and low domestic economic demand for products and services. The balance is crucial and economies are generally slow to pivot.
- Comment on UK | Fewer than half of young men believe abortion should be legal, poll finds 2 months ago:
I don’t think framing their issues in terms of women’s issues is helpful. “But what about men” is just a unhelpful when dealing with issues for women. Feminism did great things to advance the interests of women, and it required coordination and struggle over many decades against a system which wasn’t receptive to their needs. Now, each year, the U.S. spends close to $8B on women’s initiatives spanning many areas from healthcare to education. If you’re suggesting men need their own movement, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps what we’re seeing is the early formation of that. Messy, uncoordinated, and immature, as are all early movements.
In the mean time, I don’t think “be better” is a resonant message. It was rightly dismissed when people said it to women in the 1960s and it should be dismissed now. These issues are structural and require structural solutions. I think a big part of this is economic. Men are taught from a young age (by men and women) that unless they make a lot of money, they’re worthless. Society is offering fewer and fewer opportunities for men in traditionally blue collar industries to thrive. If we offer few opportunities and call them worthless for not succeeding, this is a recipe for societal instability.