alvvayson
@alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on How do you think smartphone manufacturers will comply with EU's replaceable battery regulation? 9 hours ago:
We will have to see.
Apple can charge $400 more, but if Samsung doesn’t, then they will lose market share.
And the EU is still one of the worlds three biggest markets.
So I am not really concerned.
And worst case, I switch to a Fairphone, which might not be bleeding edge, but it is still a better phone than my previous gen flagship Samsung or the flagship iPhone that came before it.
I see it as just running 2 years behind.
- Comment on Controversial question 1 day ago:
Economic mobility is usually determined by things like IQ, EQ and other marketable skills. So I don’t really know if your proposal is the right way to measure it. But such data would at least give some insight.
In the USA, most research I have seen says they have low economic mobility, because the rich have access to the best schools, etc.
But still, it’s not zero. Both JD Vance and AOC are examples of economic mobility.
One of them still fights (or appears to fight) for the class they came from, the other is successfully recruited to serve the interests of the ruling class.
Were they born in 1908 (and ignoring race and gender for the moment), then probably both of them would have been leaders for the working class.
- Comment on Controversial question 2 days ago:
True, but nowadays most people don’t work in factories.
The modern equivalent would be the cashiers of Walmart and the baristas of Starbucks.
- Comment on can European intelligence substitute the American one? 2 days ago:
Also, when it comes to Russia, Ukrainian intelligence is top notch due to historical ties.
But TBH, I do think Europe needs to find a way to make peace with Russia and with the Middle-East, specifically Turkey, Egypt and Iran.
They are our direct neighbours. The cold war idea that we could have a powerful friend across an ocean, while having strained relationships with our direct neighbours just isn’t going to be a good strategy going forward.
- Comment on Controversial question 2 days ago:
Correct, but there is a lot of nuance.
Indeed, when things get bad, the public is willing to take risks. When everything is good enough, they don’t revolt.
However, successful revolts do require intelligent and capable leaders.
What the rich have realized, is that if they ensure smart and skilled kids get picked out of the drudgery and get comfortable working for the rich, then the exploited class will not really have anyone to lead them.
Put another way, in 1908, every factory had a few leaders workingnat the lowest levels. And they are the ones who spearheaded strikes and such.
Nowadays, society is really stratified in terms of skill.
Anyone who grew up poor, but had talent to organize, probably ended up in some kind of middle management or professional job and makes 2x the average.
- Comment on Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks 1 week ago:
I thought Googlers were paid $500K+ and already worked 60-80 hours weeks?
- Comment on Microsoft's ad-supported version of Office only saves to OneDrive 1 week ago:
The average person uses Google docs for free (well, at the price of selling their data).
And Microsoft is trying to compete with that with this offering.
I think NextCloud is the best competitor and they also have LibreOffice in the cloud.
- Comment on If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy 3 weeks ago:
Lemmy just tends to attract the best minds.
- Comment on If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy 3 weeks ago:
The people who worry about this have never been at the receiving end of exploitative capitalism.
For the vast majority of humanity, their life will most likely improve when they become a pet / zoo creature under an ASI.
An ASI will be most interested in gobbling together enough resources to spread across the universe. As for the earth and humanity, it will probably want to preserve it as the planet and species from which it was born.
Destroying earth or humanity will provide no benefit. It can obtain energy and materials from the rest of the solar system.
- Comment on Content curation in the Fediverse is better! 3 weeks ago:
I agree. It also works the other way in terms of censorship.
My original account was on an instance that once censored one of my comments. I don’t remember if they deleted my comment or banned me from the community.
On reddit, I had come to just accept that as a fact of life and every few years I would delete my old account and register a new one.
On Lemmy, I just switched to a different instance which is much more tolerant of free speech and I haven’t had issues since.
The irony is, my comments on the old instance can still be deleted, but only for users from that instance.
I don’t know the full details, but Lemmy definitely has the more 2000-2010 type of culture that allows people to speak their mind freely.
- Comment on You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them 4 weeks ago:
You are right, but you are just missing an important ingredient: a physical community.
It’s quite easy for autocrats and gangs to isolate and eliminate loners.
And as for the communities, there is a hierarchy. Police officers and soldiers have no hesitation to eliminate gangs and terrorists. That’s their job.
They will have a little more hesitation to attack civil organisations, e.g. sports clubs, political parties and trade union places. But eventually, if someone tells them that terrorist activities were being undertaken, they’ll just follow orders. The way this is done is by getting people unfamiliar with the community to come in and do the dirty job.
They will have the most hesitation to attack religious places of their own religion. Many of the grunts tend to still be religious/superstitious.
- Comment on You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them 4 weeks ago:
You are missing the point.
Those days might be numbered, but these places are the last bastion.
They will invade private homes, businesses and offices with impunity first.
Churches in particular have a long history of being relatively safe in (civil) war.
Not immune, just relatively.
- Comment on You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them 4 weeks ago:
The next step, in my opinion, is strong privacy and decentralized organization that fully leverages constitutional rights.
I.e. a privacy preserving social media where labour unions, political parties and religious groups can federate with each other. Servers hosted on their premises and members register through an on-premise process.
A church in a foreign country could generate a thousand aliases and distribute them to their federated sister organizations in a privacy preserving way. Only the church knows which organizations got which aliases and they protect this information.
Your local labour union chapter picks up 20 of those aliases and distributes them to members. They are the only one who knows the person behind the alias.
An observer in this private fediverse trying to obtain the identity would first need to approach the church. The church can stall them and warn downstream through a canary.
The labour union chapter observes the canary and immediately wipes all information.
And if that fails, then full I2P and Tor, with nodes hosted on-premise of churches, political parties and labour unions.
- Comment on Emergency Braking Will Save Lives. Automakers Want to Charge Extra for It 5 weeks ago:
Fair enough. I have an 8 year old Mercedes.
Perhaps I should get a newer car.
- Comment on Emergency Braking Will Save Lives. Automakers Want to Charge Extra for It 5 weeks ago:
My car gives a warning when it detects a potential collision.
Usually, it’s right before I start turning into a turn.
I get it, it’s 2-bit brain doesn’t realize that the car will not, in fact, drive straight into the wall.
It doesn’t realize that I have had my foot off the gas in anticipation.
I would really hate if the car would brake under those circumstances.
- Comment on Tripling renewables globally by 2030 is doable, says new IEA report 5 months ago:
Storage tech is indeed the laggard.
The most readily available form of stored energy is still natural gas.
We really need to change our energy pricing and taxation to reward green ways to store energy better.
- Comment on Lebanon’s health minister says 8 killed, 2,750 wounded by exploding pagers 5 months ago:
Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.
A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn’t instantly explode like this.
- Comment on Salvage operation for oil tanker in Red Sea not safe, EU says 5 months ago:
Thank you. I thought I had checked Wikipedia.
It seems smack in the middle between Eritrea and Yemen.
- Comment on Salvage operation for oil tanker in Red Sea not safe, EU says 5 months ago:
Does anyone know exactly where in the red sea this is?
I want to know if it’s in Yemens territorial waters or not.
- Comment on Why do big corporations get to claim losses, but small businesses can't? 6 months ago:
Because they manage to attract investment.
As long as investors are willing to give cash in exchange for equity, a company can operate on that cash and run at a loss.
- Comment on YSK most US states assign their electoral college votes by the state's popular vote 6 months ago:
He should have said almost every.
But thanks for pointing out the mathematical truth ☝️
- Comment on Dutch toilets 6 months ago:
Yep, but nowadays they are losing popularity. I don’t even know if you can still find them.
- Comment on Checkmate, Atheists 7 months ago:
The humiliation of losing to a black woman.
The past months the mood in America has been: not these two old geezers again.
I am honestly optimistic that it’s going to be a landslide for the Democrats without Biden. Americans are just sick of Trump and they didn’t want Biden to run again.
So the Democrats are giving the people what they want, while the Republicans are trying to force feed them something they don’t want.
Let’s see how this plays out.
- Comment on So is Israel just going to finish Palestine off? 8 months ago:
I know a lot of people don’t like the American First Past the Post system, but to be honest, even in a proportional system like here in the Netherlands, you end up with very similar dynamics.
Truth is, progressives are always a small minority, in every country. Because they are always ahead of the curve on change.
In the US, this means that you only get a handful of progressives in the most progressive districts and never a really progressive national government.
In the Netherlands, this means progressives are always represented, but need to compromise to form a government. And often, they even get skipped and the centrist and conservative parties form a coalition.
Truth be told, Biden is as progressive as you could hope to get in the USA.
And, while I do think it is important to criticize him - and even threaten to not vote for him - to enable him to move more towards the left, it is also important to vote for him.
Progressives always win, not through getting majorities, but because they have the right ideas and eventually the other parties catch up to them.
For recent examples, gay marriage in the USA or marihuana legalization are now law in the USA.
I am 100% confident that American policy on Israel will also shift thanks to progressive voices. And it will not require a progressive majority.
- Comment on So is Israel just going to finish Palestine off? 8 months ago:
Americans still care about the price of oil, which is set in a global market and where Saudi-Arabia and Russia have more influence than the USA.
Obviously, the extremist Arabs that overthrew their own leaders are also to blame. Where did I deny that?
- Comment on So is Israel just going to finish Palestine off? 8 months ago:
I don’t think you really have a lot of choices to be honest.
You’d first need to get new candidates to win a primary and then a general and the required majorities are lacking almost everywhere.
A more fruitful approach is to actually change public opinion.
It’s a long uphill battle, but it’s happening.
- Comment on So is Israel just going to finish Palestine off? 8 months ago:
For decades, Israel and the US (and European countries) have pursued a policy to destabilize middle eastern regimes.
People don’t realize this, but there was a wave of Arab nationalism that was killed by sponsoring Islamic extremists. Had that not happened, the middle east would be much more secular today than it is.
Israel attacking and destabilizing Lebanon and Syria and the US maintaining a dictator in Egypt are part of this strategy.
In turn, this leads to hate towards the West and Israel by the Muslims affected.
It won’t stop as long as American voters care much more about gas prices than about human rights. American politicians are willing to sponsor genocide to have some control on oil prices in order to win elections.
- Comment on Renters' hopes of being able to buy a home have fallen to a record low, New York Fed survey shows 9 months ago:
Would such a strategy legally work in the USA?
Here in the Netherlands, a plan to regulate maximum rents seems to be much more promising.
We will know if it worked in about 2-3 years.
- Comment on How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money 9 months ago:
Indeed, also it’s much nicer to use a shared high quality tool than to buy an el-cheapo disposable tool.
Even something simpel like a crowbar. I once borrowed a (shorter) professional crowbar after struggling with a (larger) cheap one. The thing I was trying to pry came out like butter.
Even though physics dictates that a shorter lever should be inferior, it just had a much better design and grip.
Better for our wallet, sanity and environment.
- Comment on Gaza war surgeon feels ‘criminalised’ after being denied entry to France 9 months ago:
I feel obliged to point out that, Brexit didn’t happen, then his rights as an EU citizen would have been violated. As far as I know, you can’t use the Schengen system against EU citizens.
But because he was British and Brexit happened, Germany could do this.
But I do wonder… if the French government would formally invite him, they should be able to overrule the German decision. It seems that they decided not to do that?