Tiresia
@Tiresia@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly bans LibreOffice developer's email account, blocks appeal 1 week ago:
If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?
Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.
So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.
So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.
So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.
Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals.
- Comment on Just a reminder that one out of three calories produced in the US gets thrown away because of shit like this 2 weeks ago:
Daily reminder that food waste is necessary to make sure there will be enough when there is a bad harvest. Like when climate change massively reduces crop yields, or a forest fire burns down your food forest.
To some extent this can be mitigated with preserves, but preserves don’t last forever and also cost labor and resources to prepare and recycle. Sometimes harvests are better than expected 10 years in a row. Sometimes they’re catastrophically worse 10 years in a row. Sometimes you suddenly need to feed more people, sometimes you suddenly have better things to do than prevent food waste. You fundamentally can’t prevent waste without risking shortage.
Capitalism is bad, especially when its mask slips and profit opportunities are wasted to hurt people to enforce the hierarchy that capitalism actually cares about. But please make sure you have plenty of food to waste whenever you try to set something up on your own.
- Comment on repair cafes are oriented to “give you fish”, rather than “teach a man to fish” 3 weeks ago:
In that case, check out this list of repair cafes and other DIY stuff around Europe. It’s far from complete, but there are repair cafes in the Netherlands, England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Poland.
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 3 weeks ago:
Circuit breakers cost money and provide no benefit to the park operator, so it makes sense that they would prefer to sell the electricity for a negative price instead as long as that negative price costs them less than the circuit breaker.
Also, solar parks in Europe are subsidized, so beholden to government demands. From the perspective of the government and the public good, it’s better if the electricity is sold for a negative price than if the capacity to produce it for free is wasted, because it can still be used for productive ends. The value for buyers is positive, but because it’s a buyer’s market the electricity is still sold at a loss because the buyers can threaten to go to a different solar park operator.
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 4 weeks ago:
Nuclear safety standards in most western countries are legally defined as whatever was high enough to make the reactors unprofitable (with language such as “the highest reasonably attainable level of safety”). This results in ridiculous scenarios like nuclear reactors being expected to store their waste perfectly for 100,000 years even if nobody attends to it while fossil fuel plants kill millions with polluted air and agriculture just pisses pollution into the environment. We build monuments to nuclear waste so that future civilizations may know to fear it properly even if all contact is lost because oh no what if like ten of these hypothetical post-post-apocalyptic people die, while hundreds of millions are set to die right now because of the climate change that waste could have mitigated.
Nuclear reactors are safe enough that grad students can operate them. If the entire world electrical supply ran on electricity you could put the nuclear waste in a couple hundred oil drums and drop those in an olympic swimming pool and people nearby would be under less risk than from a steel mill.
And yes, without the nuclear arms industry it would have made more sense to develop cheaper and safer fuels like thorium. But nuclear disasters are like train crashes - terrible, of course, but vastly overblown by the media in a way that somehow coincides perfectly with fossil fuel/car industry interests.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 2 months ago:
It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 2 months ago:
Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.
People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.
So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 2 months ago:
That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.
- Comment on Blizzard's Overwatch Team Just Unionized: 'What I Want To Protect Most Here Is The People' 2 months ago:
Besides, better working conditions for the team means more mentally healthy workers means a better and more creative product.
- Comment on Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like 3 months ago:
Sorry for not engaging with the content, but please add paragraph breaks. kthx
- Comment on Full Circle 3 months ago:
Tell that to the 10% of the German population that didn’t survive WW2.
- Comment on We’ve unlocked a holy grail in clean energy. It’s only the beginning. 3 months ago:
Click the “paywall” link in the post body.