teawrecks
@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on 3 days ago:
The best counter example I’ve seen is Shintoism.
But on a separate note, i believe religion has an evolutionary advantage vs logic and reason, as evidenced by it being so prevalent throughout human history. So in the most literal sense, i believe humans wouldn’t have any progress without religion.
In order to survive, humans need to build societies that can adapt to the ever changing environments we find ourselves in.
One possibility is to use pure science, logic, and reason: educate every child on the scientific method, teach them how to not fall for logical fallacies, to be skeptical, to demand extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims, to repeat experiments and engage in peer review, to create ethical frameworks, and have a logical justification for the actions you take…
Another possibility is to use religion: brainwash a kid on what “good” looks like, and show them how to put on blinders to anything that might threaten that. Johnny down the street is “sinning”? Make him stop, that hurts our society. Father Dale is touching kids? Don’t lose sight of the goal, Father Dale is a great man, this is a personal struggle that we can help him through.
Which of those two methods of adaptation requires less energy? Because when an organism has to evolve, the organism that can do it using less energy will have the advantage. Religion, or the concept of morality in general, is a society’s selection pressure on itself. The best we can do is acknowledge this, and learn to wield it as a tool. And I believe that many leaders throughout human history, both political and religious, understood this well.
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
People who are interested in geography, geometry, cartography, political science, geopolitics, culture, cognitive biases, ethnocentrism
I maintain that none of those people are the ones interested in this movement, and if you believe they are, you haven’t spent any time thinking about it. Again, I’m looking for any actual legitimate argument in support of it. A condescending argument from hypothetical authority isn’t going to cut it.
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
Yeah, I’m open to any valid arguments for why it would matter, but I haven’t seen any. People who think land size should correspond to representation are…to be more diplomatic: not making any effort to think things through.
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 1 week ago:
CMV: this movement only matters to stupid people, and does not qualify as something “I should know”.
- Comment on YSK: US Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem publically bragged about killing her puppy 2 weeks ago:
That’s true, but you see why you can use that argument to take every single post from any other political community, slap “YSK” in front of it, and post it here, right? That’s not really the point of YSK. At least not why I’m here.
- Comment on YSK: US Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem publically bragged about killing her puppy 2 weeks ago:
What about people who have a habit of hitting dogs?
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 2 weeks ago:
In theory the US Federal govt should be split into branches so that it has power, but the checks and balances between branches prevent any single branch from dominating. Which sucks when all 3 branches collude to hand all the power to the executive branch, which then wields the Federal govt to dominate the states.
For the record, a similar system where the states remain separate with a centralized governing body, but with less power than a Federalist one is called a Confederacy…so yeah, we tried that in the US once too. On the flip side, Switzerland’s Confederation seems to be working out pretty great for them.
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 2 weeks ago:
What your describing is called a Republic. There are several benefits to such a model.
The most relevant was well summarized in MIB as “a person is smart, people are stupid”. A simple direct democracy is great until you are relying on an uninformed population to make a time-critical decision that requires expertise. If we instead elect people who are then expected to use tax dollars to consult experts, and then represent our interests by voting accordingly, we can theoretically avoid problems (such as the tragedy of the commons).
The downside happens when the representative takes advantage of the public’s ignorance, fosters it, and wields it for personal/oligarchic gain. Ideally the people are just smart enough to see that happening and vote them out before it becomes a systemic issue…
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, i couldn’t find anywhere on their site that indicated I would be able to download tracks I own. That would change the equation I think. Then maybe they only charge for streaming and track download bandwidth. I could behind something like that. Then it feels like a better version of Bandcamp.
Currently I use Tidal to supplement my self-hosted library, but that’s primarily due to music selection and artist compensation. If they didn’t have random tracks I want to play, I would use something else.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
Even if we assume there’s an achievable rate of growth that can consistently outpace owned plays at any given time, as with every business, there will come a day when growth slows. And at that point, they’ll be forced to solve the problem.
And then there’s all the questions of, can I download my tracks to play offline? What if they go out of business? How many artists/labels are even going to agree to this? What about tracks I buy outside of their platform? And what does “own” actually mean given that you never “own” music you buy physical media for, you don’t have any copyright, you can’t play that media for profit, you just have a license to listen to that copy personally. By default the artist “owns” their art. But do they have to give that ownership up to the co-op?
It’s going to be tough to convince people who don’t care to switch away from spotify, and there’s no reason for someone who can self-host to use it unless it’s somehow more effective at funding musicians than just buying their tracks directly.
I wish them luck making the idea work, but I think they have their work cut out for them.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
That’s fair, just…for this to scale, it needs to be competitive with existing streaming services. And if the experience for a listener is the same whether a democratic panel raises prices, or greedy enshittification raises prices, there’s not going to be an upside.
To me, the potential upside is identifying the problems with their revenue stream now out in the open, and addressing it now, rather than trying to build a captive audience now and pivot to something more sustainable later.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
I would need to buy a lot of CDs at this point and I’m not doing that anymore.
This is how the music industry is screwing artists.
Think about it. Hollywood is union, which ensures money and jobs make it down to every blue collar worker involved in every Netflix-funded project. But music isn’t union, there’s just a bunch of random bands, and middlemen who will gladly take everything. The record labels and streaming services turn a profit, pay their execs, and get away with sending fractions of a cent per play to the artists. Most artists don’t post to streaming services for the money, they do it just for the convenience of fans.
Giving money directly to an artist in exchange for their tracks or merch (CDs, Vinyls, etc) is the best way to fund an artist. Bandcamp is another middleman that enables this, but at least they have Bandcamp Fridays periodically, which is where they waive their cut and give the bulk of your payment directly to the artist.
IMO buying tracks on Bandcamp Friday + self-hosting Plex/Jellyfin + using Plexamp/Finamp on mobile is the best way to support music right now, and also future proofs your library.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
This is an interesting idea, but I would assume that over time, the number of “owned” streams would dominate the number of “new” streams, and thus eventually their operating costs would reach a point where they don’t have the revenue to cover it…
- Comment on Seed Swap – for trading seeds with others 5 weeks ago:
At least it’s not the third option…
- Comment on I self hosted a World of Warcraft server. 1 month ago:
Looking for Group. As someone else said, the ability to click “queue for dungeon”, be dropped into an instance with a bunch of random, and proceed to faceroll the dungeon without any thought or patience required.
The fun part of old school MMOs was the journey, not the destination. Modern MMOs have all optimized the journey out by making everything doable without ever being dependent on another player.
- Comment on I self hosted a World of Warcraft server. 1 month ago:
I know exactly what you’re feeling, and I totally get it. Still, if executed well, I’m at least impressed that they pulled it off. I would have sworn such an experience wasn’t possible.
But yeah, I’m not interested in having artificial multiplayer interactions.
- Comment on I self hosted a World of Warcraft server. 1 month ago:
As someone who believes LFG was the beginning of the end of MMOs, I can’t tell if I despise this or if I’m impressed.
- Comment on Tailscale addressing concerns over potential enshittification of the platform 1 month ago:
It said it was going to explain why enshittification wouldn’t happen to them, but didn’t.
- Comment on YSK that fracking is not safe. People living near fracking sites are more likely to develop serious diseases 1 month ago:
I agree that would be more environmentally friendly, but now you also need to train and employ how many nuclear experts to keep thousands of ships running safely? And this tech has existed for a while. If this was cheaper to do, I expect they would have already done it.
- Comment on YSK that fracking is not safe. People living near fracking sites are more likely to develop serious diseases 1 month ago:
For the record, the current technology we have to capture renewable energy is not capable of supporting the civilization we have built compared to how efficient oil and natural gas are as energy-dense molecules. Only very recently has battery technology come far enough to make it worth it to move a semi-truck any reasonable distance, but cargo ships are still going to be difficult to replace and account for a huge amount of pollution, as well as commerce we depend on. So it’s not a “slightly better profit margin”, as it would range from a literal decimation of society to straight up impossible to cut out all fossil fuels today.
But we should have started a global, methodical transition over 40 years ago, and the free market control over government and media has systematically prevented that. And THAT is unacceptable.
- Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google 1 month ago:
Letting perfection be the enemy of the good is why we can’t have nice things.
- Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google 1 month ago:
I mean…not that curious. It’s his entire livelihood at the moment.
- Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google 1 month ago:
To discuss the video in a comments section associated with it.
- Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google 1 month ago:
I agree it is that way currently, unfortunately, but it’s definitely a recent phenomenon (last 10y).
- Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google 1 month ago:
He switched to linux a while back. Now he’s trying to switch as much of the rest of his digital life to FOSS/non-profit stuff. He advocates for duckduckgo, firefox, paid email, graphene os, selfhosted vaultwarden, nextcloud, anything but google maps, kodi, etc.
- Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google 1 month ago:
I see you didn’t make it 40s into the video.
- Comment on I'm the creator of Seedit and I'm here to share how it works and clear up some Concerns/FUDS 2 months ago:
If it’s not obfuscating your IP address, then you’re open to getting targeted by anyone you interact with on a reddit-like platform. That sounds like a circle of hell I’d rather not visit.
- Comment on YSK - That there is a lot of trolling and brigading starting to happen around the LA peaceful protests to start violence. Here is a roadmap from 2015 on how they do it. 2 months ago:
That’s funny you say that, because this whole ordeal has made me realize that truth does not matter at all, and it’s a privilege to be able to live as though it does. But in most countries and throughout most of history, what is true doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is what people believe to be true. And only if you work very hard as a society, and get lucky, do those two things coincide.
Case in point: it could have been the case that Obama was a perfect president who made the best possible decisions to most effectively care for all constituents. But that doesn’t matter if right wing media convinces half the country that he’s a radical communist terrorist who is ignoring the constitution to enrich his deep state. Regardless of what Obama did, what happens in response is what people believe he did.
🎶No one else was in the room where it happened🎶
- Comment on YSK - That there is a lot of trolling and brigading starting to happen around the LA peaceful protests to start violence. Here is a roadmap from 2015 on how they do it. 2 months ago:
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t matter. The GOP playbook has been: accuse the other side of doing the bad thing, and then do the bad thing, so that when you get accused it sounds like more of the same.
It doesn’t matter if we have 1000 independently verified videos of Elon himself paying vote counters to fake results while holding the newspaper of that day up next to his birth certificate. People against trump will say “yeah, we know”, and people for Trump will say, “he won, get over it”.
It’s the same reason the courts found Trump guilty of falsifying records, and then did nothing: that’s not how this situation resolves itself.
- Comment on Plex now will SELL your personal data 2 months ago:
I don’t know why people use dishwashers. It’s in the kitchen. A lawn mower is a no brainer, yet people still use dishwashers??