UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all 2 weeks ago:
US Lenders: “Hey, you want some money from the infinity free money spigot”
A handful of nerds paying attention: “Well, if they drink from the money fountain, we’re leaving!”
- Comment on dollah 2 weeks ago:
/r/writingprompts strikes again
- Comment on Using a VPN May Subject You to NSA Spying 2 weeks ago:
Who doesn’t love Farscape?
- Comment on dollah 2 weeks ago:
Are you kidding? Can you imagine what a piece of human artifice from 5 million years ago would be worth to the right collector?
- Comment on dollah 2 weeks ago:
I’m going to take a line from Hob Gadling
Look, I’ve seen death. I lost half my village to the Black Death. I fought under Buckingham in Burgundy. It’s not like I don’t know what death is. Death is… stupid.
Nobody has to die. The only reason people die is… is 'cause everyone does it. You all just go along with it. But not me. I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to die.
- Comment on dollah 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Knowing that boomers had the "hate my wife/husband" humor because they were rushed to marry borderline strangers and didn't believe in therapy but can't prove it 2 weeks ago:
Happiest couple I know was in an arranged marriage by their parents starting at the age of 9.
They grew up together, went to the same schools, shared hobbies, were fully familiar with each other’s extended families, and the future-wife ended up going down the aisle slightly pregnant. They’ve been together for nearly 50 years, have three kids (one of whom was a friend in high school), and are both thoroughly convinced that American romances are dumb, shortsighted, and a big reason for the country’s endemic poverty.
Of course, this family is also stupid rich.
The couples that I see fail are consistently either poor to the point that they can’t afford a basic standard of living or where one parent is traveling all the time while the other is stuck with perpetual child care. Inevitably one (or both) cheat, or just have a series of meltdowns that end in a break up.
The handful of couples I know where one partner was closeted or just slow to recognize their own queerness seem to be some of the happiest. The relationships tend to be open or poly, to accommodate one or the other. But neither seem to mind. I even know one couple that did get divorced (primarily because the wife was constantly traveling), but you’d never know it given how much time they end up spending together when she’s home.
The “I hate my wife” crowd I do know tends to be the ones that are traveling so much they never really see one another except to deal with some financial bullshit, housework, or kids.
- Comment on Using a VPN May Subject You to NSA Spying 2 weeks ago:
like in the old days of illegal wiretapping when throughout the conversation one would randomly say “bomb”, “arson”, “nuke” etc.
- Comment on Using a VPN May Subject You to NSA Spying 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Taxes are cool 2 weeks ago:
Taxes are not theft. They are contributing to the group that shares resources like water and services like roads.
They are not contributing to anything. Taxation is fully decoupled from public spending, which is why the US can issue $1.8T in new Treasury bonds in a year to no noticeable effect.
Public utilities (such that exist - most of them have been privatized in everything but name) operate on the expectation that the staff providing engineering expertise and materials can enjoy a reasonably comfortable quality of life. Setting aside that most utilities bill separately from state and local taxation (I pay a monthly water bill and a gas tax per gallon to fund these amenities), they are provided at an extraordinary mark-up that the actual staff don’t get to enjoy. As a case in point, Houston waste removal services have been chipped away at since COVID, with staff working longer hours for lower pay using outdated equipment. The mayor has outsourced more and more of the work to a private contractor owned by one of his mega-donor friends. What money is collected via property taxes goes first into the profits of the private contracting agencies, then to their administrators, and only at last to trickle down on the actual laborers collecting the trash.
Meanwhile, the housing and personal transport and groceries and other lifestyle amenities required by the waste management workers is… once again outsourced to the private sector, where owners take their cut first and labor gets the dredges. The end result is a working class mired deeper and deeper into debt, while the landed class grows fatter and richer.
This isn’t taxation paying for labor or materials. This is taxation paid out as a rent to landlords and cronies.
The problem with taxes is who is taxed.
That’s a system functioning as intended. Taxation is rent-seeking at the governmental scale. You don’t tax your aristocrats, because they’re supposed to be the recipients of the labor surplus. You tax the laborers, because you need a legalized mechanism for extracting any surplus remaining with them, in order to redistribute it to your aristocratic peers.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 67 comments
- Comment on Taxes are cool 2 weeks ago:
Wow. Damn. I guess facts don’t care about my feelings.
- Comment on Taxes are cool 2 weeks ago:
That your conclusion seems locked-in on this possibility as the only solution
I’m mostly just being contrary.
Currency and Taxation CAN and HAVE been weaponized as you described, but so has a carrot.
You’re going to have to cite how carrots were weaponized by the state to legitimize violence.
- Comment on Taxes are cool 2 weeks ago:
Anyone who disagrees is welcome to do the research by living in any number of failed states.
Currency is a tool of authoritarian governments to extract labor via the threat of poverty and state sanctioned violence.
Taxes are a means of legitimizing that violence by recharacterizing an extortionary rent as interpersonal debts, and the violence of collections as just compensation
- Comment on We Spoke To Game Devs And All Of Them Hate DLSS 5: 'What The F***, Nvidia?' 2 weeks ago:
It looks more like something you’d see on the cover of Vogue, certainly.
- Comment on My FWB is still ignoring me so I'm sexting with my dealer 2 weeks ago:
There’s “playing with fire” and then there’s “using a lit match to check the bottom of a gas tank”
- Comment on Animals noticing 2 weeks ago:
This would be funnier if we weren’t deploying massive AI data-centers to destroy the last surviving mega-fauna.
- Comment on Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field 2 weeks ago:
Classic Authoritarian Log Flume
- Comment on Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field 2 weeks ago:
Seems like you don’t really need to fork the system until someone applies DOB field in a meaningful way.
Even in such a situation, I would suspect the short-term solution is simply a patch or crack to neuter the functionality that the DOB field is supposed to implement. A full fork seems unnecessary, even counterproductive, since it would define your OS as meaningfully distinct (and noticeably out of compliance) with a standard installation.
- Comment on Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field 2 weeks ago:
What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field.
The timing is dogshit.
- Comment on Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora 2 weeks ago:
I heard the big banks were trying something similar shortly before the '08 crash. And the Enron/Worldcomm crew right before 9/11.
Certainly possible they’ve got an exit strategy lined up. But the problem is that they’re always just a little too greedy and too high on their own supply. During the '14 mini-recession, reinflating the bubble economy was a bipartisan goal. After the '20 COVID crash, there was broad consensus in cranking open the money hose and flooding the economy with cheap cash. '08, '14, and '20 set a big historical precedent for the “We’ll never let you fail” policies of the federal government. And so we’ve diluted a lot of the short term pain of economic contraction into the longer term pains of currency inflation.
The enormous devastation to real physical capital all across these Mid-Eastern theocracies, combined with the socio-economic pressures of Climate Change induced heat waves, can and will push certain regions of the globe to a breaking point. At some point, you just don’t have anything to spend all those excess dollars on.
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
How’s this?
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
And learn to shave down below! God damn, nobody wants to see those hairy toes, you freak’n hobbit.
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
That comically oversized lollypop is giving me diabetes just to look at.
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
They’re not invisible. They’re wearing yoga pants. Just like the Allistic women.
- Comment on Live image of Trump negotiations with Iran 2 weeks ago:
I hear the guy on the left is gay.
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 3 weeks ago:
I don’t begrudge rich people going to rich people prison, because the point of prison is to remove dangerous people from society not to torture them in a cage. I do begrudge poor people going to poor people prison, because it seems as though these prisons exist as a means of extracting cheap labor from poor and PoC populations. Or outright abusing them - mentally, physically, and sexually - because this kind of brutality generates political rewards.
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 3 weeks ago:
fines don’t count anymore, only hard time
I mean, you’re assuming this survives one of the eight million appeals the Facebook legal team is going to throw at it.
But yes, by the time it works itself all the way up and down the appellate courts, I wouldn’t expect this $1.5T company to experience any legal penalties in excess of a few million dollars.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 3 weeks ago:
Janeway was the best starship captain as a kid
Definitely feels generational. I’ve got a friend who is a Janeway diehard. But she didn’t really get into it until Voyager.
Picard will always be my captain of choice, but that might have its roots in watching the show as a little kid with my very bald father whom my mom teasingly referred to as “The Captain” when the show was on.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 3 weeks ago:
😏
