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Barbarian

@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works

Linux server admin, MySQL/TSQL database admin, Python programmer, Linux gaming enthusiast and a forever GM.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

It's been around a year since a lot of us quit Reddit, myself included. I'm happy with Lemmy, but I still feel a bit lost online since leaving the old site. Discussion?

Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it's about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social "thing", but I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others....

Barbarian ,
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In terms of boredom, it's a healthy thing! Boredom is what pushes people to learn new skills, find new hobbies, and just generally do things. I think the demonization of boredom is very bad for society.

In terms of disaster relief, that sucks. If you have to use Reddit for that, then so be it. People getting the help they need in an emergency is more important than sticking it to spez.

Barbarian ,
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For Americans, it seems like the easiest way to do insider trading is to first get elected to Congress. Then you can do as much insider trading as you want!

Barbarian ,
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You can be a member of a party without being a politician. As far as I understand it (I could be wrong, not American), the process for signing up in the US is a state-by-state thing, not at the federal level.

Barbarian ,
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It's kinda funny that the whole Vanya - Viktor trans thing in S3 Umbrella Academy had his siblings behaving pretty similarly. The vibe was pretty wholesome. Basically "I don't really understand it, but you're my bro and we're trying to save the world. On with the plot!"

Barbarian ,
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The "captain's daughter" was a euphemism for the cat o' nine tails. So in other words, that line meant give the drunken sailor a lashing as punishment.

Barbarian ,
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I feel like comparisons like this don't generally get made because capitalism is the default organising principle of the modern world, while feudalism (depending on where in the world we're talking about) hasn't been a thing for 150-800 years. People generally draw comparisons from what they experience and the experiences of those around them, not usually from history books.

Barbarian ,
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From the article, it says it automatically shuts down if it detects a full power outage for exactly that reason

Barbarian ,
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I would encourage you to read up on who the Luddites really were. In short, textile workers who were being forced into underpaid and very dangerous work making cheap shit. They broke some machines and wrote some threatening letters to try and achieve a ban on child labour and a minimum wage. Then the government responded with executions and penal transportation.

Barbarian ,
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Romania is a messy country for LGBTIQ people. Generally speaking, LGBQ are accepted (trans people absolutely not), but the government tried to pass a constitutional amendment a few years back to solidify marriage as strictly between a man and a woman. Thankfully, it failed because the general population shunned the referendum so that it couldn't get the required 50% turnout for it to be valid.

Positive steps are few and far between, but thankfully it isn't backsliding.

Barbarian ,
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My best guess is that these multiple countries dont want to commit to fighting against the "anti lgbtq movement".

For Romania, this is exactly the issue. The political situation is pretty crazy, we have a political party called AUR which is the worst reactionary tinfoil hat collection of crazies, very reminiscent of extreme US republicans. They are currently a fringe party, but growing. The mainstream socially conservative party (PSD, a socialist party... long story) don't want to lose voters to the crazies, so they have to portray themselves as anti-LGBT. An alliance of socially progressive and economically liberal parties (PNL, USR+) is currently in power, and want to concentrate on how amazing the economy is and freeze social issues because they're too divisive to win elections on.

TL;DR: Romanian politics are an absolute mess.

Barbarian , (edited )
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Yup. As someone who's worked a little bit on GDPR compliance, it's not some magic wand you wave at your data. Any data they receive after the request is also not covered by that request. Also, only EU citizens and residents are legally entitled to make a request. A company may choose to comply with non-EU users, but that's purely their choice.

Comments that contain any info about where you live, your ethnicity, disabilities (cognitive or physical), gender, where you work, etc must be deleted as part of a forget request, so that might impact LLM training data.

Personally identifying information can be somewhat of a grey area in some situations as well. If I were to say I'm from New York, that'd be personally identifying. If I were to say I'm a fan of a sports team in New York, that's not (even if that implies my location). If I were to say I'm a fan of a New York sports team, my favourite pizza place is in New York, my favourite park is in New York, etc etc, that might arguably be identifying, even if each of the pieces by itself is not.

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot one of the most important parts: it's not like there are any spot checks or anything. You'd need someone to actually lodge a formal complaint, with some kind of evidence they haven't done what they're supposed to, and the procedures are different for every EU country. They are normally very involved and complex. Essentially, you'd need to lawyer up and care enough to slowly and painfully shove it through the legal system.

Barbarian ,
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The original game that Monopoly is based on (The Landlord's Game) was a tool for teaching how bad landlords and owning land privately and permanently is. Monopoly is still a great tool to show how an early advantage leads to an ever-growing monopoly that will inevitably crush all the other players with no modifications necessary.

Magician David Copperfield Accused of Grooming, Groping, and Drugging Women ( www.rollingstone.com )

Magician David Copperfield is facing allegations of drugging women before sexual encounters, groping women during live performances, and behaving inappropriately with women who were significantly younger than him — including under 18 — in a new investigative piece in The Guardian....

Barbarian ,
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My completely uncorroborated gut feeling is that it's because each celebrity caught doing horrible shit causes a massive media frenzy, so even if (and I don't know if this is true) the numbers of horrible people are proportional to the overall population, there's a bias because each one is named and shamed unlike non-celebrities.

Barbarian ,
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Tbf, blocking Romania wasn't about Russia, it was drumming up support amongst xenophobes for political gain.

EDIT: Tocmai am vazut numele tau :))

Barbarian , (edited )
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(going to reply in English for the benefit of other users)

Croatians don't have the same stigma in western Europe that we do. In the minds of German/Austrian/French/etc racists, the Polish, the Bulgarians and us Romanians are lazy, criminal welfare thieves.

Insofar as Russia is involved in the Schengen decision-making, they're likely just attempting to deepen existing fault lines and create more instability. In that context, I completely agree with the pro-Russian eurosceptic angle.

Would Lemmy Benefit from Implementing Polls? ( slrpnk.net )

A popular way of dealing with discussions, and familiar to most people, I assume. As far as I see it, adding a poll system to Lemmy is a good way to enhance user engagement. I'm not really aware if this has been a topic before or not, tried looking it up but didn't see much juice on the topic, so thought I'd spark it up....

Barbarian ,
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Should be an option to allow/disallow non-instance users to vote. That'd be really useful here in sh.itjust.works for the Agora.

Barbarian ,
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Honest question, is there no dead time during the work schedule to do at least a little bit? There's a lot of exercises that don't need any equipment. You might look like a bit of a weirdo to your colleagues, but health > social awkwardness imho

Barbarian ,
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I'm sorry man. I hope things get better for you.

Barbarian ,
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Even in a historical context? Colonialism was absolutely real, 1930s neoliberalism was a real political movement, and the British Empire was absolutely a western imperialist system.

Barbarian ,
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Don't give postdocs money, they'd just spend it on booze and drugs

Barbarian ,
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So a child isn't sentient in your opinion? I've always understood sentience as the ability to have experiences, memories, and emotion (which is different from the paper's definition, that was my layman definition).

Barbarian ,
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Don't forget the massive subsidies from your taxes that go to the dairy industry.

Barbarian ,
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It's actually not uncommon. Trauma and PTSD leave epigenetic changes in people. These can become hereditary through a combination of both nature and nurture. Unless treated, this leads to an intergenerational heightening of fight or flight responses and a host of other issues. This in turn predisposes people to do horrible things in the name of "survival" (in their minds), even when it's not actually necessary.

In short, traumatized families are predisposed to inflict trauma unless treated.

Barbarian ,
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Primer is one of my favourite movies ever. It was made on a budget of 3 peanuts and pocket lint, and it shows, but damn it's an interesting premise.

Barbarian ,
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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Barbarian , (edited )
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Ranching and fishing, yes. But considering that worldwide more than 70% of agriculture is used to support ranching, it definitely seems that ranching is reducing the amount of food worldwide, not increasing it.

Edit: Also should mention, generally when climate activists talk about drastically cutting down or outright ending ranching, that's for the developed world, where healthy alternatives exist. Nobody sane is talking about going and taking the dairy cows off of Indian villagers who depend on it for survival.

Also, we have destroyed the global aquaculture with overfishing.

Barbarian ,
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Absolutely. I think it's better to refute than to ignore (within reason) for people reading through the thread. Not for the benefit of the troll.

Barbarian ,
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Only if the users on that server treat it like a death sentence.

Barbarian ,
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According to a quick Google search (I'm no expert on copyright law), a sufficiently original email is automatically copyrighted. What constitutes "sufficiently original" seems to be pretty arbitrary.

So I guess if you post a short story, that's automatically copyrighted. Commenting "this" is not. And then there's a huge grey zone in the middle.

Barbarian ,
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Maybe a battery weight limitation?

I'm no aviation engineer, but as far as I understand it that's exactly it. The more weight, the more thrust you need, which means your fuel (or in this case, stored energy) needs to be very efficient in thrust per kg.

Barbarian ,
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Sort of? Vanguardism is inherently totalitarian, for example. The core idea is that the vanguard know better than the poor proles what's good for them (Maoism is basically vanguardism). Stalinism is quite obviously and clearly totalitarian, putting rapid "strong" decision-making for the goal of rapid economic development above everything.

There are more democratic and equal forms of socialism, like Democratic socialism, syndicalism, mutualism (if you accept anarchists as part of the umbrella) and so on.

My core point is that socialism can be totalitarian or not depending on the actual ideology inside the big varied umbrella term.

Barbarian ,
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Yup. For a lot of cats the layers are oil, undercoat, main coat. The undercoat is a very short, dense and wiry coat of fur to stop things getting from the main coat to the skin.

The undercoat, as you can imagine, also absorbs a lot of the oil. Most people who are allergic to cats are actually allergic to the oil.

Also, in very specific breeds, there can be 3 layers of fur (like Siberian, for example).

Barbarian ,
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"It takes a village to raise a child" is an old expression for a reason. Historically (EDIT: And today in most of the world), parents wouldn't take care of their kids 24/7. They would have parents, siblings, neighbours and friends to help share the load.

The idea that parents and parents alone do 100% of everything to raise a child is a very modern western thing.

Barbarian ,
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For the families who can afford it, daycare is the replacement.

Barbarian ,
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There's a lot of evolutionary processes that don't have to do with having more offspring, but increasing the viability of less offspring. Having kids, no matter the species, is a very costly affair. You could argue that mate selection generally reduces the number of offspring, but increases the viability.

I've read a hypothesis (very much unproven) that having some gay members of a species increases the viability by having more people to care for the offspring without being in mate competition. It's called the gay uncle hypothesis

Barbarian ,
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I see this opinion a lot, but I honestly don't think Sanders or his campaign were to blame.

She lost far more centrist votes than she did left-wing votes.

Barbarian ,
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Highly doubt it. What he has said he needs are volunteers to help run the place

Barbarian , (edited )
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The point being made here is that it's not about income, at least not directly.

It's about whether or not you need to work for others for that income.

Petit bourgeoisie, the origin of what would become middle class, originally meant small business owner. This was to differentiate between the owners of massive factories and small shops.

Barbarian , (edited )
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I haven’t said a damn thing for or against communism.

Neither have I.

valid class identifiers

I don't know if that's true. The modern definition of "middle class" is very fuzzy and poorly defined. Sometimes tertiary education is a requirement, sometimes not. Sometimes it's about professional certification. Sometimes it's about whether you're a manager.

Even if you're looking at a definition that only cares about income and nothing else, that's still a pretty terrible definition. Cost of living is drastically different depending on where you are. Somebody in New York might be middle class, but lives like a member of the lower class compared to someone on that same income in Kansas.

If we then ignore income and only care about standard of living, does that mean someone living frugally and saving a lot of money becomes lower class due to their spartan lifestyle? Instinctively, that seems wrong.

EDIT: I should mention that I find the worker/small owner/owner distinction more useful than the lower/middle/upper distinction because it's far better at figuring out who has interests that are aligned. Workers, generally, want higher wages. Small owners and owners are aligned on lower wages, but are not aligned on taxation and regulation. Interestingly, small owners and workers tend to be aligned on minimum wage for competitiveness reasons vs the owners.

Barbarian ,
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Not in any real or useful sense, no.

Barbarian ,
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even at the cost of our own privileges

I agree with everything you've said except for this. With worldwide growing inequality, it's very clear where those resources are going. The people making less if the janitors get a pay bump isn't the middle managers. It's the owners, by a very tiny amount. If you don't have a share of the company, you're not affected by other people making more or spending less.

Funnily enough though, another winner in that scenario are small local business owners. More local income means more customers.

Voters said they didn't want a Biden-Trump rematch. Now they're facing longest general election ever. ( abcnews.go.com )

"It's almost a cruel joke on the electorate that the longest presidential election potentially ever might also be the one that they're least excited about," said one Democratic pollster, speaking anonymously to candidly discuss the race.

Barbarian ,
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Got no horse in this race, but wouldn't "doing it to get re-elected" be a good thing? Isn't that how democracies are supposed to work?

Barbarian ,
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Maybe they should be having a serious conversation with the Qatari government. You know, where the Hamas leadership actually is.

Barbarian ,
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Completely agree. I'm as against the Israeli terror campaign in Gaza as the next guy, but come on. Iran-backed terrorists attacking random cargo ships is hardly a basis for progress.

Barbarian ,
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This might be an explanation in the US, but here in Romania (not normally useful to talk about the EU as a monolith) there are tons of people that love pseudoscientific woo-woo despite the fact that we have some of the cheapest medical coverage in the world (definitely cheapest in the EU).

Small tangent: in some sense, we get what we pay for. Our medical system is nowhere close to France, for example, in outcome. It's probably one of the worst in Europe. It is cheap though, and for basic things (broken limbs, colds, basic medical surgeries) is just fine. It only becomes unfit for purpose during mass casualty events and exotic diseases.

Barbarian ,
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Assuming that any and all politicians have a price tag (that's your implication here), what's preventing your third party candidate from getting bought?

Barbarian ,
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We have a party here in Romania called USR. They're a technocrat party, and one of their big core pillars of policy is dealing with political corruption. I think it's safe to say they also understand it's a problem.

Their politicians still occasionally get busted for corruption. Less than the other parties, but still. Don't let the ideology blind you to reality.

Barbarian ,
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They actually do. They'll show up for Mastodon users subscribed to the Lemmy community.

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