ang_cire

Yes, it's a word.

What are you taking about? Literally every restaurant and retail worker has had to do this. I was cleaning toilets in high school. You think restaurant restrooms are clean before the workers go in to clean them? You think people aren't shitting in urinals in Best Buy?

I was mostly just being cheeky :P

I don't have anything against mongo in particular, the real nosql problem imo is people overusing it.

Good read. I do think it's giving too much credit to our evolutionary instincts, though, and not enough to personal and political choices.

Unless there's something lacking in the brain of climate change deniers (which as nice as it might be to believe that, there's no evidence to back up), they should be able to match the many people who are reacting in horror and fear to it.

So now use whatever political power you have to push for changes to mitigate, respond, or prevent as much of it as possible?

An intro article on syslog servers in the year of our Lord 2026?

Did you know you can replace your noSQL db with VSAM too (honestly better than mongo).

As someone who works in risk management, I think I have a hard time understanding how anyone can be so blase about climate change.

Like, it truly takes a level of willful ignorance to have something so dire happening, and just choosing to either ignore it, or ignore the evidence for it.

Like, even if you think the science isn't that accurate, the impacts, the massive potential harms, should outweigh the choice to just ignore it. Then again, there are people buying wooden homes in wildfire, hurricane, and flood zones, so who knows; maybe doing risk management as a job has just inured me to head-in-the-sand reactions, since I've seen what happens when you don't beat the odds.

This isn't a personal risk, either, like riding a motorcycle where you're the only one who's going to get hurt when your number comes up. This is literally going to kill millions.

It's hard to fly an airplane in the office.

When a charity *worker* embezzles money, they're more like to be charged with a felony.

When a CEO who *owns* a charity embezzles money, they're more likely to be charged with a misdemeanor, or not at all.

No, it's a white patriarchal system.

If you think that patriarchy means "men can do whatever they want without consequence", rather than, "men are in control of the power hierarchy", you don't understand patriarchy.

A hierarchy run by men favors men, but there are still men at the top of that stratification, and men at the bottom.

And guess which of those men go to prison.

Nonviolent felonies are tools of oppression.

Edit: since this is apparently somewhat controversial, perhaps some explanation is in order.

"Felony" has no set definition of which crimes it must apply to, it is entirely based on the discretion of the locality setting the laws. What is a felony in one place can often be a misdemeanor in another. This is especially true for nonviolent crimes.

It's also been shown in studies that nonviolent felonies are imposed against minorities at a much higher rate, for the same crimes.

And because felonies carry additional, lifelong consequences, they are an effective way to mask a 2-tiered justice system.

Qualitative assessment is the overall process of using qualitative metrics to evaluate something.

Qualitative metrics are also metrics. You have to have a spectrum in order to weigh things against each other qualitatively, even if the spectrum is just a 2-point binary.

Unfortunately, imo this is one issue masquerading as another: the real barrier to much of the US' societal progress is that we're an incredibly low trust society.

When you talk to e.g. Republicans about policies like universal healthcare or mass transit, what you realize is that they're not opposed to the policies themselves, they're just convinced that it will benefit others more than themselves. A lot of people chock that up as them being hateful (which is an easy and sometimes true explanation, as right-wing politicians and media stoke this to capture them as voters), but the core of the problem is that they are often convinced that any system structured like this will be denied to them when they try to access it (and if you've been obtaining medical care via patient-hostile private insurance your entire, it's probably hard to imagine otherwise).

And it sucks because this low-trust social system ruins things even in low-level shitty ways, like people cutting in line, or destroying free neighborhood food pantries or libraries, or driving like assholes.

"Someone else will exploit it if I don't" is both a justification used by some people for their own shitty behavior, AND something that turns people against anything not being forcibly controlled or structured to prevent that exploitation (I.e. anything communal or democratized). This is why the myth of the "welfare queen" was so easy for Fox to sell.

Authoritarianism also heavily degrades societal trust, though it's certainly not the only thing that does this. Capitalism does as well, because it offers the same incentives to exploit (the aforementioned "do it or have it be done to you").

They're both systems that live and die on the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Apologies for the necro, but I wanted to reply here before it got too far past the thread's life.

First off, thank you for weighing in here, you were I think a lot more persuasive than me in responding to the assertions of innocence here.

I think you and I agree on this topic, including about vigilante justice, with the exception that I don't think it corrodes a system if and when that system is already broken. I think it is in this case a negative outcome of exactly that; were our justice system working properly, the UHC CEO would have been jailed or executed for his actions, like you said.

Anyways, I enjoyed the discussions here, and I'm glad you're here too!

Cheers.

I have always loved long books, or better yet long series, but it's because I just don't want a story I love to end.

> with a much higher chance of dying in 1975 Cessna 182

Tell me you're not a pilot without telling me...

He grew up very wealthy. People act like "grew up wealthy" means "was given millions of dollars as a child", to disprove my point, when in fact growing up wealthy means your parents have the money to prevent your mistakes from biting you, which he had and did.

Am I misreading something, or was it not in fact the corporate leaders who torpedoed the reorg suggestions they knew were coming, who were at fault?

This is a classic hierarchy-brain/ bureaucracy problem, where "leaders" think the top is more important to the org than the bottom.

I mean, Russia's currency is in the toilet, and if even just 10% of their nukes are actually functional they probably kill a significant percentage of the world pop.

Nearly there...

Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?

Lawsuits are how regulations are enforced...

I have bad news for you...

https://www.hejlfoundation.org/from-gas-tanks-to-gummy-bears...

Tragedy of the Commons was specifically the idea that cooperation would fail due to selfish competition, so some force was needed to administer it.

Economists used it to argue both for privatization and against, but always for top-down, authoritative control.

In the US, it was almost always used as an anti-"socialist" argument for privatization, by arguing that the free market would in fact be an analogue for the "natural" competition, because as we all know the Free Market always finds the most equitable and consumer-desired outcome.

I'd imagine in Europe it was more common to argue for government management.

Except the author did choose, which is my point. They specifically chose to only represent it one specific way, that omitted the most common or famous incarnations, because those run counter to their narrative.

Since we now have to vote with things other than our actual votes, apparently, here's some more things you can vote with:

3D printers

Torrent clients

Unlicensed radios

DJI drones

Custom firmware

(FOSS in general)

Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities.

Every child starts out thinking, "if I was in charge, I could fix this. It's so simple!"

Then you actually see that when you make bad choices, you or others get hurt, and you realize that you don't always know what's best.

But these guys never get hurt, because they have the money to be shielded from it, so they end up being these delusional wrecking ball assholes, who think they know better than everyone else and don't need anyone else's consent (I.e. votes) to make whatever overly simplistic or authoritarian changes their underdeveloped brains concoct.

The hunger games is also about an authoritarian society with mass surveillance, though?

WWZ is about a literal zombie outbreak, and while I can't comment on whether the book is actually using it as a vehicle to critique or extrapolate real-world social systems, the movie sure as hell didn't.

Without going into a very long rant about Bethesda missing the point of Fallout as a universe, suffice it to say that it is also not intended to be a serious examination of what life might or even could become, ever. In fact, it was intended to be a platform for social critique via parody and caricaturism.

That *opinion* article is by a literal anti-climate-science hack. He cites none of his numbers, and it's because they're complete lies.

Here's some actual cited evidence:

The WHO fact sheet on heat and health [1] says:

> The number of people exposed to extreme heat is growing exponentially due to climate change in all world regions. Heat-related mortality for people over 65 years of age increased by approximately 85% between 2000–2004 and 2017–2021 (1).

> Between 2000–2019 studies show approximately 489 000 heat-related deaths occur each year, with 45% of these in Asia and 36% in Europe (2). In Europe alone in the summer of 2022, an estimated 61 672 heat-related excess deaths occurred (3). High intensity heatwave events can bring high acute mortality; in 2003, 70 000 people in Europe died as a result of the June–August event. In 2010, 56 000 excess deaths occurred during a 44–day heatwave in the Russian Federation.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...

The author claims:

> A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. Over the next 10 decades, global annual deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.

In no universe is this remotely true, if he's attempting to be accurate about climate deaths. The US alone had 4,000 direct heat exposure deaths annually as of 2020, and an average 47,500 cold exposure deaths. As in, people literally dying of extreme heat and cold exposure. That doesn't include every other climate impact death, and, once again, that's US only.

That's from Yale [2], btw:

> In a new study, YSPH researchers found that while cold weather continues to be a leading contributor to U.S. deaths annually, deaths linked to heat exposure surged more than 50% over the past two decades. Cold-related deaths rose from about 44,000 between 2000 and 2009 to more than 47,500 between 2010 and 2020, a 7% increase. Meanwhile, deaths associated with high temperatures climbed by 53%, from an annual average of 2,670 between 2000 and 2009 to more than 4,000 between 2010 and 2020.

[2] https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/warming-us-climate-linked...

Globally, heat deaths alone in 2023 were over 178,000 [3].

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266667582...

I'll leave debunking the rest of this misinformation to others, as this comment is already long enough.

I like how the author defines dystopia as

> reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos.

rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly-strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings').

But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like.

"No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?"

It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.