satellites

She admitted on video that she misrepresented work hours “by mistake.” That’s how they got her.

I’m usually guilty of not reading the whole article, but this time I did.

She admitted on video that she misrepresented some working hours “by mistake.” That video was cited in the ruling.

Social media and gig economies are also net negative, yes.

I’ll always pay for Spotify or something like it because the UX is 1000x better than pirating everything and trying to sync up my collection to the cloud across devices. Not gonna bother with that. The ease of discovering new music and sharing it with friends is also unparalleled.

For movies, I usually just pay $4 to rent it from iTunes on my Apple TV. If it’s something I love and want to keep forever I might pirate it.

Agreed. I've worked at a scarce few companies who organized this way, but it seemed to work better than "frontend team, backend team, devops team." When each piece of the stack is a different team, it creates unnecessary hostility and miscommunication. Aligning engineers around products, such that your iOS dev and your backend dev are on the same team, seems to run more smoothly. YMMV.

> Primarily used for illicit goods and services

This is the only actual use case. And it’s not a great look.

That’s a blatant straw man fallacy. No one here is insinuating that financial institutions are pure and innocent.

If anything, crypto news over the past year has proven one thing: that the crypto space is just as corrupt as “traditional finance,” but with none of the guardrails that make it harder to commit blatant scams.

Society developed immune responses to financial fraud in the form of regulations. They are insufficient and evil people still take advantage of loopholes in the system. However, crypto right now is a living example of how much worse it could be.

I noticed this happening pre-Covid and gave up on Prime. I didn’t use it enough to justify the price anyway. But I was experiencing 3-4 day shipping instead of 2 days. Not a big deal, but it broke the promise of “free 2 day shipping” in my mind which was the whole point of paying for Prime.

Industrialized humans have a historically abysmal track record of ham-fistedly “optimizing” ecosystems.

Any manual intervention into an ecosystem generally requires establishing an indefinite commitment to more manual maintenance.

Who determines what “optimal” means? Who implements the optimization? Who pays for it? What happens in a few decades when people lose political interest in the project? Which creatures do we optimize for? Why are we doing this at all? How have similar projects fared in the past?

I can tell you haven’t seriously studied ecology from the way you are approaching this question, so I’m not too worried. But consider questions like those as you ponder this scenario.

Yes, but in specific quantities, no? Manually depositing them on the surface after extraction would still disrupt the system’s balance.

Why are you assuming that rare earth metals deep below the surface of the earth would benefit the life ON the surface that has evolved to live in the absence of those metals?

Even if for some bizarre reason the metals were beneficial, what about when the mining operation is done and humans leave the area? It just goes back to the previous status quo.

It’s a disruption either way.

Yes. It’s farcical at this point.

Is it really that common? It’s happened to me once, in my 10 years of using Reddit. Not saying my anecdote proves anything but I wonder how rampant it really is.

Good catch. I assume it was to mitigate the risk of him fighting the extradition or outright fleeing. If he had known their case was this strong, with his former colleagues flipping on him, I wonder if he would have agreed to be extradited or if he would have tried to delay it.

(Or maybe he already knew and it’s just a coincidence).

I can rant about this for a while, but I’ll try to distill it down into a few points.

The tasks are repetitive and boring. Many dev teams are poorly managed - they claim to be Agile, but really they use Agile as a smokescreen for micromanagement. Product designers dictate widget orders to devs who churn them out for users who didn’t ask for them. Products themselves are increasingly hostile to users. SEO and ad revenue are the main optimization metrics. Some of the big players in the space (Meta, Amazon) have lots of harm to answer for. Big companies in general are eating the web alive and consolidating control of it into monetized silos.

And with all the information coming out about how harmful our technology addictions can be, it’s hard to be stoked about creating apps that glue eyeballs to the screen.

But honestly, the boredom is the biggest thing. All the technical challenges feel “solved.” I don’t care about building yet another graphql microservice or yet another “dropdown component, but like, it looks different.” It’s just not interesting or fulfilling anymore.

Thanks for this! I’ve found a few interesting posts already. Appreciate the link. I’ll update this comment with any specific feedback but I like it so far.

This is blatantly false. The Portland Police have more funding now than ever.

Statistical correlations are a subset of reasoning in general

Good points, and honestly I’m more curious to try out Mastodon after this discussion than I was before.

> Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit

I’ve been on Reddit for 10 years and I’ve only experienced this… once? Twice at the most. It happened so long ago I can’t even remember the specifics.

I’m not against it either, in theory, but I wouldn’t say it’s a defining feature of Reddit or even a common occurrence the way it is for Mastodon.

That’s not the point the article was making. Imagine if, by subscribing to /r/books, your posts on /r/funny were governed by the moderators of /r/books, even though they are unrelated subreddits. (I know this happens sometimes under the table when mods get angry but it’s not how Reddit is “supposed” to work).

It seems like mastodon is essentially forcing you to choose a subreddit that will be your governing community, then that becomes your identity. It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. (I don’t have a mastodon account, this is my impression of what the article says).

I’m telling you that there IS demand, there IS need, but capitalism will not provide because market incentives are not enough to correct the situation.

Reality is not a thought experiment, and “supply and demand” is a simplistic reduction that conveys a general principle of economics but does not cover the entire nuanced reality of the food desert phenomenon. You are approaching this like someone who just took Econ 101 and thinks they have the whole thing figured out.

And since it’s clear that you really are doubling down on your idea that “it is poor people’s fault if they live in a food desert,” all I can do is encourage you to read this article and read more about the subject before assuming you are smarter than everyone else who actually works on this type of issue. Cheers.

… unless you live in a food desert, in which case that capitalist society is failing to provide for basic needs.

This is a complex problem. Your reductive takes don’t really address the issue at hand and instead seek to wave it away.

“I already believe our system is great, so I’ll blame the poors before applying critical perspective to the system itself.”

Good point. I hadn’t considered that type of housing.

It got me thinking though. My partner got evicted when she was younger (early twenties) because her roommate was lying and stealing rent money. Her credit was shot and she had to live with family for years while getting her record cleared. It’s sad to think that if she hadn’t had family to fall back on, she could’ve ended up in that situation. More people than one would think are just one bad situation away from falling into that trap.

As mentioned in the article, some low income housing units literally don’t have kitchens or don’t allow cooking.

This blew my mind and is a facet of poverty I hadn’t even considered.

Also, are you actually making the point that food deserts exist because all the people in the area just decided not to buy groceries? I haven’t read such a blatant “blame the poors for their situation” take in a while.

I'm a noob when it comes to stock trading rules, but can someone explain how this is different than what Jim Cramer does on his show? Cramer has been exposed for knowingly giving people bad stock trading advice. Is it just that Cramer didn't do a blatantly obvious pump-and-dump like these influencers did?

To anyone curious about exploring this angle more, I recommend Noam Chomsky’s book “Imperial Ambitions.” It’s a collection of interview transcripts where he discusses the US wars in the Middle East and the political and economic motivations behind them. It’s very informative.

But of course, American leadership will never break the facade of doing “good.” The propaganda is too effective. It’s way easier to maintain false narratives that keep the population looking the other way than to come out and say why you really want to invade other countries.

True, but that’s on the bubble of a college campus. In the media and in non-college circles it was close to heresy to criticize the war during the first few years. Much more so to say it was a profit-driven sham.

Not to say no one was speaking out about it, but the vastly dominant narrative was to support the war effort and ignore the corruption.

Agreed. This is typical anti-intellectualism disguised in academic language. They make frequent appeals to the past, talk about the "West" as a unified concept (a favorite of the modern Right that sounds catchy but has no real substance) - and they insinuate that refusal to work is a moral failure of individuals, rather than symptoms of a declining economic system. They cherry pick information to support their points and get more and more preachy as the article goes on.

In the rare instances where you do have bugs in the compiler, have you been able to resolve them reasonably? Or is it deeper language issues that you then have to work around? Not trying to poke holes; it seems really cool and I want to try it myself soon.