Incrementalist policies could have worked if we started decades ago. We’re now at the point where it’s become a catastrophe in progress. The best we’re hoping for at this point is mitigating the disaster if we were to make big changes starting now. It’s kind of all or nothing at this point. Either we do what’s necessary or we don’t.
The article acknowledges the administrations failures and says that activists need to “hold his feet to the fire” … by voting for him unconditionally? People who take this stance have no concept of power. They think that they can get the government to do what they want simply by writing strongly worded letters and going to the occasional conflict-free protest to hold up signs and then go home.
If you’re not serious enough about the problem to break away from civil politics and lesser evilism,then we’re doomed. At some point people need to start breaking things.
I agree we need to get organized to make this happen, but I’d push back on the idea that Biden/Democrats would be somehow more amenable to the development of movements that have genuine power to change things.
Just some of the concerning things to have happened with Democratic support in recent history:
They’ve continued to expand the military, which aside from being one of the major sources of pollutants is also a tool to secure more oil/resources and when needed, push back against the protests of the masses and any of the other consequences of climate change like mass migration.
They’ve continued to expand the surveillance state, both in capabilities and by eroding legal protections to privacy/security such as attempts to get companies to give them back door access to people’s secure devices, attacks on encryption, etc.
When faced with a choice about how to respond to police violence, they decided to support the police.
They’ve labeled left wing activists, including climate activists, as potential domestic terrorists.
People talk about how electing someone like Trump would slide us into fascism as if they can’t see the infrastructure of fascism being built before our eyes. It’s not really a matter of revolution being easier or harder under democrats or republicans. The establishment will push back against challenges to the system with violence regardless.
Admittedly I’m less familiar with the specifics on the gradual climate change argument, but to my understanding, it seems like there are some things that would make it very difficult to go back from once we let them happen. Various positive feedback loops. Major shortages of water, arable land, and food causing mass displacement. More frequent and intense disasters like storms and wild fires will present major disruptions to organized human life that will make it more difficult for us to build the infrastructure we need to solve our problems. Etc.
If we do a few small things, but ultimately fail to stop the world from getting to that point in time, are we not still doomed? Scientists have been sounding the alarm bells about this my whole lifetime. Through 2 republican and democratic administrations. And the problem has only gotten worse. It’s borderline suicidal to put any faith in the system that has continued to fail to address the greatest crisis of our time for that long.
Even if want to pretend that things get better under democrats and worse under republicans, the very fact that our system is built in such a way that allows for such frequent and profound losses of progress is a critical failure of it. To consider this another way: What would you do if Trump wins? Let him do what he wants for 2-4 years and hope you’ll be able to do something next election? Adhering to the rules of the system is killing us. You can’t play nice when the stakes are this high.
I’ve been torn on the game as well. The platforming has been enraging/draining and you need to do so much of it in the process of backtracking around the map for metroidvania stuff. I’ve been kept going by the intrigue of the secrets, but I’m not sure how long that can carry me past this much frustration, especially as new discoveries get fewer and further between.
It seems I’m near the end of the basic ending, but honestly if I don’t end up going beyond that I’d consider the game a failure. The core gameplay isn’t fun enough if I don’t get some solid payoff on the secret hunting.
It’s a shame. I really like these kinds of games that reward exploration and discovery. Tunic is up there as one of my favorite games of all time. But the key there is that while there was some skill based combat I had to struggle through, once I did it, I usually didn’t have to do it again to get around the map. I constantly need to deal with the same platforming bits and puzzles to get back through certain parts of the map in this game.
No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.
There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.
But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.
The core problem isn’t tax policy. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is power. Capitalists have it as an inherent property of their class. Workers can have power, but only collectively. Individual workers can’t exercise much power. Therefore, in the absence of a check to their power, capitalists use it to enhance it further.
Make people poor and dependent on employment and consumption so that they’re desperate enough to accept poor pay and working conditions.
Atomize workers so they can’t realize their collective power.
Use ownership over media and communications platforms to put out favorable propaganda and discredit those opposed to capitalist interests.
Use bribes campaign contributions to subvert democracy and shape the government to their will, such as tax policy , labor law, business and financial regulations, and imperialist foreign policy.
No lasting gains can be made for the working class while capitalists hold this power. Any policy can be watered down, repealed, or resisted by capitalists given time. There is no structural way for a system built by and for capitalist interests to reign in the power of that class.
There are struggling “capitalists” that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business. And then there are rich as hell “workers” like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can’t. And I think most people don’t have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.
These are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Small business owners may often be workers themselves, but they also still profit from minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. They have the same incentives as any other capitalist, even if they have less ability to act on them due to lack of resources and competition keeping them in check. Even to the extent that these are more acceptable forms of capitalists, the trend in the economy for a long time has been towards consolidation and large companies putting smaller ones out of business.
Similarly, while some artists make it big, far more of them end up exploited by record labels, studios, etc. In fact even some of the successful artists have stories about their awful contracts.
There’s also the aspect of this which is that once you have enough money to invest it in significant amounts, you indirectly enter into the role of a capitalist, since the profit you derive from those stocks is the same as the profit made from the companies exploiting workers.
But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.
More to the point though, I ask you why/how they end up paying so little in taxes? Tax law didn’t fall from the sky. It isn’t just that the politicians were stupid or that most people wanted it this way. This is the result of the structure of political power in a capitalist nation.
So how do you address the problem: “Rich people don’t pay enough taxes and poorer people pay too much.” I can come up with any number of clever policies to solve our problems, but what good does that do if you can’t make the government adopt these policies?
This is why you need a theory for understanding how power is distributed, used, and perpetuated in a society. Otherwise you’re doomed to keep asking the question “Why don’t they just do this?” It’s not a new idea, but it’s still relevant.
If you disagree, I challenge you to be able to explain how we got here or how we move forward without any kind of structural critique.
Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.
I’ve been to a few therapists now for my depression/anxiety issues. I’m still not sure what a therapist is even supposed to do. I’ve only ever left sessions miserable and it’s hard to see how it could even turn out differently. They can’t fix any biological factors and they can’t do anything about the environment that contributes to these problems. What the hell is going to get better from paying someone to talk to you for <1hr a week so they can tell you that the problems you have with the world aren’t real.
When I explain to people why I don’t want to keep trying therapists, they always just say something like “oh you just haven’t found the right one.” What? What would be the right one? Why are there right and wrong ones? Aren’t they supposed to be professionals?
Perhaps more precisely, they’re all about your reaction to problems. A lot of “lots of people deal with these problems, it’s about how you handle it.” But to me, this kind of advice feels wholly detached from the realities of the problems I end up encountering.
The example I go back to (not my only problem, but illustrative of something) is when I was in college, I’d often find myself with unbearable amounts of work. Multiple pieces of homework and projects with different duration and due dates, tests to study for, classes to attend, groups to meet with for projects, etc. With how little time I’d have, it got to the point where I wasn’t sleeping enough, I either missed meals or ate some quick, unhealthy food just to get it over with quickly, what little exercise I got dropped to almost nothing, etc.
This is more work than any reasonable person should be able to handle in a healthy way. And there’s the added pressure that if you don’t keep up with it you’ll fail the class and it’ll make it take that much longer to graduate.
You could say that other people went through the same experiences and turned out fine, but I’d challenge whether or not that’s actually true. Most of the friends and classmates I spoke to in my time there were either just as depressed/stressed/anxious as I was, or were coping with it in ways that were just as unhealthy. Massive amounts of coffee, energy drinks, all nighters, alcohol, and I’m sure a non-zero number of them were on the various focus/productivity drugs people sometimes use for academics/work.
The rate of depression and other psychological problems on campus was really high. Personally in just my friend group, one person I know cried over a particularly bad HW assignment, one was doing self harm, two friends had to go home in the middle of a semester, one of them ended up transferring, and one friend disappeared for a few days during a group project and it turned out he was so stressed he was hiding in a shed on some other part of campus.
And yet the school was woefully understaffed on mental health professionals. All we really got were some platitudes about taking time for ourselves. What time? Did I miss the part where the school made the professors keep a reasonable limit on the work they gave out? Or is there some magical work free time set aside for us? No? Then this is useless “advice” that just shifts the blame onto us.
So what good would it do me to change how I was thinking about all this? Regardless of how I thought about it, I needed to get that work done or suffer the real life economic consequences of failing to do so. If I do get it all done, it comes at the very real cost of the physical strain it puts on my mind and body.
The only real “solution” ended up being me dropping out like halfway through my grad program. I had to completely separate myself from the source of the stress. But of course note how this is a burden that is entirely placed on me and my family. Even if I wasn’t a mental wreck, my job prospects are pretty bad.
I didn’t actually have a problem with the way Enterprise ended. Setting aside the actual quality of the episode, I think the framing device connecting the beginning and ending of this era of Star Trek was fitting given that this was the end of Star Trek for the foreseeable future.
I’m of the opinion that time travel stories are never good, at least when time travel is the focus rather than just an excuse to get to a fun setting.
Since time travel seems to be a physical impossibility, essentially any set of rules you create for it are just as valid/nonsensical. So you spend a bunch of time dealing with technobabble and paradox talk that has no hope of making sense outside of whatever the author needs for the story.
Sure, Biden’s climate policy could be better, but consider what a second Trump term would be like (www.motherjones.com)
Unreal (lemmy.world)
Google Researchers Say AI Now Leading Disinformation Vector (and Are Severely Undercounting the Problem) (www.404media.co)
Every time I hear news from the tech industry lately (lemmy.world)
I hated Animal Well until I beat the game (www.theverge.com)
Why has no one thought of this before?! (lemmy.world)
Opinion | Will A.I. Ever Live Up to Its Hype? (www.nytimes.com)
Is Lemmy a good alternative?
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
Is that some sort of non-profit? (lemmy.world)
Zero to hero (mander.xyz)
RFK Jr. Lands Coveted Kevin Spacey Endorsement (www.rollingstone.com)
‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles (www.theguardian.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/15086405...
STEAM starting to issue refunds for players over the 2h playtime limit due to PSN on Helldivers 2 (twitter.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9832fe65-84fa-4f55-9a1e-e8ac068339fe.png
Mine does the exact same thing (lemmy.world)
Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account (www.gameinformer.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/14764738...
A cool guide note (i.redd.it)
cross-posted from: lemmit.online/post/2827544...
The Ten Forward Hot Take Thread
Lets say contentious things about Star Trek! I’ll start!...