Given I’ve been described as a right with conspiracy theorist for saying that capitalist countries experience less starvation than socialist ones, I’m going to have to take this assessment with a grain of salt.
That’s not the methodology used, unless your description of starvation literally includes QAnon hashtags:
Tracking commonly used QAnon phrases like “QSentMe,” “TheGreatAwakening,” and “WWG1WGA” (which stands for “Where We Go One, We Go All”), Newsguard found that these QAnon-related slogans and hashtags have increased a whopping 1,283 percent on X under Musk.
And if not, then I’m not sure what your observations add to the discussion.
I’m too old for school shooter drills, but I’m like basically the perfect age for being terrified of velociraptors after watching Jurassic Park in theaters. Not only do I know how to barricade a door, but I also know how to use mirrors to visually trick people into seeing hallways that aren’t there!
Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
After being acquired by Google, YouTube got better for years (before getting worse again). Android really improved for a decade or so after getting acquired by Google.
The Next/Apple merger made the merged company way better. Apple probably wouldn’t have survived much longer without Next.
I’d argue the Pixar acquisition was still good for a few decades after, and probably made Disney better.
A good merger tends to be forgotten, where the two different parts work together seamlessly to the point that people forget they used to be separately run.
One of the worst companies in recent years has been Purdue Pharma, which worked with the also shitty McKinsey to get as many Americans addicted to opioids as possible, and make billions on the epidemic.
Both Purdue and McKinsey were privately held.
Koch industries is also a terrible privately held corporation.
Being public versus private doesn’t make a difference, in my opinion.
Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.
But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don’t think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn’t quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he’d been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.
So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.
I used to be really into cars in the late 90’s. But I got into other stuff since, and car stuff kinda fell off my radar.
Last week I read an article talking about how automatic transmissions are up to like 8 gears on average. And cars seem so computerized now, I’m wondering whether the old mechanical systems for things like variable valve timing have just given way to totally electronic systems.
What can you tell me about what has happened since, say, 2000, in regular ICE cars?
Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....
IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION!
It’s not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn’t make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.
Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I’ve seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).
And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.
The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.
Nuclear doesn’t make financial sense anymore. Let’s keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.
It’s certainly interesting that people are exploring other options for creating hot dark beverages that taste at least somewhat similar to coffee, but it’s also entirely possible that synthesized caffeine makes its way into other beverages entirely. Obviously there’s tea as a substitute, but there are also lots of soft drinks and energy drinks with caffeine.
So long as caffeine remains cheap, increasing price of coffee will likely be met with caffeinated substitutes that have nothing to do with the coffee plant.
It is understood that Ireland and some other EU states will announce formal recognition of Palestine once a peace initiative – expected in the coming weeks – is under way. Sources were reluctant to put a date on this but said it would be “sooner rather than later”, and was a matter of weeks rather than months....
Don’t forget “foreign power just starts drawing borders” like India/Pakistan partition and the ensuing chaos, or the Sykes-Picot Treaty carving up the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
Both here and on reddit communities/subreddits, especially big ones, is a difficult place to hold a discussion on the topic of that community. Take for example technology, I could enjoy to discuss anything from SR-IOV to maglev trains. But the technology subs are filled with business news of companies run by eccentric...
And the comment-section on those type of post isn’t the right place for a “philosophical” discussions that would otherwise be on topic for that sub/community, but exactly align with topic of that post or news article.
Can you explain why you believe this? I’ve always understood deep dives into the topic or context or general issues raised by an article to be fair game, whether we’re talking the comments on the news article itself, a link on Reddit, a link on Hacker News, a link on a vBulletin/phpBB forum, or even old newsgroup/listserv discussions.
Reddit’s decision to start allowing “self” posts that were only links back to the comments thread itself (showing just how link-centered the design of reddit originally was, that every post had to have a link to something) came after the discussions around links became robust enough to support comments-first threads.
The only instance I’m aware of where the US military built a specific model meant to be a replica of a real place was the Osama bin Laden compound. Which they did, in fact, raid.
The building of a fake town isn’t the unusual part. The building of a replica of a specific place might not even be that unusual, but it is a strong signal that they definitely intend to attack the real world place that is being replicated.
Please be kind with me as I am new to this platform. I was at a club when a very handsome guy, totally my type, started dancing with me. I don’t know what gave me the courage to take the half finished beer from his hand and take a sip of it without asking. I then gave his beer back to him, and he said he had to go but will be...
I know, right? I think some of the answers in this thread are wild.
People are allowed to have their own hygiene boundaries, but some of the views in this thread seem fundamentally incompatible with dancing with other people.
[P]erhaps the voters are sensible and the economists are obtuse. And perhaps the indicators on which economists rely no longer mean what economists suppose them to mean.
So narratives are crafted that are divorced from reality the public is experiencing
This is true, but it’s true for many, many more places than just politics, or even messaging about politics coming from politicians. And it swings in both directions.
Social media (including the Activity Pub driven fediverse) takes off with some narratives that are just wildly inconsistent with each other and inconsistent with how a substantial number of people feel. But the nature of how we experience the world now is that our feelings are driven increasingly by little threads of online interaction that may or may not actually resemble the world we are experiencing offline.
Is Taylor Swift a good musician? Is the best cell phone an iPhone? Am I considered strong if I can bench press 220 lbs/100 kg? Do electric cars help the environment? Is it a red flag that my date refused to tip more than 20%?Your answer to these questions depend heavily on who you talk to, and the discussion around these topics can get pretty heated, even when they’re ultimately low stakes issues.
The Internet has a way of catastrophizing little things, ignoring big things, and mixing it all together that it’s almost inevitable that how we feel becomes disconnected with actual metrics, even the metrics within our own life. Negative feelings like anger, fear, resentment, and hopelessness can fester even with people who are thriving.
In other words, while I agree that the correlation between economic metrics and personal feelings has loosened a lot, I’m not entirely convinced that the feelings are correct while the metrics are wrong.
Following the first link shows an article that paints a picture of life being better for dual earner households:
This shift towards a dual-earner model presents challenges like fewer hours for home production, but also benefits like improved work-life balance satisfaction for husbands doing more housework. Personal savings rates have fallen from 15% to 5%, yet 71% of dual-earner families contributed to 401(k) accounts in 2015.
Following the second link shows that multiple jobholders as a percent of the economy has been trending downward for decades, hitting a record low during the height of the pandemic, and climbing back up to around the average for the previous decade.
The article continues:
If one earner loses a job while the others keep theirs, she may leave the workforce for a time; there is the option of making do with less, and for some there is early retirement. She will not, in that case, count as unemployed—however difficult her life. A low jobless rate can mask a great deal of stress in such households.
This is strange, because the hypothetical person in this category would be counted in metrics like U-6, which has also been at near record lows since the pandemic recovery.
The employment-to-population ratio is still a bit below where it was in 2020, and far below where it was in 2000
Well, the percentage of the population over 65 is much, much higher than it was in 2000. If you look at prime age labor force participation, the number is higher than it has been the previous 2 decades before that.
The author should’ve focused on other metrics (housing prices, food prices) rather than choosing metrics that don’t actually support his hypothesis, or metrics that are themselves presented in this context. To that point, he could’ve expanded on how it is that individuals experienced what he describes as “sawtooth” economic fortunes, rather than just the brief mention he gives them: pandemic era relief actually went to real people, especially households with children.
I mean, I actually like the author. He’s shaped a lot of ideas that formed my own political identity and view towards economic issues over the past 25 years. I just think this particular article is a miss.
nation wide polls and indicators suggest that people are generally unhappy with the economy
The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey that is basically the standard on this sentiment analysis seems to be heavily correlated with gasoline prices, far more than gasoline prices actually affect the economy.
And consumer sentiment about the economy has been moving upward over the past few months, while gasoline prices have been low. Did anything change between November and now, to bring it to the highest level of the last 3 years? I’d argue the only real change we’ve seen in the economy over the past few months is low gasoline prices. All the other long term structural things are still present.
The consumer confidence index has been on a down ward trend over all since an initial jump with vaccine rollouts.
Yes, and partisan affiliation is a big chunk of that shift during late 2020 and early 2021. Republicans went from generally positive to strongly negative when Biden was elected, while Democrats didn’t flip as strongly from strongly negative to still pretty negative. You can tie it to vaccines, but, uh, I’m gonna go ahead and point out a more significant shift that happened at the same time.
I don’t think the lived economic experiences of Republicans and Democrats of the same income levels are all that different, but the cross tabs in these surveys show very different perceptions.
So I stand by my general view that a lot of the mismatch stems from people’s feelings being poorly correlated with even their own experience.
Telling people they should be happier because unemployment is low is an awful political strategy.
I’m not trying to formulate any kind of political strategy. I’m just observing people and trying to explain what I see with a predictive/explanatory model, not formulating some kind of message. And my model is simple: Republicans will never be happy about the economy under a Democratic president, and most of the rest of the sentiment is just driven by gasoline prices, and to a lesser extent, food prices.
I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn’t good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.
“While no one predicted this specific outcome, we shouldn’t be surprised,” added the investor Benaich. “If antitrust regulators make [mergers and acquisitions] prohibitively difficult, we should expect these bizarre semi-exits to become more common.”
If your company’s secret sauce is that it employs a particular person, then your moat is whatever it takes to poach that person. If that person is willing to leave behind whatever intellectual property, un-vested equity, and relationships behind, then your company was never that valuable to begin with.
Open and auditable source code is a laudable goal, and one I generally endorse.
But the more important issue is an open audit trail.
The implementations I’ve seen that make the most sense are electronic machines that validate and mark ballots that are both human readable and machine readable. The input validation can prevent overvotes (accidentally voting for more than one candidate) and add a verification step for undervotes (choosing to leave a particular choice blank), while the voter gets a verifiable visual feedback that their ballot has been properly created. Then they drop it in the box.
At the end of the night, the paper ballots are fed into tallying/counting systems, which should entirely distinct from the input validation systems. That way they get a machine count that night, but still have an auditable paper trail.
Given the choice between a direct voting machine that’s open source, or a closed source machine that creates the paper trail in that way, I’d choose the auditable process.
"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says (mashable.com)
Archived link....
Columbia Student Terrorists? NYPD Must Think We’re Pretty Dumb (jacobin.com)
Does enshitification happen because companies are publicly-traded?
Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
What's a hobby or interest of yours that you really love explaining to others?
What’s something you love, and love describing or explaining to people who are new to that interest, hobby, or activity?
He revealed the secrets ! (jlai.lu)
The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns (www.smh.com.au)
Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....
Your Coffee Is About to Change, Whether You’re Ready or Not (slate.com)
archive.is/NHhH1
Delay ‘not credible any longer’: Recognition of state of Palestine by Ireland and some EU states expected in coming weeks (www.irishtimes.com)
It is understood that Ireland and some other EU states will announce formal recognition of Palestine once a peace initiative – expected in the coming weeks – is under way. Sources were reluctant to put a date on this but said it would be “sooner rather than later”, and was a matter of weeks rather than months....
I would like communities to be a better place for discussion.
Both here and on reddit communities/subreddits, especially big ones, is a difficult place to hold a discussion on the topic of that community. Take for example technology, I could enjoy to discuss anything from SR-IOV to maglev trains. But the technology subs are filled with business news of companies run by eccentric...
Satellite images reveal China built a replica of Taipei’s presidential district in remote Inner Mongolia, fuelling speculation that Beijing uses the site as training ground for an invasion of Taiwan (www.france24.com)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/10664616...
Please help: What's your take on woman drinking guy's beer without asking after he starts dancing with her?
Please be kind with me as I am new to this platform. I was at a club when a very handsome guy, totally my type, started dancing with me. I don’t know what gave me the courage to take the half finished beer from his hand and take a sip of it without asking. I then gave his beer back to him, and he said he had to go but will be...
Matrix rule(s) (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Source...
Bidenomics and Its Discontents (www.thenation.com)
[P]erhaps the voters are sensible and the economists are obtuse. And perhaps the indicators on which economists rely no longer mean what economists suppose them to mean.
But Claude said tumor! (jlai.lu)
AI unicorn Inflection abandons its ChatGPT challenger as CEO Mustafa Suleyman joins Microsoft (www.forbes.com.au)
“While no one predicted this specific outcome, we shouldn’t be surprised,” added the investor Benaich. “If antitrust regulators make [mergers and acquisitions] prohibitively difficult, we should expect these bizarre semi-exits to become more common.”
A Transparent, Open-Source Vision for U.S. Elections (undark.org)