I think you’re currently in a place where I was in myself many years ago. This is all assuming everything you said was in good faith. You see all of the pain and damage the -isms have caused (racism, sexism, etc) and it seems at first blush that if society simply disregarded the traits those -isms are based around, the problem would go away. There’s enough truth in the idea to make it feel like a solution and, even if it’s subconscious, it kinda takes the onus of action off of you and puts it on the people that that are actually racist or exist. I don’t want to assume your political leanings, but I was farther right on the political spectrum than than I am now, and it fit well with my ideas about personal responsibility and limited government at the time…and I feel like it was regarded as common sense with everyone in that political sphere at the time. At the time, I was a 20-something cishet white guy (I’m still all of those things, except 20), and I felt like everything I had I’d earned, and I legit thought people could pull themselves out of the mire if they wanted it enough. I didn’t like being grouped in with the -ists, but I also wasn’t likely to call out a buddy for making an offensive joke.
That whole chain of thinking is deeply flawed, but it’s an easy place to land, especially in middle-America. I feel like a good analogy that would have hit home with me at that point in my life would have been stories about places where Christianity was outlawed. I remember I had one of those old Christian comic books that were popular in the 90s about it. If you wanted to wear a cross, you’d have to hide it, you couldn’t talk about being Christian or meet with other Christians (like a church service or prayer group) without having to worry about the law coming down on you. (Really makes me wonder where that infamous sense of persecution the right has comes from). At the time, I’d hear those stories and think, “Man, government sucks…it would be terrible to have to hide who you were like that.” I think about those stories now and I think instead about not wearing the clothes you’re comfortable in, not being able to get healthcare for legit medical diagnoses, not being able to have a club or group of similar people you couls safely meet with to build community around shared life experiences. The story about persucted Christians in some unnamed dystopia was also telling the true story of LGBTQ people in my own country. And women in my own country. And racial groups In. My. Own. Country. I never would have accepted the idea that those persecuted Christians would be OK if there just wasn’t religion. Just like I know marginalized groups today won’t be OK if whatever society deems “wrong” with them just went away. Societies have inertia, and without someone exerting some kind of force on them, they’ll maintain their current trajectory. I came to see I didn’t like my societies trajectory, so I started trying to change it, probably went a little too extreme in the other direction for a while, but eventually learned to just listen first. It’s OK if I belong to a group (or several) that have been bad actors. It means I’m in a position to leverage my privileges to help change society’s momentum. I grew up very poor, but I’ve got pretty much every other privilege society has to offer. I honestly don’t know that I’d have been as fortunate as I am today if even one of those privileges was missing. Even with the deck stacked pretty well in my favor, it was a fucking fight to get here…and even now, doing so much better than most, it feels like barely hanging on some days. I agree that humanism is what we should be striving for, but I also understand that I’m part of a group that’s done a lot of bad to a lot of other groups. I don’t think it makes sense for me to be “proud” of any immutable part of my identity, but that also means I shouldn’t feel personally attacked when people talk about that identity. Things like the whole bear thing would have probably bothered me in the past, but now it’s more nuanced. I’m sad people feel that way, but I don’t blame them, and I’ve listened enough that I believe them. Now the question I ask isn’t “How is this fair to me?” but instead. “How can I use my membership in the group to help change its momentum to something better.” Sometimes it’s voting, sometimes it’s canvassing or protesting, sometimes it’s reaching out to someone I see a part of my past self in.
You wouldn’t really need collusion to figure out what your new tax liability was and raise rent by that much. Just like how the cost of an EV goes up by the exact amount of any new tax rebates you’d qualify for by buying one.
I’ll get the trains ready to forcibly move the unhoused to where to where an empty house is…you wanna start rounding them up, or are you still busy finding them a job they’re able to do so a bank will let them buy one of those houses?
Edit: the situation isn’t as simple as you’d like it to be. If it were, it’d been solved already.
You still don’t need collusion…it’s got nothing to do with undercapitalization. The IRS would publish a new rule, the underwriter would increase the escrow payment to cover the new tax liability (meaning the amount the property owner pays the bank monthly would increase) and the owner would increase the rent by that same amount. You would only need collusion if you wanted to raise the rates higher than the tax increase. If you wanted to, for example, increase rents by 2x the tax increase, then collusion could be helpful…but its still super risky. It only takes 1 landlord to not be OK with it to expose the whole thing.
Per-swipe ads on phones. Free tier: every 5 swipes, regardless of app, full screen unskippable ads (content saved to devices locally so airplane mode doesn’t stop it). Then you pay more to increase the number of swipes you get between ads.
It’s not about being the only ones, and the very size of the universe is precisely why it’s extremely unlikely we’ve been visited by a race so incompetent they keep crashing their ships
Yeah, I get that there could be some hypothetical race of beings so far beyond our comprehension they might as well be magic…but, again…I don’t see a species that advanced being so incompetent as to continually crash into the broad side of a planet…or get shot down by our military (which would be like a caveman throwing rocks at an F35).
Nothing. It’s a pretty fantasy. Best I think we can hope for is a few monopolies busted up so some little guys can break into the market. That’ll buy us about 20 years until those little guys have become the new Googles and Microsofts and Apples, and then we start over. We need to entirely rewrite how we do antitrust assessments to account for both vertical and horizontal monopolistic behaviors (a vertical monopoly is a company that controls the entire supply chain where a horizontal one controls the market and customer base. Historically, the US has been more concerned with horizontal monopolies.) It’d be great if we could come up with a better measure of consumer choice that we currently use. If you have the choice between 2 ISPs but they both charge the same amount for the same service, you don’t really have a choice there…at least not a meaningful one.
I’m a prior Special Operations Airman myself. Worked on a different version of the C-130 as a radio operator. It’s still almost a year of additional training after BMT and usually involves a stint at a general aviation school, then technical training for your specific role on the aircraft, then specific training on your assigned airframe, then a SERE school (survival, evasion, resistance, escape…basically how to not get caught after you’re shot down and how to handle being a POW if you are caught), then a bunch more training at your first unit. Still a pretty intense first year of service. What a fucking waste.
Neither does mine, but I’m still doing it. Worst cae, the popular vote being very far from the electoral college results highlights some of the absurdity in the system, which is a vital part of accumulating support for changing the system. Best case, I don’t understand the political landscape of my state as well as I think I do, and I contribute to it turning blue, even for a single election.
You really don’t need anything near as complex as AI…a simple script could be configured to automatically close the issue as solved with a link to a randomly-selected unrelated issue.
Even that’s not technically accurate. That’s the kind of thinking that makes people think a snowball means the climate isn’t changing. We’ll still have some summers that are marginally cooler than some previous summer, but the average over time is gonna keep going up.
Misinformation campaigns increasingly target the cavity-fighting mineral, prompting communities to reverse mandates. Dentists are enraged. Parents are caught in the middle....
Man, are these conspiracy nuts gonna be mad when they accidently ban us removing fluoride from water with dangerous concentrations. The amount of fluoride we shoot for would require a 155 lb person to drink around 5000 gallons.
You would kill yourself drinking too much water long before you’d have to worry about fluoride toxicity in the US. Part of our water treatment protocols also include reducing fluoride levels when they’re naturally too high.
You know what’s really useful? Not conflating “a thing that happened” with “a thing based on scientific consensus”
American Institute for Economic Research Menu How Government Prolonged the Lobotomy Vincent GelosoVincent Geloso Raymond-J-MarchRaymond J. March – August 1, 2019Reading Time: 3 minutes AIER >> Daily Economy >> History Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint
Ramming an icepick through someone’s eyelid to remove a part of their brain sounds like a horrifying method of torture. However, this procedure, named the lobotomy, was a common method to treat mental illness in the United States for nearly 40 years. From 1936 until 1972, nearly 60,000 people were lobotomized. Most lobotomies were performed without the patient’s or their legal caretaker’s consent.
Unsurprisingly, the procedure was a spectacular failure. After surgery, patients often found themselves paranoid, emotionally volatile, incontinent, and with severely impaired intelligence. Surgical complications often left patients unable to function independently, requiring constant supervision and caretaking. When a patient was released from the asylum after being lobotomized, they typically found themselves returning within a few months. Upon their return, they often underwent a second (or, in one case, fourth) lobotomy.
The lobotomy has been described as “one of the most spectacular failures in the history of medicine.” But unlike many historic medical practices which seem barbaric and detrimental only in hindsight, the lobotomy was scorned and dismissed by medical professionals when it became most popular. By 1941, the American Medical Association denounced the lobotomy as ineffective. Shortly after, a world-wide consensus developed along the same lines. However, the procedure continued to grow in popularity, eventually reaching a “lobotomy boom” in the mid-1940s and early-1950s.
X now treats the term cisgender as a slur (www.engadget.com)
Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much (lemm.ee)
Do any of them know what the word “liberal” actually means?
Red Lobster is abruptly closing dozens of restaurants | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)
48/650 locations so it’s not bad YET. But generally these things don’t get better.
Baybe what's wrong? You've barely touched your Strawberrum (jlai.lu)
Solve the housing crisis with this one weird trick (lemmy.world)
Picasso Moth (mander.xyz)
Yeah, I'm GREAT! GREAT I TELL YA! (lemmy.world)
With 2024 presidential contest looming, Georgia governor signs new election changes into law (apnews.com)
Archived at web.archive.org/…/georgia-kemp-voting-challenges-…
What are your best intrusive ads ideas?
If your job was to come up with greater enshittification for society, what would you do?...
Top senators believe the US secretly recovered UFOs (thehill.com)
Addiction is a scary thing (lemmy.world)
Microsoft wipes out evidence of real ads in Windows 11 Start menu (www.xda-developers.com)
Air Force IDs airman shot and killed by Florida police (apnews.com)
All my real Americans from US State stand up! (lemmy.world)
I'm the new mod here... Apparently
I have no idea why, I’ve made a single comment here one time and never asked for this, but I promise to be a benevolent dictator
Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT (www.tomshardware.com)
AstraZeneca requests European authorisation of Covid vaccine be pulled (www.euronews.com)
AstraZeneca was the first pharmaceutical laboratory to launch a vaccine on the market at the end of 2020, a year after the appearance of the virus....
save this to repost next year. and the next year, and the next year, and the next year (slrpnk.net)
Medical freedom vs. public health: Should fluoride be in our drinking water? (www.nbcnews.com)
Misinformation campaigns increasingly target the cavity-fighting mineral, prompting communities to reverse mandates. Dentists are enraged. Parents are caught in the middle....
Why doesn't any country do this? (sh.itjust.works)
Are they stupid?...