Arotrios
Arotrios avatar

Arotrios

@Arotrios@kbin.social

For Amusement Purposes Only.

Changeling poet, musician and writer, born on the 13th floor. Left of counter-clockwise and right of the white rabbit, all twilight and sunrises, forever the inside outsider.

Seeks out and follows creative and brilliant minds. And crows. Occasional shadow librarian.

#music #poetry #politics #LGBTQ+ #magick #fiction #imagination #tech

Republicans did their best to turn Pride into a celebration of bigotry (www.dailykos.com)

According to a Washington Post article on this phenomenon, “The attacks also coincide with signs of a shift in public opinion, with opposition to LGBTQ+ rights rising again, especially among Republicans, polling shows.” But saying “especially among Republicans” is underselling it. The Gallup poll the Post points to as...

The Bidenomics push needs a second focus: Corporate greed (www.dailykos.com)

US just released a study finding “many of the largest general consumer S&P 500 companies have admitted to benefiting from increased prices as their net profits increased year-over-year and they rewarded shareholders with billions in new shareholder handouts.” In other words, price gouging and corporate greed is driving...

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Left 4 Dead 2. It's not my favorite game, or what I think is the best game of all time, but it's definitely my most played by more than 1k hours. The game hits a sweet spot in terms of tactical gameplay that's almost chess-like in its level of complexity, balance, and replay-ability. The fact that it was released 14 years ago and still has a massive modding community and playerbase speaks to its quality. It's also on sale on Steam right now for $.99, and as it uses the Source engine, runs well on the most basic of potatoes.

gamingonlinux, to random
@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social avatar

What have you been playing lately? Is it any good?

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

@gamingonlinux Starship Troopers Extermination. Hands down the best early access title I've played, and the only one that could stand on its own as a full game without further development. The real technical accomplishment of the game is the 16 player teams with integrated voice chat and cooperative base building running smooth even when you've got hordes of hundreds of bugs. I'm doing my part, are you?

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

@gylotip meanwhile I'm just sitting over on kbin.social, eating popcorn and watching the lemmy instances rant at each other. Come to the dark side - we have kookies!

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Well, my reputation just went from 80 to 860, so I'm going to consider this a positive change.

ERP program for a small business

I work at a small business ~20 people and we're looking for a self hosted solution to our resource planning software. We have a huge variety of job scopes, skillsets, equipment, and technicians. The owners have a hard requirement for self hosting due to the variety of clients we work for who want to know their data stays within...

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

@iocase With 20 employees, you'll probably want to look at open source solutions unless you have a significant budget available. To get all your employees on Microsoft Dynamics Nav, for instance, would run about $8000 a month.

The drawback of open source solutions is that you'll likely need a dedicated employee to keep the system running and updated, and there's no higher levels of paid support option if they run into problems.

Here's a pretty good article on using Quickbooks as a core and then attaching open source Inventory Management and CRM integrations that you may find useful.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Ya know, I was thinking about it, and the only really good content in AMA was when things went horribly wrong. The AMAs that went smoothly were actually kinda meh. So that being said, this might actually be a net win for Reddit in the short term. Everyone loves to watch a trainwreck... ain't that right, Spez?

DNA as music, and can music affect DNA? (youtu.be)

In 1986, the Japanese geneticist Susumu Ohno discovered DNA music by converting the nucleotide bases G, T, C, and A to the musical notes A, C, G, and D, respectively. This intriguing revelation led to the question: if DNA can be translated into music, can music, in turn, affect or change our DNA? Sound, as we now know, possesses...

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

@Bendersmember Content generation has slowed and from what I can tell, comment participation is way down. Right now, after going through and subscribing to a number of magazines, my kbin feed is more useful and active than reddit ever was, although the audience is clearly smaller (but seriously growing since last week). The quality of the content is better, and it's much easier to filter out the shitposting.

The clearest place to see content drought this is in /r/all - the top posts are all 3 - 15 hours old. Before the blackout, it would refresh in a matter of minutes, not hours.

voltur, to random

Ok, I have selected a replacement guitar. It is an Epiphone Les Paul Studio, very similar to my old one. I went with the red instead of my usual black. There was a discount because of America Day, which is nice.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

@voltur looks gorgeous - what kind of wood is the neck?

The Supreme Court is out of control and must be reformed (www.dailykos.com)

The majority then announced, with an opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts, that it was overthrowing the student loan forgiveness program, granting a request from six Republican state attorneys general on behalf of a loan servicer, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, that did not want to be used as a plaintiff....

Arotrios, (edited )
Arotrios avatar

@dankapotamus I disagree - while there's certainly deadlock on the federal level, your vote absolutely matters, especially when it comes to state and local politics. Take a look at the states that have democratic super-majorities. Best example of progress in action is in Minnesota right now.

That being said, speaking to your larger point, I think that if ranked-choice voting were implemented, we'd have a much more effective democratic process that would allow protest votes that didn't directly harm your best interests. Sadly, given the state of American politics, if you make under $150k a year or are a member of any minority group, if you don't vote Democratic, you're voting against your own interests.

Supreme Court's student debt decision has bad implications for environmental protections (www.dailykos.com)

The Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action admissions could undermine the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to bring environmental justice to predominantly Black communities disproportionately harmed by pollution. Today’s decision rejecting the administration’s forgiveness of student debt could mean the...

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

I blame Canada.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Given the volatile nature of the current political discourse, I'd suggest some basic safety features. In my opinion, the following should result in a ban / removal:

  1. Doxing of any user

  2. Posting of personal information

  3. Calls to or threats of violence

  4. Harassment and bullying

On a more personal note, I would love to see an active team providing additional context in comments and fact-checking to posted articles. This might help reduce some of the hyperbole and over the top commentary that turned political discussion on Reddit into a shouting match and echo chamber. Political discussions are best when they're informed and honest, and that often takes a more hands-on approach from those who wish to curate and foster real conversation.

georgetakei, to random

I have two words to say to this radical Supreme Court: Term Limits

(Actually I have another two words to say to them, but I’ll keep them to myself.)

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

@georgetakei While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't feel that term limits would fix the core problem. Rather, it would increase the politicization of the court and thus encourage further "legislating from the bench."

I would prefer to see additional justices on the court, combined with a streamlined impeachment process for ethics enforcement that includes an independent recusal board. This board would have the power to force justices to sit out on cases where they have a conflict of interest. I also believe that justices that deliberately hide or obfuscate conflicts of interest should be subject to criminal bribery charges.

Term limits only increase the rate at which we cycle through justices, and result in less qualified justices overall - there is an advantage, particularly in the legal world, to having decades of experience. Term limits do nothing to address the current corruption and conflicts of interests that have marred the Roberts court. Expanding the court, on the other hand, reduces the individual power of each justice, so a corrupt justice has less influence on a final judgement. Simultaneously creating an ethics oversight body with real criminal enforcement power would help reduce the likelihood of corruption in the first place.

Rufus' prophecy about the Supreme Court decision regarding student loans. A toast to the immortal Carlin who predicted this day of infamy. (www.youtube.com)

'They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests.'

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

A wake up call to anyone who has student loans. The class war is here, and you're the latest casualty.

Arotrios, to politics
Arotrios avatar

Anyone else feeling that the sudden collapse of Twitter and Reddit is related to the conservative buyout of CNN? It feels like there's a concerted effort to capture or degrade major news outlets previously seen as left-leaning or centrist. I became suspicious after it became clear that Musk was deliberately running Twitter into the ground after buying with Saudi and Russian backers, but the timing of Reddit's attempt to emulate Twitter's self-destructive practices combined with the purchase of CNN has resulted in a significant portion of the MSM landscape that's been quickly and deliberately shifted politically rightward by the owners.

Curious to hear other folks thoughts on this dynamic, and what it will mean for the upcoming elections.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

@Sharpiemarker

Some context on why I included CNN:

But the bigger question floating over one of the world’s largest and most important news organizations is why it’s changing. Is it because the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, its new owner, wants an overhaul? Or is it at the behest of a conservative billionaire investor in the company who sits on its board? ...

That billionaire is John Malone, a legend in the cable TV business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav, the CEO of WBD. People close to both men insist that Zaslav is remaking CNN because he wants to for both business and editorial reasons, and not because Malone has told him to.

But complicating that narrative is the fact that Malone has repeatedly wished, in public, for CNN to remake itself. And his prescription happens to sync with the new CNN agenda: a plan to steer the channel away from what Malone and others call a liberal bias they say muddles opinion and news. And to shift it toward a supposedly centrist, just-the-facts bent.

and...

Malone is conservative/libertarian whose bona fides include a former board seat at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, and a $250,000 donation to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee. (Two years later, Malone had pivoted: He told CNBC that Trump generated too much chaos and shouldn’t have a second term. “Look, I think a lot of the things Trump has tried to do — identifying problems and trying to solve them — has been great. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it,” he said.)

Malone has also said he admires Rupert Murdoch as a business frenemy and shares a political viewpoint with the Fox News owner: “Rupert is sort of like I am. He’s a libertarian, but he thinks we should have a strong military,” he told the Financial Times in 2017.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

No labels because the label "Republican" has become an anathema to good governance, and justifiably so. This is just another bunch of GOP operatives trying yet again to mask destructive policies and spoiler candidates under the guise of centrism.

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