Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82....
Dennett taught me how to find common ground with very different people in discussions which might otherwise be heated arguments. I was lucky enough to see one of his talks some years ago, and his work and methods are something I frequently think about even today. His writing style was playful and accessible, but it paled in comparison to his presentation which really demonstrated his abundant charisma. His passing is truly a huge loss in a world that increasingly needs his teachings. My condolences to his family and the communities he fostered.
Vale, Daniel C. Dennett. I hope I can continue to do even a shred of justice to your contributions.
Edit with link: Dennett (somewhat accidentally) created a community for interdenominational Christian clergy who are also secret atheists. It started with a research paper with interviews and some analysis of their similar/different experiences. Ignore the abstract if academic language isn't your thing, the rest of the paper is a much easier and interesting read:
Maybe, just maybe it shouldn’t cost close to 10k to even TRY to have a kid through IVF? More like 15k out of pocket costs till the Medicare rebate anyway....
I'm likely infertile, and no thanks. I'm having enough trouble existing and being employed with long covid on top of pre-existing medical issues for which i have long run out of medical options, certainly all that are available under Medicare. Maybe I would sort of want children if I weren't struggling to just eat, work and sleep? Or maybe the bleak future of humanity would still be enough to convince me not to condemn another person to it.
Falling birth rates might be a little more than just an IVF cost issue. Perhaps we should look into that instead of slapping on a subsidy bandaid and hoping it cures the symptoms.
No, it's just better than other places. It's overstressed, underprioritised, acute-focussed and failing the population at large. Better than the US, even exponentially, doesn't mean good.
For example, I personally can’t listen to Guns and Roses without immediately thinking “that Axl sure is an asshole”, and that sours the entire experience.
Die antwoord also adopted, abused and abandoned an albino (Edit: my mistake, he has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia) child, Tokkie, who spoke out a few years ago. They're truly awful and Tokkie's documentary is worth watching.
Also Marilyn Manson has been evicted from my music library for sexual abuse. I have no interest in supporting known exploiters, and I can't listen to their music without thinking about how awful they are as people. No regrets, there's plenty more musicians out there worth my time.
Many of us are getting banned from other instances because there is a bug where kbin is sending way too much traffic per interaction. I know that was affecting federation (according to other instance admins) so It might have something to do with that. The content on kbin does seem to me like it's not in sync at all, but I haven't measured it.
All we can really do for now is hope for a fix and not interact with posts from other instances.
I’m part of a small group of Jr Self Taught Web Developers who were recently brainstorming ideas for a Group Project App we could put together and actually create a user base....
so they could be edited out of the episode and then the user could also download said episode where ads are cut out of the final audio file.
This is the part that might be problematic and I can see being part of a civil suit (I am not a lawyer). Depending on how you collect and store the episodes (which you may not actually have to do to achieve your goal, but is the easiest solution) you would likely run afoul of "distribution" precedents in the US that may result in a judgement against you.
But even if you didn't actually break the law, the media lobbies globally are well known for filing huge numbers of lawsuits over anything that even looks a little like it might be costing them money. Defending yourself at all is hard time-consuming and often expensive. It's not something I would recommend going into casually.
https://torrentfreak.com/category/lawsuits/ is a great site for learning about the current lawsuits from a tech perspective, and has helped me out many times over the last decade. It's one of the gems of the internet, in my opinion.
Feeling thwarted by the 404, I suddenly remembered there are plenty of curated feeds over in Collections for us to browse. Have updated one of mine to reflect newer communities.
I channel the despair, anger and misery into working on solutions to help marginalized peoples. I don't have all the answers to the world's problems, and I can't solve it all, but I can show the people who might have the answers that there is someone in their corner who supports them in their efforts. Even if those people haven't been born yet, demonstrating the power of empathy and collaboration sets them up to choose constructive paths. If I give up on them, then it becomes much easier and more likely that they will choose the same anti-social self-interested motives that are destroying us all. But, if they are going to be able to make that choice at all, they need to be in a position where they aren't in survival mode all the time.
We're all just organisms who exist for a brief flash of time on a galactic scale, ultimately this is all meaningless. But as someone who identifies as a bit of an existentialist, I make my meaning. You can too.
It also enables me to leave the weed for wind-down time, mostly. Depends on how badly my health is doing, and it's pretty variable.
It's a meme designed to express dissatisfaction with income equality and the desire to fix it. What isn't clear to me is what qualifies as "rich". Because a US based entry-level fast food worker is at the 50th percentile of richest people in the world by income, after accounting for cost of living and other regional inequality.
It's also pretty clear from studies that everyone in the top 30% of the richest in the world will need to give up a lot of our privileges if we're going to address climate change, and I don't think people realise how rich they actually are. https://wid.world/income-comparator/ uses some of the latest research to help you find out, it's definitely worth a look.
How is it victim blaming to try to define the scope? Most of the demographic who visit lemmy wouldn't consider fast food workers to be rich, and I certainly don't, but by income they are literally at the halfway point globally. To the billions of people who are below even the 25th percentile, they may well consider a US fast food worker rich. The extreme poverty that exists in this world is a very well hidden atrocity, but the perspectives of those people still matter to me and still should be taken into account.
I'm using the original definition of the word meme: "a unit of cultural information spread by imitation". Meme as a word doesn't imply that it's a comedic image macro on the internet, but I appreciate that the more modern slang usage might have made that confusing for you.
To an extent, it's completely understandable. To have a significant proportion of the richest people in the world struggle to pay all their bills or afford medical care is a really hard concept to reconcile. And if you're someone who has never been exposed to a sizable group of people who don't have a reliable source of clean water or the most basic of staple foods, it's very easy to not realise how privileged you might be - even if you're really genuinely struggling compared to everyone around you.
To me it highlights that the problem is much deeper than wealth inequality, even though that's a huge symptom. But that's another topic altogether.
Thanks for understanding where I was coming from though!
I just think a lot of the people who are keen for "eat the rich", especially in its more violent forms, may not realise they're on the menu themselves when the issue is looked at from a global all-of-humanity perspective. And, I encourage people to really think about who and what is included or excluded in the definitions of "rich", what level of variation is acceptable to them, and what a sustainable living situation even looks like for the world's population if we had total equality. They're all very hard questions that I don't have an answer to either.
I have now been banned from cat@lemmy.world :( I haven't attempted to post or comment today anywhere except now. I've only liked posts today, so that narrows down the actions required to trigger the problem. I liked 4 posts over the last 24 hours in that community.
Hope that helps someone narrow down replication steps for the problem.
A Texas appeals court has thrown out a five-year prison sentence for Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who was sentenced for trying to cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election that was rejected....
Now, however, 11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property—nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender—but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the US where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked. The...
No documented leadership hierarchy or organisation structure when there's more than maybe 10 people working there. If you have to waste your time fighting out who everyone is and you can't do it in a single meeting where everyone can introduce themselves, then the place is too big to not document roles and responsibilities officially. It leads to closed circles of people who hold the necessary historical knowledge to get anything done.
Spoken like someone who is certain that they won't be the first to suffer and die.
Accelerationism leads to a bunch of good people dying, when we need all hands on deck to fix this broken mess. Especially the people who have the most experience with making something work from almost nothing, and experience in being part of a community. Accelerationism also only keeps around those who are willing to exploit others to get ahead. And then humanity starts the next dark age with neo-feudal warlords and the people who survived as their pawns.
Humans don't even have collectively long enough memory to not repeat the evils of the Holocaust within living memory of its victims, let alone maintain any theoretical level of post-collapse enlightenment. Good thing I'll be one of the first to die!
Good people are indeed dying now, which begs the question of why we would double down on it with accelerationism in the hope that the remaining humans have a change of heart somewhere along the way. That's the stuff of movie plot lines, not reality.
Some form of radical change is necessary, definitely. But doing more of the current system isn't going to lead to better outcomes. It leads to the same outcome, just faster.
What else do we have? There have been multiple revolutions and regime changes in human history of varying success and violence. We could learn from some of those what makes a revolution more helpful or harmful and attempt to replicate that. It's worth a shot before we just accept the sacrifice of society's most vulnerable in the hopes it somehow increases empathy among those who were always fine with those people suffering.
I don't consider a TV producer insulting a (obviously terrible) politician to be news, but I do enjoy this particular insult. It's nicely crafted. It's a pity he continues to use Twitter.
For sure, but insults are just (nicely crafted in this case) words, and unless the insulter is in a certain position, they ultimately don't affect much. It's not like Simon's statement is going to change Baltimore policy or shipping or things for the citizens, or Greene's actions. And it's not like Greene will be able to make funding decisions about Baltimore or declare war on the city.
Like, I enjoy some dramatic shit-slinging, but I wish "news" were more about objective things happening than someone expressing an opinion on social media that doesn't have any obvious real consequences for anyone.
I finally gave in and watched it after multiple independent recommendations from people who had strong educated opinions on quality nuanced literature and media. The last series sort of declined a bit, but overall I was in no way disappointed. It was exceptionally well done, and importantly for me, not too watered down with tired tropes, stereotyped single dimensional characters, painfully predictable plots and neatly tidied moral threads.
I mean, there were definitely some, but, it's TV. It holds up extremely well even with age.
Go with the standard politician non-answer: "to spend more time with family". I have no idea if German politicians give the same stock response though!
Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82 (www.nytimes.com)
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82....
There's a baby drought in Australia. Maybe we should fund IVF? (www.abc.net.au)
Maybe, just maybe it shouldn’t cost close to 10k to even TRY to have a kid through IVF? More like 15k out of pocket costs till the Medicare rebate anyway....
Bondi Junction mall attack: 'Obvious' killer targeted women, Sydney police say (www.bbc.com)
Joel Cauchi, 40, sent the crowded Westfield Bondi Junction complex into panic on Saturday when he began stabbing people with a long blade....
Can you separate the artist as a person from the music?
For example, I personally can’t listen to Guns and Roses without immediately thinking “that Axl sure is an asshole”, and that sours the entire experience.
Are we cut off?
I can only get my subscriptions and not the all feed. I feel like maybe I am only getting kbin content.
Are there any legal issues recreating YouTube SponsorBlock for Podcasts?
I’m part of a small group of Jr Self Taught Web Developers who were recently brainstorming ideas for a Group Project App we could put together and actually create a user base....
If you're encountering the Subscribed 404 error, this is a good time to revisit Collections
Feeling thwarted by the 404, I suddenly remembered there are plenty of curated feeds over in Collections for us to browse. Have updated one of mine to reflect newer communities.
How to deal with living in a world with no future without being high 24/7?
Been high nonstop for years. I realize it’s bad for my health. But at least being high feels good....
Biden calls for ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Gaza (www.theguardian.com)
What does 'eat the rich' mean to you?
So I really am the cancer on this platform
Noticed I got banned by the admins from lemmy.world shower thoughts yesterday. The admins have an interesting reason though....
Crystal Mason: Texas woman sentenced to five years over voting error acquitted (www.theguardian.com)
A Texas appeals court has thrown out a five-year prison sentence for Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who was sentenced for trying to cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election that was rejected....
Jeffrey Epstein's Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker (www.wired.com)
Now, however, 11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property—nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender—but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the US where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked. The...
What gives away that your new workplace is cliquey?
We compared the finances of 30-year-olds now, to 30-year-olds 30 years ago (www.abc.net.au)
I’m sure this whole article comes as a shock to nobody, but it’s nice to see it recognised like this.
‘The Wire’ Creator David Simon Rips Into Baltimore Bridge Conspiracists, Calls Marjorie Taylor Greene A “Complete Submoronic Pratfall Of A Human Being’ (deadline.com)
Help me formulate the dullest response to colleagues when they goad me into telling them why I quit
This happens in Germany....