I would imagine it reads rather differently to different people. Rich guys reading Forbes probably think it’s a great dunk on China. Meanwhile, I’m reading it thinking, “Shit, I could get behind this. Just wish I lived somewhere that it didn’t mean I would be homeless in less than a year if I tried it.”
The Democrats have cried about “the most important election of our lives” too many times, and people tuned it out. For people crying how terrifying a Trump presidency was going to be, their actions told voters that they would be happy to let this happen and keep working with the same individuals they told them would end democracy, and so far, they continue to work with the Republicans, with a very few conspicuous exceptions.
People warned the Democrats they could only run that play so many times before it no longer worked, yet they decided to stick with it anyway. If the Democrats wanted to win, they needed to have run a very different campaign, if not a different candidate.
Didn’t even really need to overlevel him for that, though. He was fast and had a high special attack, so he got the first move in most situations and could oneshot most things. Even when it first evolved, my Kadabra carried me through pretty much every gym on its own, just because of how broken the psychic pokemon were in gen 1.
The last time I played gen 1, this was my strategy up until I caught an Abra. After that, once I got.some.levels on Abra and he got a psychic attack, my starter only came out when Abra ran out of moves. By the time you hit the Elite 4, you can just one shot pretty much everything with a well-leveled psychic Pokémon.
It’s seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it’ll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it’s not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.
It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.
In fairness, that’s not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I’ve had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.
It could also just be peoples’ biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.
And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet “communities” really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I’m closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.
Gonic works pretty well with my library, and Tempo is fine for a client. I mostly just put stuff on an SD card in my Fiio these days, though.
I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I’m kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn’t getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I’m also pretty happy with it for now.
It hasn’t? When I was in Manchester in January, anything except the cans had a bunch of artificial sweeteners in it, in order to lower the sugar content. I don’t know if the cans are a small enough size to skirt the tax, or just not be worth raising the price over, but bottles of regular Coke definitely had artificial sweeteners in them.
Says the guy backing the same group that lost 4/7 presidential elections since 2000, including two (against Trump) that people thought nobody could possibly lose, since he was that terrible a candidate. You guys are killing it at getting people to agree with your platform, and it’s totally in line with what the broader population wants.
Great stump speech for why your preferred party isn’t just a bunch of people hostile to anyone who disagrees with them. With people like you representing them, I’m sure they’ll be able to win consecutive elections, rather than just getting the odd touch of power when people get tired of the GOP’s nonsense. Keep telling yourself it’s the voters that are wrong and stupid, and not your party, buddy.
People just don’t like them because they aren’t good enough.
It’s more that they’re still all in on incrementalism, while the problems people face are worsening by leaps and bounds, and they’re actively hostile to members of their own party who advocate for advancing the sort of large-scale, structural changes needed to actually resolve the various crises bearing down on the working class. They’re also at odds with their base on major issues, such as healthcare reform, a robust social safety net that isn’t means-tested to death, and their obsession with supporting Israel, because they’ve been captured by the purse strings of their major donors. It certainly doesn’t help peoples’ opinion of them as embodying the out of touch elites who are deaf to the plight of the working class when party leadership comes out against [https://www.businessinsider.com/we-are-free-market-economy-pelosi-rejects-stock-ban-congress-2021-12?op=1](Congressional insider trading) that our representatives are notorious for exploiting to enrich themselves via privileged knowledge they gain through their positions.
If they didn’t dump millions of dollars into primary challenges to progressive candidates that represent a challenge to the prevailing neoliberal order the Dem leadership so dearly loves, even when it means ultimately losing the race to a Republican, I doubt people would be so hostile to them, and the party would probably be in a better place. When party leadership won’t resolve their issues in a satisfactory manner, won’t listen to and incorporate criticism from their base, and actively fight their efforts to get elected officials who more accurately represent their views and values, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people decide to go elsewhere.
You can’t publish enough TikToks and youtube videos to media manage your way out of a hostile, out of touch group having a death grip on the party and refusing to admit that, perhaps, the present situation is vastly different today than it was 3-4 decades ago when they were first elected.
There are plenty of people, both politically engaged and those who only show up to vote every 4 years, who are legitimately dissatisfied with the Democratic Party’s deafness to the problems facing the average voter, and as long as the Democrats and their supporters continue to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it’s all down to a hostile media environment, the further down the path to complete irrelevance they’ll find themselves.
Sure, but they often aren’t terribly appealing, outside of those that target highly qualified professionals. Japan also needs manpower to make up for shortages in areas like their agricultural and fishing industries, and the terms just kind of suck. Like, I could qualify right now to move there based on my work experience in seafood, but it would be on a 5 year, non-renewable visa, which doesn’t count at all towards establishing permanent residency and doesn’t allow me to bring my family with me.
Those sorts of programs really only appeal to people from nearby developing nations that want to go to Japan for a few years, send a ton of money back home, and then go back to live in Malaysia or the Philippines once they finish building their new house, or paying for their kid to attend a good school, or whatever. It doesn’t do much more than kick the problems of a shrinking tax base and labor pool down the line a bit, nor does it really encourage those participating in such schemes to make serious efforts at integration with the local culture.
Sooner or later, Japan needs to implement a proper immigration reform to offset low domestic birth rates, or they’ll have an elderly population that can’t fund the government and public services, because they aren’t working and the younger generation is too small to carry the load all on their own, and they also won’t have the people to care for them and provide them goods and services in their old age.
In comparison, Italy and Spain have roughly 4x the immigrant population of Japan, and Canada’s number of immigrants is nearly 10x as large.
they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty.
In fairness, this is also down to companies having no loyalty to their employees. I would be more than happy to never have to go job hunting again, if career jobs, with appropriate incentives, were still a thing that actually exists. I am substantially less enthusiastic about the prospect of spending my entire working life dedicated to a single company that will not give me annual raises that beat inflation or any sort of pension as a reward for my loyalty, while my working conditions and benefits will likely deteriorate over time at the whims of a rotating group of petty tyrants in management, and the prospect of getting laid off because some dipshit in the C-suite implemented a terrible idea that anyone with the least amount of experience doing the actual work could have told them was doomed from the start and saved everyone suffering the consequences of their dumbass vanity project to pad their resume for when they pull the cord on their golden parachute and jump ship to sink another business.
I suspect a lot of people would be quite content at having the stability of such a position, if only the trade-offs weren’t so terrible for them in pretty much every other way. The vague possibility of a farewell party at the end of 40+ years of work doesn’t cut it.
You could probably make a big enough threat to the companies just by saying, “If our audit finds you are, in fact, sending meritless denials to try and pad your bottom line, you need to reach out to all those impacted and inform them that the denied services will be covered 100%, along with any follow-up care needed as a result from the treatment you denied. And the fine is 150% of the cost of all claims you denied.”
Shareholders ultimately don’t care about the CEO, they can get another one. Hit their bottom line hard enough, and they’ll take note, though.
At lot of this strikes me as non-issues, or even bordering on entitlement.
Well, for instance, if you’re contributing your own code, there is a high bar to clear. It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is. Just to get accepted, you have to offer something better than some existing product that may have been around for decades.
Well, no kidding, that’s how it works in most things. Why would a project accept a contribution that doesn’t add a previously missing feature or improve on the implementation of a current one? I would be pretty suspect of using a program that accepts a random commit so that a college kid can check the “Timmy’s first accepted pull request” box and let them pad their resume.
Some would-be contributors are very familiar with programming, reading, and writing code, but they may never have opened an issue or sent a pull request. This is a scary first step. Others may have the necessary tech skills, but not the creativity. Where should they you begin? Also, if someone is scared, that can result in impostor syndrome. The fear that people all over the world will see your bad code is a powerful factor reducing the urge to share it.
These are all things that the greybeards being maligned had to figure out at some point, I don’t really see the harm in new contributors being expected to do the same, especially when there is an abundance of documentation and tutorials available now, which simply didn’t exist in the past.
For instance, there are a lot of folks doing mods for video games. This can be a very creative activity, there is lots of room for innovation, as well as outlets such as streaming to reach an audience. It applies to all sorts of games, such as Pokémon, Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft. Game modding is a great way in. It could even be a way to set up a company, or to make a living. But it’s not considered as FOSS. For novices getting interested, it could even be attracting people away from getting into FOSS development.
Again, nothing new here. No, game mods weren’t nearly as prevalent in the past, but new devs have had the choice between contributing to FOSS software and contributing to/creating proprietary programs for as long as FOSS has been a thing.
I don’t think the old guard should be dismissive or rude to newcomers when their contributions aren’t up to the standard expected to be accepted, but they also aren’t getting paid to be these peoples’ mentors. It kind of reminds me of posts I see in language learning communities, where people would get all upset, “I completed the Duolingo Spanish tree, but the cashiers at my local Mexican restaurant speak too fast for me to understand and they switch to English when I try to talk to them in Spanish.” Cool that you want to try and use the language, my friend, but these people aren’t being paid to be your tutor, and you may well be making their job more difficult and/or holding up other paying customers by trying to force random people to listen to your extremely basic, and likely incorrect, Spanish. They don’t have an obligation to put everything else in their work or life on hold to try and stroke your ego.
Curiously, I don’t see any mention of what, in my view, is likely a much more serious issue to getting new generations of contributors involved, as well as having a more diverse set of contributors. Access to technology and relevant education is far from uniform. If little Timmy from Greenwich, CT has had a personal computer he was free to mess around with to his heart’s content from the moment he could read and attended a well-funded school with the possibility of studying computers, programming, and early exposure to things like Linux from grade school onwards, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that he’s more comfortable working with these concepts and more likely to wind up contributing successfully to FOSS projects than my friend Lucas, in Brazil, who only got a second-hand computer when he managed to get accepted to university, and had no real concept of Linux/FOSS until I explained to him why I couldn’t just install a random, Windows-only program he thought would be useful to me.
To draw another language learning comparison, it’s like how in the US, most students will only study a second language for a couple of years in high school and two semesters at university, if they attend higher education, and then you periodically have people going, “How come so many Americans fail to speak a second language compared to students in Europe?” Then, you look at the curriculum in countries like Germany, and realize they begin teaching students English as early as grade-school, often adding another foreign language later on. Is it any surprise that, when they have nearly a decade of foreign language instruction, compared to the mere two years many Americans get, alongside a fair bit more exposure to and encouragement of engaging with foreign language media, that they wind up being more proficient at using said language on average?
It’s hardly a perfect solution that will completely mitigate all of the issues with getting younger and more diverse groups of people to contribute to FOSS projects, but I don’t doubt that having access to computers in the home from a young age and access to more extensive education on computers and related fields from a much younger age would go a long way towards getting more people involved. Of course, even then, having the downtime to be able to dedicate to contributing to/maintaining FOSS projects is a factor that will disproportionately favor historically privileged groups. Even if she has the knowledge and ability to do so, a single mother working three jobs in the Bronx in order to keep a roof over her family’s head, food on the table, and the lights and heating on simply might choose not to spend what little free time she has writing a badass new MPD client in Rust that has plugins to integrate with Lidarr and automatically fix metadata with beets based on matching the hashes of files to releases on various trackers in order to scrape the release data from them, no matter how cool the concept might sound to her. And it’s not really something I could blame her for.
Beyond games, hardware support would still be a pretty big one. If Linux is widely adopted enough, it makes more and more sense for hardware companies to make sure their new devices will be supported on launch day. Not having to worry about my network card being too new from a brand that has poor/no Linux support would be a pretty big factor in influencing my purchases the next time I’m looking for a laptop. Pretty sure I’ve also encountered people complaining about being unable to use all the features that their new GPU offers under Windows, because the company hasn’t released a Windows driver and devs working on Linux are still in the process of reverse-engineering things to write an open driver that is feature complete.
Another big one would be configuration of peripherals, as there are a fair number that assume you have Windows to run their proprietary configuration tool. I’ve come across mice like that, as well as mechanical keyboards that require some proprietary Windows program if you want to flash the firmware and customize your layout.
More Linux users also makes it a more attractive target for devs in general. That could mean you get a cool, new hobby project that someone is working on and decides to make a FOSS Linux version, could mean companies at least offer a Linux version of their proprietary software that doesn’t have a comparable Linux alternative. There’s a lot of software out there that people need for work or school, especially in more niche fields, where there’s not a viable Linux alternative and your job/school isn’t going to change their entire workflow just for you.
I’m sure others can come up with further examples that wouldn’t occur to me.
You keep saying this is a practical response, but won’t say how, so I’m done with you. You’re the one talking in hypotheticals here, as if bills with no chance of getting passed are actually going to accomplish something. You just keep repeating the same statement about these bills, with zero factual basis.
Good luck out there, because it sure seems like nothing is getting through to you, and I see you talking in the same circles with others now that I’ve looked around the thread more.
You might want to work on your reading comprehension, as that is not at all what I said. Let me spell it out loud and clear for you. Republicans already did a terrible thing removing women’s right to autonomy over their own bodies. Several Democratic Senators proposed bills that would impose restrictions broadly within the same category that would impact men, rather than women, if they were to pass, but have literally none of the dire consequences women face from the Republican actions. These proposed bills have literally zero chance of passing into law, and thus will not have any effect. Now, then.
this is a very practical solution.
Let’s pull up the old Cambridge dictionary for that pesky word I’ve bolded.
relating to experience, real situations, or actions rather than ideas or imagination
Now, since these aren’t going to pass into law, and thus have no binding effect on reality, how exactly is this a practical solution.
it isn’t. this legislation prohibiting female bodily autonomy already happened. raped children are being forced to keep their rape babies. women are dying in the parking. lots of hospitals. they are being bounty hunted for seeking medical care. That’s not performative. those are real life effects of these people. you want to allow to steal civil rights, including basic human dignity.
Uh, I don’t know how to break it to you, but those are all the consequences of the Republican policy that have already taken effect, and these laws don’t propose to undo any of them. Once more, they don’t even level the field of oppression, since they aren’t going to pass, and the people writing them know this.
A practical solution would have been addressing the filibuster and expanding the Supreme Court to prevent the conservative-packed court from doing exactly what they did. Or actually codifying the protections obtained from the Roe v. Wade decision in law at any point in the 50+ years since the ruling was initially made. Either one of those would have actually prevented this situation.
You have yet to articulate in any way how proposing laws that these legislators know will not be passed will do literally anything aside from generate some media coverage. Unless you can do so, there’s no point in engaging with you any further. I don’t know if you’re just a troll, or if you really believe this will actually provoke any real change, as you refuse to explain why you believe this to be a practical solution that will bear fruit, either by correcting the wrongs done to women in this country or by making men face vaguely similar (but not really, kind of hard to equate dying painfully and unnecessarily from being denied healthcare with a $10,000 fine) consequences, in spite of all evidence indicating otherwise.
Yeah, this was an odd write-up. I found this section particularly baffling.
Now, credible eliminates the means-tested-to-death programs the Dems love so much, right out of the gate. This, much as the author seems loath to say it, leaves you with progressive ideas, or Republican/conservative ideas. Presumably, folks who cared enough to register as Democrats don’t like the conservative ideas, so we can fairly safely discard them as a winning move to get those voters out. Raising the minimum wage, universal healthcare, building more housing and/or implementing schemes to help people afford current housing, expanding benefits like WIC and EBT, free and universal university education, or taxing the rich and corporations to fund these sorts of programs are all clear, credible and progressive stances that would help working people.
It doesn’t get much more simple than, “I make minimum wage. They say they will make minimum wage a bigger number, so I will get more money.” or “My check would be bigger if I didn’t have to pay insurance premiums, and I could spend it on other stuff if my insurance actually reliably covered most medical expenses without me having to cough up $2500-$6000 a year out of pocket first.”
I’d also like to send out a special “Fuck you” to everyone who signed off on changing the position representing nonvoting Democrats and those who voted, depending on whether the nonvoters were more or less likely to respond in a certain way compared to those who voted in this section.