OpenStars @ OpenStars @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

Except they can jam up - otherwise as you said it would be better to reload one than to switch?

Oh that's weird. If it helps, here's another link that my phone automatically translates the above into: https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=RyyrDneVyLze3rWE&v=ximgPmJ9A5s&feature=youtu.be. Anyway it's just the word "Authoritarianism". Enjoy!:-)

I cannot stomach much of it, but it is fun to go back and watch older media related to technology - e.g. the six million dollar man has like spinning tape disks, when computers were entire-room affairs.

So he was right, using the definition at that time, though there was also so much potential for more.

Also it is funny to hear them say that technology would literally make the six million dollar man "better", not just "well again" or "he will have side effects but his capabilities will be far above the norm" or some such. One glance at Google these days, or a Boeing plane, does not inspire me to think of the word "better" than what came before even from those exact companies. Technology moves forward, but I am not so sure that the new is always "better" than the old. It was an interesting bias that they had though, during the cold war and after the moon landing.

I mean... America is influencial, therefore what evil is there gets spread more readily. Also it has historically been more transparent, so what evil is there is easier to see.

But e.g. Communist China has evil too, though it is usually better at hiding the details, and yet it cannot cover everything and what little does come out is rather chilling.

And India, well I can't start listing every country on earth, but let's just say that if I did, much evil would be listed out.

Smaller nations with less ability to create evil on a larger scale ofc may demonstrate less evil, but if those nations were to suddenly discover I dunno let's say vibranium, they would likely become just as evil as the USA. What nation doesn't have a sordid backstory of murder and espionage and assassination and so on? (Unless it is brand new I guess?) Though America does enjoy it to excess and even puts it on display, so yeah I agree with that part at least.

Check out that video I linked for more.

More to the point, I would hope for something to be DONE about the whole fiasco. Simply calling it "evil" is not enough - of course it's evil, and it also does good too, ironically, but now what? Commit violence against it? :-P

For now... except managers don't want to actually think, yet do want to be in control of even the tiniest aspects of every single fucking thing (see e.g. Boeing planes literally falling out of the sky, against the wishes of the engineers bc the managers figured that this way of skipping maintenance and then covering that truth from federal safety commissioners was "better"... for the sake of their profits ofc), so how soon until their unthinking need to "feel like" they are in control leads them to using computers to control the people, without even those humans who hold the admin rights ever making any conscious decisions?

I suspect that a thinking computer may be correct far more often than an unthinking human.:-D

How soon until we settle for just one of those though? :-P

As @lad said, it is not the identical same thing, but yeah it certainly does seem connected.

As for evil, I could not name a single country on earth that wasn't, especially in a historic context, but neither does that excuse the USA for being thus.

Watching Rules for Rulers really opened my eyes on that score though.

Possibly. He's not the best at making documentaries, and perhaps watching a trailer for it would be sufficient and better than watching the whole entire thing. Or maybe that one was actually good? It's been awhile for me too and I do not recall either the details of how "entertaining" it was, but I do recall that it pointed out how news media aims to make profits rather than inform the public - and that is a very necessary lesson to learn. There are other sources to do so ofc, though this was also a commentary on gun violence at the same time, so I thought of it. But if people want to point to other, better documentaries that's awesome.

But more than all that, and whether OP actually watches it or not, my point is that it exists, and moreover it did so for DECADES. In all that time since, protections against gun violence have actually gone down, as some stuff has expired and new protections for the violence have been added - e.g. in California where the judge ruled that AK-15s or whatever were perfectly fine home defense weapons. i.e., Bowling for Columbine shows one example of how long we've known about all of this stuff. Surely there are other documentaries too - probably some from the 70s even - but this is one that I could recall offhand.

And for that purpose it does its job just fine, merely by existing:-).

The top end of medical care is higher than it has ever been in the world. And stuff is available to more people than ever too - e.g. tiny villages in Africa can get vaccines that Americans refuse to take even. But access to programs such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are closing up shop. Younger people are forced to pay into it but will never get the value out of it that older generations were able to. So while the programs ostensibly look to be still there, their "meaning" has changed, bigly.

Similarly with the top and bottom ends of knowledge - except it was far easier to afford a college education when it was a fifth of the cost that it today, and you used to be able to Google pretty much anything, but now all that is shown are ads, ads, and more ads (SEOs have seen to that - tbf AI stuff is helping but it is extremely unreliable and soon enough that will fall prey to SEO stuff too).

But the biggest issue may be affordability of housing: having cool phones that can play games is nice and all, but what else in life could possibly compare with being able to afford your very own home? Even if bought at age 40-60? One answer to that is having a semi-permanent "job", compared to a shorter-term position in today's gig economy (there was some article saying that nearly all positions created in 2020-2 were short term ones, though ofc I can never find this article again on Google).

People today have little hope for the future. Neither Trump nor Biden (nor Mitch McConnell nor Nancy Pelosi, now Hakeem Jeffries, etc.) seems to be able to provide that. Nor could they even on theoretical grounds due to the forces at work of automation and globalization. But perhaps there is reason for hope? If so, someone smarter than I would need to explain it, and even find it first. "The economy" has grown for almost a hundred years... but at this point whether that unrestrained growth pattern seems sustainable or not is besides the point, since "the economy" doesn't seem to be trickling down any to the people who want to share in the good fortune of "America". But yeah... maybe it will get better? Or maybe it's Maybelline?

The difference I would guess lies in who is doing the replicating.

I mean... those glasses on his face look awfully modern too...

Then in that case it is subjective to whatever YOUR desires are... and I cannot help you by telling you what those are:-). Though at a guess, you sound like you would be more permissive towards it - like especially if you got a refund when you asked for one then all is good for you.

But there is an argument to be made that a company that is this negligent in checking whether the sample was contaminated in any way before sending out the results is arguably not one that you want to use? Even if it was the only company in existence that offered that service - at what point is bad information, i.e. unreliable & untrustworthy, worse than no information at all?

Though again, that gets back to it being a subjective determination. Which if not pertaining directly to you, needs to be applied to the customer population at large. Likely many of them would want some measure of reliability in the results, which is a pressure towards them "having to", in order to stay in business - i.e. even if you would offer them your own business, they need a sufficient amount overall to remain viable.

Ofc, you cannot truly know the answers to your questions, without deeper testing. I am just saying that based on the evidence put forth so far, it is not looking good. Especially if the industry overall is entirely unregulated. You could send them the same sample three times and get back a different dog each time? Or not... but then depending on the breed, some are more trustworthy than others? Or they could detect a lot of business from one customer, and start doing higher QA checks on only those samples, at the expense of all the others.

The true answer is that none of this is really known, and they can do whatever they can get away with - at which point the fact that they have already been caught, when such a simple & basic test could have easily prevented it, does not bode well for the other issues that remain unknown. The prior has shifted.

I dunno, at this point - as always - the person most singly damaging to Trump's brand is the man himself. His people don't worship him so much as the ideals that he represents. They KNOW who he is, they simply do not care. And if he died, they would just move on to the next one - we thought DeSantis but similarly to Trump himself, his own shortcomings got in the way, and unlucky for him Trump did not step back + he (DeSantis) simply could not force the issue on his own.

And unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to the idea that the Democrats suck ass. If the question is "what is 1+1=?", the Dems answer is a million, whereas the old-school (e.g. Tea Party) Repubs answer was negative Pluto, while the Alt Right would fuck your mom and kill your dog (or maybe get them confused and vice versa). i.e. there are a lot of ways to be wrong, but they are not equally so.

His conservative base is not nearly so "Pro-Trump" as they are "anti-libtards". Which should worry us all, b/c McCartyism has touched this nation before, and those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. Anyway, yeah they would move on, and yeah those others would not be supported quite as strongly, but I don't think this would actually matter, in terms of people showing up to vote to swing an election? If anything, it could even help Repubs chances, for those middle-of-the-road voters who definitely do not want to vote for Biden yet did not want to vote for Trump, and would consider voting for a different Republican.

It is impossible to type out all of the reasons, but here are a few. Check out Bowling for Columbine btw - a movie from two thousand fucking two, 15 years BEFORE that particular one. We've seen that particular bullet coming for a LONG time, and the ones before it, and the ones after it, and the ones yet to come - we KNOW, yet we do NOTHING. Most especially the "Pro-Life" crowd.

Lobbying. It's a thing. The NRS especially is one of the more powerful ones. More than 80% of American citizens - rising to >90% of NRA members even!!! - want some form of extremely limited gun control. However, we do not live in a democracy, not even one dominated by conservatives or rural Americans - rather, we live in a plutocracy where despite the OVERWHELMING support of the VAST MAJORITY of Americans, we cannot manage to get anything done.

Also, much of that money supposedly flowing to politicians from the "NRA" actually has been found to have ties back to Russia. Many of the politicians receiving that money may not even know the true source of where it came from - nor do they particularly seem to care.

Oh, and then billionaires bought up pretty much all of the major news outlets (a handful of others still exist - did The Guardian escape that? Well, even if they were, they seem to be allowed to talk about other corporate take-overs (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/03/billionaires-extra-power-media-ownership-elon-musk).

And hopefully you already know what happened to Google, where SEOs took over the searches so that it is nearly impossible to find things that just five years ago were easily retrievable, with the only lingering hold-out being Reddit, before then that whole thing happened...

BTW, the government is literally not allowed to collect statistics on how many violent gun deaths occur in America. I am not sure if this is the video where Jordan Klepper showcases that, but if not then he has a bunch of others. Or take your pick - there are millions if not billions of videos, of varying degree of quality and relevance. I've never seen one show a truly "unbalanced" take though - that is just not how for-profit corporations work. You just have to educate yourself by watching a bunch of stuff until you know how trustworthy the source is, and also each and every material topic too. It is sad, but we cannot seem to trust any (especially for-profit) advice these days. Though if you want another recommendation, there's John Oliver's whole expose on the NRA. To provide a modicum of balance, on the other side there are series such as Paul Harrell's Mass Shootings: Causes and Possible Solutions.

And - yes there is always more - there are other arguments such as: "if someone cannot get a gun they will simply make their own bomb" (ignores how much harder it is to do that), and the whole thing of plastic ghost guns (again ignores how difficult it would be to do that). Ultimately, i think that children being sacrificed is itself merely a symptom of a much deeper cause. People on Lemmy call it "capitalism", which has a LOT of truth to it - but then again, nations such as communist China have their own different issues. But, again, since ~90% of Americans already are in favor of stopping these kinds of mass-shootings, this will not be solved by merely educating yourself or "getting the word out". In fact, this type of issue is precisely the type of thing that Trump leaned heavily on as his route to the White House - "Hillary Clinton is corrupt so you should elect me and I will get rid of all the corruption, everywhere". So realistically, this is just something that we are going to simply have to live with, unless and until people fucking DO something about it. e.g. a responsible gun owner could patrol their own neighborhood schools. However, do note that every time someone does try to do that, they end up shooting innocent people instead, and yet it does nothing to stop the actual shooters, who can pull guns out of a bag (long-ish violin or trumpet case maybe?) and start shooting in mere seconds - not enough time to notice and prevent it. So start by educating yourself, since that's really all you can do, and also it will help enormously to ensure that you are on the correct side of the issue.

For those so inclined, there is a verse commanding the latter point even in the actual Holy Bible, at 1 Thessalonians 5:21: "Test EVERYTHING against what you KNOW to be true". I don't know what can be done, after the education stage, but I know it MUST begin with that.

"Have to" depends on factors like whether there are any laws being violated - e.g. for fraud, which would normally be difficult to prove but this kind of story might open up to an enormous lawsuit, regarding who has the responsibility of providing the services in return for the money, so despite offering a refund if the company had not done that in advance, but instead waited for the lawsuit, then it could get into deeper territory like what the specific language of the contract says, and what damages may be able to be demonstrated, etc.

And the laws there differ for a for-profit corporation iirc compared to a nonprofit organization that can still pay a hefty salary to its workers and management (I think?).

And then there's just public perception: people hearing about these scenarios could put the entire company, if not the industry itself, in severe financial jeopardy.

Especially if that check could have been implemented in a month or two, the cost of failing to do so may be extremely high in comparison to simply just doing it - as in, better safe than sorry.

But "have to", I don't know exactly. It just seems naively like something that would have been worthwhile? Maybe.

Bc chips are as dumb as rocks, but really really really good at repetition:-).

He also deregulated the FCC, the SEC, and trains. I dunno, I seem to recall hearing some stuff about train derailments that seem to me to be directly traceable back to those decisions...

Also, while he is not directly responsible for Russia invading Ukraine, he likewise directed our response - e.g. "you have to do me a favor though" (which iirc is literally treasonous).

Also, well there's a lot of also's.:-( Unfortunately, we may get to start working on a whole second listing:-(.

It could have, if they had bothered to actually implement that check.

The company exists for reasons of short term profits though, so... why should/would they?