So basically 1 in 20 inmates on death row are innocent, and people (mostly conservatives) are A-OK with that percentage of innocent people being subject to state-sanctioned murder in a very brutal way that’s far from painless. A dog being put down by a vet receives more humane treatment than a human being put down by the state.
That “at least 4%” bit makes that even worse. Just look at the List of miscarriage of justice cases on Wikipedia, it’s not not exhaustive and it’s huge, I cannot morally or ethically justify capital punishment on that alone, the whole state-sanctioned murder bit just makes it even more horrific.
So everyone that punishes someone with death will receive the death penalty?
Of course, you will have to punish the person that punishes the person that punishes someone with the death penalty with the death penalty with the death penalty
But then, because they punished someone that punished someone that punished someone that punished someone with death with death with death with death, they will have to be killed
Eventually, you will run out of people who can punish someone with the death penalty, so you will have to do it. Since you killed someone as a punishment, someone will also have to kill you, but because you are the only person that can do that, you will have to do it, ending the loop
I used to be a big reader of books and comics so I have a lot of story ideas and then sometimes I wish I lived in some start trek utopia and could just work on opensource things or do my initial thing which is molecular biology.
Also, I would enforce every online shop, transport company, hotels… All of these functioning under a federated market, sort of like the fediverse. Impossible to corrupt. Impossible to monopolize. True choice.
What’s with Git? Sure, it is used by a lot of people, but it has some of it’s own shortcomings as a snapshot-based version control. VCS like Pijul has it’s own advantages, something to do with the patch theory of differences (disclaimer: I’m not an expert in this).
I am also kinda opposed to enforcing XDG, because of how unstandardized it is. Like for example, to set a terminal, GNOME Shell had to hardwired a piece of code to their internals, checking to see if a particular environment variable exists, , or else use gnome-terminal, which is just bad practise.
Most of the time. I use calendar versioning (calver) for my internal application releases because I work in IT. When the release happens is more consequential than breaking changes. And because it’s IT, changes that break something somewhere are incredibly frequent, so we would constantly be releasing “major” versions that aren’t really major versions at all.
OpenDocument.
Agreed compared to .doc and .docx. And if you’re going to version control it, markdown instead of a binary blob.
For academic documents in STEM fields, I’d love to see a transition from LaTeX to Typst. Much cleaner, better error handling, and it has a web UI if people don’t want to install a massive runtime on their own computer.
Yeah, Typist is great and has potential for much more still! The big issue is something like the network effect, LaTeX has everything you could possibly want, pretty much, and people will continue to primarily support it because it’s the biggest tool. It will be hard to break that cycle, but in the long run it may be possible.
I like giving the seller the benefit of the doubt, not everyone can be on their a game everyday.
Honestly while eBay was a nuisance it understandable why it’s set up this way. I was on the other side of this where we shipped a thing and the buyer claimed it never arrived. Which we later proved it did. And considering how rare or hard to find some items are it’s a good service.
That said I support local sellers in my area before I check eBay. Then eBay but local to my country, the international if the price is right.
eBay relies on buyer confidence to continue to exist. They’re essentially the only game in town for a well known world-spanning used stuff selling platform, so they know sellers don’t have a choice and they don’t give a flying fuck about the seller’s bottom line. eBay sides with the buyer. Always. It might take some time, it might take some extra emails, but ultimately you will always receive a refund no matter what if you as a buyer complain. This means that it is always possible to get your money back if you were overtly scammed by an eBay seller, and this is because eBay knows very well just how prevalent seller-side scams are on their platform.
But this also means that the buyer can concoct any lie or pull any scam themselves no matter how obvious and an honest seller ultimately has no recourse and will be out both the money and the product. A buyer can lie and claim the product never arrived, swap it for a broken instance of a similar item and ship it back to you claiming you “scammed” them, or even just apply your shipping label to a brick and mail it back to you and eBay won’t care. They’ll close the case, take the money from your account, and refund the buyer their purchase amount while the buyer keeps the item. It doesn’t matter if you posted your item as “no returns.” All the buyer has to do is say it was defective, damaged, or didn’t arrive if they have buyer’s remorse or simply feel like ripping you off.
For this reason I don’t sell anything with any value whatsoever on eBay. Only literal junk that I got for free via work, like parting out broken equipment that has a net $0 cost for us, etc. If I turn a buck on it, fine. But sometimes I don’t, and I have seen buyers try every trick under the sun, and every time eBay sides with them in the face of all evidence to the contrary. So you will ultimately always lose some, and if that’s going to impact your bottom line you just can’t sell on eBay.
Use to sell on eBay for years, and remember a time when we shipped a Scuzzy drive to Australia only to find ourselves in eBay court. Thankfully we kept receipts and won. But as a seller you need to be extremely cautious with what you list.
I don’t like eBay but for other reasons like 3d printed model resellers who rip models and pictures from thingiverse and sells it like its theres. Even if the model is under a noncommercial license.
You forgot that sellers can’t even leave negative feedback about buyers now.
As a buyer I film unboxing videos for myself for expensive purchases. As a seller I don’t sell anything more expensive than $100 or so, and after hundreds of sales I haven’t had a return yet (knock on wood).
For more expensive items above $100 I might film a boxing video, though, and if I ever did get a return on that item, I’d film an unboxing video as well. At least I could prove if a buyer mailed me back a brick or whatever. Of course it’s also entirely possible that eBay staff don’t even bother reviewing the evidence.
I’ve been buying and selling since the late '90s. I stay away entirely from areas rife with fraud, like computer parts or things teenagers might want to buy, and so far it’s worked out for me.
It defintly is a slippery slope. I work for a municipalitylies utilities company. Part of my job is working with a utilities companies union to lobby politicians to make laws that will actually improve the way we can work. I think we actually do improve things for the German public by bringing desperately needed knowledge to the table.
But I think we are a small minority among lobbying institutions.
“By buying [unnecessary product] you will help [marginalized group] to gain a livable income and also send their kids to school instead of sending them to [work place with - even for adults - horrible work conditions]. Also, when buying [product] we will save [arbirtary area] of [rainforest/ coral reef/ mangrove swamp] that would otherwise have been destroyed [but not by us]. Additional to that, your purchase helped us to save [arbitrary ammount of CO2 - at least in a completely hypothetical scenario]. While using [product] you will make the world a better place.”
As a customer there is barely any way you can ensure or check that these things are true. It cannot be possible to save the enviroment while buying stupid products like, for example, internet-of-shit-devices which will be phased out in no time or single use products made from plastic or other harmful materials that are not recycleable.
All these claims are just an indulgance trade - like it is done for centuries in a religious context. It is just that you have an excuse to consume more, because they to something to help people/ enviroment. If there was a product that would have been advertised as: “Well, we irretrieveably destroyed 100 km^2^ of nature, and for each single product in average two workers died and at end-of-life this product will fuck up the environment once more - also it will impair your health just by existing”, it would be horrible - but at least it would be honest.
Yup. Revisions knocked me down Several pegs… all the way from “I think I’m competent” to “how did I even get accepted into the program if this is what they think of my work?”
A reviewer once remarked that I’m not worthy of being in my field of study. I’m so much happier since I left academy behind. I obviously love science, but fuck the current culture and people that enable and encourage such behaviour.
Goddamn… yeah, my PhD program was fucking toxic, but if nothing else, it was a learning experience. Doubly so when my advisor gave me the bad news that I failed the third prelim, and wouldn’t be continuing on. I was so relieved… it kind of hit me right then.
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