There would be 2 fewer extreme MAGA judges in supreme court.
The same level of MAGA corruption and disinformation would not have been possible.
January 6 would never have happened.
Trump would not have the same legitimacy and platform to constantly scream his MAGA hate message.
Trump would likely have been judged much sooner for the crimes that were revealed during his first campaign. So he might actually have been in prison by now.
The widespread MAGA treasonous behavior to favor Putin and Russia and undermine USA would probably not be a thing.
So since Trump has been THEE major driver of extremism and treason in USA for the past 8 years, I’d say no. USA would not be nearly as divided as it is now.
Don’t forget Trump dismantled the Obama era pandemic response program shortly after taking office. He had a game plan all laid out and he threw it away out of spite and vanity.
Not so much that he was incompetent, as it was pure unfiltered corruption.
He was recorded behind closed doors agreeing that people should mask, and get vacinated, and make sure space between people is adhered to.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut, if covid kills in NYC so easily because it’s condensed amount of people in a small space, and if all the major cities vote blue…then that means covid will kill the democrat voters and mostly leave the republican voters unharmed because they all live on farms and such!
That was his thought process, verbally expressed. Not mine.
Problem is, democrat voters didn’t fall for his bullshit. I remember one press conference where he would say things like “Covid will go away in the spring, it’s all a hoax” and then a scientist studying the virus since conception IMMEDIATELY followed it up with “Covid is NOT a hoax. Treat it seriously, or you may die”. Then Trump would say something like “We don’t need businesses shut down, we need to get back to work.” And immediately followed up by that same scientist saying “It’s not wise to encourage people to engage in public activities at this time. We must continue the quarantine”.
Basically Trump would spew some bullshit, and IMMEDIATELY be followed up with this scientist saying the exact opposite of what Trump said. All this while Trump is giving him a look of “WILL YOU SHUT UP??? YOU’RE FACT CHECKING MY BULLSHIT!!!”
I LOVE a good absurdist moment…but I prefer for the absurdity to be based in fiction. 3rd Rock From the Sun is amazing absurdist humor. John Lithgow is amazing in that role. However when the show ends, my country isn’t on fire with 1 million people dead.
So, I see this as corruption rather than incompetence.
I started on Debian potato and used pretty much every distribution at sone point, often three at a time. I’ve used Ubuntu for the last five years because it’s easy, stable and upto date. I know people get very minmax about their choice of os and I love that but yeah we need to remember when we say it’s ‘fine’ or ‘good enough’ that yeah it’s not race tuned or weaponised or whatever special builds people are making but ita still much much better than windows.
First, please define what you mean by socialism. That word encompasses a lot of very different forms of government, even when it’s used “correctly”, and it’s typically not.
The Nazis called themselves socialists, and I’m not moving there.
When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy with a strong social safety net, strong government regulation, and highly progressive taxation.
Edit: for the love of god, please do a little bit of reading about socialism before reinforcing my point that this word is used terribly. We won’t take the wiki as ultimate truth, but please read. Be better. Read and think first. Comment later.
Why couldn’t that what you just described be called something different other than “socialism” then? Sounds like a bad move to make it fall under that same umbrella especially since that term is very frowned upon if not straight out forbidden in a few European countries for example.
So in your view these people are inherently more ‘great’ than others? What would you call these people who are so above average? The over people? The overmen? The ubermensch… oh whoops
Yes I think subdividing humanity into the great people who perform all the work, and the lowly masses that exist to serve them is at the heart of Nazi ideology so I am making that comparison.
See, this is the kind of shit I’m talking about when I drag these pseudo-eugenicist techbros. How you gon classify who’s ‘great and greater’? Doming hammers, calipers, and speculae? You finna start talkin bout achilles heel lengths and skull dimples now? You know saying some downright ghoulish shit then deleting-and-running doesn’t make you seem any less ghoulish, right? “Oh, nah MS10k, life’s just split into the greats and not-greats and if you’re not-great you’re a fuckin serf to your betters” I sincerely hope you fuckin hear yourself someday
Because we’re too busy categorizing this stupid shit into bins of “good” and “bad” when reality is a greyscale between these two. These are fairly reasonable points and should be viewed as a more centrist POV, but since we (read: primarily North America) have a tribal “us vs. them” animosity about it we lump many reasonable ideas together on each end of the spectrum. Things like not having to go bankrupt when you or a loved one needs an emergency hospital visit somehow automatically gets lumped in with the other extreme “socialist” ideas just to solely argue against it and not budge from their end of the extreme.
Wow, yes this is so true for many discussions online and increasingly offline as well. Nuance seems to be not welcomed. Sometimes even suggesting there might be nuance or the topic might be more complicated than black and white already puts you firmly in the enemy camp.
It is, the term for this type of system is called Social Democracy which is not a synonym for socialism, but people (Americans at least) confused and conflate the two terms to the point that they’ve become one and the same in the minds of many people who don’t really understand the terms or their origins.
When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy with a strong social safety net, strong government regulation, and highly progressive taxation.
Let’s go with that definition since that’s what most people think of as socialist.
Provided there is an appropriate amount of technocracy (decisions made by experts rather than politicians), it’d be hard for me to think of a better form of government.
Anyway, this was largely the US until Regan. Social safety net could’ve been stronger, but that had to evolve. Same as in Europe.
Except , racism. Addressing that is not a part of any definition of socialism that I’m aware of. Equality is certainly going along with the spirit of this definition of “socialism”
Can’t answer the where at, but most likely by having an in demand skill and/or a job already lined up. Either that or they had family there. Immigration away from here is basically impossible otherwise.
I read that Denmark releases a list every six months of the skills and degrees that are allowed to immigrate, or get priority or something like that. From looking at the last one I assume they value education, the liberal arts and humanities a lot more than the US.
It ends up being a catch 22. When you want to leave the US because of a lack of upward mobility, social services, jobs in your field, and you can’t save because of healthcare, rent, and debt, then how can you have enough money to move to another state, much less another country?
That is objectively not socialism (any definition of socialism that begins by defining it as a form of capitalism is fundamentally confused)
That said, I’d agree that it is a widespread misunderstanding today. And what people mean when they say socialism is usually actually social democracy (which despite sounding like the word socialism is a mixed system based on capitalism)
Using that misunderstanding as the definition I would definitely live in many of those countries. Many have some of the highest qualities of life in the world, low rates of poverty, universal access to good healthcare and education, and good social mobility.
Exactly. This is what the person you are responding to is saying as well.
They state that the above definition of socialism is wrong as it defines it as a from of capitalism with social features. But under the condition that this is meant he would move into these countries.
@nodsocket@PetDinosaurs > OP: what socialist policies would you implement?
> commenter: what do you mean by socialism?
> OP: let's go with an incorrect definition of socialism. what social democrat policies would you implement?
No, “most people” do not consider that to be what socialism is. Particularly those of us who live in countries with the aforementioned policies. Here we’ve had real socialists who wanted to take away our fundamental individual rights, amongst them the right to ownership, which frankly is a scary idea.
A lot of our regulations and limits on the free market don’t have a socialist bent at all, but are intended to defend our individual liberties against large corporations, which if left unchecked can become corporate institutions, something the US has fallen victim to.
I’d consider these policies as important, if not moreso than our social welfare systems. The social mobility and safety provided by these are meaningless if an arbitrary decision by google, amazon or some bank can singlehandedly ruin your life.
The internet of the 90s was wild, creative, and not as accessible. We dreamed that as it grew and became more accessible, a utopia of information and creativity would flourish.
Instead we got a bland, corporate wasteland, and free soapboxes for every shithead out there.
There is a bit of a smolnet renaissance happening in niche tech and creative circles. Using IRC to socialize, reviving gopher protocol for blogs, creating lofi and pure HTML/CSS sites instead of using bloated JS frameworks. And of course, creating simple and/or federated services for media sharing.
Tell me if you’d like to know more. Additionally, my home instance is full of people with such interests.
I’ve been thinking of starting a blog to help motivate me to do more writing. For a while I felt burnt out because I knew I’d have no hope in hell of being able to do a bunch of SEO stuff to enable people to actually see if anything I write, but I’ve concluded that people based networks are the only way something like this will work for me. After all, most of my favourite blogs or blog posts are ones I’ve heard of through word of mouth.
I’ve not heard of gopher protocol though, that sounds interesting
Finding it is almost impossible though. I’ve tried and tried but the search engines don’t show any of these cute little niche sites that are definitely out there.
I wish people would realize there are people from every generation who won't touch Facebook, IG and other meta things. When we finally got s new mayor who actually said our town with soon have a real website, I nearly wept with joy.
Yup, most of the internet is now sadly an ad-infested monetized corporate hellhole, and as a bonus it’s now rapidly being filled to the brim with AI slop, because it clearly wasn’t bad enough just yet… :(
That’s insane who in their right mind would dedicate their time to that? And what kind of dogshit company would openly allow that to happen! Glad we’re not there is all I’ll say
But that’s only really makes sense in like the simplest of cases. The government doesn’t know if you had a kid this year, or maybe you bought an EV, or maybe you started renting out a room in your home.
If all you have is a single W2 income; then by all means go to your local library, grab a 1040-EZ form, fill it out, and drop it in the mail. Will probably only take you 10 minutes or less.
You seem to have a very optimistic view of the efficiency of governments. I mean the IRS is basically running on a budget of table scraps after being defunded for decades.
Every large organization, private or public, that I’ve interacted has been basically just a bunch of different people in many different silos. I’m surprised to see so many people have this “well oiled machine” perspective of the government where apparently it is all seeing and all knowing.
Sure, that would be simple enough for them to mail you a letter with like “we’re aware of these incomes from these employers” and any failure to file additional income on your part makes you liable. And of course not filing to claim any credits/deductions on your part just screws your out of your own money.
But then that also assumes the IRS knows your address. Does your employer even report your address when your taxes are withheld from your paycheck? And what if you move in the time between then?
I would be very surprised if they didn’t know the address of every taxpayer, and I do believe it’s reported by the companies you work for. If you move, you can fill out a change of address form with the postal service today, which makes the new address generally available. If they really don’t have any way of knowing currently, it would be worth every penny of my taxes to just make an online portal available where you can enter that information yourself.
In all but the most niche cases, they do in fact know that you had a kid. That being said, most things they have a pretty good idea about (or could) and they could easily adopt the system that they do in a lot of other countries where the government sends to a tax form all filled out that says, “we think you owe this much.” Then you just provide the exemptions you listed.
This would save a considerable amount of time when I file my taxes by just being able to double check they got cost basis correct on stocks sold and applied appropriate credits for mortgage interest and what not.
In all but the most niche cases, they do in fact know that you had a kid.
How would the IRS know that? The only way I could think of would be the Social Security department sharing the information with the IRS; and are they legally allowed to do that? But let’s even say that’s true; if the parents aren’t married and filing jointly, who gets to claim the child as a dependent? That’s a decision made by the parents (or local courts in case of custody battles), so not something the IRS would decide.
Basically what it seems to boil down to is that filing taxes is complicated because the tax law is complicated.
I was assuming social security could share that information since now there’s a new taxable citizen. The IRS could easily prepare tax amounts assuming married filing jointly, married filing separately, and single. You would just choose one. And like it currently is, if both people attempt to claim dependency, someone gets slapped with a fine.
Tax law is absolutely complicated, and I definitely won’t deny that, but the IRS can make things easier and could do the basic filings.
They don’t share that information unless absolutely necessary. All government agencies hold their cards pretty close to themselves for legal and liability reasons. The IRS will complain that you’ve both claimed a dependent because you have to include that dependent’s information and they can tell when you both try to claim the same one
Not the sole reason. They play a part, same with H&R Block, but it’s more the people working for the ultra-wealthy who keep bribing politicians to create laws that allow their clients to avoid paying taxes. The companies that have tax software for the small people benefit from the tax system getting more complex, but they don’t directly lobby for those rules, they just want any kind of complexity. Their big fight is against any kind of free tax preparation for the poor and middle class.
It’s pretty disgusting what they do though. They make say $20 from someone filing their taxes. They take say $3 from that $20 and spend it to ensure that their customers are never offered a free alternative. They’re basically making their customers pay to lobby the government to keep taxes so complex that the customer has no choice but to use them again next year.
That’s absolutely not the case. They lobby to prevent the IRS making their own version of TurboTax, not lobbying to make the tax code more complex. Taxes are complex because we have little real oversight but a lot of deductions and credits. The IRS literally cannot track everything they offer deductions for, so it goes largely on the honor system until something seems fishy.
If you have a house, you have deductions. If you added solar to your house, you have deductions. If you bought an electric car or a hybrid, you had deductions for a while there. If you rent you have deductions in some states. You have to list your dependents for credits.
But like I feel like this system of deduction taxes is more difficult than any other country and it reinforces the need for americans to use software or an accountant. Am I wrong? Are other countries putting up with this shit? The biden admin is the first in my lifetime to give us credits rather than a rebate or deductible.
I should have used more precise language. There’s so much jargon! …wikipedia.org/…/Child_tax_credit_(United_States)To my understanding this is the first time it’s ever been paid directly “in advance” rather than served as a credit against your tax payments, awarding money at the end of the year - or even worse when it was non-refundable. This in advance, far higher amount, fully refundable child tax credit is fucking radical compared to what we had and what we’re going back to.
Likewise, the IRS already knows everything about me. If I qualify for, say, food stamps, just have the IRS send me the food stamps. Don’t make me jump through hoops when I’m already destitute, come on.
This would make tens of thousands of jobs redundant and make many social programs much more efficient.
If Democrats actually wanted to win every election from now until forever, this would do it for them. Imagine worrying how you’re going to feed your kids and then the mail arrives “BTW you’ve qualified for food stamps for the last 18 months, here they are” instant loyal voter.
It comes down to price. You can buy used ThinkPads and replacement parts for them quite cheap a lot of the time.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at devices from places like System 76 but if I recall correctly they are still over a thousand dollars when a used ThinkPad T440P for example can be found for around two hundred dollars.
I can confirm this with personal experience. Wife has T470 (if memory serves, something around that) for 100€. That was from previous work and they offered my old laptop for cheap, so it doesn’t really count as average, but not uncommon either at least around here. I got myself T495 a while ago for 299€ from “public” market and have been purchasing couple years old thinkpads for decades now. There’s plenty of those available, they work just fine for the workload we have for laptops (I got a separate desktop for more power hungry applications) and they’ve proven to be pretty reliable workhorses since the brand was owned by IBM.
Framework specially is really interesting approach and I’d love to test to their hardware, but they don’t have Finnish keyboard available just yet and I can get several used thinkpads for the price of one framework, so as long as I’m using my own hard earned money I rather spend it on a known brand where I already know what I’m getting into and spend considerably less money while doing so.
Also with linux thinkpads tend to work just fine or at least there’s documentation and howtos to get everything working.
Taitonetti.fi. Local shop which refurbishes and sells previously leased computers, so their selection varies quite a bit, but I’ve been a happy customer for years and they have frequent sales for the ‘last of the batch’ computers where mine came as well. However I think they don’t ship to outside of Finland, so it might not be so helpful for you.
Framework laptops are interesting and I hope eventually the modularity allows the components to go down in price. Right now I was looking at a 16 (which all sold out within 3 hours of pre-order launch) but it comes out to easily over 3k CAD for a disassembled kit, skimping on RAM and an SSD.
yoo I didn’t know about used/refurbished Thinkpads being that cheap, I just checked and indeed you can find a T480 with 16GB of RAM for $248 on Amazon!
I also agree with this sentiment. I got a used t440p which I used for years in school before upgrading to the framework 13. I still love my old thinkpad, but its now my cheap in home media server. I would agree that old thinkpad are easy to find and a cheap (but still very useable and still to some extent repairable) option for work and school.
T440P is cheap for a reason. Personally I don’t want a 6 pound laptop with a decade old CPU and a crappy TN screen. Something like a used T480 is reasonable though I guess
I use an early 2010s Thinkpad, with Ubuntu, and I can play Minecraft pretty well on it. It’s great. I don’t often carry it places, it’s a desk laptop, but I don’t know of any other affordable laptop that would have such a long useful lifespan. If you know of any, please tell me, but my experiences has made me quite the Lenovo loyalist.
Replacement parts are a bitch though. At least when it comes to batteries. The only battery I’ve seen with any positive reviews are Green Cell which is European, so shipping is absurd, and Duracell which no longer produces thinkpad batteries.
We don’t need more pronouns. We need less of them.
In my native language there is no even he/she pronouns. The word is “hän” and it’s gender neutral. You can be male, female, FTM, MTF, non-binary or what ever and you’re still called “hän”. You can identify as anything you like and “hän” already includes you.
That sounds like a solution that should make everyone happy. However, the crowd arguing against more pronouns would also argue against this, just because they’re impossible to appease.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the (mostly) political right that seems all these new pronouns as stupid would also ironically be against giving up on their own gender specific pronoun for a gender neutral one.
I’ll go one further: I get (and respect) the utility of they/them pronouns for a singular entity, but it IS clunky and confusing. English is ever evolving but when I hear a “they” it is still very much more abstract and plural than a more specific he or she.
Whatever: it’s my shit and I’ll gladly deal with a nanosecond of confusion and adjust if it allows people to maintain their dignity. Point is, by insisting that there’s nothing confusing about they/them in reference to a single entity feels disingenuous. I know moderate people who are otherwise live and let live as well as receptive to basic human dignity who are turned off by the confusing abstraction, switching tenses, etc.
They/them isn’t the elegant, seamless drop in that people say it is and it hurts the messaging. I get that being rigid and forceful is necessary with the rampant transphobia and “i’m just asking (bad faith) questions” going on, but I still fuck up semantics and tenses like whoa
I don’t think they/them is the ideal word to replace he/she with either. It probably needs to be a whole new word. They/them exists in my language too and it’s used when you’re talking about multiple people. It’s confusing to say “they did something” when you’re speaking of a single person.
This argument has never made sense simply because of the fact that singular they/them has been in use for literally centuries. It’s even reasonable to say it’s always been in use considering singular they/them was in use in the 14th century and modern English formed around 14-17th. I can guarantee you have never batted an eye when you heard something like “someone called but they didn’t leave a message”.
There are only two differences with recent usage: people are less likely to assume genders so use they/them more freely; and people identifying specifically as they/them. The words themselves haven’t really changed, they’re just more common now. Opposition to singular they/them is almost entirely political.
Their argument has a lot to do with people not establishing context upfront unlike your example with “someone called”. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a conversation with someone talking about a non-binary person, only to realize five minutes in they weren’t talking about a group of people. It’s super jarring when it happens.
True, but singular they is undeniably clunky. Unfortunately it’s the best we have, so we will have to get used to it. Opposition to the natural evolution of language has never worked.
It’s not people using the neutral that bothers me, it’s the fact that the neutral is both singular and plural while the non neutrals are only singular/plural.
and the plural part also alters the entire sentence structure to plural.
“He is over there” - Singular and easy to understand
“They is over there” - Just sounds wrong.
“They are over there” - Both singular and plural. Is it a person of unspecified nature or multiple people of mixed ones?
English could use a popularization of a strictly singular neutral that doesn’t carry implications of being an object rather than a being (“It is over there”)
I feel the same but with genders. To be clear if anyone identifies to a specific gender, I’ll respect that. However I don’t see why genders are necessary. We are all unique human beings and there’s no need to label everyone to a specific gender.
I think a little bit it’s just that people typically like labels. They want to fit neatly into their little labeled box and the more labels they have, the more unique and/or complete they feel.
I really rejected labels as a teen, I hated the idea of it. Now I realize they can be useful for some things, and you know, if my trans brother feels better because his label is now male, that’s fine it doesn’t hurt me any to call him what makes him feel good.
the more labels they have, the more unique and/or complete they feel.
That sounds completely bonkers to me but you might be right.
if my trans brother feels better because his label is now male, that’s fine
No, of course if you don’t like the body you have and you want to change your “gender-defining” features, you should. It’s a bit like changing your haircut - although more impactful. You didn’t like your looks/body before, so you changed it and now you feel better so that’s perfect!
Before I learned about the LGBTQ community, I thought of gender as something you were born with and that described your body type: masculine or feminine. Aside from that, I don’t and never believed that it defines what kind of person you are, it only defines a part of your looks.
Now with the community there are people who describe themselves as non-binary or agender and again, I’ll totally respect that. However when I tried to think about what my gender really was, I started to realize that the whole concept of gender didn’t really make sense to me. What does it really mean to be non-binary? Heck, what does it even mean to be male or female? If it’s not just your body-type then what is it? Why do we need it? Isn’t it easier to not assign any genders at all? Just be who you want to be and love who you want to love!
If it’s not just your body-type then what is it? Why do we need it? Isn’t it easier to not assign any genders at all? Just be who you want to be and love who you want to love!
That would be lovely if they weren’t a lot of heavily armed persons willing to kill you or make you suffer if you act that way.
We should remove the gender information from ID and other documents unrelated to the gender
(Maybe kept the XX or XY mark on medical papers though, may be useful to avoid death from medical poisoning, but even your gender and sexual preferences have nothing to do here, so no gender mark neither)
However I don’t see why genders are necessary. We are all unique human beings and there’s no need to label everyone to a specific gender.
And if many people (specially, even if not exclusively, in a certain country whose name I’ll avoid mentioning) didn’t have as their favorite passtime “kill the freak”, where “freak” is anyone not belonging to their narrow definition of acceptability, difference would truly be unremarkable. However, reality doesn’t seem to be working well for those folks, and they need a way to identify each other to provide community and to feel less alone and, maybe, to defend each other.
And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.
My language is the exact opposite, everything is gendered in a binary way, and there’s no way to talk in a neutral or non-binary way, at least not in a super awkward way.
If you look at the state driver’s manuals from the dmv it actually says exactly that. It’s already considered a privilege. Otherwise you wouldn’t have to test into it and pay annually to keep your car on the road.
I actually like cars. (They’re… “cool”. I play Forza sometimes, lol.) But the reality is they’re fucking expensive to maintain, along with insurance and taxes and fuel. And very much not fun to drive under normal circumstances, next to removeds and idiots. And terrible for the environment, at absurd US numbers at least.
I’d rather save thousands of dollars and have public transit or easily maintained bike. But bikes are not viable when planet is trying to kill us (Texas is 100-110 °F for 2 months straight now).
Those are all things you need to pass to get your driver’s license here in The Netherlands. We still have idiots on the road. Granted, they don’t (or at least, very rarely) slam their vehicles through the fronts of stores and houses, but we still got idiots doing idiot things.
Agreed. I’m the era before every car had a camera, I’d back into my driveway because foggy windows plus backing up sucks. I still back into my driveway even with all of the current day features on my vehicle - it’s just less stress in the morning to pull forward.
Zero traffic would mean it’s an empty lot. If there’s a curb or cement blocks preventing pull through, I’d still back into a spot.
But to answer the spirit of your question, it’s easier to back in to a confined spot due to the steering being on the “back” side and ability to use the side mirrors to line it up. Other than pull through spots, I can’t think of a single good reason to pull in to a parking spot forwards rather than back in.
I agree it can be easier. I prefer it if the spot I am backing into is tight. When I say zero traffic I should clarify to mean it is very unlikely to have another vehicle in motion within your yard when you are parking/leaving.
My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.
The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.
The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.
I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.
I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.
The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.
It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.
Out of curiosity, how much had you already taught them about the tasks? Was it just expected that between the whole team there would be someone who knew this stuff?
If I recall correctly I didn’t tell them much about anything. One of them had a nerd dad who set up his daughter with Linux at home but she wasn’t familiar with the install process. I gave them some basic info when I gave them the rules (you have to connect the hard drives and ram) but for the most part everything was new to them.
On the other hand, I also ran a computer club with some other kids (in a younger grade) where we took that pile of broken computers and salvaged working parts. We ended up with 3 or 4 working pcs that we ran Linux mint on. They used the computers for Roblox or something at lunch lol. The computers ended up being a popular attraction at lunch!
@maxprime my technology teacher in middle school did something similar with me and a bunch of other kids in 1995 or so. That's how I fixed my first pc, and eventually started a career in IT. There was no team competition, but he basicallt said "these are some broken computers, if you can fix them you can have a lab to play Doom or whatever you want. He helped us setting up the IPX network tbf, but we had to check what dimm banks were working, which not, same with hdd and processors, and put togheter everything and install Windows 3.11
Yeah I had formatted and partitioned the disk ahead of time. The JPEG was in the root directory IIRC. I warned them to not plug in both hard drives during the install process to be sure not to overwrite the wrong drive. They were labelled physically but were otherwise identical.
@maxprime@nayminlwin what an amazing story. I love that this could be gamified for them and made more fun. I presume you had a guide or helped them when they got stuck?
I had some of my classes (14-15yr olds) assemble their own computers as the first class. It was cheap junk anyway, and I was willing to risk it, but it set the stage for the year. I dont think I got them to install system on it (whole school run on Linux btw), thats a great touch. And making it into something that entertaining, and stereotypes breaking is brilliant!
If i were to become a teacher in the future (unlikely, but not impossible), i'd hope to be just as caring and enjoying the craft as you are. Keep it up! ☺️
I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways 😂) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.
Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.
One thing I love about lemmy is how easy it is to get a conversation going. On reddit it’s really easy to be buried in a thread, and if you get a response it’s often just a joke or a snarky remark. Here there’s so much genuine engagement. It reminds me of the transition from Twitter to Mastodon. I guess people who bother to make the move are more likely to be more engaged users, too.
Lemmy’s comment sorting does also actively prevent getting buried, unlike reddit (?). Newer comments are biased towards the top, and even heavily-upvoted older comments will fall towards the bottom. The lack of “global karma” and our community’s propensity to heavily downvote anyone doing redditisms like pun threads are also doing a lot of work here.
I didn’t even know about that, that’s really cool. I have noticed that if I come back to older posts there’s often a lot of new activity since I was there last.
My roomie is German so I share stuff from that community with him from time to time. It might be against the Geneva convention, but I’ve not faced repercussions yet.
Someone better versed in Lemmy may correct me, but isn’t comment activity more of a factor with some of the sorting algorithms (e.g. Hot/Active) here? In which case your upvotes may help but your comment may be even better!
I wouldn’t put Afghanistan and Iraq on the same level.
Bin Laden (and Al-Qaeda) was in Afghanistan and they refused to hand him over. That invasion had the support of NATO and even Russia and China. Why? Because Al-Qaeda existing doesn’t benefit anyone and they were behind the attacks.
Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences. Iraq used to have chemical weapons and even used them against civilians back in the 80s, started a war with Iran and invaded Kuwait, but those were not the reasons given for the invasion…
Now, why wasn’t Bush charged with any crimes? For the same reason nothing will happen to Putin in Russia. What are you going to do, invade the country to arrest the president?
I’m not defending the occupation and whole “nation building” (which I doubt they though would take 20 years). Just pointing out that there was a difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, and that difference was reflected by the support (or lack of) from other countries.
The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks.
It’s insane to suggest the US would ever agree to that.
I believe it would have been the correct move, but the US as a nation would straight up never agree to that. The citizenry would have lost their fucking minds.
But did Bush knowingly lie to a degree provable in court?
He would have had to have known it was a lie and for that to be proven in court. With trump, his crimes were so egregious there were devout party line adherents backing out and explicitly stating just how illegal what they were doing is. Trump had been told multiple times, in multiple ways that what he was doing was illegal and he went for it anyways.
Another point to add. It is not illegal for anyone to lie, so unless he was testifying under oath, Bush could lie as much as he wanted without legal repercussions.
Not quite. The constitution has a cutout for official duties of the office. The president must faithfully carry out the duties of the office. So knowingly lying can fail that test.
If you want someone to blame for the US invasion of Iraq, blame Italy, their Intelligence apparatus, and Nicolò Pollari in particular. He submitted the “Iraq is buying Yellowcake” to the CIA twice, who figured out it was a forgery before setting a private meeting with the vice president who did not know the CIA had already ruled it out.
Not quite. Trump is currently being charged in federal court for his part in lying to overturn the election. They used “knowingly false” 32 times in the indictment for a reason. His defense is not that the president is allowed to lie, but rather that he truthfully believed he was telling the truth, so I’m not sure where you assertion is coming from: It is illegal to lie in furtherance of breaking the law, even for the POTUS.
Trump is not being put on trial for lying per se. The lying however is part of the furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, which is illegal. So with regards to Bush, he can’t be charged with lying to the American people. It can however be used as evidence against him if it was part of furthering a criminal conspiracy.
To the best of my knowledge, we have never put a president on trial for the faithfulness clause (and no, impeachment is not an actual criminal/constitutional trial, no matter how much we treat it as such)
The Constitution lists one crime: treason. He didn’t do that. Not faithfully carrying out the duties of the office is absolutely grounds for impeachment, but it’s not a crime.
That’s not true. Even the specific rules laid out in the constitution have limits. You have the right to freedom of speech, and yet it is silent about the type of speech protected. We did not write down that the president is allowed to lie about winning the election in the constitution, but we did write down the president must carry out the duties of the office faithfully, and we gave Congress the power to create laws, which all citizens are bound. The president is a citizen, not a king, and I have to say this again as it was very important to the authors of the constitution: The president is not a king. He doesn’t have the divine right. Trump’s just another citizen who was temporarily given the power of the executive. You could charge him with a crime and put his ass in prison while he was a president without impeaching him. Executive privilege is court tested, but it only applies to confidentiality, and going in front of the public and lying is, by definition, not confidential.
and we gave Congress the power to create laws, which all citizens are bound.
Exactly. Congress has to make things a crime. The fact that the Constitution says that the president has to faithfully carry out their duties doesn’t make not doing that a crime.
If you’re saying that Congress did pass such a law, can you tell me which one?
I think you folks are talking past each other. The constitution requires faithful fulfillment of the duties of office, so because of that requirement, presidents swear oaths of duty. Lying under oath is a crime (not delineated in the constitution) and a violation of the faithful fulfillment of duties, which means that he is violating the terms of presidency set out in the constitution (also not a crime, but impeachable).
Which I’m sure they passed in the year between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq just by coincidence, and they weren’t expecting any shady shit to go down at all.
No no, don’t you know that we don’t do “war” any more? We do “operations” now. War is totally different. Then we have to obey Geneva conventions and all sorts of other hairy stuff. Our politicians have decided as long as we don’t call it “war” then we’re fine.
This is why I maintain that Trump will never go to prison… The u.s government itself would never allow it. They’ll likely help him stay out on appeals till he dies, that’s gonna be the worst punishment he’ll get. I think the government would have him killed and made it to look like an accident before they ever allow him to set foot in prison.
The US government will allow Trump to go to an American jail. This is like ruling over like. The US government would never allow Trump to go a foreign jail, no matter how much he deserved it.
I think there are enough people in power who will use the “one of our presidents in jail will hurt our country” excuse, or they’ll fear reprisal from the maga cult, that they’ll let him walk. I hope I’m wrong, but the u.s pulls this shit all the time.
Yeah but it’s like the PATRIOT Act (it’s an anagram Im just lazy). The PATRIOT Act had been kicking around DC for decades before we had an excuse to pass it. The ICCJ bill was no different.
Iraq was different. It was mostly a US and British invasion, under false pretences
Lil Bush didn’t even really know…
He was just a puppet, and Cheney was part of his dad’s “old guard”. Lil Bush knew the game, so Cheney set it up so every intel agency reported to Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney decided if that info went anywhere else, including Lil Bush.
Cheney wanted the war, so he only passed on info that would cause the war, and it’s entirely likely he was the only member of the American government who could have seen 9/11 coming. The reason no one else could, was everything has to go thru Cheney, and he saw everything.
I’m not saying Lil Bush is innocent, I’m saying he was a useful idiot that knew he was just a puppet and went along with
But it pisses me off everyone acts like the puppet fall guy is who we should be upset with, not the people who were actually doing stuff and still work with the American Republican political party.
You need to look into the Project for a New American Century. It’s a PAC that most of GWB’s initial team was on and were asking fir war with Iraq in 1997. Wanna guess who in the GWB administration was not part of it?
Officially that was the reason. The violation of the ceasefire. Iraq did not abide by the terms of the ceasefire.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t have invaded. I supported the invasion at the time because of the violations of the ceasefire. I didn’t completely buy the wmd argument.
Looking back, Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan.
Both countries also do not recognize the authority of International Court. High ranking officials definitely should have been hauled off to jail for authorizing, developing, and employing “enhanced interrogation” (aka torture) techniques
Your body is constantly generating heat. If that heat has nowhere to go, your temperature goes up and up.
You need to be in an environment that sucks heat away as fast as you create it - and if the external air temp isn’t cold enough to do that on its own, then you have to rely on evaporation of sweat to help shed the heat.
It’s the feature that let us become the dominant predator. We could track large game that is wounded until the collapsed from heat exhaustion. Yay sweaty humans!
So are you saying that people who sweat more in hot environments are better suited for long distance hunting? Because I’m a gross, sweaty mofo and I would like to feel better about it
Probably not I’m sorry. Sweating enough so that the sweat evaporates as fast as it excretes from your pores is optimal. Skin being more wet doesn’t cool faster (drops of sweat falling off you don’t cool you), so excess sweat would just dehydrate you faster. Sorry
It also seems like this is part of why there were so many powerhouses around the mediterranean, the climate there is just right that you can work a lot without melting, and warm enough that it’s comfortable to walk basically naked.
And it makes sense when you consider that humans evolved for a comparatively sedate lifestyle (even hunting isn’t going to involve sprinting that much) in subsaharan africa.
They are still happening, the western News just got bored of it. The morality police just received orders to start cracking down hard on women with uncovered heads. The government believes it has the authority to end any Iranians life for any reason, even outside of Iran. The clergy would rather burn down the entire country than let people live free from religious oppression. Without outside pressure, these protests are just going to mean more dead women and stiffer laws against them.
I’m not disagreeing with you but I think what we see is a minority of people with the protests. It seems like there is not really much political will to change anything from the half of the country with a penis, and the older females.
The whole thing is pretty sad but from my understanding when things like this happen they generally blame the west and the majority go along with it.
Honestly as a westerner Iran is pretty irrelevant to my life. It’s not like we can invade them or force them to overthrow the government and if we did people would never shut up about it.
Look at Afghanistan the USA spent so much money trying to spread liberal democratic ideas, integrate and educate women but as soon as we left they went back to how it always was. There is no civil war, the majority just consented to the Taliban rule.
Yeah, absolutely, it is a minority. But I don’t think it’s entirely irrelevant. The clergy used religion to twist and conform the will of the people, turning their views into Sharia treacle. Human suffering is relevant in an empathetic way, but it’s also good to know that human society can look like Iran with the majoritys support. Western society could end up in as bad a spot as Iran, all it takes is a revolution. There is a growing christian theocracy movement in every western country. Disillusionment with western capitalism and democracy is as high as ever and as things get worse, theocratic dictatorships become more and more appealing to more people. There is a non-zero chance we could have our own Iranian style revolution in just a few generations.
I agree mostly. It’s like North Korea, I can’t really do anything to change the situation. My government can’t change the situation. We can try to push some buttons to help foster change but we can’t force it. Change has to come from within.
Have you listened to the it could happen here podcast? The first episodes(the story ones) are pretty good.
Edit specifically this episode but you should start with episode 1 for more background.
If you listen to anti-imperialist analysis by Iranians, it’s never been “Western disillusionment”. The West has always brutalized Iran, stolen from them, murdered them in droves, and destroyed their national self-direction. Nothing saved Iran from the West until the theocracy emerged and purged all of the Western influence. Iranians have the benefits of their own labor and their own resources for the first time in centuries because of the theocracy. And I don’t think any of them think theocracy is the pinnacle of Iran’s potential, but neither are they ready to liberalize until the West falls.
Edit: Frankly, your whole contribution to this thread reeks of orientalism. In your world view, the Iranian people have all had their brains wrecked by authoritarian religious freaks and they’ve become disillusioned with the former vision for a civilized West. This implies that Westoids are normal people with functioning brains and that the problem is limited to some “bad guys” in the West that ruined it by being greedy.
The reality is so different from the delusion your worm-eaten brain conjures up. The West has been mushing the brains of its people for centuries and the entire Western project has been to destroy, murder, pillage, and extract everything it can get its hands on with zero respect for life, dignity, truth, culture, or anything that makes life what it is. The West has been a fanatical death cult for centuries. There is literally no way to criticize a country like Iran the way you do without exposing yourself as a completely propagandized subject of said death cult.
I don’t like the oppression of women nor the elevation of religion either, but that doesn’t mean I regurgitate Western propaganda.
I think calling the west a fanatical death cult is a bit romantic. Let’s not pretend that much of the rest of the world isn’t the same but has historically just lacked the means to do it at the scale the west has.
And nobody is regurgitating western propoganda, we’re talking about the protests in Iran and you start spouting this shit. Way to project.
The West literally subjugated 80% if the world’s population and invented religious, scientific, economic, political, and cultural justification for it. There is no death cult larger or longer living in the world today than the west. The only way to do what they did was to get their population on board. They propagandized their people the most thoroughly to do the most atrocities in the most effective ways possible in order to achieve that 80%. It’s not merely that they had steel. They also needed millions of people to believe that death was life, slavery was liberty, god is good and also god says we must kill, rape, and enslave all of these people. It is literally an understatement to call the West a fanatical death cult.
And y’all are regurgitating Western propaganda in this entire thread when you parrot the bullshit that the theocracy has turned Iranian brains into mush. It’s straight up orientalism.
Projection is when I accuse you of doing something I am already doing. I am not eating Iranian propaganda every single day from the day I am born to now. I am not educated by Iranian propagandists. My movies are not rewritten by the Iranian military. My TV is not owned by Iranian oil magnates. Instead you and I live in the West and our entire lives have been soaking in the most vile, most effective, and most pervasive propaganda in the history of the world. When you accuse Iran of making Iranians believe garbage, that’s projection. When I tell you your brain is rotten with Westoids worms, that’s not projection.
You try so hard to sound smarter than you really are. Also, you don’t think that what’s happening in China, N.K and Ukraine isn’t worse than what’s happening in the west? Lol. The West are no angels, but you seem to have a personal vendetta.
And you are projecting. You are spouting the exact shame rhetoric, just from a different perspective. Extremist, media-inspired dribble.
Do I think what’s happening in China, NK, and Ukraine is worse than what’s happening in the West? Absolutely not. Turtle Island is under a 500 year occupation by European settler colonial structures that killed hundreds of millions of people in a program to make extinct all non-European ways of life.
The occupation of the world by Western white capitalist men is still ongoing and still threatens to end cultures, national self-direction, biodiversity, and sometimes even all life on earth through nuclear escalation. The US has pulled out of so many weapons treaties, has poisoned multiple generations of Vietnamese, Japanese, Yugoslavians, Iraqis, etc. The man who designed and engineered the mass murder of generations of Southeast Asians, Kissinger, literally just went to China as a representative of the US. It’s non-fucking-stop extreme violence by white men.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea have all been bombed to shit by Americans, specifically. The amount of unexploded US ordinance in these regions is mind boggling. The amount of ordinance dropped by the US defies human cognition.
Then we have the US-trained death squads using US-guided tactics to terrorize families and indigenous communities throughout the “Americas”, literally torturing and beheading entire families. The US torture program. The long history of Euro-US apartheid in the Americas, the support for South African and Israeli apartheid, the explicit opposition to ending South African apartheid. The emergence of Euro fascism replicating the US program of apartheid. The industrialization of mass murder.
The US leaves open uranium waste pits in Indian territory, poisoning generations of native families. They destroy water and food supplies, on purpose, to maximize extraction and maintain genocide. The mass murder of the US buffalo was committed by the US military to be explicitly take advantage of a treaty clause that would strip the indians of the lands the US displaced them to. Canada is subject to many of these same critiques.
And it never stops. It hasn’t stopped in 600 years. Name a country that isn’t part of Europe and it will have a centuries-long history of brutal domination by white people replete with genocide, torture, slavery, and theft in the billions. Haiti is still suffering under the debt the West levied on them for freeing themselves under the shared recognition by the West that slaves who revolt stole the property of their own bodies from their owners. The famines caused by England killed millions of subjects. All of the Western touting of poverty reduction has backslid and is built on the total subjugation of billions. If you take China’s poverty alleviation numbers out of the UN total count, the backsliding in Western-held territories leaves almost nothing to speak of.
Yes, what’s happening in the West is many many many times worse than what’s happening in China, DPRK, and Ukraine. And we haven’t even talked about Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, the Berlin Conference, nuclear weapons testing in populated areas, environmental devastation by Western oil companies and the millions they kill, the must brutal embargo regimes inflicting collective punishment on hundreds of millions of innocent people for almost a century. The 600 global military bases. The predatory lending. The disgusting medical experimentation. The role of religion in all this.
And despite all of this, you still think you have a leg to stand on. And that’s the icing on the cake - the amount of Western propaganda and indoctrination that enlists little children in propagating structural racism and violent extremism from a very early age. Indoctrination so thorough that 20 years of schooling are all completely and thoroughly aligned with the violent lies that perpetuate genocide and no one bats an eye. Where all mass media reinforces the dominant narrative and when people speak up millions shout them down. Where sex is worse than violence. Where violence is so normalized that children commit mass murder in their school on a regular basis. Where you and I can have a real conversation and you think it’s somehow logical to claim that what’s happening in China is worse than what’s happening in the West.
It’s a terrifyingly powerful indoctrination, so it’s not surprising that you hold the position you do, but it is a position without a single shred of basis. It is 100% a set of false beliefs that perpetuate the centuries-long genocidal extraction and accumulation of wealth.
Go learn history. The fact that you think I’m spouting “the exact same rhetoric” is fucking mind blowing. The fact that you think this is “media inspired” leaves me completely dazed and confused. What media do you think I have access to that pushes this? You think I watch Chinese TV? Russian TV? Iranian TV? You think they have the time and inclination to put out media programs that explain 600 years of global domination by white people? Motherfucker I am studying history and have been for years now and this is literally what happened. Nothing I detailed above is media hype. It’s literally YOUR history. Go fucking learn it.
Relax dude. You let the baby out with the bathwater. What are you trying to accomplish, you really think I’m going to change my mind and NOT think you’re some nutjob with these walls of text? You do you.
Also, you haven’t changed my mind. I still think that other cultures are equally bad if not worse. I could provide examples and explain it, but it’s not like you’d listen anyway.
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