not to mention he’s a psycho himself. instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons while letting the biggest maniacs and the ones leading these gangs run away every time.
Yeah but he never actually went after the original murder if you notice. He spent his entire time going after lunatics who thought that they were going to take over the city because they had planted a bomb on a bridge or something.
And that “vengeance” is what taught him that vengeance is dumb, and it’s better to fight to better the world around him than go after people Punisher style.
instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change
Do we know this? I don’t follow the comics at all but do they ever go into the things Bruce Wayne does as CEO of Wayne Enterprises? I can’t fathom we have gone decades without someone touching on this.
i don’t follow the comics but things that are established that i know of are:
Bruce Wayne is insanely wealthy
Uses his wealth for his bat-themed middle age crisis (bat sports car, bat private jet, bat motorcycle, bat gondola probably)
Other than that the best thing he does for other people is “philanthropy” (in the real world this is a scam by the wealthy) unless you count taking in his young lover sidekick
The police and the politicians are extremely corrupt and are for sale.
Now from all this i gather it would be very easy for Bruce to get actual political power in Gotham to make real change but he doesn’t do it because running around in a furry costume is more fun.
Even apart from that, sneaking around in a costume talking about how you’re the night or the knight or whatever is on its own very cringe and psychotic.
idk what the hell you’re talking about. there’s one comment that gives reasons, and excuse me for being asleep at the time. other comments are just people being offended on batman’s behalf. that’s not disproving.
i know right. i mean we’re in showerthoughts, and some of these people are accusing me of not having inhaled the entire batman anthology. i like two of the comments though, supersaiyanswag and underpantsweevil
instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons
Some of the better Batman comics introduce him as skilled detective, rather than a superhero whose power is infinite money.
Like any good crime thriller, his work starts with some innocuous crime or tragedy that gets swiftly covered up by corrupt police. Batman steps in as a noir vigilante, listening to the witnesses everyone else ignored and tracing the crime back to the low-level thugs who serve as pawns in a much bigger game. He extorts them for information in order to move on to bigger fish - the crime boss who runs the docks or the sleazy businessman who thought he could pay to make a problem go away - and uncovers a deeper systematic corruption. He runs into various freaks and geeks - your two-faced DA or your web-fingered club owner - who facilitate the city-spanning crime. And, in the climax, he discovers the whole system is rotten, even to the point where his own Wayne Enterprises is complicit in these cruelties.
He discovers the limits of vigilantism, its not just a question of biting into a few bad apples, but tearing the rotten tree out of the earth root-and-branch. And he realizes its too much for one man to change. So he goes back to that first original witness/victim, and he brings him back to his cave. And he sets himself to training this survivor of a broken system how to fight crime like he does.
The best Batman stories aren’t the ones where he punches a Clown Prince out of a factory window. Its ones in which he pulls another scared child out of the wreckage of his parents’ home and gives him a second chance at life.
I don’t mean to direct this at only you, but I hate this take. There are plenty of comics that dive into this, him using his wealth to help Gotham, the city just had too many problems. Court of Owls for instance, the group that is always watching Gotham and influencing it state and its key figures.
One of my favorites story arcs. I do agree with you to some degree though because there are a lot of comic book writers that have a habit of romanticizing his wealth, that’s why he does come off as a “typical billionaire” most often. Then it is up to the next writers to mitigate the damage. Comics are tricky like that, you just have to pick and choose your own head canon.
Hrm. No one has mentioned the decline of middle class wages.
I remember in the … late 70s/early 80s my mother would drag us to the mall nearly every weekend. She was there to buy clothes. She always wanted something new and she wanted to try on at least a dozen items before buying one or two. I was thrilled when I was old enough to go off to the record store and/or hobby store while she did that. Earlier, I begged to go the the toy store, but was typically refused. Later, I was at the book store getting paperback scifi.
I don’t think people have as much disposable income as they did then. I don’t know many people who can buy as much frivolous stuff as my folks used to. I guess I could technically buy stuff all the time, but I want to save fore retirement. My folks had pensions. I have to put it away myself.
It actually screws us 2 ways. First, by removing liability/responsibility from the company and putting it on people. Second, by forcing everyone to have to car about the stock market, and be subject to its whims
So I’m not in America and might be able to offer some insight. Others have mentioned big box stores, online shopping, and lack of money as the main culprits. I’m fairly certain big box stores are not it, and the fault may lay almost entirely on amazon.
Where I’m from, malls are still the place to go for new things to buy, including electronics, clothes (of varying degrees of quality and price), drugs (the legal kind), and home decor. Businesses like Walmart (as in, supermarkets that sell things other than groceries) have shops inside those same malls. In the whole city, there is one standalone Walmart, in the emptiest part of town with middle-upper class suburbs around it. The one exception is Costco, which has two franchises in town, not inside a mall, but the demographic that goes there is decidedly middle class families and businesses.
We can order stuff from amazon, but it ends up being about the same in terms of cost, and takes up to a month to arrive. Money is tight for pretty much everyone at the moment, but we all still go to the mall from time to time, for one reason or another.
For example, I’m overdue a visit to get my eyes checked again, my glasses need replacing. And I’ll probably stop by the radioshack (yup, remember that?) and nab some rechargeable AAs.
Malls were dying in the US well before Amazon and online shopping itself was meaningful. Big box stores did a number on them. Best Buy and Circuit City had nearly the same selection of music that mall music stores did for much lower prices. Stores like Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million eviscerated the smaller more expensive mall book stores. Walmart, Target, and the like hit everything else.
Once that decline happened, I noticed that many malls started going after the kids that just hung around malls and weren’t in constant spend mode. Teens were treated like pests that were not wanted. Guess who got the message and didn’t come back a few years later when they had jobs and money?
Malls in the 80s and early 90s were pretty awesome, but malls told us to fuck off so we did. They can rot.
Interesting. Malls around me seem to cater mostly to young adults with expendable income. Lots of non-traditional cuisine (commercialised of course, not high-brow places), wine bars, etc. Places where you’d go to on a night out with the gang.
Now that you mention it, they have stopped catering to the youngest demographic. I think the laser tags closed down before the pandemic, and the arcades have been gone for a decade. Unless Chuck E. Cheese has some, I haven’t been. Maybe we’re catching up, then. I still see young teens, around the age I was when I visited those places, walk around. No idea what shops they go into though. Maybe the ice cream places, and the food court.
I’ll also offer the “sameness” of everything at malls. Let’s say you want jeans. There’s five shops that carry jeans. You want “normal” jeans, iow, not torn, not bleached, etc. Each shop carries jeans, but they are all some version of torn, worn, bleached, etc. For all the variety, they’re all the same.
Plus, mall overhead and branding makes the shops quite often more expensive than you might find at something like a Target or even a Kohls.
I’ve found that taking my kids to the mall to check out clothing we more often than not buy nothing despite visiting a half dozen shops. It’s all variations of the same thing along with being designer pricing.
Yep, I want marketing to not exist. If your product or service is good then its reputation will stand on its own and spread via word of mouth. Billboards and ads should be criminal as they ruin our scenery and waste our time
Oh I get it, I totally do. But of all the celebrities who are actually worthy of praise, I can’t think of anyone else off the top of my head who deserves it more.
But I mean it’s not like I worship Keanu, he’s just cool.
This is a forum where people seek help. Of course you’re going to see problems here. Nobody posts “hey it’s been several years and I’ve had no problems.”
Of course linux is stable. It runs like 80% of servers on the Internet.
Also can confirm. Been using Arch, which most people consider requires more fiddling than other distros, for almost 10 years now and have had few issues with it. I've had to fix my Windows install more than my Linux.
Personally, I don’t get the appeal of distro hopping. I think it’s nice to try different concepts, but there aren’t that many.
You basically have the “classic” distributions, like Debian, Suse, Fedora and their derivatives and if you want those split up into the stable and the rolling distributions (Arch, maybe Debian Sid). Then there’s the source-based distributions, most notably Gentoo and derivatives. Declarative distributions, NixOS and GUIX system. And then maybe the newer breed of immutable distributions like Fedora Silverblue.
To me, the difference between an Arch system and Debian are kind of minimal. Yet I’d always prefer Arch. But why would I hop to OpenSUSE?
Granted, I always install from the terminal anyways and build my system to my needs, so I usually don’t get the default experience.
I’m going to do my best to “wait” for PopOS 24.04 before I hop out again. It seemsbI finally got Endeavour right, with hybrid graphics and all. The only pain was actually how long it took to install Lubre Wolf. Ah, and that the first attempt at installing flatpaks, nothing was showing up after install until I rebooted. But now they work as expected.
For every one you see, there are dozens you do not. Some mod on here is a billionaire apologist, and keeps removing references to guillotines as “promoting violence”.
To my way of thinking, accruing and keeping a billion dollars is a deliberate choice. That massive disparity of wealth brings great harm to all of society. We as a society are empowered to declare deliberate, harmful acts to be criminal, and assign a sufficient penalty as to deter.
Consequently, I suggest that “Being a billionaire” should be made a capital offense.
I don’t actually want to kill billionaires.
I want people who become billionaires to be extraordinarily embarrassed by their obscene wealth, and quickly “refund” the excess they “inadvertantly” collected from previous buyers, or failed to pay to workers.
Barring that, I want the IRS and SEC to confiscate the excess, convey it to liquidators, and keep the proceeds.
You don’t have to cut off a billionaire’s head to rid the world of billionaires. That billionaire no longer exists when you roll back his wealth to $999,999,999.
Taking the whip out of the hands of the overseer and strangling him with it is not an act of violence. It is an act of humanity.
Likewise, the guillotine is not a tool of terror. It is a tool of democracy. It is how the third estate told the first and second to go fuck themselves.
Universal Healthcare is the most visible thing the third estate needs today. The guillotine is for anyone choosing to stand in the way of that need.
The anger that the us in the lower classes has been steadying increasing, year after year. Some of us realize the the ability for certain groups to hoard wealth is a problem. Some people have decided that marginalized communities are the ones to blame for how social mobility has become a pipe dream.
The next recession has a strong potential to get real ugly.
More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
I’m convinced Musk’s Neuralink thing is an attempt to transfer his consciousness into one of his brood, or into a machine. Bankman-Fried hopes to create an AI version of himself.
The core belief of sovereign citizens – initially, anyway – is the notion that since government exists at the consent of the governed they can “opt out” of being subject to the laws of wherever they are.
This has a tiny grain of legitimate logic to it, in that not a single person on Earth is given a choice of society and/or country to be born into. Governments attempt to exert absolute authority over everyone within their spheres of influence regardless of what those people may happen to think of the matter, and the feasibility of them physically leaving said society/country notwithstanding. All laws are just words on paper, after all, and from a certain perspective completely artificial, arbitrary, and transient.
Where it all breaks down is that these people typically arrive at the above conclusion by being absolutely stark raving loony, and typically want to have their cake and eat it, too – they don’t want to be subject to obeying laws, or paying taxes, or having to register their vehicles and get driver’s licenses, pay child support, etc., but they still somehow feel entitled to the use of public infrastructure like roads and bridges, police and fire services, municipal water and sewer use, and so forth. In modern times a simple “no gubmint can tell me what to do and I’m answerable only to myself” outlook has mutated into this arcane and nebulous pseudo-religious willful misinterpretation on the wording of laws, what is and is not printed CAPITALIZED on various government documents, and fixation on “contract law,” treating every interaction between everyone and every thing as a “transaction” which the sovereign citizen believes is inherently negotiable (always in their favor, of course).
This is furthered by shucksters who sell books and seminars to idiots the types of people who have the right type of chip on their shoulders, which purportedly contain the secret knowledge and legal incantations to make all this work but are, of course, just bullshit. Usually people who entangle themselves in SovCit bullshit are trying to weasel out of of some particular financial obligation. Not wanting to pay child support seems to be a very popular one, as are taxes in general, fines, loans, and liens.
The whole thing is just fascinatingly whacked the more you look into it. Here’s the RationalWiki article on it, for instance:
Voting is the least you can do, so I will choose to vote against Capitalists and not for genocide. If you can’t even do that bare minimum, you don’t deserve democracy.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist party in the United States. PSL was established in 2004 and claims to be active in a wide range of social movements. PSL describes its primary goal as the overthrow of capitalism and the institution of socialism.
It’s a bit cliche and a little too individualistic for what is supposed to be literally rule by the people, so I’ll gladly embrace the democratic ideal of voting for the organization I think will not support genocide and is not capitalist. After all it is literally the least anyone can do.
If we used just about anything but FPTP, absolutely. But as I see it, if I want to have any hope of being able to vote to make things better next time, I have to vote to just make things slightly less worse this time.
Perfect is the enemy of the good, and the GOP is the enemy of both.
But hey, if you see it differently, I don’t see any reason we can’t be friends. I just disagree.
In the software world, based on personal experience and the UNIX philosophy, software should aim to do one thing and do it really well.
Then there are also the bloat complaints (why should I download a whole stack of arr services when I only care for movies)
The most unfortunate one however can be them mixing. If my child looks up Star Wars but instead the suite ends up downloading a Star Wars porn parody… that’s just… bad
Not everyone has to, though. I use one instance for a wide variety of resolutions, depending on the show and consumption model; including 360,480,720,1080, 2160 (HDR/10-bit). But I run Plex on a box with quicksync that is doing my transcoding for me.
So why have you chosen to run different instances?
It’s not as relevant today as it used to be, that’s for sure. Originally it was to limit transcoding of 4K content (which used to be a lot harder), and also to avoid the HDR tone mapping issues with 4K content during transcoding, both of which are largely resolved with newer hardware and Plex software updates.
The only reason I keep them separated now is because most of the folks I share with can’t direct stream 4K content anyway, and so I only share out the 1080p libraries in Plex. It keeps bandwidth usage down and limits having to go to hardware transcoding, which can reduce quality and introduces startup delays. The library I use locally indexes both the 1080p and 4K content, so Plex will always prefer the 4K if it’s there.
If diskspace ever became an issue, I’d probably consider merging the libraries again.
My absolute biggest complaint with my BMW. The electronic gear shifter. Want to go backwards? Push the shifter forward. Want to go forwards? Pull the shifter backwards. Fucking genius! <\s>
Burning Man may be the epitome of the many optimistic and maybe naive qualities of the 90s that were co-opted and exploited in the early 2000s, and turned into the very things they were built to protest against - another being the free and open internet
Ha. When I said hot take I meant that you were dead-on with that take. But I’m downvoted all over this thread for suggestion nuance and compassion…so fuck hipsters they deserve it.
Yes. I watched it happen. The large number of people that go now pay thousands $$ for a plug-n-play camp and don’t contribute their own art (if they even have art). They are not what the festival once stood for.
I see where you’re going with this, but no, people really are just absolutely horrible. The fact is that with other social media they’re just already very set up in managing this so we never see it. Lemmy wants to be open, this is the flipside of that openness.
It’s generally easy to crap on what’s ‘bad’ about big players, while underestimating or undervaluing what they are doing right for product market fit.
A company like Meta puts hundreds of people in foreign nations through PTSD causing hell in order to moderate and keep clean their own networks.
While I hope that’s not the solution that a community driven effort ends up with, it shows the breadth of the problems that can crop up with the product as it grows.
I think the community will overcome these issues and grow beyond it, but jerks trying to ruin things for everyone will always exist, and will always need to be protected against.
To say nothing for the far worse sorts behind the production and more typical distribution of such material, whom Lemmy will also likely eventually need to deal with more and more as the platform grows.
It’s going to take time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way a federated social network eventually can exist is within onion routing or something, as at a certain point the difference in resources to protect against content litigation between a Meta and someone hosting a Lemmy server is impossible to equalize, and the privacy of hosts may need to be front and center.
The solution in this case is absolutely AI filters. Unfortunately you won’t find many people willing to build robust model for that. Because they’d be those getting the ptsd you mention.
Iirc, ptsd is something only certain characters get. We should probably focus on finding people who really have no problem watching rough content. I have ptsd so I probably am not the right person for the job.
I don’t want to try. I have pretty low barrier. I set up NSFW filter on lemmy because I found disturbing the furry content that was common some time ago… I don’t want even to try anything worst than that
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