Because on Reddit (and here on Lemmy) people use up and downvotes exclusively to rate the quality of a post, not as a tool to show disapproval without having to be able to actually articulate why. I like when social interactions go exactly as intended - like in this case - and don't devolve into two people arguing with silent mobs behind them.
/s for everyone who's as blind to sarcasm as this shitty AI from Google.
Humor IS a quality though. Human voters are able, in aggregate, able to award certain types of humor. Which an LLM is not able to. Which gets recycled with no context, as fact.
The internet would be a vastly different place if sarcasm and in jokes were not regarded as a type of “quality” content.
Well, there’s an oddly existential argument to be made that “funny” AI answers like this or adding a pot of Elmer’s Glue to pizza sauce to get the cheese to stick are valued. Simply because those are the posts I’ve seen from Google AI, and I’ve never touched the feature myself.
By letting a language “speaker” learn from Reddit and forums, we created an approximation of “that guy who thinks he’s a comedian” because that guy is always there and always drowns in upvotes. Clearly, he’s a valuable part of the discourse!
Yeah people are desperate to believe ‘Edison evil, Tesla jesus’ it’s so weird. I get that it was like a cool fact online twenty years ago but there have been so many actual historical documentaries showing how complex and interesting the real story was.
Truth is neither of them invented anything from scratch, - AC generators, motors (useless), transformers, and lights were in use before Tesla even began his big invention. He was a name in a long list of people who worked together understanding the newly emerging field of electronics - if Westinghouse or Barrington had made outrageous claims to allure conspiracy theories then they might have got the Tesla treatment by thy internet instead and we’d only hear of Tesla in the science museum while they’d be regarded at saintly heros of science.
I like Tesla but there are so many interesting stories
if Westinghouse or Barrington had made outrageous claims to allure conspiracy theories then they might have got the Tesla treatment by thy internet instead and we’d only hear of Tesla in the science museum
Hey now, you get to hear about Westinghouse plenty in the railroad museums. A variation of the Westinghouse brake design is still in use on modern trains to this day
electrocuting an elephant to death, and for no better reason than tabloid advertising, kind of stands out in the historical record
that’s not to say Edison was PURE EVIL, just that I always remember the elephant alongside the more humanizing factoids. [Once, he asked a math student to find the volume of a lightbulb. The student started doing all kinds of caliper measurements and geometry calculations. Edison just filled the bulb with sand and tipped it out into a measuring cup]
Except in realityit seems he was against the elephant being killed but said electrocution would be more humane than the hanging which had happened to ‘murderous mary’, his opinion being something the aspca also supported.
The assholes in this story are the themepark owners that upon being unable to sell Topsy decided to kill her as a spectacle to gain publicity, A previous attempt elsewhere to electrocute an elephant had failed so they also used other measures. They poisoned her. Electrocuted her and strangled her with a steam powered winch.
They did use locally supplied power from the Edson Co but this was because it was a decade after war of the currents and Edison was the main supplier of AC to NYC, they certainly weren’t trying to promote its danger. Plus he no longer owned that company, he’d sold to GE and it still used his name.
The Edison film company did film it but again no evidence the man himself was involved, they filmed short clips of specticals and news events which could be viewed in a slot machine. It’s upsetting but people were a lot less caring about animals back then, it wasn’t especially shocking that this happened or was recorded.
I.e. your locally owned mom-and-pop Chinese takeout. I’ve seen the kiddos answer the phones there a couple of times, tho most of the time when picking up food for the wife they’re just playing in a blocked off side area that used to be dining pre-pandemic.
Yeah, I agree it’s fucked up but there’s almost no way that kid’s under 14, which is the youngest age Culver’s will hire at, he’s just a late bloomer probably. I think a lot of people would disagree with calling that age group a “literal child.”
I don’t think most people would disagree that “teenager” is a more accurate word to describe that age. Trust me, there is plenty fucked up with the OP picture, we don’t need to resort to hyperbolic language to get our point across.
Its not hyperbolic, 14 is a teenage child. Teenager is not more accurate, because when you say a ‘teenage worker’ most would assume they were at least in the usually accepted ‘young adult’ range, 16-19, the image here is of a child worker. If they were 17 or 16 that might be different, though still literally, legally a child.
I don’t think most people would disagree that “teenager” is a more accurate word to describe that age. Trust me, there is plenty fucked up with the OP picture, we don’t need to resort to hyperbolic language to get our point across.
It is blatantly the opposite of accurate. When teenager describes both a thirteen year old who hasn’t hit puberty and a nineteen year old who could fight and die for their country, it’s obviously not an accurate enough term
Assuming the literal meaning of “literal”, a child is, according to the OED, literally:
a young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority.
I’m not in any way defending child labor in general or Culvers in particular, but factually speaking, a 14-year-old fits between those two definitions (above the age of puberty but below the legal age of majority).
So that’s an inclusive “or” in the definition. If EITHER of those criteria are fulfilled, then the definition can be applied. Since the criterion about the age of majority is true then the definition is true.
So conversely, a person above the age of majority who hasn’t reached puberty yet (medical condition maybe? Just suspend disbelief for the sake of the argument) is still by definition a child.
I have a 14 year old right now and I’d have zero issues with him getting a job. He’s already been eyeing some places. I know this isn’t what you’re exactly saying, but once they hit puberty they’re a bit different than young kids.
I respect that, but your 14 year old is probably quite unusual in that respect. To his credit, of course! Some kids mature faster, and in different areas at different rates. I have a 13 year old and a 16 year old and neither of them would be capable of paid work in my opinion. I love them from the bottom of my heart but they would crumble after a shift at BK
I got my first job in ‘95 when I was 13. This was in a Toronto suburb at a computer shop and it was awesome although only got $5 an hour and had to stay in the back mostly shrink-wrapping a million cd cases. There was a cute 16 year old older girl at the register that I still remember lol.
Didn’t love wearing a large Windows ‘95 box costume and standing at the corner like a hooker though.
Jeeziz. We’re about the same age and I was unable to even make a sandwich at that age I think. Mind you, I bet 13 year old you was ecstatic about that 5 dollars an hour in 1995. I hope you’ve got a picture of yourself in that box for the laughs.
My first job was call centre work at 16. I answered an advert in the local paper. Trying to use a script to swindle old ladies out of their pension for a commission, it was horrifying. I remember thinking “is this what adults do for a living? Cheat each other??” Looking back, I wasn’t that far off in a lot of cases I think.
Oh man that’s a terrible first job lol. I would absolutely hate doing that.
By the time I was 16 I had moved to the states and got a job at KB Toys at the mall. They paid 7.75 an hour which was better than the rest of the mall at 5.25 an hour. Mall was the place to be though!
I liked service work. I tended bar and worked in kitchens for years while I got my qualifications. I sometimes think everyone should have to do retail or service for a bit so they can meet as many different types of people as possible. I work in research now, and I see a lot of the graduates coming in in their twenties and they don’t understand shit about how the world works, or how people work. I think there’s a lot of value in the experience you get in those jobs that people look down their noses at. If it paid the bills as well as science and engineering, I would’ve stayed.
Service work wasn’t bad at all. First service gig I had was when I was 18 and I worked a catering gig for a golf tournament. Thought I was practically a millionaire because it paid $20 an hour!
Went to college and waited tables at some restaurant named Pargos. Biggest tip I ever got was when I accidentally spilled an ice tea over the patriarch of an 8 top lol. I was mortified. I had been pledging a fraternity and got very little sleep before. Turns out the guy was also a fraternity alum so I got really lucky.
I completely agree with you. You learn so much dealing with customers and not to mention some interesting coworkers. That movie “Waiting” was pretty spot on.
I was laying lines blueberry raking at 14, and doing dishes in a restaurant at 16. I wanted money and it certainly taught me how difficult manual labor is without putting me in any real danger. The worst I got was bread cuts. I’d 100% put my daughter in the same situation when she’s older.
Getting a job as an indulgence because they are interested is fine. Getting a job because their parents are not capable of giving them a dignified lifestyle is downright disgusting and such kids should be rescued. Often greedy parents mask the latter as the former because they are scum.
Getting a job because their parents are not capable of giving them a dignified lifestyle is downright disgusting and such kids should be rescued
I just don’t understand this leap to conclusions that every young person is out there working because their parents aren’t feeding or clothing them. I grew up with rich friends, middle class friends, and poor friends. Random assortments of all three groups grew up working. The vast majority of the time it to earn money for themselves to buy luxuries. One friend was working to support their family due to a parental situation. There’s no way putting that person in the foster care system would have been better. They Graduated with decent grades too.
Don’t get too worked up over it. The average Stay-At-Home-Lemmy is completely unable to understand the concept that not everyone’s mom and dad will buy them an Xbox and that sometimes teenagers will get jobs to pay for things they want.
I enjoyed it. The work was easy and it gave me a sense of purpose and I needed that. It taught me the value of my time, and enabled me to get a car when I turned 16. Some people grow up fast, simply because they have to, or sometimes because they just, do. One size does not fit all.
I think many states allow children as young as 12 to work in specific non-dangerous jobs with permission from the parents. A company recently got in trouble when they had like 20 12-15 year olds working in a meat processing plant which definitely did not qualify for the “not dangerous” qualifier.
My mom laminated mine when I was like 6 years old. It still has my 6 year-old, childish signature on it. Every time I use it someone says “you’re not supposed to laminate these”, and then they accept it anyways. So who’s the fool now?
My ex’s dad laminated his whole ass birth certificate. He had a bitch of a time fixing that lmao.
Though I think people ask for birth certificate less often than they do our SIN (and also our SIN cards are actual literal cards in Canada not just pieces of paper).
I always thought my birth certificate was the little vanity one with my feet prints on it. I learned it isn’t when I actually needed a birth certificate for the first time. Since I live in an entirely different State now it was a bit of a PITA to get the real one.
It was the only video you could watch without buffering for days with the shitty dial up internet of the time. OH OH AND YOU’RE MARY TYLER MOORE. Fucking kill me.
That’s honestly the only reason why I know that they exist. I remember thinking that it was a weird name for a band since people who wheeze can’t talk well, let alone sing.
Forget shitposts, there were legitimate flame wars in Pompeii graffiti:
Successus textor amat coponiaes ancilla(m) nomine Hiredem quae quidem illum non curat sed ille rogat illa com(m)iseretur scribit rivalis vale
Translates to:
Successus the weaver is in love with the slave of the Innkeeper, whose name is Iris. She doesn’t care about him at all, but he asks that she take pity on him. A rival wrote this
A response to this translates to:[6]
You’re so jealous you’re bursting. Don’t tear down someone more handsome― a guy who could beat you up and who is good-looking.
Honestly, the internet was at its best when it was the fever dream of stoned, sexually frustrated grad students at Berkley. Infinite potential - it could’ve been anything. Could’ve. But wouldn’t. The real thing, after it became fully saturated in everyday American life, was always going to be some mediocre, watered down corporate cesspool of lowest common denominator, hyper-sanitized garbage. Because that’s what people like. They like safe, familiar, predictable, and uncomplicated. Well, most people.
Twitter has only lost ~10% of it’s userbase after repeatedly abusing its own users. Reddit probably less. After everything we’ve learned about Meta, tens of millions of people signed up on day 1 to join their new service, Threads. Google Chrome still has like 80% market share.
Changing is honestly a trivial ask, but we won’t, because no one cares.
It’s not that no one cares, per se. We just live in a society where the majority of working adults are fucking exhausted. They have bills to pay, uncertain job security, seemingly constant climate crises/natural disasters in many geolocations (e.g. Canada and US West Coast wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), hyper polarized partisanship in many countries (yeah, it isn’t unique to the US), and on and on. That Google, Microsoft, or Amazon own the internet is such a low priority to the much more immediate, life threatening/living security concerns of the majority of people.
I care, but I also understand why many people do not.
LOL that makes zero sense. It takes 5 minutes to switch to a different browser or service. If they were tired or didn’t have time, they wouldn’t be spending it on Twitter and Reddit.
It’s not really the time. It’s more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.
Sure, it’s easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it’s there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.
Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.
The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.
This just sounds like a bunch of non-sense, making up excuses for people making poor decisions. Like you can’t blame every bad decision on “wahhhh life is hard!”
No, it’s not excuses, it’s just reality. It’s hard. Does that mean people shouldn’t try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.
The thing is, just because people aren’t doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn’t mean that they aren’t in other areas that you may not know about.
For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn’t leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that’s ok.
Just be the best human you can be every day and don’t beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works. How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway. Your username checks out for real.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works.
Uhhhh nope, it takes way less time than it does to simply continue using it. All the time you’re using could be spent finding and switching to something else. It literally only takes a few minutes. Way more than people are actually spending on these other platforms. And if they’re spending time on these platforms, they can’t possibly avoid learning about competing platforms.
How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway.
How an individual chooses to use their time is none of my concern. How millions of people choose to use their time directly impacts everyone else, myself included, so yes it abso-fucking-lutely is my business.
Man, I would love to run a Linux box and still be able to run the like 4 programs I use my computer for, but I don’t have any interest in running an OS I have to build and make work. I got Redhat working once (feels like a million years ago) and I am just not that interested in my PC anymore. It’s a tool. I want it to work without any fiddling on my part. It has exactly 5 programs it ever has to run. I touch it on the weekends. Windows it is.
Linux today is plug and play in almost all areas. Off the top of my head the ones that have problems are creativity (no Adobe and also wacky color management, though it’s getting a complete rework with Wayland setting it on par with macOS) and engineering (next to no support from big CADs).
I have played through Skyrim and No Man’s Sky in Linux VR. Valve has done a great job keeping up the development of Linux Steam VR, especially considering how low its market share is. It’s part of their nuclear option against Microsoft and Windows or something.
In fact just yesterday I installed EAC so that I could play New World, and all I did was to install it straight from Steam before also installing the game from Steam.
You realize all of that old shit is still possible today right? Static plain html still works. It loads quicker than ever. The only thing preventing it is the creators of the content. The masses on social media were never going to create that so having Twitter around doesn’t change the possibilities. Get cracking.
I interpreted “we” as the general public. And yes, that was kind of my point. ActivityPub exists. NOSTR exists. Probably a dozen other decentralized social media protocols and services. And yet no one leaves the garbage-ass, bot-riddled, insanely-popular social platforms.
No we can’t. It’s been consolidated. Sure some of us might get a little piece of freedom but the web is going to stay consolidated unless something major happens…
If you can afford it, cough up the money for a laser printer. I’ve had mine for years and only changed the ink once. So much better than ink jet printers, which are a total scam
I think the earlier ones were great, too. Jokes aside: people have been saying how much better Brother printers are (used to be?). I only heard positive comments about them, but even my HP laser printer is just a reliable workhorse. Or at least it has been in the last 2 years. I’ve been trying to convert people ever since (to laser printers, not HP).
Old HP laser printers (20 years ago) were tanks, unstoppable workhorses. I had a 4000N that was virtually unbreakable. But they’ve been coasting on that rep for a long time while they changed to inferior hardware and predatory subscription practices. Nowadays they are so enshittified I can’t imagine anyone will even be buying HP printers 20 years from now. I went to Brother for my last two printer purchases and they just work. Look through this thread or any other printer thread for “brother” and “just work”. It’s not an accident.
First I read 4000N as four thousand Newtons and it even felt appropriate, considering its supposed weight (Mass? Force?). Yeah, you can read everywhere how shitty HP is with printers nowadays. I just wonder what other owners of relatively new HP laser printers think, because in my 2 years I haven’t seen anything dodgy yet. I hope it stays that way crosses fingers.
Tried to fire up an older HP monochrome laser printer that is still working perfectly.
The problem? Windows 11 has no drivers, and it literally cannot be used at all. Not through Wi-Fi (old drivers, too), not through the USB port, or my shared through my router.
I mean, seriously, this stuff should work on a generic print driver until the end of time, but nope.
Hot news, linux is incredibly compatible with printers. CUPS is very well designed. With relatively little technical knowledge you could probably plug a raspberry pi into virtually any old printer and get it running with the Pi as a print server sharing it with the network.
It’s actually been the case for 20 years now. Same with lots of other devices.
Around 2008-ish I saw a Tesco-branded webcam for something like 5€. I was just in need of one, so I looked up if it’s not, by any chance Linux compatible. It was, right out of the box.
Same thing with Sony Ericsson phones of that era. Capable of lots of things, like Ethernet over USB or Mass Storage, but with Windows it all needed a massive and annoying driver package. Linux - plug and go.
we’ve done this with our router at home. Plug the printer into the router’s USB (has to be direct tho, doesn’t like a hub) and then install the drivers on my mac and it works. Even though this printer is an ancient brother.
We all know there’s barely enough people here. It’s not unusable, but there are so few people it’s always the same users posting and commenting, and it can be a bit dead occasionally.
I’m committed to the fediverse, but we could do with another big push from people dumping Reddit. Part of that would also rely on us (🫵) not being obnoxious towards the potential new users 👀
There are a lot of forks of Misskey which are more popular in the “West”. I recommend you to have a look at Firefish, Iceshrimp, Catodon or Sharkey. Firefish used to gain a lot of traction but there was some personal drama going on with the original maintainer, causing the project to feel unmaintained for a while. Luckily the do have a new maintainer now. Anyway partially due to this problem some folk like the former community manager created a new fork Catodon. Iceshrimp also another direct fork of Firefish. So a bit of trivia from the FOSS Mastodon world. In the you might as well just use Mastodon if you are fine with the UI. But I love that we have so much variety in the FOSS ActivityPub World.
I heard it’s something like 90% of people lurk, 10% of people comment, 1% of people post. So you need a pretty substantial population just to have enough posts and comments for the lurkers to still hang around.
It’s also why it was particularly dumb of Reddit to piss off their 1% and 10%.
When I was a kid in the 70s, a lurker was a turd that had failed to flush away properly. As in : “Dad left a big beefy lurker in the toilet again.” How language changes.
It’s just a bad habit for me really. I’m so used to reddit immediately slaughtering anyone who doesn’t conform with the hivemind even though Lemmy isn’t like that
Yep, I’m part of the problem. Was super active on Reddit, dumped them, then just don’t really have the energy of fucks anymore to create content or comment really; it’s a shame…
As per the website there are around 900 active users servers on lemmyI recently joined the fediverse both lemmy and mastodon and tbh lemmy is more active. Mastodon is just an echo chamber only bots are reposting from reddit and twitter.
I’ve got a mastodon account. The people I follow don’t mark snarky quips. Instead, they post updates of things they are making (music, games, and comics mostly); and they share photos that they’ve taken, and links and comments to news that they find interesting. Compared to Lemmy, it’s more personal, because when you respond you are talking directly to a person that you are likely to talk to again.
Mastodon doesn’t use a personalised algorithm. So your home feed will only show hashtags and people that you follow. (There is an ‘explore’ feed for seeing other stuff that might be ‘trending’ or whatever.) So if you are seeing too many snarky quips - just unfollow the person making them.
they post updates of things they are making (music, games, and comics mostly); and they share photos that they’ve taken, and links and comments to news that they find interesting. Compared to Lemmy, it’s more personal, because when you respond you are talking directly to a person that you are likely to talk to again.
You can do all that same stuff on Lemmy/reddit, except the comments are actually organized and readable. Trying to read a continuous comment thread on Twitter is such a pain.
For years Reddit and Twitter were coexisting peacefully and it should be clear for everyone by now that each format has its pros and cons and they are used for different purposes. Was is a bit interesting though is that the active users gap between Mastodon and Lemmy seems to be much higher than it was/is with the corporate originals.
A lot of the thousands of Reddit comments per post were variations of ‘this!’ or inane joke responses, and I don’t miss that at all. It’s not the quantity, but the quality, and I’ve found discussions here to be more like Reddit’s early days when comment threads were more worthwhile.
But if you’re looking for the Reddit experience, I’ll help:
Never doubt your ability to be influenced by propaganda. The technique that broke the internet in 2015, lying and then confirming the lie more convincingly with a second account, is still very successful today.
Largely because Reddit was so much more diverse. Even ol hive mindey Reddit tolerated differing views significantly better than the shit heap that is Lemmy.
Reddit does get super echo chamber-y in some places, though. Check out any thread in /r/worldnews lately and all the comments. They’re all of the same opinion. At least on Lemmy I see disagreement. I see as many complaints about tankies on Lemmy as I do tankies themselves, for example. The only one I’ve seen in this thread has all their comments in the negative.
It’s not as clever yet, thought, as the demographic is rather small. I was amazed that reddits’ world news the comments were almost uniformly not only anti Hamas but pro Israel. I mean not to pick a side here, and not saying theres not astroturfing here. However there’s more diversity of position, whereas the reddit thread felt almost strangly like everyone was just saying stuff, but not carrying any meaning. Felt like the last scene of body snatchers where even the protagonist turns out to be snatched, in a way.
The amount of sophistication is lower. There are people holding extreme positions but quite often they self identify and aren’t state sponsored most of the time.
I agree and have noticed the same things. I don’t think Lemmy is big enough to attract the state sponsors yet like Reddit is but it will probably be susceptible to the same issues when it is.
I mean, the actual source for this statistic is usually “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” by Juliet Schor who in turn got the number from an unpublished paper written by Gregory Clark in 1986. Clark did eventually publish a paper in 2018 where he increased his estimate to 250-300 days (which may still be less than some modern workers work).
Farming peasants worked pretty much from sunrise to sunset, sometimes even longer. If you count the number of hours the average medieval peasant worked in a year, it was probably a lot more than we do now.
Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters—their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
I worked on a farm down in the Central valley in California about 15 years ago, and all the Hispanic people worked from 5:00 a.m. to noon and that was it. They were done for the day. And this is modern society!
There is quite the difference between 150/365 and 300/365.
One is about 3/7 the other 6/7 and now look at today when most of us work 5/7 on a normal workweek.
Yes, but let’s do a breakdown of the average day in the life of a Medieval European peasant. Let’s assume it’s a standard 8hr day for a male serf aged 15-20 years.
Sun comes up, start the day with perhaps a half hour for breakfast, another half hour for prayer, depending on the day, then it’s out to the fields for 3-4 hours work, which was dependent on the particular produce of the farm where he worked and the season. Livestock tended to, fields plowed, that sort of thing. Then an hour for evening prayer and supper, perhaps some beer with the lads at the tavern before sun down.
Another thing you’re forgetting is that we measure time completely differently than they did in Medieval Europe. I’ll let David Graeber, of “Bullshit Jobs” explain:
Human beings have long been acquainted with the notion of absolute, or sidereal, time by observing the heavens, where celestial events happen with exact and predictable regularity. But the skies are typically treated as the domain of perfection. Priests or monks might organize their lives around celestial time, but life on earth was typically assumed to be messier. Below the heavens, there is no absolute yardstick to apply. To give an obvious example: if there are twelve hours from dawn to dusk, there’s little point saying a place is three hours’ walk away when you don’t know the season when someone is traveling, since winter hours will be half the length of summer ones. When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking “three paternosters,” or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.
Farmers have always worked 12+ hour days, starting before dawn to feed animals and ending their days with the sun going down, serfs we’re no different. Once they were done with farm labor at sundown they worked at home on anything that needed mending for the next day, ate boiled veggies and then went to bed.
Farming is a way of life where you dance a razor’s edge. You don’t have the luxury of time not working.
I’ll concede that point. And I’d like to add that the modern clocks as we know them are also a very modern invention. Farmers in Medieval Europe certainly did not have a device in their homes which chimed the hour with regular and exact precision. The closest equivalent they would have had were clock towers, starting about the fourteenth century, funded by local merchants guilds. It was these same merchants who were in the habit of keeping a human skull in their offices as a memento mori, reminding them to make good use of their time, as each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. There were no time clocks which a serf could use to punch in or out of work for the day, no payroll and accounting department in the employ of the local lord to keep track of all hours worked, etc. Time was not a grid against work could be measured because the work was the measure itself.
The church wasnt why peasants worked less. They worked less because there wasn’t that much work to be done. During the slow season, there just isn’t enough work to justify paying a peasant to work.
Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who's title controlled the land.
There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I'll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.
He brings up capitalism out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, in response to a post about serfdom. With a sarcastic “what a surprise.” Is he implying serfdom is preferable to capitalism?
Well, everybody knows capitalism rose out of feudalism in Europe. @ Cheesus briefly mentions it too.
The sarcasm is a response to the universal assumption that money and wages were always had universally. But @ TheChurn says very few were paid and those were rare.
Reminder: the soviets ran a state-capitalist system. That’s not very feudalist.
I think you’ve misunderstood her quite a bit. Happens a lot on here lol.
You’re right they were not paid money, but they arguably were provided more goods for their services starting in the 15th century. In western Europe.
Eastern and Western Europe behaved very differently when it came to serfdom. Serfdom, as you described it, began to decline starting in western Europe in the 15th century and was pretty much gone by the 17th century. Meanwhile Eastern Europe started a rise in serfdom as you described it in the 16th century.
Serfs started to get better conditions thanks to the bubonic plague and increasing workers power over lords. In western Europe they were paid a higher share of the crop as a result. They still had a bad life overall, but it got ever so slightly better.
The whole notion that they had 150 days off isn’t even necessarily accurate either because record keeping is so bad from those eras on time worked. It’s not enough data to provide an accurate assessment of working hours.
This happens not really because of the gender of the person but because in Spanish things have genders: The moon is a she, the sun is a he, etc. and ChatGPT confuses that and the fact that in this context that distinction makes no sense.
Usually Spanish speaking non-binary people use also “no-binarie”, something that doesn’t exist in the language, for now at least, but wipes out the gender.
I’m not an expert, thought, just a native Spanish speaker.
Exactly! I would add that you can still use “no binario” or “no binaria” in a (somewhat) respectful manner. For instance, you can say “persona no binaria” (non binary person), “comunidad no binaria” (non binary community), because both nouns are feminine, you can use the feminine alteration of “no binario”. For masculine I would go with “su género es no binario” (its gender in non binary), since gender is masculine and “su” doesn’t imply any gender at all.
Again, not an expert just another fellow native Spanish speaker with a bit of a geekiness about languages.
agree, except “doesn’t exist in the language” - if people are saying it, it exists in the language, there’s no committee deciding what’s “in” or “out” of Spanish (or English, for that matter).
Yes there is a committee for Spanish. It’s called the Real Academia Española. Their official mission is to ensure the stability of the Spanish language across 22 hispanophone countries. I reference them daily because I don’t speak Spanish fluently yet I live in a Spanish speaking country.
I believe that English is the largest language without any sort of “official body.” In France, the Académie Française has the authority to decide what is and isn’t French. I believe that similar bodies exist for German and Mandarin, as well.
Right, but as all similar such committees eventually learn, there’s a pretty strict limit to what they can actually control or regulate. Mostly it’s just formal written usage that can be regulated. Spoken language doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s notions of what’s considered correct or incorrect. This is one of the foundational principles of linguistics.
This isn’t correct, actually. English is the only major language that has no formal regulators of the language, and Spanish is one of the most formally regulated.
Same in Mexico though in El Salvador it’s referred to beating someone up if spoken as a verb. I got really confused when a Salvadorean guy was telling me he fucked another guy only to find out it was actually in the context of a fight.
I think the e thing sounds fucking stupid, however if that makes people happy, so be it, language is supposed to evolve over time, the e is only annoying if you actively oppose to it (or are in a position where you’re not allowed to make mistakes)
This isn’t entirely true either. The adjective “binario” has to agree with the gender of what’s being talked about, either the grammatical gender of the noun or the natural gender of the person. A salient example could be the noun “piloto”. Just as adjectives inflect for gender so do pronouns, so you can say “el piloto” or “la piloto” depending on the natural gender of the person, and inflect adjectives accordingly. Grammatical gender and natural gender are both distict concepts that impact gender inflection in spanish.
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