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OwenEverbinde

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OwenEverbinde ,

Who the hell downvotes a person for saying “I have a hard time with Captchas because they don’t provide accessibility options that allow entry to someone with my conditions” ?

Like, guys, Captchas being ableist is a well known thing. And they’ve only been getting worse, as they’ve been in an arms race with AI, trying to become more and more distorted, and most AI text recognition software is already better at Captchas than most dyslexic people.

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

Depends on how you define capitalism.

According to the modern (very intentionally altered) definition of capitalism,

“a system allowing the exchange of goods and services for currency, where different skill sets can result in different compensation”

… everything, including the USSR [1][2] has been capitalism. And even most Marxists are pro-capitalists.

The definition above encompasses everything that ever was, and everything that ever will be. (And that’s only a slight exaggeration)

Which – just fyi – makes the word one of the most useless words in the history of language.

If, however – just hypothetically – you wanted to have a productive dialogue with a self-described anti-capitalist, you would need to carry out the entire conversation pretending the word “capitalism” referred to something a hell of a lot more specific. A single mechanism within market society. A single kind of contractual relationship between worker and company.

Which is an exercise in imagination and in the algebraic concept of substitution that most people have a rather stubborn aversion to.

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

Right. That is a good point. Although Marx didn’t see the elimination of currency as a realistic goal attainable within the first few decades (possibly even the first century) of communism, he did believe a post-scarcity humanity would eventually transcend the need for currency.

However when it comes to barter, the thing is: even in societies dominated by barter, some commodity tends to become the standard against which the values of other commodities are measured. Cigarettes in POW camps, cacao beans in Mesoamerica.

By an admittedly-loose definition of currency, a currency does always emerge and end up being directly exchanged for goods and services, even in barter systems.

OwenEverbinde ,

I’m not a tech worker. I have only heard stories told by the ones that quit.

I cannot even imagine how quickly entire systems would come crashing down to the tune of billions of dollars if tech workers ever decided to strike.

The amount of leverage organized tech workers could have is mind boggling.

OwenEverbinde ,

These companies wouldn’t even be able to get foreigners to replace the tech workers

Oh, but boy have they tried.

OwenEverbinde ,

THESE DAYS there are some laws protecting most workers. Those laws were written in the blood of striking miners.

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

I also can’t help but notice how her personification of businesses (as things that can “really sweat”) and empathy for them far exceeds the level at which she humanizes workers.

It’s almost like “Mary Elizabeth Elkordy, founder of the remote-based company Elkordy Global Strategies,” has a keen sense for which team she belongs to.

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

Evangelizing.

If I want to share a cool link with someone who has an account but is not yet active, I have to:

  1. ascertain their instance if they are on the site
  2. visit their instance on a browser
  3. search their instance for the post I want to share

On centralized platforms I can hit the “share” button the moment I find something interesting. When I do, I will receive a single link that will work for all users of the service.

Granted (because the platform then harasses the user who follows the link, trying to annoy them into getting an account and/or logging in so that it can more accurately harvest their data) it’s not a ton better centralized.

But it does make it extra difficult to evangelize this way. I convinced a friend to get an account, and yet when I shared a link with him (without taking the above steps), he sent back a screenshot of the banner telling him he wasn’t logged in.

I’d like an easier way to pull the uninitiated into a conversation occurring on this network of sites.

OwenEverbinde ,

The person hosting lemmy.myserv.one is trying to acquire more users because they want to take some of the load off of lemmy.world.

If you want something less burdened than lemmy.world, you should make an account over here. Do your Lemmy browsing from here, you know?

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

It used to be a banner above the comments. Now it seems to be in the sidebar. That’s a good design choice. It’s an improvement. It might not have scared my friend so much.

Here’s the screenshot he sent me a couple of weeks ago. I’ve thrown it onto some image pastebin called “pasteboard”.

These days, apparently (I followed the link to your comment, feddit.de/comment/2020091), it’s on the sidebar and says:

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !asklemmy

This is actually a massive improvement. It gives directions, and the earlier one didn’t. It’s friendlier than the earlier version too.

However, this evolution badly needs to continue (since I don’t see how asklemmy’s front page is going to tell you anything about the federated instance signup process or enough about the “home instance” concept for them to know they need to go to their home instance.) If I was given a link to your comment, and I wanted to upvote your comment, I would still need to 1) navigate to my home instance’s search tool and 2) paste your comment’s URL into that search tool. And that’s still a complicated process for a lot of people.

I do really appreciate the direction the web app is going here,

  • they have gotten rid of the “vote” buttons and the “reply” buttons if you’re not logged in.
  • the “not logged in” notification now tutorializes a little bit.

These are all very good developments.

But they need to continue. We need to tutorialize stronger.

OwenEverbinde ,

If you’re into bread tube / left tube, I highly recommend Innuendo Studios. In particular, Innuendo Studios’s playlist, “the Alt-Right Playbook.” It helps make sense of internet discourse.

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

As Bobert said elsewhere in these comments, there is a massive mental health benefit to having any adult at all who provides the child with presence and emotional support.

To add to that, I have received treatment from numerous therapists. And I have seen siblings and friends receive treatment as well. From my experience – and I might get some flak for this advice – even though a good therapist is better than no therapist, a bad therapist can actually be harmful. Your little pal will easily get more out of a well-intentioned friend than he would get if he wound up placed with a mediocre therapist. It’s the unfortunate state of mental healthcare in this country.

Ten years from now, if he’s eighteen and still in your life and starts asking for monetary assistance to pay for therapy? Great. Pay for his therapy. (Also make absolutely sure he keeps shopping around until he finds a therapist who really clicks with him. For the above reason, you know? The odds of him getting a great one on the first spin aren’t high.)

But until then: there’s a good chance he’s missing very little. And a very good chance there’s nothing to feel bad about if you can’t get this little guy into therapy. There are more surefire ways of improving his outcome.

So, like the other commenters said: offer the mom help. You noted that she’s guaranteed to dump him on you for long stretches of time.

Also, offer to pay for his phone plan. (Like another commenter said, phrase all offers as a benefit to her.) If she agrees, put yourself in his contacts, let him know he can always call you, and try to make sure he knows the number “988” and never feels too shy to reach out to that number.

OwenEverbinde ,

I wanted to try Gentoo for a while. But I could never find a bootable ISO for it. And that’s basically the only way I know how to install a distro.

OwenEverbinde ,

Yes. Installation. With all the other Linux distributions I have installed, there is a bootable CD with an installer of some kind.

  • Slackware
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu
  • Mint
  • Arch (though the install process with that one is admittedly more complicated. Also, because I have a very hard time grasping what the use cases are for anything outside of a “default” Linux system, it felt like I was using a very expensive arc furnace to toast myself a sandwich.)
  • Manjaro
  • OpenSUSE
  • MX Linux (my current favorite)

Actually, come to think of it, my problem with Arch is also my problem with Gentoo: I don’t know what the use cases are.

In fact basically, I like Linux, but I also don’t know what Linux is for. I use it for Web browsing, occasional attempts at writing code (I’m bad at that. I have no idea what the proper process is for finding code that already does the things I want done, and I’m pretty sure that’s 90% of programming), I use it for taking markdown notes and mind mapping. And that’s honestly about it.

I could do all of that with Windows, technically speaking. It would just clutter my system, and I would not get to choose my own desktop environment. And I wouldn’t have access to the Debian repositories. And where it’s effortless reinstalling Debian based systems, Windows installation can be a pain.

So the way I use it, Linux is just a sleeker, more lightweight, more visually customizable Windows that I can run on older hardware and fill to the brim with random software packages acquired through Debian’s humongous library of verified programs without worrying about messing up my OS because ultimately, I can easily reinstall the whole system in a matter of 40 minutes.

To someone who uses a computer the way I do, it almost can’t be anything more than that.

I’m pretty sure that’s the real reason I don’t use Gentoo.

OwenEverbinde ,

Aren’t you listening? He’s not liking it! His users are pissed!

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

I don’t stop there. I like to give the FULL name of my operating system when I use it. Example:

“What distro are you running?”

“Oh on this laptop here? This laptop is running Mint, daughter of Ubuntu, son of Debian, daughter of Linux, son of GNU! Her ancestors hail from the mountains of Copyleft, where the mighty Stallman wields his hammer Emacs to forge her people’s legendary tools!”

Anything shorter is just disrespectful.

From a networking perspective, does the Fediverse strike anyone else as "optimistic"?

Usually, when you open a website, that site might be pulling live data from somewhere, but it’s from a database on the same server. If you click a Fediverse link, and no-one else from your instance has already done so, it seems like your instance has to contact a remote site, pull the data and render it, in the same timeframe...

OwenEverbinde ,

I recently started a Kbin account and noticed that a few of the communities I searched:

  1. were empty, and
  2. had, in their info, the claim that they had started right when I searched them.

Which tells me that the Kbin instance only stores local information about a community after the first of its members searches that community.

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

At the end of the day though, it’s just that most people aren’t willing to admit to themselves that they shouldn’t be driving because they’re too easily distracted in the first place.

Is there any room in your mind for the possibility that some people simply have different values than you?

You’re acting like the only people disagreeing with you are people who have been in accidents and are looking for something outside of themselves to blame. You’re acting like deep down they agree with you that all error comes from a lack of competence and responsibility.

(Aside: I hate cars and our car-centric infrastructure and I haven’t been in any accidents, which means I don’t fit into your narrative here. But that’s not likely to sway you. And I know that’s not likely to sway you. Because I know you don’t share my perspective.)

But is it remotely possible to you that some people out there might just believe:

mistakes and errors are inevitable for everyone – not just for stupid, careless, irresponsible, incompetent, hopeless lost causes masquerading as people.

And even if mistakes were only made by those kinds of people – meaning a single mistake could mark you as a “bad person” – saving “bad people’s” lives is still better than letting those people die. Just because they couldn’t figure out a car doesn’t mean they deserve to die in an accident (or starve to death because their suburban house is too far from the nearest grocery store and they accept that they can’t drive.)

Is it really impossible for you to imagine that some people might just place value on human lives, regardless of cost and regardless of personal responsibility?

Prehistoric humans are now known to have spent years dragging around and caring for their paralyzed tribe mates millennia ago. Meaning the kind of people I’m talking about have existed for thousands of years. People who don’t care about personal responsibility. People who just want the best for everyone around them.

If you told these people, “some of your tribe mates will be incapable of safely driving vehicles. How should we build this city?” They would (once you showed them what all of those words meant) have intentionally laid out the city to allow those poorly-driving tribe mates to walk or use transit. They would place nearby grocery stores. They would direct high density housing to go up in the area. They would try to make it possible to avoid using cars. And the city they built would have 90% less cars because of it.

To them such a city would be an obvious choice.

You don’t have to agree with the cavemen who cared for their dying relatives. But please acknowledge that they existed, and didn’t hold your beliefs. Please acknowledge that the people you’re arguing with, don’t hold your beliefs.

OwenEverbinde , (edited )

Okay, yeah. These people definitely find comfort in hiding behind “personal responsibility” as a means of abdicating social responsibility.

But have you seen the Alt-Right Playbook video, “Always a Bigger Fish” ?

In that video, Innuendo Studios lays out the idea that there is a base, core, philosophical difference between conservatives and progressives in how we think the world ought to be, and what kind of world we think is possible.

To the conservative, nature is full of hierarchy. The strongest chimp gets the most bananas, you know? (Yes, I know that’s not actually true. But it’s the way they see the world.) The smartest, strongest human survives and hunts well and eats well. (Yes, I know early hunter-gatherer societies hunted in worker cooperatives and raised children cooperatively. So I know this isn’t really a well-researched scientific hypothesis. But it is believed by a particular group of people.)

When they say, “take personal responsibility,” it’s kind of a code word for, “accept your rightful place in the hierarchy. Accept that you are simply the weaker, stupider chimp and you are inevitably going to get less bananas and society can’t be expected to coddle you and give you more than you deserve.”

According to a worldview that asserts humans are naturally divided into the strong, the weak, and the in-between, a person complaining about their own outcomes is just in denial of this fundamental, universal “truth.” A whiner unwilling to admit they receive less because they provide less. A deceiver attempting to usurp a more deserving person’s place in the hierarchy because they are unwilling to accept the consequences of their “actions.”

There’s no better frontier for this idea than the open road, where a single mistake can kill you and everyone in your vicinity. Transit activists, who want to take people off the roads, put them on buses and in trains where they will be safe even if they aren’t “vigilant” and “responsible” and “alert” (read: unlucky), are trying to spend society’s limited resources coddling people who will never really provide a return on that investment – because they are weak. Which wastes money, since the money could have been spent on responsible people who will lead society to better places.

To these people,

  • society’s responsibility is to make sure everyone stays in their place.
  • there will always be starving monkeys.
  • the folks who would crash a car probably can’t manage their bank account. Or learn valuable skills.

Hence, roads are a convenient way to cull the weak.

OwenEverbinde ,

I’ve seen the opinion before, in community college. I was assigned to read something, and it laid out a damn good argument for why working a register never taught anyone “life skills.”

I want an alt account for writing. Is there a corner of the Fediverse you recommend?

I want to respond to writing prompts, but from a separate account. That way, if someone enjoys a story, they can scroll through my (alt account’s) history for more writing without needing to dig through all of the dramatic, vitriolic, shit-stirring my main account will be regularly diving into....

OwenEverbinde OP ,

Thank you kindly. I feel like this answer supplements Samurai’s answer really well and gives a solid illustration of their point when they said,

I’ve looked over the other options, and they’re pretty meh tbh, for a writer in specific.

Now I know what’s so “meh” about at least one of them.

OwenEverbinde OP ,

This is one hell of a write up, stranger. Thank you!

Mastodon and calckey have the most active writing communities imo.

It is very difficult to search for something when you don’t know it exists. Now that I know Mastodon and calckey have a vibrant writing community that you recommend, I know there’s some value to finding it and learning how to immerse my account in that community. Much appreciated.

I think the best route is a lemmy or kbin author account combined with mastodon. Instances rarely matter in terms of where you join, so long as it’s a fairly stable and not heavily defederated/defederating one.

You even gave a recommended route!? Seriously, you have my gratitude. This is awesome.

By “combined with mastodon” do you mean to create one new account at lemmy or kbin and one at mastodon? Or do you mean to create one new account at lemmy or kbin and use it to connect with the writing communities at mastodon?

OwenEverbinde OP ,

Wonderful. Thank you South Samurai. I’ll do just that.

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