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SwampYankee

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SwampYankee ,

WHAT HAPPENED TO MY MOTHER SCHRODINGER!?

‘Will I ever retire?’: millennials wonder what’s on the other side of middle age (www.theguardian.com)

Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan....

SwampYankee ,

Most recent social security trustees report says the trust fund will run out in 2035. What happens in 2035? Benefits are still funded at 83% in perpetuity. By the way, last year it was going to run out in 2033, and the year before that it was going to run out in 2031. And also by the way, the trust fund was specifically set up because they knew the baby boomers were going to stress the system, so it’s supposed to get depleted as the boomers use it.

Everything is working mostly as intended, and yet there’s all this anxiety around Social Security. Why? Because Republicans want you to think Social Security is fucked all on its own so that you don’t question it when they ratfuck it. That and they want to constantly frame the conversation as such so that the conversation doesn’t turn to “how do we make social security more robust and generous?” or some other radical socialist nonsense.

SwampYankee ,

I’ve had some pretty long commutes in the past because my work location changes every few years. I enjoy the work, though, so that helps, but I’ve still been feeling the OP lately. I’m in my late 30s and I don’t have kids and “fun” doesn’t really do it for me anymore. More and more I need to feel like I’m doing something worthwhile instead of aimless hedonism. I’ll figure it out, though, it’s just time to make some, as you say, necessary changes again.

deleted_by_moderator

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    SwampYankee ,

    It was the naval ensign of Massachusetts up to 1971, and I guess still is, just with the words removed. As a proud Swamp Yankee, I say to anyone using it to support a fascist coup attempt, and especially anyone from New Jersey - fuck right off.

    SwampYankee ,

    If you read the full article, it seems as if the Saudi religious establishment was infiltrated by Egyptian extremists fleeing a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood following the assassination of Sadat. Their ideology meshed with Wahhabism and Bin Laden’s religious vendetta against the United States. The Saudi state apparatus did not have effective oversight over the religious establishment and so this all happened under the House of Saud’s nose. The countries in red are (at the time) places with either US puppet regimes or some form of Arab Revolt descended, nominally secular/socialist regimes. The religious extremists pushing Islamic rule operated in these countries under various militias and terrorist groups, notably Al Qaeda, backed by the newly radicalized Saudi Wahhabi establishment, and of course, Iran.

    From that perspective, the US was waging war against militias and terrorist groups with roots and support in Saudi Arabia, but the House of Saud was not considered to be complicit. The article goes on to say…

    Astonishingly, the attacks of 9/11 had little effect on the Saudi approach to religious extremism, as diplomats and intelligence officials have attested. What finally changed royal minds was the experience of suffering an attack on Saudi soil. In May 2003, gunmen and suicide bombers struck three residential compounds in Riyadh, killing 39 people. The authorities attributed the attacks to al-Qaeda, and cooperation with the U.S. improved quickly and dramatically.

    Interesting stuff, to be sure.

    SwampYankee ,

    He was more than a hero. He was a union man.

    SwampYankee ,

    In the US, there are positive and negative stereotypes, too. German efficiency and Japanese perfectionism and perseverance are among them. Jewish intelligence and commitment to education, too. These things have a basis in reality, of course, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for reality itself. It seems to me these things appearing in your textbooks were probably attempts by your own government to get its people to emulate what it sees as positive traits in other cultures, rather than an attempt by foreign adversaries to paint Chinese people as inferior. Of course, when the message was a little too unclear or negative as in the “toxic textbooks” incident, your government deflected blame.

    SwampYankee ,

    Full disclosure, I am Jewish myself, and sorry for the book… try not to knee-jerk react to it.

    I hate to partake in this genetic essentialism garbage, but Ashkenazis by and large share their paternal heritage with Sephardic Jews and other Semites, although that Semitic heritage has become somewhat diluted over time by converts in the maternal line and their descendants. My point in saying that is not to say that Zionists have any legitimate claim to Palestine - they absolutely don’t. It’s just “Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Semites” is a highly debatable and fraught claim that has the potential to lead one down a rabbit hole into actual racism, and incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes of Zionism. When I hear that implication, my mind is drawn to the adoption by antisemites (most recently Black Hebrew Israelites) of the now disproven myth that the original Semitic Jews died out and were replaced by Khazars.

    I’m stopping short of calling what you said, specifically, antisemitism, but in another context a similar statement might be called a dog whistle. People can say these things unintentionally when they just don’t understand the implications. This kind of reckless use of language and ideas is at least part of why we have Jewish students on college campuses claiming they don’t feel safe. We Jews have grown up being implicitly taught to keep our ear to the ground when it comes to rising intolerance, and yes in a lot of cases that has resulted in a massive blind spot for our own intolerance, but it doesn’t mean we should ignore warning signs. Of course, as a Jew, and like you, I often scoff when I hear claims of antisemitism, and in fact I get angry about them when they conflate Jewishness with Israel & Zionism, which ironically IS antisemitism.

    Now I mentioned the Khazar myth and Jewish students who don’t feel safe. The issue here is that they lack the self awareness to say, “maybe my hangups about certain things people say are a product of my own upbringing and sensitivities, rather than any intentional antisemitism on their part.” On the other hand, when people talk about Jews or Jew-adjacent issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they should also have the self awareness to ask themselves “am I contributing to a climate that lets actual antisemitism fly under the radar and should I be more careful about the things I say?”

    In any case, flinging accusations back and forth is unproductive. If my fellow Jews feel threatened by protestors and their words, I would recommend they approach those protestors with humility, and listen to their grievances before making assumptions about their intentions. Which is funny, because here I am Jew-splaining in response to a flippant remark in an internet comment section, but the reason is I just desperately want people to understand each other (and themselves) better.

    SwampYankee ,

    I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment.

    I feel like a dick talking about it with what’s going on, but it’s still important. And to be clear, we Jews who are inculcated with Zionism and the generational trauma of the Holocaust from a young age have to zealously interrogate our unconscious fears and biases. The protests provide the perfect opportunity to confront it head on if you can swallow your pride and just listen. My Arab & Muslim friends are some of the most thoughtful people I know, with strong opinions and moral convictions that come right from the deepest parts of their being. I feel as at home with them as I did in the Synagogue growing up, and I have no doubt if I were to attend a peace protest that I would find many more like them. They’re an absolute gift; I was never a supporter of Israel, but their friendship has thrown the whole thing into even sharper focus since October 7th. I hope one day the Zionists can be defeated, and from the river to the sea, all good people will finally be free.

    SwampYankee ,

    Well, yes, I suppose, and that’s why I said all the stuff I imagine you must have read before you got to that part, and the thing I said right after that, too.

    SwampYankee ,

    But have you considered the heat death of the universe?

    SwampYankee ,

    Can I subscribe to Mid-Atlantic Raptor Facts?

    SwampYankee ,

    No, conspicuousness is when something is obvious to the point of standing out, you’re thinking of conscription.

    SwampYankee ,

    A Windows update broke my wife’s install earlier this week. Her laptop has Manjaro on it now.

    SwampYankee ,

    Without even reading it.

    SwampYankee ,

    Not the guy you’re responding to, but Discovery and Picard are awful entirely on their own merits; so bad, in fact, that it took me four years to recover enough to try Strange New Worlds, which was great by the way. Lower Decks and Prodigy aren’t really for me, but I’ve caught enough of them to know they’re quality entertainment, too.

    SwampYankee ,

    /u/[email protected]:

    A picture is worth a thousand words.

    Also /u/[email protected]:

    https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/a3660bb1-a5d5-41af-9d3c-a87102c38937.jpeg

    SwampYankee ,

    Well, two legs, and attached to the left leg is part of its tail hoop, which it uses to strangle its prey. What looks like a foot is actually used to gather the excess length of tail and tighten the hoop, and also assists in gripping the prey.

    SwampYankee ,

    Yes you can get dial-up, DSL, cell network data, or even satellite! These services are clearly equivalent to cable or fiber in the ISP marketplace.

    SwampYankee ,

    but they’re school teachers, so they definitely like kids

    Oh, you sweet summer child.

    SwampYankee ,

    Let’s just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It’s not 1954. I’m not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I’m reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?

    As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.

    SwampYankee ,

    You beat me to it, but I’ll also add this other obligatory link.

    SwampYankee ,

    Commenting to remind myself later because I’d love to check into this. My hands are achy from years of overuse, so an alternative to physical controls would be amazing.

    SwampYankee ,

    Looks like the headset she’s wearing in that video (EPOC X - 14 channel EEG headset) is available from Emotiv for $1k, and the software she’s using to map controls (EmotivBCI) is something they provide for free. They have 2 and 5 channel headsets for cheaper and 32 channel caps that are more expensive. Seems pretty consumer-ready to me, but I’m sure your EEG activity data gets shared with Emotiv, which isn’t ideal.

    SwampYankee ,

    Mostly true, but also the excessive use of antibiotics in animals reduces the efficacy of antibiotics in humans over time via resistance. So, kind of a distinction without a difference. I’m not a vegan, by the way, or even a vegetarian, but I do try to limit my meat intake for a number of reasons - ethical, environmental, nutritional, and medical.

    SwampYankee ,

    To be fair, both bikes and fences are made of pipes. What else is made of pipes?

    Pipe bombs.

    SwampYankee ,

    While I agree for the sake of clarity, a bigger problem is that it only goes back less than 2 months. Has the number of installs been steady at 7k for a long time? Or does it fluctuate wildly like this occasionally for reasons totally unrelated to laws?

    anders , to memes

    True 😄

    @memes

    SwampYankee ,

    I just started my switch to Linux and the only things that don’t work out of the box on my brand new Lenovo laptop are things that have no bearing on the actual use of the device. And frankly, spending hours fiddling to make things work is much more satisfying than spending hours trying to figure out how to stop Microsoft spying on me.

    SwampYankee ,

    Your mistake was trying to do literally anything yourself. Just sit down and let daddy Microsoft take care of everything for you.

    SwampYankee ,

    Bought a Win 11 laptop recently (it’s now a linux device), and on first boot up there was no way to gracefully decline using a Microsoft account to sign in. Luckily, I was in a hotel and couldn’t connect to the wifi without going through a login page, so the lack of internet connection allowed me to set up a local account. In any case, if you’re forced to log in with an MS account, OneDrive starts syncing right away. You can disable it, but maybe not before it’s already done some damage.

    SwampYankee ,

    Will definitely file these methods away for the future. Microsoft just keeps getting skeezier and they didn’t do this shit the last time I had to install Windows. This new laptop is the start of a transition to as close to 100% Linux as I can get.

    SwampYankee ,

    Or a debit card…

    SwampYankee ,

    Has no one here ever used a debit card?

    SwampYankee ,

    Don’t forget Meatball Ron while we’re at it.

    SwampYankee ,

    VTOL VR is awesome too. The problem with a lot of games that support VR is they don’t support the controllers to the same extent. Playing VR with an Xbox controller instead of the motion tracking Index controllers just ain’t the same.

    SwampYankee ,

    Basically, the more vram you have, the better the contextual understanding, their memory is. Otherwise you’d have a bot that maybe knows to only contextualize the last couple messages.

    Hmm, if only there was some hardware analogue for long-term memory.

    SwampYankee ,

    It’s amazing the way you NOTICE TWO THINGS.

    SwampYankee ,

    I guess I’m wondering if there’s some way to bake the contextual understanding into the model instead of keeping it all in vram. Like if you’re talking to a person and you refer to something that happened a year ago, you might have to provide a little context and it might take them a minute, but eventually, they’ll usually remember. Same with AI, you could say, “hey remember when we talked about [x]?” and then it would recontextualize by bringing that conversation back into vram.

    Seems like more or less what people do with Stable Diffusion by training custom models, or LORAs, or embeddings. It would just be interesting if it was a more automatic process as part of interacting with the AI - the model is always being updated with information about your preferences instead of having to be told explicitly.

    But mostly it was just a joke.

    Neo-Nazis Swarm Home of New England Governor (www.rollingstone.com)

    Comment on Headline: I don’t know if swarm is the right word, I think that implies they entered the home? I guess a group of insects is a swarm whether it’s inside or out. They had their Nazi party in the street, and the governor’s home is protected at all times by state police....

    SwampYankee ,

    Yes, who knows? If only someone had transcribed the article into the lemmy post and mentioned armed security in the third sentence. But I guess since that didn’t happen, we’ll never know if the Governor’s home is protected at all times by the Massachusetts State Police.

    Music Piracy Is Back, Baby (gizmodo.com)

    “Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers...

    SwampYankee ,

    just don’t close the tab

    My RAM is screaming.

    SwampYankee ,

    I was in the same boat as you about 5 years ago - I had been stubbornly using iTunes, but it was so slow and the store was just an annoyance, it was getting in the way of me actually listening to my music. I ended up choosing MusicBee over Winamp or foobar2000 because it has all the library management stuff (even a sync to mobile device function) and a great interface right out of the box.

    SwampYankee ,

    I mean I have 64 GB but I’m not wasting it on browser tabs. I’ve got people at work who never close anything, they’ll have 15 tabs, 28 PDFs and 7 Excel spreadsheets open 24/7 because it takes them an hour to remember where they saved them otherwise.

    Literally me when I hear them complain about their slow computer:

    https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/234fa47d-2af1-4b87-85e0-c72a94f2c20d.gif

    SwampYankee ,

    Of course!

    smacks forehead

    Joe Biden Is Arming Greece So Greece Can Arm Ukraine—And Pro-Russia Republicans Can’t Stop Him (www.forbes.com)

    As the Republican Party’s blockade of aid to Ukraine drags into its fourth month, the U.S. government under Pres. Joe Biden has found a clever new way to give Ukraine’s forces the weapons and ammunition they need to defend their country....

    SwampYankee ,

    Unemployment at a 60-year low, real wages at a 50-year high. That’s not to say there aren’t problems (largely the cost of housing, education and healthcare eating up all the gains over the last half century), but the economy is good, Jack.

    SwampYankee ,

    Millennials/Gen Z:

    • Uses computer to finish day’s tasks in 4 hours, browses internet for remaining 4.
    • “Wow, I feel like a useless piece of shit.”

    Boomers/Gen X:

    • Spends 2 hours reading every single email in full as if they are addressed specifically to them, getting angry that people are telling them useless information. Spends an hour printing & collating papers for the day’s tasks. Spends 5 hours doing the tasks because paper is less efficient. Stays 1 hour extra for scanning/data entry when the whole thing could have been done on the computer in the first place.
    • “Gee golly, I sure am swamped.”
    SwampYankee ,

    Your quote from the Jordanian commander dates to after the Nakba. There was significant intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine because of the mismanagement of Jewish migration by Britain, and escalating tensions from the “legal” land purchases you mentioned that had been occurring since the late 1800s. Yes, Jews attempted to purchase and settle uninhabited land, but the fact is big chunks of the land purchased were misappropriated under the Ottoman Land Code, and European Jews frequently expelled (by force if the implication wasn’t clear) the Arab Muslims they found living on it, who may have had no idea it was sold out from under them.

    SwampYankee ,

    200k people is nothing.

    1. What a horrible, neoliberal thing to say.
    2. It’s not just 200k people, it’s hundreds of thousands more that lost their livelihoods when the main economic driver in their area shut down.

    I’m not arguing for coal (it’s 2024, why are we still using it at all?), I’m arguing against abandoning an entire population of people who made their livings off of it and its cascading economic effects.

    SwampYankee ,

    There’s a vast political center in the post-industrial east, northeast and midwest willing to be pursuaded. The Democrats have certainly attempted to do the right thing for the climate… sort of… but have utterly failed to consider the effects on industrial communities as the industry leaves. Then they add insult to injury by saying things like “learn to code”… but then not doing anything about the spiraling cost of education. This has been going on for decades, and the result is generations of impoverished people losing trust in the political process and falling victim to narratives of fear and hate.

    Understanding this is step zero in beginning to steer this ship left again.

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