EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

This is the best answer. Billups is torn between his loyalty and affection for his home, and his desire to be a Starfleet engineer. His internal conflict is manifesting as his own insistence that these customs and traditions are binding, despite the fact that this is all very silly and no one seems to be taking it that seriously.

I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that it’s accurate and something that continues to be a problem.

This isn’t new. Every job posting is always in a superposition of being real or not real until someone actually gets hired. Job postings are used as bait to get cheaper talent, as an implicit threat to existing employees that they might be replaced, as a way to gain negotiating leverage with internal candidates, etc. There are no rules about job postings, you can literally post any job with any salary and any requirements, of course they’re going to be abused by any number of bad actors.

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

First of all, define “work”. Lots of people do unpaid labor, like parents raising children, or family members caring for the elderly. These are necessary functions for society, and if people didn’t do that labor for free, we would have to pay people to do it. Not compensating people for doing that labor is effectively taxing their labor at 100%. Childacre allowances, for example, aren’t a subsidy for having children, they’re compensation for the costs of having children, which is literally the only necessary requirement for furthering our species. The fact that these unpaid laborers don’t have employment for money doesn’t mean they aren’t actively adding value. This is basic “we live in a society” stuff.

There are also plenty of people who largely aren’t able or expected to work. Aside from the aforementioned unpaid careworkers, there are children, the elderly, the disabled, students, etc. Those people still need resources/services from society to support them. They aren’t lazy freeloaders, they’re mostly just in a different part of their lifecycle. Children eventually become working adults. We all eventually become old people who need to be able to retire as we become less able (and also people should get to stop working at some point as a matter of principle, but that’s a digression). Students need to study so they can become doctors and teachers and engineers. It’s in everyone’s best interest to support people throughout that lifecycle, for obvious reasons.

Further, even bAsIC eCoNOmiCs tells us that a 0% unemployment rate is not only practically impossible, but also inefficient. It actually makes more economic sense to have at least 4% of the working population unemployed at any given moment so that there’s a pool of labor that can fill gaps as the natural progression I mentioned above occurs. People change jobs, retire, go back to school, have kids, etc., and if everyone always had to have a job just to get enough income to survive, there wouldn’t be anyone to fill positions left vacant by the above. That’s why “full employment” in economics terms is usually pegged at around 4-6%. That means that it would be less efficient, and thus inevitably cost more tax dollars, to try and keep everyone employed instead of paying people a minimum income (plus various social services) even when unemployed.

At any given moment, only about half the population is actually “working” in the sense of being employed in some way, and that’s how it’s always been. You will likely spend only about 2/3 of your life working, and the fact that you’re paying taxes on your income now is just the price you pay for all that unproductive time across the rest of your life, past and future. There is and always will be a universal need for supporting people who “don’t work”. I, personally, think that a bare-minimum of compassion for humanity is more than enough reason for redirecting society’s resources to ensure a dignified existence for everyone, but even a misanthropic sociopath should be able to understand why their precious tax dollars should be spent on social infrastructure.

Memes are reposts! That’s their defining characteristic! They become memes by being reposted! If they didn’t get reposted, they would not be memes!

Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.

Google is probably mad that AI is doing a better job of ruining the Internet than they are

I can’t imagine how the surveillance in China could possibly be worse than in the west. We have CCTV cameras everywhere, the government has a backdoor into every major software platform, smart devices are passively listening to everything we say and do, feds are constantly reading social media and infiltrating message boards, etc. It’s probably the same in China, but the idea that our dystopian panopticon is meaningfully less intrusive than China’s dystopian panopticon is cope.

Western media loves writing stories about things that happen in China that are not unique to China, but that are bad and scary because they happen in China.

This is happening on every part of the internet. A lot of old content is disappearing for a variety of reasons. I’m guessing that this is one of those things where they take a phenomenon that is not unique to China and explain how it’s bad when it happens in China because China bad.

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

I’ve been looking for an appropriate analogy for the current AI hype and this sums it up perfectly.

This is surprising to read. Ukraine was never going to have enough ammo, weapons, or manpower to win the war, but I never thought the western media would run out of cope.

If things don’t turn around for him, he might have to lower himself to try to get votes from non-Republicans.

Getting older and more mature has definitely helped with this. For example, I completely cut out the part where I promise myself I’m going to change the pattern.

Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.