NietzscheanNull

Joined 6 years ago

Karma
212
Submissions
69
Member since
Jan 23
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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
Genuinely curious, as someone who was exposed to porn on several occasions as a kid (with seemingly no negative long-term consequences): what makes you think it's "really bad"?
Comment · 4 days ago
> We don't have enough tags to distinguish a 28-year old NYC lawyer earning (or soon-to-be) $200k with $200k in student loan and negative equity RIGHT NOW from a 55y old working 2 minimum wage jobs at Amazon, sleeping in a trailer park.

Well, fortunately, the graph makes at plain as a clear blue sky that neither of those hypothetical individuals are anywhere near the demographic that ought to be targeted by a wealth tax. When people say "eat the rich," they're not referring to late-career millionaire lawyers or doctors; those people work for a living just like the vast majority of us.

Comment · 4 days ago
Under the first amendment, Americans have the right to celebrate the death of anyone they please. It might not be tasteful or respectful, it might be inflammatory, but that's an American freedom enshrined in constitutional law; freedom of speech is integral and fundamental to the US national identity.

As to your last point, I don't recall BLM ever storming the capitol and defiling the building by smearing the walls with their own feces, but in any case, rioters are criminals under the law and should be tried and charged according to due process.

Comment · 5 days ago
The problem with that is that consumption doesn't scale remotely as fast as wealth. Wealth would still continue to concentrate.
Comment · 15 days ago
In ecosystems, progressively fewer individuals are supported at each higher trophic level.
Comment · 21 days ago
> She probably gets paid market rate for cleaning services. And while that isn't extravagant, it's probably not a poverty wage either.

The median annual wage for a hotel cleaner in Ohio (as an arbitrary middle-of-the -road example) is $28.4K per year.[1] (And on average, immigrant workers earn 6% less than their native counterparts.) And in Ohio, the official annual household income poverty line--based on an outdated food-cost-heavy model that doesn't properly account for the explosion of housing and healthcare costs--is $27.3K for a three-person household.[2]

To me, that very much is a poverty wage. I agree that tipping is a subsidy to business owners and ultimately depresses wages at the expense of consumers, but that doesn't change the fact that under the status quo, tipped workers absolutely rely on their tips to provide for themselves and their families. The type of work they do is, by and large, grueling and thankless; they deserve fair compensation from the business that benefit from it, but in the absence of government-driven intervention, those business will continue to externalize that cost to workers and consumers regardless of whether you and a handful of others decide to tip.

Refusing to tip on principle results in a direct and tangible harm to those workers, but doesn't move the needle at societal scale. A true solution would require top-down overhaul of our wage-and-hour regulations to eliminate tipping loopholes and impose steep penalties for businesses that subsidize employee wages through the expectation of tips from customers. Any bottom-up approach is likely to fail as it's a prototypical collective action problem, and a patchwork implementation of that strategy would disproportionately harm those who can least afford to shoulder the burden for a long time before ever impacting the businesses and policies directly responsible for the current state of affairs.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/IAG/TGS/iag70.htm#:~:text=Earnings%20and... [2]: https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/v1778780151/jfs.ohi...

Comment · 1 month ago
This is great!

FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):

  Something went wrong: Out of bounds memory access (evaluating '_PyRun_SimpleString(r)')
Comment · 1 month ago
This is a specious argument because it neglects to take into account information asymmetries and change over time. When Facebook was first launched, there wasn't any widespread understanding of the breadth/intensity of their data collection and its downstream implications.

People initially chose Facebook because it truly offered a novel and improved service, and the true cost users would pay for it wasn't obvious to anyone yet. The "wall", chronological friends-only feeds, etc. provided genuine value, and at that point the public at large were almost completely oblivious to how much personal data was being collected from them (and even less as to how it might be used in ways counter to their own interests). Once they'd fully captured the vast majority of user share, Facebook clawed back value by deprecating the chronological feed, serving ads and "high-engagement" posts in place of friend submissions, and generally ramped up their data harvesting significantly further since.

Most people would agree that the service is far worse than what they initially signed up for, but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.

Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively. They're effectively held hostage by network effects that were intentionally planned and designed around producing that lock-in effect and guaranteeing that all potential alternatives either withered on the vine or were absorbed (e.g. Instagram). To the extent there's a "choice," it's a coerced choice on purpose.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I know! I should have made that clearer in my original reply. I think it's a bad line now in general, but an even worse justification for the ultimate ruling at the time.
Comment · 1 month ago
Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors.

Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.

For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.

If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).

Comment · 1 month ago
Isn't that essentially what they trained with, anyway?
Comment · 1 month ago
Was that really honesty? I'm sure some who were caught in the layoff were truly underperforming, but everyone has peaks and valleys in their output quality over the years, and tons of performance reviews are purely political (i.e. does your manager like you).

It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.

It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
You would rather infringe on the privacy of your community and invite a company known for indiscriminate multi-pronged dragnet surveillance (plates/faces/bluetooth beacons/etc.), with a nation-wide blanket coverage network that has already been provably abused by police on multiple occasions, all because of a handful of petty package theft cases?

Honestly, I'm at a loss for words.

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