Substitute “convince by indirect and non-confrontational means” for “trick”, and you’re saying the same thing as the original post. Makes for a shit joke though.

As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.

“Lots” of American cities seems like an exaggeration.

Some American cities have certain areas which are car-free.

Is it? Okay.

It’s not historical consensus. It’s a claim made by some historians that went viral online.

I think the joke is supposed to be “the IDF is so dumb, they think this is what a Hamas HQ looks like!”

The real joke is, that is what Hamas HQ looks like.

Medieval chores weren’t putting clothes in the washing machine or giving the bathroom a wipe, they were weaving and sewing clothes by hand and then laboriously washing them in the stream, and hauling buckets of shit. Everything was much harder and much less pleasant, and that was how you spent your ‘free time’.

I’ve played Skyrim and Fallout 3 & 4 on Linux, and Uncharted. They worked just fine.

You need to enable Proton for all ‘unsupported’ titles in Steam (literally two clicks). After that…the only games I’ve found that don’t work are down to anti-cheat. I used to occasionally have to change the Proton version for some games, but it’s been a while since I had to do that.

It’s nothing like gaming on Linux was 10 years ago. It’s much more like gaming on Windows, the last time I did it: you occasionally find a game that needs tweaking, but 95% work flawlessly.

I know you are, but what am I?

(Just trying to keep pace with the level of discourse here).

This is true. For example, a musician could wave a banner saying " lives don’t matter!"

Fuck the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei of Germany, circa 1920-45. Fuck the American Nazi Party. Fuck neo-nazis. Fuck Trump, for that matter, though for all his very obvious flaws, he’s not a Nazi. FWIW, I was warning people in 2015 that Trump had all kinds of fascist energy.

But I mean, if you look up-thread, now I’m a Nazi. That’s the problem. People use ‘Nazi’ the way Nazis used ‘vermin’ or ‘parasite’: the worst word they could think of to slap on their enemies, in order to dismiss everything they say. To dehumanize their opponents.

Add two and two together, and in this thread people have said my life doesn’t matter. Why? Because I said I didn’t like this stupid patronizing banner. And I worry about the day when people really do that math–the way they did on the Right during the Trump years, and started killing churches full of black people.

These people think they’re sooo different. They’re just potential fascists with a different flag.

Yup! And I stand by that. Israel has committed many war crimes in Gaza, but by no definition of ‘genocide’ are they committing genocide. They are not killing Palestinians in any systematic way with the intent of killing all of them, nor are they trying to eliminate their language or culture.

What the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs could be termed ‘genocide’, as could the attempts to ‘educate’ Native Americans in the US, because they were deliberate attempts to destroy a culture.

But Israel isn’t doing that. They’re neither killing en masse or teaching Palestinians children Hebrew.

Are they oppressing the Palestinians? Subjugating? Terrorizing? Very likely! You could easily make the case.

But commiting genocide? Nope.

There you go. I’m not in the circlejerk, so I’m a Nazi. Absolutely par for the course.

God, Lemmy is stupid. Bunch of fucking children.

Yo! That’s me. I downvoted this. It’s a childish and simplistic message, pandering to it’s audience.

And the question once you’ve agreed “we should kill nazis!” is, who’s a nazi? Are you talking about actual, card-carrying members of the Nazi party–all 30 of them or whatever? Or are you talking about, like, nazis, man! Cuz you could easily be called a nazi for supporting Israel in that conflict: Israel is acting like fascists, and totally committing a genocide! You could also be a nazi for supporting Palestine: they’re antisemitic as fuck, and genocide is literally their party platform! You could be called a nazi for supporting either side of Russia/Ukraine, too. Clearly the Republicans are nazis, amirite? But wait no, ‘Nazi’ stands for ‘National Socialists’ so actually the left-wing dems are real nazis!

I’ve heard the world ‘nazi’ (and ‘fascist’) so fucking much in the last decade that I’m fucking sick of it, so “kill nazis!” is a meaningless statement, intended to make the reader feel smug and self-righteous, and nothing else. Fucking pandering.

Also, Tom Morello (gifted tho he is) left a bad taste in my mouth with this bullshit.

Just so it’s clear for everybody: Nix is a programming language, build system, and package manager. NixOS is a Linux distro built with (and upon) Nix. Home Manager is a dotfile and home management tool using Nix, allowing control of dotfiles, but also per-user software, systemd services, and more. You can use Home Manager in any distro, not just NixOS (but you do need to install Nix).

Lol, I got the Astro Boy theme stuck in my head just looking at these.

Another problem: legislation like this cements the status quo. It’s easy enough for large incumbents to add features like this, but to a handful of programmers trying to launch an app from their garage, this adds another hurdle into the process. Remember: Signal and Telegram are only about a decade old, we’ve seen new (and better) apps launch recently. Is that going to stop?

It’s easy to say “this is just a simple hash lookup, it’s not that big a deal!”, but (1) it opens the door to client-side requirements in legislation, it’s unlikely to stop here, (2) if other countries follow suit, devs will need to implement a bunch of geo-dependant (?) lookups, and (3) someone is going to have to monitor compliance, and make sure images are actually being verified–which also opens small companies up to difficult legal actions. How do you prove your client is complying? How can you monitor to make sure it’s working without violating user privacy?

Also: doesn’t this close the door on open software? How can you allow users to install open source message apps, or (if the lookup is OS-level) Linux or a free version of Android that they’re able to build themselves? If they can, what’s to stop pedophiles from just doing that–and disabling the checks?

If you don’t ban user-modifiable software on phones, you’ve just added an extra hurdle for creeps: they just need to install a new version. If you do, you’ve handed total control of phones to corporations, and especially big established corporations.

I propose we just stop talking about it altogether.

Whew, okay.

food deserts

…Are a thing. They’re around. But the vast majority of people in the US (much less Europe and other developed countries, with developed public transportation) have easy access to fresh food. This…just isn’t a huge deal. It’s a public policy tweak away from being solved.

the complete market domination of amazon

Amazon has a shitload of competitors in every sector. AliExpress, Best Buy, Walmart, Etsy, Wayfair, etc etc etc. But Amazon is solid as hell, so people stick with them. If they slip, people have endless options.

local repair shops being subsumed into corporate enterprise.

Don’t care. I mean, I feel for the owners, but…you know that like 90% of everybody in the Western world worked in agriculture? Including all my great-grandparents. But then they got outcompeted by more successful farmers (including corporate operations in some cases) and ended up shutting down and selling their place. None of my grandparents worked in agriculture.

Was that a tragedy, for me or for them? Do I wish I still owned a dozen acres of land in the middle of the Canadian prairies, on which I could grow just enough to sustain myself? Lol, the fuck do you think?

Small businesses are lost to progress. This is great.

planned obsolescence

I’ve been buying more repairable devices. Thus the Framework laptop. And the government is putting pressure on companies to allow repairs, which is good. In the end, though, this is our fault, because we’re a bunch of short-sighted assholes who are distracted by shiny things. We don’t have to be.

the fact that nearly 100% of the vast variety of cereals you’re referring to are produced by like two corporations

Why on earth would I care? Again, beyond those two companies, there are a thousand up-and-comers, so if the big guys slip there will be alternatives. In the meantime? They do a really fucking good job. If the government operated like Post, I’d enjoy going to the DMV.

the fact that nearly every single piece of consumer electronics you have in your home is almost certainly made from resources extracted by actual real life human slaves.

…In countries that are resolutely authoritarian or anarchic, and non-capitalist. I hope some day China escapes it’s authoritarian tendencies, and Africa manages to pull itself together. If they just establish functioning market economies, then the problem is solved.

nestle sucking up all the water from already drought stressed areas, and also more slave labor, this time with children.

Exploiting those noncapitalist countries. Shame on them. I have no problem punishing them accordingly.

millions of tons of single use plastics funneled into our oceans.

Yeah, that sucks, we should do something about that.

the fact that our access to life-saving medication is dependent on our wealth, rather than our need.

But the ‘wealth’ bar falls every day. People in Africa are able to access AIDS medication so successfully that I read recently it’s on the path to eradication. And there just isn’t a form of government where everybody gets what they need, and nobody has proposed such a government, or a path to get to it, so it’s kinda fucking irrelevant, isn’t it?

capitalism is currently causing massive amounts of real human suffering.

No, reality is causing massive human suffering, and capitalism is the single best tool we have to ameliorate it. Suffering is normal from any sane reading of history. But we’ve driven the share of people in serious poverty, on the verge of famine and starvation, from 80+% a century ago to well under 20% today. There’s a lot of causes for that, but capitalism is high on the list.

East India Company commiting horrific acts of violence against the people of India

East India Company was a monopoly grant by the crown of England. They had an army. They weren’t capitalist, they were colonialist. I know you can’t tell a difference between Amazon shipping you a shirt you bought from them voluntarily because you wanted a shirt, and the East India Company using their military to extract taxes from the natives using fear and violence, but to me it’s a pretty significant difference.

and contributed to massive famines that killed 15 million people.

Famines, again, were completely normal until relatively recently. Look up the the most fatal events in human history, and a whole lot of them are famines in China or India–most of them long before Westerners ever turned up. Saying “capitalism sucks, because there were famines that overlapped with the rise of capitalism!” is like saying “This house sucks, because while we were in the process of building it, before we had a proper roof, we got rained on! We should tear the house down again!”

Fuck this is exhausting.

It’s true that capitalism isn’t perfect, and even more to the point, it doesn’t exist in a perfect world: people trade for goods on open markets, and at the same time there are enslaved people in Africa. People pool their resources to fund enterprises that offer goods & services for sale, and even as they do so, the American government works to achieve policy objectives which I don’t personally agree with. Giving people the freedom to buy, sell, work, and invest as they please has fantastically increased the wellbeing of those people & countries who participated, but it hasn’t solved literally every problem in the world (especially in places that have very specifically not participated).

So you want to rise up and shut down the markets and ban enterprise. In it’s place you have nothing. You have no working system to replace it. Nobody has proposed anything that could take it’s place in anything but the vaguest, most loose terms possible. “What if everything was like…better, man?” Fucking useless. Anyway, even if you did have a goal, you have no politically viable means to reach it. Historically, the best anybody has come up with was, “hey, how about we just kill a bunch of people who are better off than we are, then sit around and talk about how much better things could be?” Then somebody with charisma gathers enough followers to seize power, and things get really fucked up.

Until you have an amazing vision and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, you’re just whining. And I haven’t seen anything even beginning to approach a half-baked vision. I am profoundly unimpressed. At the same time I think you (and others like you) suffer from a profound lack of perspective on where we are and how impressive it is that we got here.

me: looks at cereal aisle at the local grocery store

No…I think i’ve got plenty of choices, thanks. In which areas do you feel like your freedom to chose is badly impinged-upon?

Do you want a list of tech companies that have been allowed to fail? It’s a very long list.

I’m typing this on NixOS on a Framework laptop. Very happy with both. Both were products of (*gasp*) capitalism!

I’m sitting in a 20-year-old La-Z-Boy chair. Not the most beautiful, but it sure is comfortable, and it’s in good condition for it’s age.

Sipping on a nice red wine. Don’t remember the company–it was a random pick, one of thousands of choices. Anyway, it’s great, I’m enjoying it. Snacking on some corn nuts from Trader Joes.

That’s just a few companies whose products I appreciate, and am interacting with right this instant.

Google annoys me sometimes. I’m kinda de-googling, and it’s harder than it ought to be. Still: totally doable. Microsoft was a huge PITA back in the 90s and 00s, but these days they don’t affect me at all. It didn’t fail, but it changed in major ways, and more to the point it became irrelevant in important ways.

Overall, when I compare the system I’m living in with the alternatives that we’ve tried in the past…well, it’s very much a no-brainer.

Like asking ‘how can you be a marxist if you don’t love every single person?’

There are companies I like and companies I don’t like. Capitalism is all about having the choice to pick what I buy and what I use. Shitty companies are free to fail. That’s actually a really important part of capitalism.