Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 13 Posts
  • 903 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Very true, but that may make things worse down the line. Once they realize that kids are circumventing their restrictions, they won’t think, “Hmm, maybe a blanket ban of social media for minors wasn’t a great idea.” They’re just going to double down and say that there needs to be more hardcore restrictions on all internet/computer activity. More sensorship, more data harvesting, mandatory governement spyware in all devices.

    Essentially the Great Firewall in China. Many governments have already expressed interest in modeling national internet access after China.


  • To a large degree, yes, but blanket bans on social media use for minors will fail for multiple reasons.

    1. This has already been the case in Australia, and the latest numbers indicate that a vast majority of youth still access social media via black/grey market account purchasing, VPNs, and other methods.
    2. The ban doesn’t include some popular platforms like Telegram, which arguably provide a more risky experience, due to it being a popular platform for criminal activities.
    3. Taking away a huge swath of social platforms from kids without providing any constructive or healthy alternatives will mainly encourage destructive behaviors.

  • Find what and where you can fight best, and throw your weight behind it. Don’t fall into dispair, that’s what they are counting on.

    Some fight for better laws, some fight for better politicians, some hack, some donate, some build, some propagandize, some host and archive, some preach and philosophize.

    The best often do several of these things. Find what you’re inclined towards and do it. We need every last drop of effort to defeat the corpos and their corrupt political allies.

    You can’t stop the signal.



  • Never was full fash, but was pretty deep into the right wing libertarian stuff in my mid to late teens.

    Definitely started getting fed the typical alt-right algorithm pipeline, “leftists triggered” compilations, Sargon, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson, etc.

    A few things shook me out of it:

    • Went to University, got exposed to different perspectives and people.
    • Started dating somebody who was open-minded and would gently but effectively challenge my views.
    • Graduated and started having to pay off student loans, food, rent, got treated like trash at my first job and saw how Capitalist hierarchy screws people over unless you’re the owner.

    It wasn’t a quick switch that flipped for me. It was a slow, gradual series of realizations that my worldview just didn’t make sense and didn’t line up with reality.







  • Wow, my prediction was pretty close. 7 months ago, I predicted that the Steam Machine prices would be $800-$900 for the 512GB model, and $1,000-$1,200 for the 2TB model.

    That was in the middle of memory prices going vertical, and I still got down voted to hell by people claiming that they were expecting $600-$800 tops…

    Honestly, with how bad memory has become even over the last 6 months, and the increased brutality to the market done by tariffs and the oil supply shock, I’m actually surprised they were able to hit $1,049 for the base model.

    The hard truth: It’s an acceptable price within a piss-poor market. The harder truth: It will sell out extremely fast and won’t restock likely for months.

    When Framework announced their new Framework 13 Pro line laptops last month, a lot of people balked at the price. $1,500 was the cheapest pre-built model, and DIY was basically the same price, unless you already had some components. The pricing for higher tier specs easily climbed to $2,000+

    Still, they sold out of every model for the first 6-8 batches in a few days, and barely 2 months later, they are sold out to batch 15, with an expected delivery in October.

    The K-shaped market is further becoming a reality. The people that have the money to drop on stuff like this, are happily dropping it. And the people who can’t afford it are getting left in the dust.

    The scumbag oligarchs have created the cyberpunk dystopia, and most of us aren’t going to be living up in the shiny skyscrapers…





  • (I’m leaving this up for transparency, but I totally misread the comment I responded to. Sorry! I have attacked a strawman, and fought valiantly against ghosts lol.)

    You’re several decades out of date with that opinion.

    Chinese manufacturing has exploded in quality, safety, and efficiency over the last 20 years. The old stereotype that China is an assembly line economy pumping out cheap knockoffs and plastic junk, is false.

    China now has some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world. Even Tim Cook stated publicly a year or two ago, that they don’t manufacture Apple devices in China because it’s cheaper. They do it because China is the only country currently that has both the precision engineering plus the scale to build those devices at the volumes and quality Apple demands.

    China has invested massively into STEM, their students, engineers, and scientists attended the best Western universities across the world for decades. Learned everything they could, brought that knowledge back home, and have been expanding on and turbocharging it with massive state and private investments.

    Basically they did what the US used to do before we became a grift/vibe/hussle economy, and they are eating our lunch. Now I am absolutely no fan of China, but damn it, I am starting to get pretty jealous…





    1. The first argument is just another version of the “it’s natural/unnatural, therefore it’s right/wrong.” Many animals also eat their own young, rape each other, etc. Does that make it acceptable for humans to do it also? Of course not. Some homophobes will point out that homosexual relationships are evolutionarily disadvantageous, (“unnatural”) and therefore that means it’s wrong for humans to form homosexual relationships. Obviously a ridiculous argument, but it’s just the inverse form of the one above.
    2. Is it alright to torture a human infant or a severely developmentally disabled person? What about a person with very advanced Alzheimer’s? All three examples have little to no mental self-awareness, certainly less than a dog, pig, dolphin, etc. At what point is self awareness sufficiently low enough to make it morally acceptable to cause deliberate pain to that person for your own enjoyment? Second, there is a growing body of evidence that a large portion of animals, including many that are currently farmed/fished for consumption, demonstrate sentience beyond simple reflexes. Beyond the scientific studies, everyday experience indicates this in many animals. Dogs, pigs, birds, octopus, can all solve simple puzzles, demonstrate various apparent emotions like curiosity, fear, joy, confusion, anger, etc. Clearly some level of sentience is present, even if it’s quite simple.
    3. All essential nutrients humans need can be found in plants. You need to adjust your diet obviously, some nutrients like B12 and Iron are harder to get from a plant-based diet. While others, like Vitamin C and Fiber are easier. The old stereotype that vegetarians/vegans are all malnourished weaklings, is a myth. There are many vegetarian/vegan elite athletes, including Olympic medalists and world record holders, (Alex Morgan, Scott Jurek, Dotsie Bausch, Fiona Oakes, Meagan Duhamel). So at least in the developed world, (where factory farming is the most pervasive,) there is no nutritional need for the general population to eat animals.