CoderKat

Do you think it's a good world if someone, say, can't use the nearest small grocery store or has a 50/50 chance that any given taxi will refuse to serve them, leaving them stranded for longer and regularly late as a result? All because maybe they look gay or trans or Muslim or whatever the right wing media is currently drumming up fear towards?

Your comment is about the perspective of the person providing the service, but what about the people being affected by the discrimination (who are often more vulnerable in the first place)? Do you not care about their experience? Their ability to experience the same quality of life as everyone else?

And sure, the world is a mean place, but why defend that? Why not try to make it at least a little bit better?

There's been lots of recent stories of teachers refusing the call kids by their preferred pronouns, for one. But also, I think you're trying to be more rational than these conservatives are. They don't need there to be a difference in how they work with someone to refuse to do it. Some will literally claim it's against their religion to be involved with an LGBT person at all.

Stuff like education is an obvious basic right, yeah, but there's so much fuzziness. Should the only store in walking distance be able to refuse to serve you? Especially in small towns where there might only be a single business providing a service, they can easily make the area effectively an unlivable area for whichever group is the current focus of conservatives.

Plus there's the good ol' paradox of intolerance. By just allowing people to discriminate, it spreads. When it's acceptable for one business to discriminate, it's more likely others are going to adopt the same stance. More people will be taught their intolerance. It's basically a social illness. Much like a real illness, that needs to be isolated and prevented from spreading.

I think they're trying to get Israel to act in such a way that they finally lose the American support. Israel currently gets to do whatever it wants without consequence because the US will seemingly back them unconditionally. Also, many countries, people, and organizations are afraid to criticize Israel because they get called anti-Semitic. But I think that only works while Israel can manage to convince people it's the "good one".

But are they? Generally in tech, it's really hard to gauge people's performance and most companies are conservative with firing people for performance reasons. So you could coast by on mediocre performance. You team won't be happy with you, but you probably will keep your job simply because you're given the benefit of doubt. Tech is one of those areas where someone can actually be 10x as effective as another person, because so much of the job can be spent on stuff like debugging and dealing with weird issues, where one person might spend all day on an issue that another person can resolve in minutes.

There's also something to be said about the fact that companies are usually paying for your time, not output. Contractors are the ones who are paid for output, not employees. It's also straight up expected in tech that you're looking for ways to automate some tasks so they don't have to be done anymore. It's not like some mindless office job where you're expected to do X reports per day. There's a never ending list of bugs to fix and features requested. You're generally paid to find ways to increase productivity, not merely do the same thing over and over.

At any rate, tech is usually also paid well enough for it. There's still massive income disparity between regular workers and C-suite, but at least the pay is always well, well above living wages, stock options are commonly given to regular workers, and high performers often are rewarded for doing better than average. IMO, tech jobs aren't really an area to focus on the kinda mindset you have, since it does so much better than most (not perfect, but still far better). Most jobs don't get anything close to what tech jobs offer to regular employees.

Voters don't seem to care enough. While not nearly as easy in the US, Canadians could have voted the NDP in instead of the Liberals. But nope, most Canadians are very apathetic about politics, including electoral reform.

I loathe that Trudeau backpedaled on it. But the fact he faced no consequences (as in, got reelected) makes it clear that he was right. Not that many people care about it. Which is a dumb ass reason to backpedal, though, cause that's the case for most policies.

The sorting algorithm changes are what I've been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it's taking so long. I basically never see many communities I'm subbed to. I miss having a local city community. It has me constantly thinking of just dealing with Reddit's bullshit, cause if it's not big news or memes, Lemmy ain't cutting it.

Yeah, this is google lens. It's meant for translating via the camera, so it doesn't try to line up the text as most pictures wouldn't be perfectly aligned. But note that you can copy the translated text, which is better for readability and searchability. I tried it out on your original text and it did a great job. Even got the line breaks perfect.

Yeah, it's unfortunate. I understand it. The flavours do make smoking more enticing to young people, who might not limit themselves to one cigar a month like you do. But it does suck to ban something outright just because some people will misuse it. Mind you, nicotine is addictive, which is a pretty critical facet to this (though I don't think anyone starts smoking without knowing this risk).

I dislike smoking in general and do want things that are good for society as a whole. But the logic of banning stuff like this seems similar to, say, banning fast food because some people will overeat (or more extreme, having calorie rationing so that people can't overeat on any kind of food). It's admittedly always a balancing act for how much danger is acceptable before we just ban it for everyone. Some bans using this logic are very reasonable, some aren't, and many are extremely debatable.

I think I currently prefer the sin tax approach, especially since that best accomodates occasional usage. A hefty tax makes the dangerous thing less accessible to impressionable young people and helps pay for the social cost (though IIRC, smokers actually cost society less because they die younger, reducing the many medical costs of old age). Price influences people's choices, too. If healthy food is cheaper than unhealthy food, that encourages buying healthy stuff. But even sin taxes are imperfect, especially in a vacuum. They can make the cost of living higher for a vulnerable population. They need to be planned carefully.

It can be a vicious cycle. Someone raises price for whatever reason. Their competitors see that and think "well, if it works for them, it'll work for us". Their suppliers see the price rise and want a share of it, so raise theirs too. New players entering the market will likely set prices based off competition, even if the competition has actually set inflated prices. Eventually even companies that wouldn't want to raise prices arbitrarily has to because it's now inflation and their costs have risen.

Even without direct colusion, many companies still end up all following each other.

He also initially threatened legal action against her, for unclear reasons. Like, he's shared some racist Photoshop, gets called out for it, and his first response is to... Threaten to sue the model who simply made public comments about it?

Guy is a real piece of shit. He can walk back on stuff all he wants, but the first thing he did speaks volumes about what kinda person he is.

It's weird that Obama is being nuanced here, yet the US has been unwavering in supporting Israel, including during Obama's term. Maybe his stance has changed. Or maybe it's easy for him to say things when he doesn't have to act on it at all. Talk is cheap, after all.

The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.

The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don't link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.