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WatDabney

@ WatDabney @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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594
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Jason Schreier says Sony is backing away from putting single player games on PC

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  • They're going to learn that the days when publishers could strongarm gamers are over. There are too many games on too many alternatives, so it's too easy for gamers, faced with unnecessary hoops through which they're required to jump, to just say, "Well fuck that then - I'll play something else."

  • 50 years ago, the Supreme Court broke campaign finance regulation

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  • The national equivalent of starting smoking.

    And here we are, 50 years later, and the US is on its deathbed, riddled with cancer.

    And as it lays dying, its most greedy and loathsome children are ransacking the house, stealing everything they can get their grubby little paws on.

  • Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency

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  • The emergency being that a clear majority of Americans oppose electing Trump's Republican lackeys.

  • Conservation’s prejudice: Ecology is pervaded by a nativist dogma against invasive species that distorts the science and undermines wildness

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  • (Honestly I felt the same even as I was writing it, but I went with it anyway.)

  • Conservation’s prejudice: Ecology is pervaded by a nativist dogma against invasive species that distorts the science and undermines wildness

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  • It's about damned time.

    That whole "invasive species" thing has always frustrated me.

    "Oh no - the invasive species is out-competing the native species!"

    Yeah - that's one of the ways by which evolution has always worked. Some species that fills some niche finds itself forced to compete with some "invasive species," and it either adapts or dies out, and either way, nature ends up with a species that better fills that niche.

    I can just see conservationists getting ahold of time machines and going back to the moment when the first sea creatures crawled up onto the land and going, "Oh no! An invasive species!" and kicking them back into the water.

  • Report Details How Trump Economic Agenda ‘Will Make Ordinary Families Reliably Poorer in the Future’ | Common Dreams

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  • By design.

    Class war isn't a mere possibility - it's a current reality. The moneyed class is already fighting it, and winning.

    There's always been a certain amount of theft involved in the expansion of wealth, but for the last century or so, it was mostly just that it was sometimes convenient. The bulk of the expansion of wealth could be accomplished without overt theft since the moneyed class was, by design, in position to siphon off the bulk of the wealth newly created by economic growth.

    The era of perpetual growth is over though. The only reasonably sure way that wealthy psychopaths like Trump and his cronies and patrons can continue to expand their wealth is to overtly and systematically steal it from everyone else. And that's exactly what they're doing.

    And the biggest theft is yet to come. Through the round-robin of AI funding by which everybody owes everybody else, the psychopaths have set it up so that when (not if but when) the bubble pops, they can each and all claim to be too big to fail, so that the entirely imaginary money they keep passing around will be made real by stealing it from the taxpayers, of whom they're not coincidentally not a part.

  • Gas-Guzzler Revival Risks Dead-End Future for US Automakers | Big trucks and engines are back among US automakers, even as electrics gain ground around the globe.

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  • It's cynically amusingly ironically pretty much exactly the old cliche about the advent of the automobile putting buggy whip manufacturers out of business.

    We're exactly at that point, and official US policy, under Trump, is to discourage automobiles and subsidize buggy whips. And even a moderately bright child can see how that's going to work out.

    But children have the advantage of not being blinkered by a lifetime of compromises, betrayals, excuses and lies in pursuit of wealth and power.

  • Senator mocked ‘green energy crap.’ His house runs on it.

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  • Right, because the bribes he collects from fossil fuel lobbyists aren't contingent on his personal choices, but on his official positions, and that, in combination with his self-evident complete lack of integrity, allows him to choose the best option for himself even as he tries to foist the option he knows to be inferior on the people he pretends to represent.

  • Why is privacy important? Be specific.

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  • My post was a very condensed version of a very complex and detailed set of views. If you pull a phrase out of context and try to slap a trite and superficial interpretation on it, you're almost certainly going to get it wrong.

    Some more details to aid in parsing the whole thing:

    I don't think rights exist in any objective sense at all. They're entirely constructs. That means, among other things, that they can and should be shaped in such a way as to best serve their intended purpose.

    I didn't say that privacy is a foundational right - I said that it's a foundational violated right. As I then went on to try to explain, my view is that the common conception of rights is backwards.

    What I mean by that is that, for instance, nobody should have to claim a right to not have their privacy breached, since not having their privacy breached is the default. Their privacy can only be breached if someone else takes it upon themselves to act in a specific way in order to breach their privacy, so (and rather obviously IMO), if we're to grant credence to the constructs we call "rights'," then the way it should work is that that somebody else has to prove that they have a right to breach your privacy.

    But the way that it actually works is that others breach your privacy as a matter of course and generally without controversy.

    My view is that the fact that they can and do do that - that when the matter does come up, it's just treated as a given that they're entirely free to do that unless and until you can somehow prove that you have a right to stop them - serves to frame the whole issue in a way that grants people free reign to violate others as they please unless and until those others can successfully claim a right to stop them. In that sense, it's "foundational."

    Or to put it another way - nobody starts by blithely presuming a right to kill other people. They start by blithely presuming a right to, for instance, violate other people's privacy, then expand from there.

  • Why is privacy important? Be specific.

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  • This doesn't even semm like a coherent question.

    "Naturally forbidden" is, if I'm parsing it correctly, a nonsense phrase.

  • Should Scientists and Engineers Run Society?

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  • Fuck no.

    Here's a clue for all of the self-satusfied STEMbros who think they can do anything - you're about as skilled at making management decisions as managers are at fixing their own computers.

  • Why is privacy important? Be specific.

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  • I don't believe that privacy is necessarily important per se. Rather, I believe that it's a foundational violated right.

    Rights are (not coincidentally IMO) almost always conceived and expressed backwards. That puts the onus on those who would defend a claimed right. I think the onus rather obviously should fall on those who would violate a right - they are the ones who are acting in a specific way, so they are the ones who need to justify their actions.

    If an individual lives in complete isolation, they have a complete and total and unchallenged "right" to privacy - it's literally impossible for anyone else to breach their privacy. It's only with the addition of other people that the matter becomes relevant, and only with an attempt by another to breach their privacy that it becomes a point of contention.

    So again, and really rather obviously, that other has to be able to justify their breach of privacy, since it's specifically them and their actions that have made the issue relevant.

    And at that point, it's really a very simple question - who has a greater right to control over the details of an individual's life - that individual or some third party?

    So it's not so much that I believe that people have a right to privacy as that I believe that people cannot possibly have a right to violate someone else's privacy.

  • Trump threatens 10% global tariffs and rails against Supreme Court justices

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  • You say that as if one precludes the other.

  • Trump threatens 10% global tariffs and rails against Supreme Court justices

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  • Just your daily reminder that the President of the United States is a deranged lunatic.

  • Removed

    Conservative woman whining because men of her own political side think women shouldn't be able to vote

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  • So what is it the men are supposed to understand? That they should only discuss disenfranchising women out of your earshot?

  • 'This Is Trump's America': Scandals Engulf Labor Secretary as She Guts Worker Protections | Common Dreams

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  • Government of the people, by the psychopaths, for the billionaires.

  • "You Outlaw It": Heritage Foundation President Announces Intent To Outlaw All Trans Adult Care

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  • US Government Deploys Elon Musk's Grok as Nutrition Bot, Where It Immediately Gives Advice for Rectal Use of Vegetables

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  • It's as if Grok was trained on 4chan, incel podcasts and reruns of Beavis and Butthead.

    Which is exactly what I'd expect from Musk.

  • 'Israel' threatens to genocide Gaza if Hamas refuses disarmament | Al Mayadeen English

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  • So as it has been from the start, the choice for Gazans is to volunteer to be ethnically cleansed or be ethnically cleansed against their will.