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azertyfun

@ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

Posts
1
Comments
610
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Locked

    Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time.

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  • Except the Armageddon is real but no-one will rise up to save us when every major city is nothing but glowing embers under an ever gray nuclear sky while the remnants of humanity fight each other with sticks over the last grain silos.

    So-called American "revolutionaries" make me sick with their reckless disregard for the unavoidable responsibility their country has with regards to their military. An "accelerated downfall" won't just affect you bozos. Especially not if the means are "stoking the fire of imperialism".

    If I could press a button to accelerate the US downfall and magically contain the fighting to the lower 48 in a way that leaves whoever is left standing nuke-less, I would, but that's not an option on the table, so barring that, please vote against the guy who really can't be trusted with the nuclear briefcase, yeah???

  • Pretty much 🤷

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  • The complete fracturing of children's education post-war cannot be understated as a society-wide catastrophe.

    Ironically stay-at-home mothers were already not the norm pre-war for the poors/minorities. Which participated in generational poverty as those children had a worse access to parenting and education. But the post-war middle class suddenly fell into that pattern as well, with similar results.

    On top of that you've got the meteoric rise of car-centric urbanism, fracturing communities. It used to take a village to raise a child, now they can't even walk across their neighborhood unsupervised because the roads aren't safe for children. Indirectly, parents trust fewer and fewer community members to watch their children, making the task of raising small children unusually difficult and tiring.

    Countries with more socialized childcare and better working conditions were better off overall, but the entire western world is facing a natality crisis because it truly is harder to raise a child now than it used to be. Which is absolutely bonkers because the world is also richer and more productive than at any other time in history.

  • Portugal Hits 80% Renewables, Power Bills Drop €703M

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  • Yeah sorry but that's completely sensible. Grid-scale solar is awesome, but private solar is a symptom of complete government failure.

    Compared to grid-scale you have:

    • No economies of scale
    • Massive investments required to force utilities to upgrade transformers (here in Belgium it's quite common in the summer that whole neighborhoods have their inverters shut off because the voltage is too high because the low-voltage grid simply wasn't meant to flow in the other direction)
    • Horrendous fiscal incentives that reward the rich and punish the poor (who are forced to shoulder the distribution costs for the rich who are still using the grid but "offsetting" it with net metering).

    Getting ~30% back on the energy you put back into the grid is fair when you that into account (distribution is more than half of your actual energy cost, therefore putting 1 kWh back into the grid does not discharge you from paying for 1 kWh of distribution costs!).

    If the government was doing its fucking job no house would have solar on the roof (except in remote places for outage preparedness) because when you account for externalities it doesn't make any goddamn financial sense. Put those panels in former colza fields by the GW if you want cheap electricity.

  • What's a piece of Media that is so underrated you must mention it?

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  • Or it's the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

    Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children's show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it's easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

    Good for you if that's your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it's an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.

  • What's a piece of Media that is so underrated you must mention it?

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  • I tried but like most children's shows I just can't deal with (at least the early seasons') pacing. It's excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn't seem to be trying to get anywhere.

    Typically those children shows' pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn't change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.

  • Why Isn't News of Trump Building Vast Concentration Camps Being Treated as a National Emergency?

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  • Wait wait wait wait, where does this idea come from that the German people weren't to blame for Nazism? They were to blame. They were blamed. Their country was partitioned, their army was dismantled, their families were torn apart, and they endeavored to teach future generations what they did wrong. It did not even remotely make up for their nation's crimes against humanity, but they were "lambasted".

    Do not weaponize history to justify your own apathy. These lessons were paid in blood. Yet new blood is being shed, and every American who does not fight against the regime is responsible. Yes, it's an unfair ask; no-one wants to live through troubled times. But you are living in them so stop cowering behind historical wrongs to feel better about your inaction.

  • Why Isn't News of Trump Building Vast Concentration Camps Being Treated as a National Emergency?

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  • "yet"

    Just as a thought exercise, can you fathom and put into words a hypothetical breaking point that would wake people up to the madness around them?

    Because here's my prediction: the regime will commit atrocity after atrocity, each one somehow more monstrous than the last, and nothing will happen, because your first paragraph will still be true. They will start wars and nothing will happen because your first paragraph will still be true. Then suddenly WWIII will happen and the regime will be unstoppable. Then, some manner of nuclear exchange, potentially marking the end of human civilization, because all fascist regimes end up destroying themselves -- too bad this one has the power to take the entire fucking world down with it.

    If you are right that Americans won't fight for decency now (and I think you are), then all hope is lost. All historical precedent says that we are past the point of no return and you've forfeited your - and quite possibly humanity's - future.

  • Billionaire Ehud Laniado dies during penis enlargement surgery, surgeons banned

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  • Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn't involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.

    Funny when here in Belgium, the government put a couple decades ago a cap on the number of doctors who were allowed to graduate medical school (numerus clausus). The goal is to reduce the number of doctors to pay for (with the support of existing doctors who want less competition).

    The predictable result of artificial scarcity? I live a major city and if I want an appointment with any specialist it's a 6+ months delay or a 1-2 months if you can justify a daytrip to Brussels. This is having real tangible impacts on quality of care.

    Obviously I would not trade my healthcare system for the American one but let's not pretend that money and greed aren't factors.

  • Hasan Piker banned from Twitch for calling ICE supporters "rabid ultra-Zionist pigs'

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  • He's a political pundit. Part of his job is, at all times, to be entertaining and attention-grabbing. That means his appeal and success are directly tied to how abrasive he sounds at any given time. That's the unavoidable pitfall of the profession, and it's been true since long before the internet and even before television.

    Punditry content is not for me personally, but I do think it is filling a niche. Especially as very very few online American content creators have been willing to engage with politics directly.

  • protect trans kids rule

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  • I am not saying it did not sell. That's the one thing it did really well. But it's hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It's not offensively bad, but it's certainly not good.

    Over 6+ books it's really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it's really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don't risk writing yourself into a corner. I'm sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically -- it's hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!

    Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it's hard, but that's what storytellers do.

  • Digital Independence: Berlin wants to introduce European payment service Wero

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  • The EPI is not a German governing body. It is a partnership of banks who decided to implement Wero. All of them had to work to support it in addition to their existing systems, though it is not exceptionally hard because it's just a frontend for SEPA. If Spanish banks want to provide Wero to their customers then they'll join the EPI and have the same say as everyone else. But again, it's just fucking QR codes that translate to "make an instant SEPA mandate to send X € to Y IBAN" so I don't understand what there is to be scared of on a technical level.

    I don't understand the point of fragmenting the Eurozone for the sake of fragmenting the Eurozone. Integration is in the long run more complex, expensive, and less user-friendly than standardization. What is so good about competing solutions that they should not eventually be replaced by a common digital payment system?

  • Digital Independence: Berlin wants to introduce European payment service Wero

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  • Wero is not "something the banks don't control". It's a SEPA-based standard, implemented by the participating banks. It originated with Dutch/Belgian technology and banking markets and Germany and France joined because their sorry asses didn't have anything better so it's a pure upgrade for them.

    EuroPA is trying to work with fragmented markets, Wero is trying to establish a new standard. I fail to see EuroPA as anything other than a stepping stone to an eventually unified standard. Having a single currency but noeasy and practical way of spending it in a Austrian or Spanish online shop without going through American banks is an absolutely bonkers situation.

  • Digital Independence: Berlin wants to introduce European payment service Wero

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  • I already used it in Belgium though...? "Pushed by Germany" is a bold statement when the technology comes from iDeal/Bancontact which are Dutch and Belgian respectively and France is also a very large economy in the mix. Don't forget about Luxembourg as well. Benelux+FR+DE is hardly an ignorable market. France is already abandoning its existing solution for Wero. That's always been the plan.

    Do you care to source your claims? My understanding both the EuroPA and EPI are a private agreement between banks, but only the latter has received explicit backing from the European Commission. The EuroPA does not seem nearly as ambitious and only seeks to streamline existing national SEPA-based online payments (unclear to me what that means exactly in practice), which is a nice short-term vision for sovereignty but probably not where the EU will want to be 5 or 10 years from now. The big selling point of Wero is that you can be shown a QR code and use it to pay easily and instantly with extremely low fees, regardless of your bank.

  • protect trans kids rule

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  • Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with "yer a wizard" in the first 50 pages and that's the end of his character arc. From then on he's a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.

    .... As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don't remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry's uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don't recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.

  • Alzheimer's Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say

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  • There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com's whole schtick. There's so much happening in science that doesn't get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer's gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

  • Kristi Noem Blames Her Actions on Trump and Stephen Miller

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  • Except the Trials where that precedent was supposedly established actually allowed a great many people to escape conviction using that exact defense, then the prosecution subsequently gave up on the trials altogether. The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice, not because the Allies set up kangaroo courts, but because in an attempt to avoid such accusations and through unbelievable prosecutorial incompetence they let almost every Nazi who was still alive run free.

    What I'm getting at is, don't expect justice to magically administer itself.

  • How come residential power lines aren't buried underground still?

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  • Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it's very rarely relevant to any discussion.

    The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn't the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

  • Cycling without a helmet and high-visibility jacket may be made criminal offences in Ireland

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  • What you're saying is true, and when riding in those conditions I choose to wear a high-vis and helmet.

    Nonetheless it is victim-blaming to make it mandatory (nevermind doing that in broad daylight). There's always more that could be done ; clown hat, flashing lights, police escort, machine guns, F-35s. We have to draw the line somewhere, and if headlights are good enough for cars, they're good enough for cyclists. Cars would also see fewer accidents if they were covered in high-vis paint, yet curiously no-one is arguing for mandating it.

  • Which Countries Are In The World Health Organization

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  • Not ever. Even when every male under the age of 50 is conscripted into one of Trump's pointless wars against former allies, Democrats won't do shit because resistance is illegal and they have an unshakably legalist worldview. Calexit was already a complete joke before their government started executing their own citizens in broad daylight with no repercussion - legal or otherwise.

    Americans: stop with the escapist fantasies and start finding actual ways to fight back because your elected representatives aren't going to do it for you.

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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