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debanqued

@ debanqued @beehaw.org

Posts
17
Comments
102
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • Why Republicans are fighting the basic-income programs many cities and states are adopting: 'Is money a birthright now?'

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  • You say this like they have any decency or shame.

    I”m not sure how you arrive at that. You seem to have missed my point. That is, if the republicans get what they want (a ban on min incomes), they could end up getting as a consequence something they want even less: the state getting involved in commerce in the course of upholding human rights legal obligations.

    It makes little sense because they know full well the money will spent one way or another. So most likely this is a political tactic for something else. If there is a segment of unmotivated R voters somewhere but a strong likelihood that they would be more motivated to the polls if there were a proposition to ban any form of welfare, getting a proposition on the ballot would actually just be a trick to get more people turning out for Trump (because they will tick the Trump box while they are there).

    What matters to republicans the most is not any kind of values or ideology; it’s simply nothing more than taking and holding power.

    IIRC it was the Bush election where the republicans put a proposition on the ballot for gay marriage. Superficially you would think “sure, the republicans want to stop gay marriage”. But in reality the republican politicians did not care about gay marriage at all. They cared about a segment of elderly non-voting christian right conservatives. Those voters could not be motivated to get off their asses and travel to the polls to vote for Bush, but they would be damned if gays could get married, so they were highly motivated to vote in that election and of course while they are in the voting booth they ticked the Bush box. The gay marriage proposition was just a trick to get more votes for candidates.

  • Why Republicans are fighting the basic-income programs many cities and states are adopting: 'Is money a birthright now?'

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  • This is why I’m so disgusted every time someone says “republicans and democrats are basically the same”, which I most often hear from Europeans.

  • Firefox plan to show ads and shopping in the near future in the browser as an opt-out

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  • Why Republicans are fighting the basic-income programs many cities and states are adopting: 'Is money a birthright now?'

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  • I would love to see this backfire. If they ban min. incomes whilst being a human rights signatory, it means the state must buy food, shelter, and clothes, which means that portion of commerce would be outside of their “capitalist utopia” as the state would decide where to buy Bob’s shoes, or perhaps even make Bob a pair of shoes. It can (and should) backfire spectacularly for them.

  • Why Republicans are fighting the basic-income programs many cities and states are adopting: 'Is money a birthright now?'

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  • Sure, but then republicans are well into the territory of “I don’t like the facts”. They need to be told to work on trying to un-sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from 1948?) before they can make what they consider “progress” in their minds.

    from the article:

    "I never thought we would be going down the socialist road," Gillette told BI. "I spent 35 years in the Army fighting communism, fighting terrorism. Now we're slipping. The left is pushing us toward the socialist program."

    LOL.. I read that as: “help! We’re slipping past the 1940s because of the commies!”

  • HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors

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  • from the article:

    Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

    Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an #AI machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

  • If Capital One merges with Discovercard, I will boycott /all/ credit cards (is that even possible?)

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  • I never have to use PayPal. Goods and services my life depends on can all be bought without PayPal. If a hospital emergency room were to only accept PayPal/Zettle, they would treat me then I would simply refuse to pay the bill until they change their payment terms. It has been over a decade since I made a PayPal transaction. Exceptionally, PayPal may have processed some of my card transactions without my knowledge (before I knew what Zettle was), but if I knew I would have walked.

    I spoke to a small cafe owner who only accepts Zettle, no cash. He was the owner and cashier. He said Zettle was the cheapest for him. But as an ethical consumer I have choices and price is low priority. I don’t have to buy my coffee from him. In some cases I have managed to compel a cashless shop to accept my cash. If I have exact change or their staff has change, the staff will use their own personal payment card and take cash from me. I normally boycott cashless brick and mortar shops, but sometimes I do an experiment of forcing cash on them. But in the case of Zettle that’s not an option because PayPal still profits from the transaction even if PayPal does not obtain or profit from my data.

    I don’t know your situation with gas or how trapped you are, but if you must buy gas you can probably boycott Chevron and ExxonMobil and buy from one of the other lesser evils. Or if you have a diesel engine you can do what a friend does and collect waste oil and convert it to bio diesel.

  • If Capital One merges with Discovercard, I will boycott /all/ credit cards (is that even possible?)

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  • #PayPal is one of the most evil:

    https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

    I got burnt personally by them but even if I hadn’t they are among the least ethical options. There are some vendors selling products I would like to buy but they accept paypal exclusively, so I walk.. and go without. Recently I have encountered some small brick and mortar shops/cafes that use “Zettle”. #Zettle is paypal. So if I see Zettle and they don’t take cash, I walk out. They share data with over 600 corporations so I will not allow Paypal to serve as a payment processor of my credit or debit card. Paypal are rotten to the core scumbags. They have some sneaky tricks for keeping people’s money under the guise of AML/KYC/anti-fraud, even though they are not a bank and escape those regulations anyway. It’s no surprise Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were involved with the founding of that company.

  • Why electric bikes actually give more exercise than pedal bikes

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  • Indeed as someone who straddles two places of living I can attest to that. When living in a relatively flat city I’m cycling everywhere (on e-bike until it was stolen, then on cheap muscle bike thereafter). My other place of living is extremely hilly. Used a muscle bike and quickly said “fuck this, I’m done”. Just like the article said about hills on the trails. And since I cannot justify the cost of an e-bike in that particular place/situation, I do not cycle at all when living there. But if an e-bike had been cost effective I would be getting more exercise in that area.

  • Removed threads should still be reachable and interactive

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  • Thanks for pointing that out. I added your link to the post.

  • Votes fail to rank comment visibility

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  • I appreciate the background & history.. and the workaround sounds quite useful until Lemmy evolves more.

    If you want to contribute some code

    Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I would have to fork it just to get it out of MS Github and into an ethical work environment. And from there I would have to learn 2 or 3 new languages IIUC. I’m merely a user, or tester at best, trying to just get an understanding of the problems.. not even yet at the stage of digging through existing bug reports. When I wrote what you quoted, I did not even know yet if the tool was limited or if it’s malconfigured, or if a mod wasn’t making full use of the software. PenguinCoder hinted in another thread there is a thread hiding option in one of the Lemmy forks but did not elaborate. Superficially that sounds like a more appropriate mechanism for an off topic thread if it works the way it sounds.

  • Removed threads should still be reachable and interactive

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  • Thus the item was removed from that community. What is the problem here?

    You may be talking from the confines of the software’s capability. But in effect the thread was more than removed from the community. The only meaningful tie a thread has to a community is the link appearing in the timeline. The URL in fact excludes the community name. If you simply remove the timeline link there is theoretically no technical or social reason a civil sitewide-rules-compliant conversation cannot continue. And no reason it should not continue.

    There is likely a code limitation here. Lemmy was designed by folks who are overly gung ho on suppression (judging from how they ran dev.lemmy.ml, the deliberately hard-coding of the slur filter, their reputation, etc). I’ve not kept track of Lenny and other forks so it’s unclear if any of them offer more graceful functionality without the overbearing interventionalism for handling off topic posts. It certainly needs to evolve more in this regard because I’ve yet to see any Lemmy et al instances that enable a mod to move a thread to a more fitting community.

  • Signal Blog: Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames

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  • Anonymity is part of privacy.

    Specifically, anonymity is confidentiality of identity. Confidentiality is part of privacy, which is a broad concept. So when a tool or mechanism works against anonymity, it works against privacy. It may not work against a privacy aspect that you care about, but it’s privacy nonetheless.

  • Signal Blog: Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames

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  • You’re referring to anonymity, not privacy.

    Anonymity is part of privacy; not a dichotomy.

  • Signal Blog: Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames

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  • Sign-up still requires a phone number… -.-"

    Thanks for the warning -- that was my first question. It is my top reason (among many other reasons) for avoiding Signal.

    Checkout Matrix/Element or Session,

    All 3 of the sites you linked are Cloudflare sites (thus antithetical to privacy). Yes, I know you can use some of that tech without touching CF, but when they run CF websites it reveals hypocrisy & not understanding the goals of their audience.

  • Removed threads should still be reachable and interactive

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  • Difference between hidden and removed and even deleted.

    Does Lemmy give those three different actions?

    I can imagine that something that’s illegal would be deleted in the fullest extent to support legal compliance. I can imagine that an uncivil shitshow would be removed, whereby the content is still reachable to admins but not to users. And I would expect something that is off topic for a community would be hidden, assuming that means just not visible in the timeline but still accessible by users who have the link.

    Is my understanding of the 3 actions correct? Why would an off topic post be removed and not hidden?

    The point is in removing said ‘discussion’ from the platform.

    Does that mean a site-wide rule was broken? Because in the case at hand, it’s simply a matter of a civil conversation that was started in the wrong community.

  • Votes fail to rank comment visibility

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  • The transparency problem can be seen in the foss modlog. Before subscribing and investing effort into a community, I take a gander at the modlog to see whether the mod is overly energetic and eager to control. Some people like that mod style but some users prefer to avoid it. So if you look at the latest entry in the foss modlog, users should be able to visit the post to determine whether it was a sensible moderation move. They should be able to confirm “yes, this is off topic, so I am happy to participate in this community”, or “no, I will move along”. It’s not about payroll. It’s about users having transparency on moderators.

    In the case at hand, an apparently off topic post was removed from the timeline (fair enough, if truly off topic). Yet it was civil and in line with beehaw site rules, so there is no sensible reason to be as disruptive as to suppress conversation in that thread. When something is off topic for the community timeline, it’s merely an organizational problem of clutter. Action beyond removing the link from the timeline is over interventionalist. What’s the point? It’s bad faith to suppress a civil discussion.

    I don’t know if I’m hitting on a beehaw problem or a lemmy problem. If Lemmy only gives blunt instruments that lack the capability I describe, then the lack of transparency is a #lemmyBug.

  • Votes fail to rank comment visibility

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  • The nuclear: destruction of all traces of a post/comment is probably only useful in extreme cases like CSAM. Otherwise it’s useful for users to be able to evaluate mods to verify there are no shenanigans to establish trust. A user should be able to see the modlog and then see most removed content from a transparency PoV, one hopes.

    And I think lack of transparency is an issue. I just raised an issue about that.

  • Intel Management Engine (ME) explained | disabling the potential backdoor

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  • I can’t watch videos but I will say that my biggest problem with the iME is not the security issue, but the anti-consumer aspect. Intel decided non-corporate consumers (who do not want or benefit from iME) can be disregarded marginalized. So disabling iME is insufficient and misses the problem.

    The answer is to boycott iME CPUs. I never bought an intel CPU after 2008. I write this comment from a 16 year old PC just fine. I have pulled some more recent hardware out of dumpsters, ensuring I do not support anti-consumer products.