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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • All the free market evangelists always conveniently forget the original definition of what constitutes a free market. The paper that coined the term free market specifically referred to them as “well regulated”. From the very beginning it was recognized that a functioning market requires government regulation, if for nothing else at least for contract enforcement and dispute resolution. Without regulation what you’re left with is just “might makes right”.

    Realistically though there are two distinctly different groups that use the term “free market” and they mean two distinctly different things when they do so. We have economists who mean theoretical free markets and have a very specific concept in mind. Right or wrong they are at least arguing in good faith. Then we have politicians and the general public who are using the term purely as an excuse to justify their policies designed to benefit massive corporations and the rich. For the later group the former group are just tools to be used. Even if all the economists got together and declared free markets a bad idea they would just keep referencing the old economic papers, just like they do for trickle down economics.


  • From one senior dev to another, who remembers when O’Reily books were the gold standard, this, exactly this. Junior devs are junior because they don’t know how to code. The important bit is that they learn and become intermediate devs. If in another decade we’re sitting here complaining about intermediate and senior devs that don’t know how to program, then we’ll have a problem.




  • AI isn’t allowed on any of my systems, it’s practically the first thing I disable (alongside tracking and metrics, but that’s basically the same thing). The only AI I will ever allow would be something entirely offline and self hosted that I have complete and total control over.

    Microsoft insisting on cramming this crap down everyone’s throats has finally convinced me to go 100% Linux for gaming. I’d rather abandon the small handful of games that won’t let you run them under Linux than let MS scrape all my personal data and shove ads into every crack of my OS. It’s been going great so far and I have absolutely no regrets. Best of all, not a single piece of AI or telemetry to disable.




  • Strictly speaking no, they don’t actually have constitutional protections, it’s just that it’s simpler for our legal system to treat everyone uniformly (also I’m not sure it’s ever actually come up before except in the highly specialized circumstances of Guantanamo Bay). Additionally tourists have their government backing them so it wouldn’t be worth the international incident that something like denying them due process would cause. In general though with a tourist causing problems it’s often easier for the government to just cancel their visa and deport them back to their home country then ban them from returning, rather than dealing with the headache of trying to prosecute a foreign national.







  • Are they considering Musk as US? If so I’ll kindly remind Germany he’s South African, he’s meddling in US politics as well, and we don’t want him either.

    It’s very worrying how many countries around the world have far right fascist parties either in charge or making major waves like MAGA and AfD. The Australian government has been headed down that path for a while, and the UK isn’t too far behind them. If I recall I think there was also a far right party in France that was up to something as well recently.



  • Sure, but the overwhelming majority of people on here voted for Harris even if they really didn’t want to and continuing to bitch and moan about everyone that didn’t, the overwhelming majority of which aren’t even on Lemmy isn’t doing anything useful.

    There seems to be this group on here that’s very black and white. During the election you weren’t allowed to say anything negative about Harris or complain about first Biden and then Harris supporting Israel or you were called a Trump supporter. Nothing short of declaring her the most perfect candidate ever satisfied them. It was fucking stupid of her to endorse Biden’s already losing platform including his support of Israel and that cost her the election. Saying it was going to cost her the election shouldn’t have been a controversial thing but to some on here it was.

    It was already exhausting when it was going on during the election and it’s even more exhausting now. Harris literally doesn’t matter anymore. Whether she would have been better for Gaza or not is an entirely academic question at this point unless you’ve got a time machine (and if you do go back and convince George Washington that first past the post voting is an idiotic idea).

    I just want to see discussion about what can be done to oppose Trump and help in some way Palestine, but instead it’s a non-stop parade of comments about how anyone who complained about Harris supporting Israel is terrible and this is all their fault.

    As for your analogy, it’s more like the choice was between the crotch kicking factory and the anal raped without lube factory and a bunch of people complained that if they insist on being the crotch kicking factory nobody is going to want to go there. So 3 people voted for the crotch kicking factory, 4 voted for anal rape, 2 voted for the zoo, and 3 people stayed home. Then everyone who voted for the crotch kicking factory got angry and said it’s the fault of the people who voted for the zoo that anal rape won.

    I’m just as frustrated that Trump won, but what I’m not is surprised. Disappointed absolutely, but not surprised. The Democrats have been failing this country for decades. People are only going to keep voting for the lesser evil that sees things getting slightly worse election after election for so long before they start thinking there’s no point.

    If you really want to apportion blame for this mess the most to blame is first Trump, then the GOP, then Trump voters, then the DNC, then Harris, then 3rd party and non-voters. The DNC needed to realize decades ago that it doesn’t matter how many big corporate cheques they cash when the policies they’re adopting are turning away voters that they desperately need. Harris should have looked at the train wreck of Biden’s campaign and realized she needed to do something different. Third party voters needed to understand that with first past the post you don’t get to vote for the candidate you want, you have to vote against the candidate you don’t want.


  • I mean this with all sincerity: fuck off.

    Same to you you annoying whiny git.

    That doesn’t keep me from having the ability, nor seeing the need for, needling people who thought that this would be better for Gaza than what Harris wanted.

    Except you’re not doing that, you’re just being annoying and pissing off people that fucking voted for Harris for no god damn reason. The election is over, Harris lost, and now we need to deal with fucking Cheeto Mussolini and instead of doing something useful you’re spending every opportunity to bitch and moan about how everyone is getting what they deserve now. At this point I’m just going to stop reading the comments of any post about Palestine because the comment sections are all just cesspools of people wanking off about how right they were this entire time.

    Harris never should have backed Israel and it along with all the other idiotic policies she pushed cost her the election just like everyone said it would. People were begging her to run on better policies and instead her campaign was “vote for me or else” which failed to convince enough people. It sucks and now we’re all suffering because of it, but as much as it’s the fault of the people that didn’t vote for her it’s even more her and the DNC’s fault for running a crap campaign. It is literally a politician’s job to convince people to vote for them, and Harris failed at her job.



  • Well, for point 2, they were kind of right. It’s mostly a self fulfilling prophecy, but when a sizable chunk of your voting block says “take this position if you want my vote” and then you take the opposite position it really shouldn’t come as a surprise if you subsequently lose the election. That 100% was on Harris.

    Whether Harris would have been better than Trump (for Gaza) is perhaps a more interesting question. Ultimately Israel is going to be using their own troops for this not US troops because US troops aren’t going to go along with gunning down unarmed civilians in mass the way the Israeli troops will. Whether it’s Trump or Harris that wasn’t going to change. The biggest difference is just one of political posturing. Harris would have made disapproving statements and basically said “we’re very disappointed in Israel” while still sending the exact same weapons and funds Trump is sending. Maybe Israel would have played things more low key, maybe not, we’ll never know now. So point 1 is kind of a wash.

    Point 3 is really a more abstract moral question I suppose. At what point does something cross over into “supporting genocide”. Does sending money to the Israeli government count? What about doing business with companies that do so? What about having the power to do something about it and instead choosing to do nothing? I think we can all agree that Trump absolutely supports genocide. The argument for if Harris did is far less concrete, and for people who voted for Harris (or I guess Trump for that matter) more nebulous still.

    The real problem ultimately though is that none of this existed in a vacuum. If this was literally a referendum on how the US should respond to Israel that would be one thing, but that was such a tiny slice of a much bigger discussion. The biggest and most concerning of which was Trump essentially admitting that he was planning on staging a coup of the US government which meant no matter how the Gaza situation was going to play our Trump absolutely could not be let anywhere near the office of the president.

    The election is over though, Harris lost because she ran a shit campaign on proven losing policy. People need to get over that and focus on actually dealing with the shit sandwich we’ve collectively been handed instead of continuing to point fingers and argue about whose fault it was.


  • The issue is that it’s practically the only thing being commented in any post related to Palestine and it’s drowning out all the useful discussion that needs to be taking place. Pick any post about Palestine and look at the comments and the overwhelming majority of them are some variation on “boy, I bet all those people who refused to vote for Harris are so happy now”, which is about as useful a comment as all the idiots that used to rush to post “First” on articles back in the day.

    These “told you so” comments are so pervasive it’s starting to feel vaguely like astroturfing. A bunch of comments encouraging non-Republican voters to fight amongst themselves and drowning out any possible productive discussion or organization sure sounds like it would be a brilliant move by the fascist supporters. I’m not suggesting everyone making those comments is astroturfing or a troll, but the absolute way that’s blanketing all discussion around Palestine sure does make me wonder if some of them are.