The math is not right. Percentages don’t multiply like that.

A change from 0.25 to 7.25 over 71 years means an annual increase of about 5%. That 5% annual change, starting with $7.25 15 years ago, would take us to around $15 today.

Most fascist dictatorships have had large privatizations and all have favored corporations in economic policy. You act like business-state collaboration under fascism was unique to the nazis, but it was also central to fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and right-wing dictatorships like those of Pinochet or the military in Brazil.

Fascism happens when capitalism is in crisis because it’s better for the corporations than socialism would be. Both Italy and Germany had strong socialist movements in the years before fascists came to power, and fascists are consistently funded by a business community that fears losing everything it has. The fascist emphasis on the state, nationalism, and war, is only because it’s required to suppress organized labor.

“Poor Mexico, So far from God, so close to the United States.”

This is where it’s important to remember who exactly is writing the laws for union recognition. Many countries have laws that nominally support the formation of unions but moreso exist to reduce union support or funnel unions into polite, legal activity.

I don’t understand this political strategy in the long-run. If the left always unflinchingly votes for the leftmost candidate then the optimal strategy for the DNC is always to choose someone just 1% to the left of whoever the Republicans are running.

The trumpers aren’t strong because they always vote. They’re strong because everyone knows that, if Trump isn’t on the ballot, they won’t turn out to vote nearly as strongly.

Combine this with the fact that basically every business interest wants right-wing politics and you get the perpetual rightwards slide of the Democratic Party.

The second wave of arrests was almost entirely students, because Columbia has been on lockdown and it’s been increasingly difficult for non-students to get in in the first place. The “outside agitators were at fault” narrative that Columbia is pushing is at odds with this.

It’s from March 24, 2024

To be clear, this tumblr account is in no way associated with the actual Amtrak company

It includes transgender women, but I don't think doing so skews the numbers. AFAIK in the US there are about the same number of trans women as trans men, so any increase in the queer percentage from trans women would be balanced out by the decrease from excluding trans men.

I'd expect an AFAB-specific poll to have a slightly higher queer percentage, since it would include nonbinary people while this poll excludes them.

Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you... edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website's UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you're browsing from?

This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia's content moderation problems, but it doesn't do much against that that wouldn't also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others' pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you'd have to make a new account to edit things.

I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you'd know that all the options were wikis that haven't been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki's admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.

I don't know. I'm happy this exists. I think it's interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.

This one made me laugh. Most I just find to be novel, silly, or interesting, but a fair few are pretty funny to me.

You all are going to give me Homestuck flashbacks.

for context (beyond that being Getting Over It): orteil42 is the creator of Cookie Clicker.

It’s from The Hard Drive, which is another satire site. The sidebar for this community mentions that other satire sites are okay to post.

Stuff like “Unions aren’t guaranteed to give you a raise, or any other benefits,” “Unions just want you to join so you can pay dues to them (think about all the things you can buy with 1% of your income!),” “Unions get in the way of workers having a healthy relationship with management,” “Unions make things less efficient, so we may dip into unprofitability and have to close down the factory…” Employers also often hire “neutral third parties” to tell employees that unions can be good, or used to be good, but aren’t at [employer].

Joining a union is the sensible thing to do, but employers fighting tooth and nail and breaking every slap-on-the-wrist law on the books is also the sensible thing for them to do, so they do everything from anti-union pamphlets to one-on-one intimidation meetings to calling ICE on their pro-union immigrant workers

Two of the crabs begin to play chess among themselves

No - semantic satiation is when you read or hear a word so much in a short timeframe that it stops feeling like a real word, and briefly feels like just a jumble of letters/sounds.

If this question is “Would you rather everyone be able to talk, or just people who are correct?” Then, uhm, correct according to who?

I prefer having a range of forums of different functions, from “Only my friends can speak” to “everyone, save for those who use speech to harass or intimidate, can speak” to “only the teacher can speak.” None of those fit neatly into either category here (even teachers are sometimes wrong).

Mx is common-ish among nonbinary people. Here’s a relevant poll regarding people’s usages of it: https://www.gendercensus.com/results/2023-mx/

The pledge of allegiance, not the anthem. But yes, it was every day. Although, where I grew up, it was never enforced, and most kids didn’t stand or participate.

About 2300 in Terraria. Great game.

In case you didn’t see: https://lemmy.world/comment/2503978

In case you didn’t see: https://lemmy.world/comment/2503978

The most commonly accepted words for those concepts are gynesexual (attraction to women) and androsexual (attraction to men), though they’re used rarely

Wars tend to involve civilians getting hurt, because yeah, it’s cheaper and easier to disregard international law.

I wouldn’t generalize that to evil always winning vs good, though. Human life is complicated, and mean, but progress gets made anyway. There’s a reason most people dislike war.

That's fair, if it's well-advertised by instance admins then it could have like 4x the contributor count.

Smaller canvas, to make it feel less empty and encourage more communication across communities (or competition! >:] )

That’s the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance logo

You don’t owe anyone anything as a trans person. I disagree with the notion that you’re ugly, and I disagree with the notion that you look masculine, but even if you did, the goal of the trans movement isn’t “if you let us be trans then we’ll look perfect and fit exactly into the gender boxes that society expects us to!” The goal of the trans movement is to let people be happy and accepted as whoever they are, whatever way they present. Trans women can be beefy and hairy and fat just as much as they can be petite and curvy, and both are important. Transition is a process, and it’s often a long, hard process, and the goal isn’t just to normalize the idea of transitioning but the reality of it, where people of any gender can look like anything and they might even decide they’re happy to keep looking like that for the rest of their lives. Every person who dares to live and be trans and be proud of it is helping other trans people, regardless of how they look and whether or not they pass. If you want to help, talk to other trans people, organize, be kind and compassionate, don’t just give up because you think your very existence is hurting others. Sky, you’re worth more than you think you are, and you aren’t hurting anyone by being yourself.

Interesting. That almost seems like a bug.

The time interval hasn’t changed. It’s 30 seconds, unless you are replacing a pixel that someone else placed, in which case it is 60 seconds.

As far as I can tell, they're in the right spot now

Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.

Huh, okay. Good on you for being consistent.

I find the banning of individual users to be highly necessary, to prevent spam of porn/nazi shit/general assholery. Instead of everyone having to spend a long time forming their own blocklist, they can sign up for an instance with a mod team that they trust to do it for them. Defederation is a useful tool towards that end, because (for example) Exploding Heads is an instance that explicitly allows racism and such, so a well-moderated instance will defederate with them rather than having to ban hundreds or thousands of individual trolls who sign up over there because they like racism.

Are you also against the idea of banning individual users for the content they post?

This question is analogous to “why hasn’t anarcho-communism yet worked on a wide scale?” Which is a question with many, many facets to it. You’d have to ask a lot of questions separately.

If I were to try, though, I think the simple answer is “people who work in X area usually do not own the means of production and as such cannot redirect the end product to horizontalist organizations.” Most people can’t just quit their jobs to join a mutual aid group because, without being able to contribute things, the biggest thing a mutual aid group can pass around is time, and most mutual aid groups that exist irl are focused on doing tasks like “picking up prescriptions for others,” and cannot replace participation in the capitalist economy.

Nevermind how most governments don’t want horizontalist non-capitalist organizations to gain enough power to provide a viable alternative to living under capitalism.

Ah, yeah. I consider myself lucky to be aroace because most people struggle less with “imagine not being attracted to people” than “imagine you want sex without romance,” which requires defining what those mean, and also convincing them that you’re not just afraid of commitment. I imagine it’s getting more publicity over time but the average person (and even the average queer person) just hasn’t heard of the split attraction model and has never thought of romanticism and sexuality as separate things.

Yeah, pretty much. I’m not repulsed by romance/sex but I enjoy songs more when they’re about other things. Lemon Demon sings songs about stuff like [having a toy train set] or [being a haunted, half-human arcade machine] or [being Ronald Reagan in a romantic relationship], Tally Hall sings about various subjects in weird ways (see The Bidding or Turn The Lights Off), and Will Wood sings about mental health and how things interact with that (see Love, Me Normally or Dr. Sunshine Is Dead)

There’s an essay I read a while ago which establishes aromanticism as a political choice. I don’t agree with everything it says, but it’s a really interesting read nonetheless: https://queer.archive.work/library/download/aromantic/an_aromantic_manifesto.pdf

Aromanticism as a choice also reminds me of the idea of relationship anarchy, as in the rejection that any type of relationship is inherently above or below others. https://log.andie.se/post/26652940513/the-short-instructional-manifesto-for-relationship

Reminds me of the streets where they remove all markings entirely. I think this would increase safety, since road safety coincides inversely with how safe drivers feel to drive fast and not pay attention, and this signals pretty strongly “you’re on your own now, good luck!”