health insurance != healthcare
health insurance profits only exist at the expense of human suffering.
but lets make sure everyone has insurance but not care
Yeah, there shouldn’t be health insurance, just health care. Some things are uncertain like whether you get in a car accident, or whether a weather event causes damage to your house. Health problems are not uncertain. People will all have them. Just spend the money on training and hiring doctors and nurses to treat these issues in a large enough quantity that the care is sufficient.
Religions are mostly just popularized conspiracy theories. Believing in God is about as realistic as believing the world is flat.
But it’s not about that for many people. For many people, being religious is more about finding strength and peace in that kind of guided spirituality
False peace through a false god
There’s no public debt crisis. People don’t understand how government debt works. One casualty of this is the slow green transition which will cost us dearly in the future.
Leadership has the capacity and capability to change things for the better and continue to fail to do so because true leadership means making decisions that at times may hurt and may not be universally liked.
This is as true in politics as it is in business.
In short our leaders are not leading out of the fear of repercussions of leading.
Teachers should be paid 50% more. If you want good teachers to stay, you have to walk the walk, otherwise you’ll get a perpetual cycle of overwhelmed grads being bossed around by rusted-on bottom teer heads.
There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. Labor is labor, specially if someone else has to do it even if you don’t want to.
TikTok and YouTube shorts are brain-rotting garbage, and if you use them regularly you need to stop now. Yes, even if you claim you only watch educational stuff.
Also giving a child under the age of 8 or 9 a personal internet-connected device should be seen on a similar level as neglect if not full-on abuse.
The vast majority of humans are actually nice, altruistic and not selfish if you treat them with respect. And hence anarchism would not resolve in everyone killing each other.
Not in my experience.
Piracy equals culture preservation in an age of subscription services.
We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don’t realize how much they are missing.
The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.
This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.
This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don’t actually deserve our collective attention.
And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.
Completely agree. Now my hot take for this thread:
If governments some time in the 90s had decided from the start to ban computer hardware from being sold with pre-installed software then we wouldn’t have this problem. If everyone had to install their own operating system from scratch, which like you say isn’t hard if it’s taught, it would have killed the mystery around computing and people would feel ownership over their computers and computing.
How to learn this? The way it’s taught is so people don’t know they don’t know. What are good starting resources?
I am not a professional educator, but in general I think it is worth to start with basic computer literacy: identifying parts of a PC, being able to explain their overall functions, difference between hardware and software, and what kinds of software a computer can run (firmwares, operating systems, user utilities etc.). This would also be a perfect time to develop practical skills, e.g. (assuming you are a normatively-abled person) learning to touch-type and perform basic electronics maintenance, like opening your machine up to clean it and replace old thermal compounds.
After that taking something like “Operating systems fundamentals” on Coursera would be a great way to go on.
It really depends on your goals, resources and personal traits, as well as how much time and energy you can spare, and how do you like to learn. You can sacrifice and old machine, boot Ubuntu and break it a bunch of times. You can learn how to use virtualization and try a new thing every evening. You can get into ricing and redesign your entire OS GUI to your liking. You can get a single-board computer like RaspberryPi and try out home automation.
Copyright is far too long and should only last at most 20 years.
Actually, George Washington would agree with me if he was still alive. He and the other founding fathers created the notion of copyright, which was to last 14 years. Then big corporations changed the laws in their favor.
Myers Briggs is posh astrology.
I think that’s actually been proven at this point hasn’t it?
That doesn’t stop an absolute fuck ton of people believing in it. One of my friends is quite deeply into it, she’s in FB groups about it, and decides what everyone’s type is upon meeting them. According to her I only think it’s nonsense because I’ve only done the free online tests, not the proper one. She wouldn’t listen the other day when I tried to put her right about flouride in the water, either.
Sounds like the test itself isn’t the problem but how it’s used and how much people attach to the results, like with IQ tests. Neither that nor Myers-Briggs should be part of interviewing for a job either but apparently some US companies do it anyway.
No, the test itself is definitely the problem. Regardless of whether you believe a personality type test can be effective, the MBTI is particularly and provably ineffective in just about every measurable way:
It’s not reliable. It has terrible test-retest reliability. If I’m X personality type, I shouldn’t test as X type one time, and Y type the next, and Z 6 months laters.
It’s not predictive. If a personality test accurately judges someone, it should mean you now know something about someone’s behaviours, and can extrapolate that forwards and predict behavioural trends. MBTI does not.
It fundamentally doesn’t match the data. MBTI relies upon the idea that people fall neatly into binary buckets (introverted vs extroverted, thinking vs feeling, etc). But the majority of people don’t, and test with MBTI scores close to the line the test draws, following a normal distribution. So the line separating two sides of a bell curve ends up being arbitrary.
And finally, it’s pushed very hard by the Myers-Briggs foundation, and not at all by independent scientific bodies. copying straight from wikipedia:
Most of the research supporting the MBTI’s validity has been produced by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, an organization run by the Myers–Briggs Foundation, and published in the center’s own journal, the Journal of Psychological Type (JPT),
I risk sounding very “AKSHUALLYY” here, but online tests do a huge harm to the credibility of MBTI, no wonder it gets such a bad rep when the tests are so unreliable and people nevertheless base their entire personalities on it… Originally it’s not supposed to be based on the binary choices of the 4 letters but the “cognitive functions” as defined by Carl Jung, which a lot of people will find to be just as much non-sense but with the right attitude I think they’re a useful tool to learn about ourselves and others.
This should be a popular opinion honestly, because it’s correct.
I used to think this, but I think the new posh astrology is mental disorders in general. It costs thousands of dollars to get professionally assessed, whereas MBTI is a free quiz online. Crippling anxiety, depression, OCD, panic attacks, etc., are the new ENFP
Jesus this is a bad take
It shouldn’t be taken as scientific truth but it can help you know yourself and others better, and it’s an insult to compare it to astrology because at least it’s not based on completely random things like the position of the planets when you were born. The issue is that most people only know MBTI as online tests, which are self-report and have extremely vague and stereotypical questions that can very easily be manipulated to get whatever result you want, with the worst offender being the most popular one, 16personalities, which isn’t even an actual MBTI test but a BIg 5 one (which is not to say Big 5 is bad, but it’s very misleading to map it to MBTI types). In reality to use MBTI somewhat effectively is going to take studying Carl Jung’s work, how MBTI builds on that, lots of introspection, asking people about yourself, and lots of doubting and double checking your thinking. And very importantly you have to accept that in the end this all isn’t real and just a way to conceptualize different aspects of our personalities and it’s in no way predictive, you have to let go of stereotypes, anyone can act in any way, it’s just about tendencies.
This is insulting to astrology, but yes lol
Air fryers are only popular because Americans have been using microwaves to cook for decades, which are possibly the worst cooking devices ever created.
If they had decent fan ovens during that time, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular
Conversely, air fryers are seen to be popular in the UK, because nobody will admit they fell for the advertising, and now only use them for chips
Pitbulls are not more genetically predisposed towards biting or mauling than other breeds and the supposed “statistical data” on the subject is based around a confluence of inaccurate metrics caused by 1) people not being very good at accurately identifying dog breeds, 2) existing groups that hate pitbulls pushing bad statistics for political purposes, and 3) a self-fulfilling prophecy of pitbulls having a bad reputation and actively being sought out by people who want vicious dogs and who will treat their dogs in such a way as to encourage that behavior. And I say all of this as someone who does not own a pitbull and probably never will.
So I think your 3rd point is highly likely, but I do disagree about the genetic predisposition. If it can’t be genetically influenced then goldens are not more friendly than others, and smart dogs (poodles, Australian shepherd, etc.) are not actually smarter; they all have the same genetic predisposition.
Having an aggressive breed is possible, but as I said earlier I think the 3rd point pushes up the numbers of maulings quite a bit. I’d add a 4th point of a lot of people being real shit dog owners and not knowing how to properly raise a dog to be socially capable without harming others.
Copyright should have stayed the original initial 14 years with possible renewal to 28 years. But like in France back then, also include the original authors (last one alive, if several) lifespan. Hence, a copyright would last either the authors lifespans or 28 years, whichever is longer.
Moreover, the patent system is being abused and does not serve the original goal of “any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement there on not before known or used.” It granted the applicant the “sole and exclusive right and liberty of making, constructing, using and vending to others to be used” of his invention.. It needs major changes, including the requirement to have the “invention” be under examination by reputable third-party laboratories (such as Intertek, SGI, Underwriters Laboratories, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Technischer Überwachungsverein, SGS - Société Générale de Surveillance, etc…) before being granted a patent. Nowadays, patents are given almost willy-nilly to anyone no matter how vague or obvious the supposed invention.
Nowadays, patents are being misused in Patent Ambush mechanisms and scenarios, meanwhile Patent Trolls and Hoarders whole existence is are to impede/obstruct legally and impose exorbitant levies/fees onto organization and companies actually innovating and developing useful art/process/devices. Even more incredible, there are Submarine Patents being hidden away to suddenly take hostage existing products and process of various companies by imposing extortionate royalties.
