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@petrichor What would be the difference of such an endeavour, with things that already exist like Wix?

(I'm asking this less out of curiosity, and more as a prompt that might help to narrow down exactly what problem you want to solve)

@roelgrif Finally, the Talk Like A Manager Generator has a useful purpose

uspol 

Democrats: "we need to figure out how to improve our messaging"

also Democrats: "pay us to ex officio stymie the hegemonic authoritarian oligarchy vis-a-vis patrimonialst plutocracy and noncromulent demagoguery"

TIL that there used to be a ban on toy-oriented children's TV shows in the US, until Reagan abolished it

@kristinHenry I feel like "if only Mastodon had done <small thing>" applies to awfully many sources of community conflict over the years... 😕

Seriously, if Mastodon would rename 'CW' to 'Subject' or 'Subject/CW', it would alleviate so many hassles and conflicts while helping folks adjust to Mastodon norms.

As an Admin of a Topic Based community instance, in the years since the Twitter takeover, the biggest challenge our moderation team has faced has been to get dudes (yes, it's almost always dudes), to add CWs to certain topics.

Simply calling it 'Subject' would have helped in maybe 50% of conflicts over our asking for CWs.

Showing me a paywall for an article, but only below the fold once I've already started reading, is a very good way to ensure that I will never visit or link to your site again.

US politics and clinical trial regulation 

The STAT news podcast hosts wonder why the medical device regulators were cut more harshly than the drug development regulators

And not to state the obvious but

Musk owns Neuralink

ropol, probably good 

Lmao the neo-nazi presidential candidate got arrested

Not for the nazi shit, for "ties with the Russian state" (🙄) but still probably a good thing that it happened lmao

grumbling, noise 

A leafblower is not a tool for cleaning your goddamn vehicle! Fuck off!

"De historisch hoge prijs voor koffie stuwt de winst van koffiebedrijf JDE Peets op. Het moederbedrijf van onder andere Douwe Egberts en Senseo heeft afgelopen jaar bijna de helft meer winst behaald dan in het jaar daarvoor. [...] Volgens JDE Peets overstijgen de resultaten de verwachtingen, onder andere door een zeer sterke stijging van de koffieprijs. De prijzen zijn hier meer dan verdubbeld."

Duidelijk. Die 'hoge koffieprijzen' zijn dus voornamelijk het gevolg van winstbejag van Westerse tussenhandelaren zoals JDE Peets, en hebben weinig te maken met het meer (moeten) betalen bij de bron, de boeren die het daadwerkelijk verbouwen.

Een verrassing is het niet, droevig is het wel.

#GoodWords

“What radicalized you? Nothing. Not wanting people to starve and suffer is not radical, it’s normal. Stop saying it’s radical to be base level empathetic, and start asking what made people into sadists. Call out sick behavior, because I’m tired of people thinking kindness shouldn’t be the default.”

—credit Tara Belle Enoch

political assassinations (2) 

I don't talk about this kind of topic often, because it's very easy for people to steamroll the nuance and misconstrue or misrepresent what I said.

Don't make me regret this.

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political assassinations 

Something I think isn't talked about enough, is that political assassinations are neither fundamentally effective nor ineffective; it all depends on the context.

Broadly speaking, assassinating someone to stop them from causing damage doesn't work. In relation to my last boost; it's the underlying systems where the harm comes from, the individuals in charge are 'just' their avatars. Shooting Trump would not stop things in the US from falling apart.

But that doesn't mean that there's no purpose to assassinations either. A good example would be the UnitedHealthcare shooting; it didn't directly stop UnitedHealthcare from causing harm, but it sure did spook the hell out of the entire healthcare insurance industry.

Less claims got rejected for a while; harmful policy changes got cancelled; executives of various insurance providers suddenly felt threatened and were more careful with what they did or said publicly. These were indirect but useful effects.

It wasn't removing a CEO that made the change; it was connecting very visceral consequences for the perpetrator, to the harm being caused, making other executives afraid of exercising their power. The public and sensational nature of the shooting contributed to this effect.

Should a whole society be run on this concept? Absolutely the fuck not. Can political assassinations be an effective political tool for dealing with gross power imbalances where other solutions have proved ineffective? Certainly, as long as you have the right expectations.

There are numerous times where I think "if that person simply had better aim, the world would be so very different".

But then I remember that where we are right now globally is not down to one or two evil people - but the result of rot in many social, economic, and governmental systems. The people we think are making evil choices are avatars for the system, more than individuals.

We have to fix the systems.

EDIT: They're still evil assholes. I just mean they're replacable, not unique.

Can anyone (possibly at a French university) get me a copy of Afnor XP P99-405-6? “Billettique appliquée aux transports - Règles de codage et d'interopérabilité pour la billettique (INTERCODE) - Partie 6 : logement des données dans un code-barres”

re: Massive thread of JS/browser ecosystem thoughts 

@baldur I feel like the sort-of missing component in this analysis is who we're actually building for. Less "what do companies do/want today" and more "what do we actually need as a society and what do we need from browsers to support that".

If we take the current featureset of major browsers as a given, then that kind of preemptively removes any possibility of a solution, as that featureset is (often seemingly deliberately) far bigger than would plausibly be needed to support real-world needs of people. At a certain scale, there simply are no sustainable solutions anymore.

So I think that if we want to find a solution to this situation, we should start thinking about "what can we afford to remove from the picture?". Define our own playing field, instead of playing by the rules of the industry.

And I don't mean in terms of exhorting people to stop using particular features, but more in terms of "if a competing browser were to be built, what does it actually strictly need to support to be pragmatically useful, and is that a small enough set to be able to do it sustainably?".

(This also means explicitly shifting the framing from "what do companies want" to "what do *people* want". The industry is functionally a malicious actor here, not the target audience.)

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