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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It’s precisely a good bell-weather! It means that the cold money monsters think gay people and their supporters have more money, and hate doesn’t have the power to punish them. It also means that good people who work for the company feel safe saying “donating resources to LGBT teen suicide prevention would be great… Advertising?” And the money monsters don’t disagree, and the bad people don’t have enough sway to squash it.

    Rainbow capitalism is a parasite that feeds on social tolerance. It’s gross that it showed up, but it couldn’t unless society was in an at least moderately healthy place.

    Just don’t fall into the trap of personifying the companies that do many people do.


  • Oh, I’m not defending BMW or any company in specific regarding Nazism. I’m saying the actions and beliefs of dead people who used to run the company are the wrong reasons for cynicism, particularly in the context of a violent and coercive regime.
    A company doesn’t have opinions so it can’t support anything, good or evil. It makes as much sense to be cynical of “posters” because there have also been evil posters.


  • While it’s not wrong to be cynical about it, this isn’t exactly the right reason. The Nazis would just take over companies and install new leadership if they were inadequately supportive.
    It’s not even “if I don’t do it, someone else will, so I may as well do it”. A lot of people did refuse to do it and were arrested or fired.
    Beyond that, everyone involved in the decision is dead now. They could have all been Nazis and that would have little bearing on if the people who work there now were.

    The reason to be cynical is because companies can’t care about things, so if they say they do it’s a lie.
    People inside the company might care, and might find a way to get the company to do something good, but that’s a person finding a way to use the company for good, not the company caring or being good.

    Unlike the Nazis, no one is forcing them to embrace pride. They do it because they think it’s a profitable demographic.


  • I would describe need to proactively go out of your way to ensure a program is simple, minimal, and carefully constructed to avoid interactions potentially outside of a restricted security scope as a “security nightmare”.

    Being possible to do right or being necessary in some cases at the moment doesn’t erase the downsides.

    It’s the opposite of secure by default. It throws the door wide open and leaves it to the developer and distro maintainer to make sure there’s nothing dangerous in the room and that only the right doors are opened. Since these are usually not coordinated, it’s entirely possible for a change or oversight by the developer to open a hole in multiple distros.
    In a less nightmarish system a program starting to do something it wasn’t before that should be restricted is for the user to get denied, not for it to fail open.

    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=Setuid

    It may be possible, but it’s got the hallmarks of a nightmare too.




  • Nono, not acknowledging the sacrifices of the first people to forage a wild hot pocket and try it, blind to the knowledge of if it was edible or thermally safe is immoral.

    When you eat a bowl of berries you’re relying on the sacrifices of unpaid and forgotten people who tried them first and didn’t die.
    When you eat a heaping bowl of pop tarts ™ you’re relying on the sacrifices of paid and forgotten people who tried them first and didn’t die in legally actionable numbers.

    The key to solving the immorality of exploiting these people is money, because money solves morality.



  • Okay?

    People disagreeing on the boundaries or details of a definition doesn’t make it not an objective definition.

    It seems pretty clear to me that tea would fall into the ultra processed category, since it’s an extraction of a highly processed ingredient. Home baking, fermentation and cheese making would all be processed because they’re a transformation of unprocessed foods or processed food ingredients like flour. I’m not incredibly familiar with the classification system so I’m not sure where a piece of uncured beef, an unprocessed food, cooked with salt, a processed food ingredient, would go. I’m thinking it would be processed, like bread, but I’m not sure where seasoning falls.

    Disagreement in the boundary conditions is pretty normal. Geologists disagree on exactly where different types of rock fall on the classification scales. Biologists disagree on a wide array of animal taxonomic boundaries.
    You wouldn’t say that geology lacks an objective definition of what is or isn’t limestone, you’d just note that some people would disagree with the classification of some samples.



  • Yes. People have conflated the term “processed food” with the higher end processing that some foods get, more correctly called ultra processed foods.

    Processing food is transforming it from one state to another. Bread is a processed food because you’ve milled the wheat. Acme® Fued lewps™ are ultra processed because the corn was dissolved in acid, reconstituted into a fiberless slurry, fortified with enough vitamins to be legally referred to as nutrition, fortified with enough sugar, salt and fats to make your body demand you eat more, then bulked with milk protein concentrates to make you feel like you’re eating something substantial and also qualify as a dairy product for tax purposes.

    The conversation would often be much clearer if people didn’t use the term for “almost all food” when thet mean the more chemistry oriented type of food.

    Even within the category of ultra processed foods there are items that are perfectly benign. Breakfast cereals can be perfectly healthy, but they’re necessarily ultra processed since you need at least minimal shelf stability.

    Processing isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s just that the worst foods are ultra processed because that’s how they did the things that make them bad, and every transformation destroys some portion of the food, and eventually you need to start adding things back in to make it keep being food, or at least appearing to be food.




  • It’s a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.

    There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn’t change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
    Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passively

    They also don’t actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn’t really special. If you can’t put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?

    If you’ve decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.

    When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn’t need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)