Well I didn’t want to have a bio, but Lemmy doesn’t let me null it out, so I guess I’ll figure out something to put here later.

  • 0 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 10th, 2024

help-circle








  • I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It’s Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you’re firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don’t think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it’s interesting to consider things like whether there’s a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we’re in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.




  • Not sure if that really fits because I don’t recall any other prominent Republicans having issues with handling classified information/documents at the time.

    And Hillary definitely did mishandle classified information (whether it was marked as such or not) and sent it on an insecure personal email server instead of via SIPR or Top Secret channels. Trump, it turns out, did much worse during his presidency and was non-cooperative during his investigation. Biden also appears to have mishandled classified documents, but was at least cooperative with his investigation. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, we should be holding all the careless/negligent old boomers we keep electing accountable for mishandling classified information/documents. We should be holding them to at least the same standard we hold service members and government employees/contractors to and not giving them a free pass.

    There’s nothing that’s going to convince me that Democrats’ pushing onward with Hillary as a candidate instead of choosing Bernie, while downplaying her perfectly legitimate email scandal along with the DNC’s own fuckery helping her cheat during the primary debates, wasn’t responsible for her losing the presidency and giving us the nightmare of a Trump presidency instead. The timing of Jim Comey’s investigation concluding sucked, but she shouldn’t have done what she did and it’s entirely her fault.

    But yeah, I guess we can still mock GOP whataboutism with the “buttery males” thing if it keeps making us feel better.


  • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninjatopolitics @lemmy.worldThe GOP Is Done with Democracy
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I certainly am in favor of a popular vote for president. The only reason anyone would want the president elected by a convoluted system whereby our votes don’t directly count toward who we want to represent us all is because the system is currently benefiting their side disproportionately. The only reasons the electoral college exists at this point are to give some states an outsized weight on the end result and to override the will of the people in the form of faithless electors. But electors could’ve prevented the disastrous Trump presidency and chose not to, so if they’re going to rubber stamp an unpopular and unqualified candidate, they are not fulfilling their original purpose.

    The only way I’m in favor of keeping the electoral college is if we uncap the size of the House of Representatives (which I think we should do anyway). The House no longer represents the makeup of the entire American public because it’s now unnaturally skewed conservative and each representative represents over 700,000 constituents. If we’d kept expanding the House about the same rate we used to (and should), we’d have almost 700 representatives. This system is increasingly unfair and undemocratic.


  • I see, well I guess the real question is whether it can be improved at the server/protocol level and my answer is I don’t know. There’s some handshaking that clearly has to occur between your instance and the other instance to load the initial community state and I don’t know where that process can be optimized. I think I’ve seen people mention tools that have been created to automatically subscribe a dummy account on your instance to all the communities on the largest instances to kind of bootstrap the process for other users, but I don’t have a link to such a tool handy.

    Edit, and there’s never going to be a guarantee that your server can talk to their server until you try clicking the link because the other server could be overloaded, down, or blocking your server.



  • Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

    I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That’s what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it’s just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn’t say “self host Beeper” on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they’re showing you how to set up with Matrix.