People tend to get the wrong idea from the story of David and Goliath. That story isn't about a small guy defeating a big guy. That's a story about somebody bringing a gun to a knife fight. Slings absolutely kicked ass in the ancient world. Goliath never stood a chance. Besides, David has been fighting goddamned lions before that point. Meanwhile modern experts have determined that Goliath likely suffered from a host of mental and physical disabilities due to his gigantism. Like, the bible describes him as needing to be guided by attendants to the battlefield because he couldn't see right. David had that fight in the bag from the first moment, and anyone who paid attention knew it. Modern audiences misunderstand the story because they don't know what a powerful weapon a sling is.
The Greeks didn't understand asexuality and thought it was hubris, since the only examples of ace people they did accept were literal gods. Narcissus was 16 when he died. A 16 year old who constantly gets sexually harassed has the right to be a little rude in rejecting people. Ameinias, for example, asked for the 16 year old's hand in marriage multiple times. If you want to say hounding a mid-pubescent child for sex is acceptable in any cultural context, then I'm going to view you the same way I view the ancient Greeks: as a pedophile.
Me: Just commenting on how much trouble the customers are having, boss. I should probably ask if they want a hint.
You can self-host an artificial neural network, just like you can self-publish a book, but that's not where the money is. The AIs that most people are using are owned by corporations, just like the distribution channels for selling books are owned by corporations. That means the efficiency gains won't be passed on to the consumer. They'll let you play with it as first, while they gain market share, but pretty soon it'll back to the capitalist norm. When you publish an epic poem using ChatGPT 7 and make a million dollars, OpenAI will just sue you, and say their AI made the work so they deserve the money. Something like that will happen, and it'll go back to normal, just with the corporations that own the capital making even more money.
Why do you think we're still working 40 hours a week, despite all the gains in efficiency from technology over the past century? Wait, scratch that. Women entered the workforce, so now the average household works 80 hours a week when they used to work 40. We're working twice as much, even though technology made us 10 times as productive. Why aren't we all doing 2 hour workweeks like in The Jetsons? Well, Karl Marx predicted that this would happen, because the owning class has the capital, and we live in a capitalist system. The gains in efficiency only benefit the capital holders. You work twice as much to produce 20 times the wealth, and all that wealth just goes to some rich guy sipping martinis on a megayacht. Even if you work for a small business, the big ones just use their market dominance to squeeze your boss and get the wealth you produced anyway. Technology won't save us. We need to fundamentally restructure our economic system, so ownership is no longer equivalent to control.
Well being an author, you're entitled to royalties. It's different for wage and commission workers. You keep getting paid as long as the books keep selling, but they only get paid once. It's called capitalism, it's an economic system in which control of the economy lies with the owners of capital. Capital is the means of production, the stuff people need in order to produce works of value. At a farm, capital is the soil and tools. At a mine, it's the earth and machinery. At a factory, it's the shipping contracts and the lathes.
At a book publisher, capital is the printers and presses, yes, but that's not all. It's also the abstract idea of intellectual property, which doesn't actually exist on the physical plane. Intellectual property only exists in the law, it's not a real material thing. Humans invented it. There's no way a farm can produce more crops than the soil will grow. And no way a mine can produce more ore than what's in the veins. But a computer can produce a million copies of a book for pennies in electricity costs. And I'll prove that to you by pointing at social media, where a 10 megabyte video that lasts for twenty seconds is shared without a single thought, and the company makes up the cost of distribution on ads, which only cost pennies per view. A TXT of the entire works of Homer is less than 10 megabytes. And we use PDFs instead of TXTs, despite the massively increased size, because size just isn't a relevant issue. It's too cheap to bother worrying about, it doesn't matter.
We didn't have copyright before the invention of the printing press, because there was no point. Back then, if you wanted a thousand copies of a book, you sent a manuscript to a monastery and got the monks to copy it. And a thousand books would have cost a king's ransom to produce. But when it became possible to copy intellectual works at low cost, publishing houses pressured the government to invent artificial scarcity in order to maintain profits. So that it would still be expensive for consumers to buy books, and publishers could pocket the gains from the printing press. And with the digital age, that fact is dialed up to 11. They're laughing their way to the bank. The publishing industry isn't in danger, they're more profitable than ever. Technology made copying works easier, but e-books still cost the same amount as paperbacks. The profitability of publishing is at a record high. I want more people to use Libgen, so that their profitability goes back to what it was before the internet, and so that they have to get competitive again. When profitability is guaranteed by law, as in this case, companies start to ignore what's good for customers and for workers like you. They don't need to listen to anyone. You and I both want them in a weaker position, so that you can push them harder in negotiations and so that prices are better for us. Students are paying hundreds of dollars per semester for online copies of textbooks, it's ridiculous. Tools like Libgen give ordinary people the power to break the laws that enable this power imbalance. That's justice.
They can pay the workers using the gigantic piles of money they have lying around from decades of exploiting customers and workers. And in fact, they already did, because the books Libgen is pirating already exist. You think Pearson is leaving wages unpaid until they hit a sales quota? No way, those books already got made and the workers already got paid. Some of those books are decades old, and Libgen is the only place you can get them aside from rare booksellers and libraries, and the court still awarded damages to a company that no longer even sells the product. It's crooked.
But all those people aren't publishers. The publishers are the ones owed money by Libgen, and the publishers can eat my shorts. The translators, editors, layouters, illustrators, printers and binders already got paid their wage/comission by the publishers. And besides, printers and binders aren't making digital books, so bringing them into the conversation is bad faith nonsense.
They're not fictional, they're mythical. Here's the difference between reality, fiction, and myth: Fiction is made out of the rearranged parts of reality. Myth is made out of fiction that people thought was important. And reality is made out of myth that people took too literally.
That's ass. People just wanna read. Words are free to copy.
My overall point is that Putin's actions are having the consequence of expanding NATO and the American Empire. Putin isn't opposing western imperialism, he's making it stronger. Russia is the number 1 recruiter for NATO
No, not equally. One more molecule of CO2 increases the risk. If you're going to use that logic, then I might as well drunk drive everywhere because there's already cars on the road and therefore potential for an accident. It's poison logic.
It's the kind of pro russian imperialism bullshit where I make fun of Putin, call Russia stans NPCs, point out that Russia's pointless war is only making the US stronger, and celebrate the fact that Ukraine is stomping Russia's pathetic ass. Does that clear things up for you?
Walking drunk is safer than taking a cab unless the cab is electric. When you walk drunk, you risk your own life and maybe one other person. When you take a fossil cab, you risk everyone's lives forever.
You left your SI in the link
Actually, Earth is around about the largest that rocky planets tend to get. Look at the gap between Earth and Uranus, it's huge. Planets in the middle size are rare. This planet is a super-earth type planet.
Gender ain't in the pants, it's in the brain.
I notice that your big comment only mentions liberals and conservatives. If you don't like the way liberals and conservatives approach men's issues, here are some leftist descriptions of issues facing men:
Men are dying in pointless wars. We need to end predatory military recruiting strategies, and pursue a culture of international peace. Downsizing the military is also a top priority.
Men are having trouble affording houses. We need to build more high density housing, which will require ending R1 zoning laws and investing heavily in public transit. We should also pursue serious reforms to reduce or eliminate the profitability of landlording.
Men's mental health is suffering. We need to open up psychologist and psychiatrist registration criteria to get more professionals in the workforce, and we need to mandate more paid time off for workers. Single payer healthcare will also help.
Men are finding it difficult to provide for families. We need to increase sex education and access to birth control. We should also reduce the number of hours in a full workweek and raise the minimum wage, now that housewives are no longer the norm. Basic income for children would greatly alleviate financial issues for fathers.
Infant males are receiving genital mutilation for religious reasons or in an attempt to reduce masturbation. We need to criminalise infant circumcision.
Yes, after cars are banned. Bicycles, especially bicycles carrying children, are allowed on sidewalks until then.
Boycotting is doing nothing. If 99 people do nothing and 1 person buys the game, studio still makes revenue.
You know what you can do to stop bad games practices? Share resources on how to do piracy. Shoplift copies of the game and dump them in the trash. Write to your politicians and ask for customer protections reform. DDoS their servers. Use the internet to bully and troll people who admit to playing the game. Cancel people who stream the game.
I'm not going to name names here, because there's multiple places doing this and also I forgot what instance I saw it on, but I've noticed something disturbing with the automated repost bots. You know, those bots that copy whole Reddit communities over to Lemmy with tons of automated posts? I don't like them in general because when I reply to a post I like the OP to actually see my reply, but this issue is more ethical. It's the automated duplication of porn from Reddit to Lemmy.
Now, I know that these models have consented to their images being shared on the internet. However, in my own personal opinion, porn models should have some amount of control over the manner in which their image is shared on a public forum. In this case, the people posting their naked bodies do not have control over how the image is shared. They can't decide to delete it if they revoke consent later, and they can't report creepy comments on their pictures. In most cases, they probably don't even know what Lemmy is, and yet their images are getting search indexed and shared with people. There's no creative control over the distribution by the person whose body is in the picture. I consider that a form of non-consensual intimate media. I don't think these bots should be allowed to repost porn without asking the permission of the user who originally shared the media.
You used to be able to hold ALT, and your mouse would unlock and you could mouse over your abilities and read about them. You could also ping the map to communicate with teammates with ALT. You can still hold ALT and press the number keys to upgrade your abilities, but ALT doesn't let you mouse over stuff anymore. You can still unstick the mouse with TAB, but that brings up the whole scoreboard UI. Why did Valve straight up remove a functionality from the game?
17 days ago, @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world banned @Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net from !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world for 2 weeks. The cited reason was Admitting to being a troll: "I'm an agent of chaos." lemmyshitpost does not have a rule against trolling, so even if this claim is true, there are still no grounds for a ban.
https://lemmy.ca/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&modId=729060&userId=391830 !
While we no longer have access to the thread in which this quote was allegedly said, the modlog would seem to indicate that it was related to this post, which shows a man complaining that he's never been privy to private conversations between girls and their fathers, and a dad mocking him in reply. The body furthermore elaborates in meme form that people are being misogynist in the comments.
Misogynists and other varieties of bigots often complain that the inclusion of women and minorities is political and divisive, and thus that we should not discuss feminism in polite company. Track_Shovel's meme is feminist, and FlyingSquid's problem with Track_Shovel appears to contain the same essence - that Track_Shovel's feminist posting is apparently intended to create conflict; the definition of trolling.
FlyingSquid's association between being an agent of chaos, and posting with intent to create offense, is an unfounded leap in logic. Chaos is actually an important religious concept, so influential that it forms one of the pillars of the morality system in Dungeons and Dragons, alongside Law, Good, and Evil. Back in the real world, various religions have painted chaos as either bad or good, depending on the values of the religion. Many religions describe chaos as a primordial force predating the gods' creation of the world. The Greeks venerated, or at least respected, the chaos goddess Eris. Discordianism, a cult originating in the 1960s, worships both Eris and the concept of chaos.
FlyingSquid has a history of mod abuse when the topic of religion is raised. In this post, FlyingSquid violates the rules of a community they themselves mod, concerning hate speech against religions. This ban fits into that pattern. Track_Shovel has the religious right to worship and to act on behalf of chaos, however they see it, as long as they do not harm anyone else. Their post to lemmyshitpost was not harmful, and was offensive only to misogynists. Supporting women's freedoms and safety is consistent with the values of Discordianism and other chaos-worshipping religions, and is not trolling. FlyingSquid's analysis of the situation as being intended to get a reaction out of misogynists, rather than as intended to affirm the safety of women, dismisses women's safety and silences feminist speech.
Just played a match with Bebop and I felt very limited by my powerset. It was great at first, me and my lane buddy were dominating the game. Most pushes, most kills, most souls. But once the game got to the teamfight phase, it all fell apart. The enemies stayed as far from me as they could, and I couldn't get enough burst damage in with my hook before they ran away, and they usually had better move speed than me. It felt like my only good ability at that point was the hyper beam. And sure, I was surprisingly survivable in 1v1s, and the hyper beam could really help a push, but any time the hyper beam was on cooldown I felt like I could do nothing unless I caught an enemy alone.
How do y'all play bebop in the midgame? Are there any upgrades that make up for bebop's weaknesses? I followed the suggested build up until I started getting my ass kicked, then switched to lifesteal. Lady Gheist and Shiv were the biggest pains in my butt.
I've told this story on Lemmy a couple of times since being banned from Blahaj Zone, and I'll tell it again.
I once posted a meme to a Blahaj community I moderated in which someone named Obvious_Troll@hexbear.net was attacking a trans person. It was a political meme, and I'll try to avoid saying what the political viewpoint was so that this thread doesn't get derailed. But as part of the meme, Obvious_Troll was being transphobic, and the reader was expected to agree that transphobia is bad and Obvious_Troll is... an obvious troll. The username wasn't actually important to the meme, I was just including a picture of a Lemmy comment and had to include a name, so I made one up.
Ada then messaged me to say that the post would be removed unless I redacted Obvious_Troll's name. Ada said that Obvious_Troll is a real, trans lemmy user, and I'm not to attack them. There is nobody on hexbear named Obvious_Troll, I made that username up.
So Ada defended a fictional transphobic troll, deciding they were trans for some reason. The troll's username was not the point of the meme, the point was what they were saying. So I made up a nonsense username to support the point of the meme. I don't think anyone would choose the username Obvious_Troll unless they wanted to be seen as a troll. As near as I can tell, Ada defended Obvious_Troll because they were from Hexbear, and Ada seems to think every Hexbear user is trans. Even a made-up one who wants to be seen as a troll and who harasses trans people. Why did Ada hyperfocus on the instance name, and not notice that the username was ridiculous? I don't know. I don't understand it.
Blahaj is intended to be a safe space for trans people. And Ada's intention with asking for redaction of this fake made up name was, somehow, to protect a trans person. And that's good. But it's really weird that Ada thought the way to protect trans people, is by defending fictional transphobic trolls.
EDIT: So, the discussion got derailed not by politics as I expected, but by Ada claiming Obvious_Troll is a real person again. Here's the original post in which Obvious_Troll is being transphobic and the reader is supposed to agree that transphobia is bad: !
In this guide I will tell you how to put absolutely any video instead of an intro or menu background...
(I will explain more about the drama surrounding Flying Squid if people don't already know about it)
The community /c/soulism@lemmy.blahaj.zone was removed by the instance admins two weeks ago. The community contained only memes and discussion of the ideas of soulism. There were no attacks against anyone. Here is the admin's explanation of the situation:
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https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/9875313
Transcript:
ADA: The post you linked to by MindTraveller is an active misrepresentation of events by them
Traveller and I are not “in agreement” about much of anything. Their politics are very far removed from mine
This is the text of the message I sent advising that I was shutting the group down.
> After consideration, I’ve decided that non voters does not really fit the stated goals of blahaj zone. Your motives for creating it seem based on a personal vendetta, and whilst your views are genuine, nothing constructive comes from the community. All it does is create division, because its sole purpose is to target others, without really focusing on any progressive ideas or discussion of its own.
> At the moment, it’s causing more harm than good to the overall community.
> I’ll leave the community open, so that if you choose to set the community up on another instance, you will have the opportunity to direct them to the new location.
Given the post which you linked, (which I had not seen until now) I will be removing Traveller and the new community, because once more, the goal appears to be to create division
The goal of blahaj zone is not political. The goal is to allow trans people to have a space where they can exist on their own terms, without having to pretend to be someone they’re not. My own political views are closer to Links/LibertyHub than nonvoters or its ilk. Yet as long as there is no bigotry or gatekeeping, then trans people with politics at odds with my own are welcome. It’s why we have an “armed queers” community, despite my own strong distaste for gun culture.
It is communities/posters that exist primary to create division, without adding anything positive back, that have no place here.
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This comment contains only one side of the discussion I had with Ada about Non-Voters and Soulism, here is the full context (top is newest, bottom is oldest):
Transcript:
ADA: Hey there. After consideration, I’ve decided that non voters does not really fit the stated goals of blahaj zone. Your motives for creating it seem based on a personal vendetta, and whilst your views are genuine, nothing constructive comes from the community. All it does is create division, because its sole purpose is to target others, without really focusing on any progressive ideas or discussion of its own.
At the moment, it’s causing more harm than good to the overall community.
I’ll leave the community open, so that if you choose to set the community up on another instance, you will have the opportunity to direct them to the new location.
MINDTRAVELLER: Thanks for letting me know. I don’t mind if nonvoters is gone. It served its purpose. The guy who was banning trans people and calling us liberals for not wanting to die is no longer in power. The Blahaj community is no longer divided. We achieved unity. And sure, some people are whining that they have to get along with others now, but the tide is against them. I’ll see if there’s a way to lock the community and prevent new posts. I want to keep the most recent post visible so in two months when the transphobes start whining about Kamala I can link that post and tell them “called it.”
MINDTRAVELLER: There we go, all locked up. No new posts or comments.
MINDTRAVELLER: Also, your mention of constructive politics gave me an idea. I want to create a soulist community on Blahaj. Something like https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulism101/. That place has been a ghost town since the APIcalypse, but the soulist movement has been going strong on Discord. It should have a place on Lemmy too. Plus, it would dramatically reduce the number of people mischaracterising soulism on the fediverse. The only attacks shall be against capitalism, the cisheteropatriarchy, the state, and reality.
ADA: That sounds like a much better fit!
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Non-Voters was completely locked up, and I made a post explaining the decision to close it, which both Ada and I agreed on, as you can see in this message log. In Ada's later public comment, she says the post was a misrepresentation of events. She said that she and I did not agree. However we can clearly see in this chatlog that when Ada told me the community was closing, I agreed to close it. And when I asked to open a new community not focused on any form of criticism of others users, she agreed too. If I had not agreed to do as Ada said and close the community, there would not be a post from me announcing the community's closure. So the idea that Ada and I did not agree to close the community is nonsense.
At the time that /c/soulism was removed from lemmy.blahaj.zone, I had in fact already been unbanned from /c/libertyhub by the community's mods. Ada cites division as the reason for the removal, but there was no division at this time, except between some Liberty Hub users and their own mods. Here is the log:
Transcript:
MINDTRAVELLER: Hi, I’d like to appeal my ban on Liberty Hub. I never broke the rules, I only complained about LOC’s overly strict moderation style. I was banned with the reason “off topic”, which isn’t a rule.
KITTENZRULZ123: I unbanned you however know that you have broken the rules, if you make me regret this act of leniency I will reban you.
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At this time, the division between Non-Voters, myself, Liberty Hub, kittenzrulz, and linkopenschest had been resolved. Non-Voters had never been a community specifically designed to target Liberty Hub, and in fact linkopenschest and kittenzrulz both had posts on the community that engaged with the concept in good faith, and which I did not remove. They were never banned from the community, and they decided to reverse my ban from the community. So the three of us had been engaged in a good-faith disagreement from the start, minus one impulsive ban that was reversed, and we had already set our differences aside. I became an outright ally of Liberty Hub when they decided to relax their excessive bans, and they were exploring the possibility of treating me the same way.
Here is where I diverge from pure fact to analysis and speculation: Since division still existed between the users of Liberty Hub and the mod team, and the users perceived Ada as an ally of the mod team and of myself (because I was cooperating with everything Ada told me and getting along well with the LH mods), Ada panicked. The fact that I was getting along with everyone and making compromises was causing the conspiracy theorists to target Ada. So Ada manufactured a drama between her and myself to make it clear that she did not approve of me, even if I was agreeing to do everything she told me. The unity, compromise, and reconciliation was a bad look for Ada in the eyes of the tinfoil hat people. Ada chose to regain the tinfoil hats' favour by inventing a fake disagreement between herself and me. That's the reason /c/soulism was removed, despite hosting zero offensive content and never even having one of its posts or comments reported by anyone. Ada needed to conjure up a fight from nowhere to look good to the conspiracy people.