• 11 Posts
  • 717 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle



  • If you want to fix institutional racism in the US you need to fix social mobility because that’s the primary mechanism by which it gets perpetuated. For that you need educational status of the parents and their tax declarations, not skin colour. You need to stop financing schools from local taxes so primary and secondary education is as good or better in poorer areas instead of having quotas lowering standards for people who got a worse education because they live in the wrong neighbourhood. You need free tertiary education.

    Focussing on race is a convenient way to ignore actually addressing the issue and instead continue to deepen societal rifts and to breed resentment among non-racialised disenfranchised people.



  • How can you actually think at all, and arrive at such a conclusion?

    Bold claim, asserting that whoever downvoted you thought before doing it. Humans short-circuit all the time, nothing you can do about that, and getting bitter or exasperated won’t help, either. Deal with it. If you want you can start your comments with something universally agreeable, that always helps, and only then get into details. “Universally agreeable” as in “agreeable to both truth and all false notions anyone on earth has at the moment”. If you want to get idiots to listen you have to start out on a common ground that they share.

    More specifically, in this case, you could’ve started your comment with a short rant about the state of availability of ADHD medication.



  • Like what Tao Te Ching says. Humans shouldn’t have too much of what they desire.

    Actually, quite the opposite: Empty spirit, full stomachs, weak will, strong bones. Will as in “determination, aspiration, ambition”, not as in the opposite of demure. Same difference as pride vs. dignity. The idea is to fulfil all base desires and devalue the fickle and temporary to nip strive and competition in the bud. The answer to “People are spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like” isn’t to preach asceticism, isn’t to leave desires unfulfilled, it’s teaching that that’s not a desire it’s a neurosis: Humans should have all they desire, problem is many don’t know what that is because they’ve been conditioned to consider contentedness shameful, instead of a base desire. What you actually want is food, shelter, health, family and friends, peace, song and exercise, being there for others as they’re there for you.


  • When placed above

    Yeah but now you don’t have a terrace you have something that’s in permanent shade. Long story short: People still want to be able to see the sky. You can, in principle, plaster a whole city with solar pavers, you can’t cover it all in solar roofs.

    Things like solar roadways don’t make sense because a) cars much less trucks are way more destructive and b) you don’t really need to see the sky when driving. But a terrace? If there’s any place for ground solar, then there. The question isn’t whether it’s a good solar installation, the question is whether it’s a good terrace paving and if the extra costs are made up for by electricity production then sure, why not.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy TED talks suck now
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    7 days ago

    There are legitimately valuable talks, like this one. As a format it’s very good to deliver specialised knowledge in a concise, impactful way thing is you need to pay attention that people actually have something to say – and that there’s a good reason to put it in a concise format for a general audience. That’s rarer than you think, thus you get tons of slop and platitudes. And TBH the only reason I know that talk exists is because SPJ is giving it, I was already over TED talks in general at that point.





  • So… user-curated default subs. Probably less relevant on lemmy because communities aren’t as fine-grained as following individual users but I don’t think we even have instance-wide default subs, just the all feed.

    A “people who joined your communities also joined these communities” mechanic would also be a good idea I think. Run dimensionality reduction over the data once a fortnight and just give people the results, that is, tell them which bubble they’re in.