ragebutt

You want a commercial microwave, basically, except the wattage will often be higher. Try restaurant auctions for a cheap(er) one

Collective buying and building of such a project means that there is not universal standard or regulation and the project falls apart when there is disagreement. Given the scale this is inevitable

Look at lemmy for example: most servers play nicely but occasionally you get the server like exploding heads that cause the overwhelming majority to defederate

Amazon has 300 warehouses across the US and another 175 worldwide according to a quick web search. That’s a lot of sites that have to play nice with each other. If even one of them starts having poor practices, doing something offensive, something disruptive, etc. it may cause a lot of the others to not want to work with them. If you have one that is especially shit stirring then it may cause a huge portion of the network to cut ties.

But unlike lemmy now it’s not just some social media where you jump to a new server. Now companies have their products held hostage. Now people in that region potentially have services significantly disrupted. Now your whole system is undermined and a bezos type can swoop in to prove his is much better and more trustworthy.

A state controlling it (which would inherently happen with collective ownership if done correctly, a pseudo state would be created given the scale) would introduce regulation and enforcement to ensure consistency in operation. It is then the responsibility of the constituents to hold representatives accountable to ensure regulations and enforcement are meaningful

I worked at a psychiatric hospital with an operating budget of 75 million dollars that paid the ceo 750,000usd plus bonuses. She hired all of her children and their spouses for six figure executive positions plus bonuses.

We made $11/hr to work with patients that were often violent, we were regularly exposed to bodily fluids. I still have significant neck and back pain from 2 permanent cervical and thoracic spine injuries I got on the unit, 15+ years later

Our annual holiday bonus? $12. Same number, for four years. The fifth year they eliminated the bonus and replaced it with a hoodie. I quit soon after to go back to school. It was a gift card too, not even actual money.

the staffing numbers were always wildly different so it wasn’t like they did bonus money divided by number of people. I never figured out how they arrived at such an odd number. My best guess is the gift card store (a local grocer) donated the cards, which is the only reason we even got a bonus

amazons true strength is ultimately in their logistics. Amazon itself isn’t a bad idea in theory but the execution is poor because of cutthroat capitalism exploiting workers and privatization. Ultimately the idea of sellers being able to ship their goods to communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized. The marketplace can be federated, sure

you might need to work on making peace with your mortality. it’s a bummer and a reallllll tough one

Another thing to consider is the idea of setting events in your life. We all generally understand the cause and effect relationship of triggers (though sometimes they can be tricky to identify). A setting event, or distant antecedent/trigger, is similar in that there is a cause and effect relationship but it is not always obvious to see the relationship because they can be spread out. As an example: you are in a long term relationship and get dumped. This is now a setting event. For the next few weeks (or maybe longer) your behavior is modified as a result. It is not a direct “trigger” in the traditional cause and effect understanding. It is an albatross around your neck that increases the likelihood of you being depressed, irritable, anxious, etc.

Consider this effect and then we can analyze: is there something like this present in your life at the moment? Existential dread is a common one for a lot of people I work with right now given the state of well, everything, and it increases things like this for some people. Addressing the setting event here is challenging because we are potentially right back at the same conundrum. Making peace with climate change, potential government being overtaken by right wing nuts, trans erasure, etc is up there with making peace with mortality in terms of difficulty. Unplugging from news and social media can help although that may just feel like escapism and denial (to be fair it is, a little bit, but that’s not necessarily bad. Sometimes you need to prioritize your functioning)

Also never a bad idea to get a physical check up when new mental health symptoms crop up. You’re probably fine, I cannot stress this enough, but it’s especially a good idea if you haven’t had a check up in a while (eg over a year) or if the issues come with a lot of physical discomfort that is new. I again cannot stress enough that you are probably fine and this is precautionary

Of course it could be a million other things too. Consider talking to a therapist if you are able to do so. If you don’t have insurance or have shitty insurance open path collective is a directory of therapists that offer counseling for $30-$70 per session. https://openpathcollective.org/

Silica gel says do not eat but it’s non toxic and generally harmless if eaten. Even if you eat a ton of it you generally only see mild GI symptoms like bloating and diarrhea. You typically pass it undigested.

Little kids can choke on it though, thus the do not eat. Also in rare situations it’s coated with cobalt which is toxic and will make you vomit but this isn’t used for consumer desiccant, especially so for food

I wonder if this is a response to someone jailbreaking all kindles ever the other day

Fuck kindles, get a different brand of ereader that just runs stripped android

This is just a pretext to reduce food stamp payments. Conservatives have used this rhetoric since the 90s to attack food stamp payments. “Welfare queens are buying STEAK with your tax dollars!”

And the overwhelming majority of antidepressants are prescribed on a voluntary basis, eg the people taking them are choosing to do so because they feel there is not a more viable option for them. There is a whole essay on why this is the case but just some key points: therapy is really expensive (often a therapist costs almost as much as a psychiatrist except it’s a weekly visit instead of monthly), effective therapy requires a lot of active buy in and effort that people often don’t have the bandwidth required to contribute due to external factors like oppressive work or family life, therapy requires a time investment, stigma, etc. essentially overprescribing is a side effect of massive systemic issues

So do you address any of these systemic issues? Do you address any of the issues related to the western diet being loaded with sugar and other carbs, that we have huge swaths of residential areas with no proper grocery stores around throughout a great deal of the US, or that our environments are so structured around cars that we walk like 50 feet a week, etc?

Nah, just create more financial stress for poor people who eat like all of us (eg, like shit). Punitive approach 100% of the time!

How about increasing the amount of ebt funds for people who do not buy an excessive amount of empty calorie food and drink? Create a base amount of funds that everyone gets and increase the amount by 2.5% for every 25% of funds used that are dedicated to “healthy foods”. So if you buy only “healthy foods” you get an extra 10% of your ebt allotment, and if you buy nothing but junk then you aren’t penalized (unless of course you count not getting the reward, I guess). But this isn’t punitive so americans hate it

Or maybe make regulations that any grocery store that opens more that 20 stores is required to maintain at least 1 store per 20 in an underserved area that will not be profitable. Adjust the regulation actively of course so that whole foods doesn’t just become 800 separate stores to circumvent the regulation or whatever. But this means that corporations have to do something to enrich communities at the expense of constant profits so americans hate it

Or any of the obvious shit people have gone on about for ages. Nationalized health care, shorter work weeks with improved wages, workers getting equitable shares of companies, robust pensions, unions, etc. but americans are brain washed to think this is commie bullshit

He was always kind of a privileged scumbag who would throw tantrums when he didn’t get his own way. He literally twists words to support his narrative going back well over a decade

He heard fireworks once and saw a black jogger in like 2013. He decided with no evidence this was a crime so he chased the guy and detained him with a fucking shotgun. Sound familiar? 7 years later the same scenario resulted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. And as a result of that during his senate run when people dug this incident up he stated he was the “chief law enforcement officer”, which was bullshit. He was mayor, but he was also really buddy buddy with the cops (technically mayors in Braddock have admin power over the cops but he basically removed that to “make the cops jobs more efficient”, except when he needed the title 10 years later for damage control). He has never apologized for this incident and actively refuses to do so.

He also barely won the mayor position the first time (literally one by a single vote) and the second time influenced the election by using his power to release his opponents arrest records to defame him

The mayor of Braddock is also a small part time position that basically paid nothing. He was able to dedicate himself to it wholeheartedly because his rich dad paid him 50 grand a year to be mayor. He also used family money on several town enrichment projects early in his tenure to win favor. He still collected his meager mayor salary despite getting daddy money.

When he encountered roadblocks to projects he circumvented traditional means and as a result limited the ability for people who lived in the town to comment or intervene in his nonsense. This was probably by design because his plan was ultimately to gentrify the town. He only wanted you there if you were like his rich dad; if you weren’t then you could fucking leave. He wasn’t interested in serving you, he was interesting in “revitalizing the town” aka removing the undesirable elements and bringing in new desirable (read: rich and white) people to replace them.

In the meantime he scored brownie points by doing some gay weddings and having some nice community projects. Bc of course, he wanted the community to be nice. He just didn’t want you to live there if you were poor.

It is absolutely no surprise that he has aligned with neoliberals, with pro israel sentiment, and even with trump. Fuck fetterman. He’s always been a privileged, classist, and racist bully who will bend the rules if it means he gets his way. The stroke changed nothing.

Interesting. I also wonder how it would fare across different models (eg user a uses chatgpt, user b uses gemini, user c uses deepseek, etc) as that may mimic real world use (such as what’s depicted in the comic) more closely

I remember when compression was popularized, like mp3 and jpg, people would run experiments where they would convert lossy to lossy to lossy to lossy over and over and then share the final image, which was this overcooked nightmare

I wonder if a similar dynamic applies to the scenario presented in the comic with AI summarization and expansion of topics. Start with a few bullet points have it expand that to a paragraph or so, have it summarize it back down to bullet points, repeat 4-5 times, then see how far off you get from the original point.

However, my extensive mermaid knowledge consists of: ariel,