While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.

America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.

That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.

Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.

There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment

So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.

We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.

We have all just accepted the term “Human Resources” as something that I guess we aren’t going to revolt against

I’ve heard it’s a generational divide thing between “you’re welcome” and “no problem.” I’m an older millennial and tend to use “you’re welcome” in more formal settings and “no problem” in more casual settings.

I use “no worries” if someone is apologizing but sometimes I suppose if someone is thanking me for some slight inconvenience I’ll also use “no worries.”

I read an article that older generations think “no problem” is a rude replacement for “you’re welcome” which is funny because they mean the same thing. The thing you are telling the person they are welcome to is your help and time because it was not a problem.

Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

I think even a young child could understand “we don’t talk like that” I don’t really see the alternative as particularly more gentle.

If a young child is figuring out what “self” is, I think it would be even better to provide them guidance that could help them answer that question. “Please use kind language” is just a request / order, I imagine someone might think it’s more gentle because it contains the word “please” but I’m not really sure

I think either phrase could be delivered in a gentle or aggressive manner. I would support telling a child “we speak kindly to others” as a sort of middle ground. Even better would be to explain the importance of this value to them “we speak kindly to others. It’s important that we treat each other with kindness” and then to follow up any questions about why, to provide space for the child to understand the value you want to communicate instead of just the instruction.

I do think raising up a child with kindness is good, but our children will not always have an adult nearby to tell them to be nice. Our goal should be to give them the values that guide their conduct in our absence and help them navigate the world.

There’s a weird feel from this comic for me. I’m glad that these two people could have an amicable divorce. I think the thing that feels off is how casual the decision feels in the comic. I suspect this might be why some people are having a negative reaction as well.

Even if you think marriage isn’t forever, it’s still a promise to love and care about someone, to cherish them and share your life with them. I think if you’ve been in a marriage and seen your loved one through hard times together, this comic just feels capricious. A discussion about ending such an important component of your life happening in the span of two panels in a car ride just feels abrupt and unserious.

I imagine in real life the conversation was more serious and the impact of changing you relationship from one of romantic love to friendship weighed on both parties more than the comic has space to show.

If you’ve loved and supported your spouse through difficult and unexpected change or been the recipient of that love and support, this comic can feel dismissive. If you’ve gone through the heartache of losing your special person, even if they are still a part of your life, the celebratory tone sounds wrong.

I am happy that they can separate and still care about each other, but I also understand why people feel like something is wrong about the comic.

I always tip my hair cutting person 100%. I wanted a hair cut, the hair cut cost $x, that person literally does the entire thing often with their own equipment that they paid for. The place will charge me $x because that’s what the haircut is worth to me but I know the person that actually physically cut my hair with their skills and labor won’t get $x and I think that’s bullshit.

In many other kinds of transactions someone can go “oh well the business deserves a cut of the profits because they provided the ingredients, or they stocked the inventory, or yadda yadda yadda”. But the hair cut is the one place where with my own eyes I witness the full body of labor occur and see who does it. That person deserves the value that their labor produced, not some owner sitting off in their beach house doing plenty I’m sure but one thing I’m damn sure they aren’t doing is cutting my fucking hair.

People act in accordance with their notion of identity. There was a study about voting that showed that getting people to identify themselves as a voter resulted in statistically significant increase in them actually voting than asking them if they would vote or having them pledge to vote.

For this reason I take issue with replacing “we don’t talk like that” with “please use kind words”

The former helps form the child’s identity as a person with values, one of which, is not using mean words. The latter is a plea to abide by the parent’s values.

It is not cruel to raise your child to have values and to instill those values. I would argue it is cruel to deprive a child of those core values and replace it with some sort of obedience to authority which is what the updated phrase instills.

TIL updated my post to reflect that

“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.

Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority

Thanks, TheReturnOfPEB for correcting me

Based on your interpretation every group could simply be redefined into illegitimate.

• We are for democracy
• Oh so you think that monarchy is bad and you want to define yourself as excluding loyal subjects of the king! That will never be legitimate.

Leftist think that democracy should extend into the economic realm as well and what we should do with the means of production should be governed by the people and not just whoever happens to own the capital. One way to word that would be anti-capitalist, but another way would be to word it as economic democracy.

So if you require an inclusive definition for something to be legitimate, there you go. Liberals in America do not seek to do away with capitalism, you would be hard pressed to find any that do. If you support capitalism, then by the fact that capitalism’s private ownership is mutually exclusive with democratic control of the economy, you don’t support a democratic control of the economy.

You can’t have a vegan meat eater, not because of any moral assessment on veganism or meat eating, but because those two terms are mutually exclusive.

I remember back in 2015 people were saying that trump was saying that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it. I thought, “I wonder what he actually said that got chopped up and editorialized this way?”

Every day after that has been me realizing that if you dig any deeper on the stupid shit it just gets stupider. We will kill off the planet because one time trump bought a cheap led bulb that didn’t flatter his natural orange glow quite enough and now we can only have coal fired power plants. Every stupid thing he says has an even stupider story behind it which itself probably has an even stupider story behind that and on and on. It’s truly astounding

Or that people prone to fear of others would self select living in areas that provide them with fewer others

Rush Week might be a good match

This part of your post is interesting to me

If more and more people started voting 3rd party, how long would it feasibly take to enact change? 2 election cycles? 4? 10? Does it ever even happen?

Mathematically as long as the system is first-past-the-post, it always tends towards 2 major parties. Let’s say we could solve the prisoners dilemma we find ourselves caught in, it’s interesting sometimes to consider what the results of outlier scenarios would be.

So let’s imagine a world in which you could convince voters to embrace 3rd parties. Pew Research has some voter statistics that are useful https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/

Only 37% of Americans reliably voted in the last 3 elections with a roughly even split between the two major parties. So let’s use 40% with an even split to make the numbers more convenient.

So we have an America where 20% of eligible voters vote for the Democratic Party, 20% vote for the Republican Party, and 60% stay home. Let’s imagine a best case scenario for 3rd party voting where a quarter of the democrats, a quarter of the republicans, and an additional 10% of the population that would sit it out are activated by the new choices these parties represent. This america now looks like. 15% reliably vote for democrats, 15% reliably vote for republicans, 20% are willing to vote for a 3rd party and now only 50% sit out.

Because it’s first past the post voting, there are many ways that the 20% can split amongst multiple parties such that the incumbent major parties still win the plurality. It actually doesn’t take much, 2 third parties splitting as unevenly as 14% of the population and 6% of the population ends up still letting the majority party with 15% of the population win. So we come to find that even with a larger population of possible voters than the 2 major parties, they still have to work together quite a bit to win.

Now let’s further imagine that the third parties are able to hold together they form a new independent party that get at least 16% of the population to vote for them and beat the incumbent majority parties.

Have we freed ourselves from being dominated by 2 parties? No, we just switched who does the dominating. The voters in the democratic and Republican parties will see which way the wind is blowing and shuffle around until there are two parties competing again, because in fptp there is a serious penalty to spoiler votes.

Now maybe it would be worthwhile just to put new people in charge. But the most likely outcome is whoever you elect ends up bowing to the same pressures that make the current 2 parties such trash fires and the donors that wrote checks with elephants or donkeys on them to have their way will be just as capable of writing out those donations to a bullmouse.

I’m all for electoral reform and reform in the government. But make no mistake, people posting on Lemmy that you shouldn’t vote because both options suck aren’t doing it out of a serious concern about legitimizing the process. The process is flawed but there’s no outcome of the election where they go “brave patriots all over this nation sat at home and so it doesn’t count.”

Real reform would require sustained and substantial action from the populace and even if you were to prefer that method of action, it would obviously still be advantageous to vote for the candidate that you think would create policies and laws under which that grassroots action would have the highest probability of success.

I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.

That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.

For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.

My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.

If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.

So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.

This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.

I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.

The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.

A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.

People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.

The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.

RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.

I think this is the main disconnect for people.

What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.

Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.

It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.

A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.

Eventually they do need to pay back the loan, the low interest rates just make it so that they can choose to sell their stocks in the most favorable way.

This is why it makes sense for the financial institute to give out the loan in the first place.

So here’s the scenario. Let’s say you wake up tomorrow and somehow find yourself with $200M worth of stock. You are now “worth” $200M so you’d like to start living like it! You want to go buy a mansion and a nice new car and a private chef. Problem is, none of those people take stock, they all want money.

Goldman Sachs goes, “hey, I’ll loan you the money really cheap, you have to pay me back with interest, but since you have $200M in stock you can sell some of that later and pay me back”

This is great for you because you get to enjoy the mansion and new car and private chef right now. If you sold the stock right now you’d get taxed as if it were income at 38% but if you hold the stock for a few years when you sell it it will be considered capital gains and only taxed at 10% (or 15%, whichever the rate is). In addition, you don’t have to go to the stock market and sell for whatever they want right now, you can wait until the value of your stock is really high and selling is very advantageous for you.

So you do have to pay back the money, but this is still a really sweet deal because you can enjoy all the nice things right now and you get to avoid that extra ~30% you would pay in taxes if you sold it right now.

As long as the amount you saved in taxes outweighs the amount you pay in interest, this is a great deal for you. And for the financial institute it’s low risk (they extended you $10M backed by $200M in assets) and when you repay they make back enough in interest to make it worthwhile.

You get more money in your pocket, the bank gets more money in its pocket, from their point of view this was a win win. The losers are the market suffering a higher price for the stock because the supply was artificially constrained by you having access to this credit (otherwise you’d have sold shares to buy a mansion and nice car and private chef) and the taxpayer who was to shoulder a heavy tax burden because you converted your income into capital gains.

The one thing that definitely isn’t happening is Bezos or Musk or any of these other “they are only rich on paper” people clipping coupons to make ends meet. They live like rich people because the have access to plenty of money secured by their less liquid assets