• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 13th, 2023

help-circle








  • WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said the U.S. would take over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and develop it economically

    The scope of this statement is a shock, but the motivation that led to it, isn’t. That said, I hate everything about this.

    I’m not the first to bring this up, but it bears repeating. This is colonialism, plain and simple. That, in turn, is an outcome of unchecked capitalism. Practiced ideologically (i.e. as the guiding light in one’s life), it holds up “exploitation at all costs” as a virtue. Second to that is “give your competition no quarter.” Combined, that explains the current state of affairs.

    We all may be used to thinking of colonialism as some thing that ended on one more more independence days in the last 300 years or so. In reality, the engines of commerce and industry that made that happen kept right on running. Since nation-state-sized real-estate deals like this don’t come along very often anymore, these animals are quick to react and pounce before someone else figures out how to exploit the situation.

    As an aside: the attitudes and values that enabled things like the US westward expansion, slavery, classism, eradication of indigenous peoples, environmental destruction in the pursuit of minerals, pollution and litter from energy extraction, etc., are still alive and well in the population. Being this kind of evil is insanely profitable under the right conditions, which confers an outsized advantage to reproduction and social influence. Which is to say that it’s not the ideology of capitalism that propels these values to stay with us, but rather the other way around. It’s as though those colonists with exploitation in their hearts are still very much with us, and that’s something to keep an eye on.



  • Force these shitters to make their products healthier for all age groups.

    There’s a lot of nuance here, but in general I agree. Hank (of vlogbrothers and SciShow fame), summed this problem up brilliantly. To paraphrase: social media is engagement based, not quality based. Upvote/like content on all you want, but misinformation, propaganda, rage bait, and doom-scrolling fodder will dominate any platform where the only valued metric is eyeball time.

    So, the top-down solution would be to somehow strictly define how for-profit ranked media feeds and news aggregators are allowed to operate. Unintended consequences of such a law aside, I think it’s possible to legally define a “well-behaved” social media site, but it won’t be easy.






  • Reading the article, I see why this is a problem to be addressed. At the same time, I’m not sure how in the world you would directly “fix” this other than outright banning unruly customers after they cause problems.

    The best course of action might be to quietly work with restaurant managers in major airports to start watering down mixed drinks, and serve lower-gravity beer and wine, on heavy travel days. I’m mostly sure this is how amusement parks operate; they just need to consult with Disney or SixFlags on this one. The threat of airlines (or the airport) banning heavy restaurant customers might be motivation enough. That way, restaurants make more money, airlines have (maybe) less nonsense to deal with, and there’s no documented limit on beverages.