SpaceCowboy

SpaceCowboy , vor 12 Tagen

Yeah if it were about security they'd check the version of HTTPS, SSL, TLS and all that stuff.

SpaceCowboy , vor 20 Tagen

So you open any other image editor, click the rectangle select button, draw a rectangle, then select a move button beside the rectangle select tool, then it moves the rectangle you just selected and you think "That's fucking stupid, it should've moved the entire image, not the rectangle I just selected!"

Really?

SpaceCowboy , vor 20 Tagen

Key bindings and a good GUI aren't mutually exclusive.

Key bindings are great for people that use the app a lot and want to be more efficient at the tasks they do most often in it. But most people aren't going to be learning keyboard shortcuts the first time they use an app. And if someone uses an app a few times and find it frustrating to use, they never use it enough to want to learn keyboard shortcuts to improve their efficiency with the app.

SpaceCowboy , vor 22 Tagen

Maybe get a beret? But will it look weird if I wear a beret with my Che Guevara t-shirt?

SpaceCowboy , vor 27 Tagen

You could have told me this is is the current layout of Israel's Knesset and I would have believed you.

Proportional representation only looks good from the perspective of a spreadsheet. As soon as power dynamics enters the picture it doesn't look so good anymore.

The biggest problem with "first past the post" is the name. Politics works when people are able to compromise. Requiring that a representative is at least able to compromise enough to get the majority of votes in their community is useful for weeding out the weirdos who are incapable of compromise. Any democracy can become two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner, but in a proportional representation this result is significantly more likely. There's no one in a the "Identity and Democracy" that has to compromise to get a few more votes to get past that post, right? Just as the Left and Green parties can have 100% uncompromising dedication to the causes they care about, so can the other side. And if that side forms a coalition, the concerns of minorities won't be addressed as minorities have zero power when not in the coalition.

Well, you never know... whatever coalition that forms after you vote might not be be as extreme right as the one that formed in Israel. Cross your fingers, and hope for a good outcome from the backroom deals to form a coalition that you have no say over. And if the worst happens and you have a far right coalition running the EU, at least the numbers line up on the spreadsheet and you got to vote for a niche party that didn't have to compromise!

SpaceCowboy , vor 27 Tagen

In PR the compromises all happen in the backroom deal to form a coalition. After that they have the votes they need and don't really need to care about anyone that's outside the coalition.

In FPTP I can call my MP and complain. I'm not one out of tens of millions of votes, I'm one out of thousands of votes. A small group of people in a riding can make the MP pay attention because they could lose their job if they don't. We influence the MP, the MP influences the party. And the party needs to listen to the MP because the seat doesn't belong to the MP, it belongs to the MP. The MP could cross the floor, go independent, or even join another party, and the party loses a seat. The power dynamics flow up from the people. The people can remove the MP and the MP can take away a little bit of power from the party.

In PR, the MP exists only for show. After the election that party has X% of the vote and has X% of the seats. The job of the MP is dependent on sucking up to the party leadership. They will vote for or against what they're told to by the party leadership, so what's the point of them? Just have the party leaders there and when they vote for, X% of the vote is for the legislation. Or conducts it like a courtroom, the parties hire the best advocates they can find to read the rationale for voting for against a piece of legislation.

PR has legislative assemblies only to provide a show of representation, put people in those seats don't represent anyone except their party.

The proof is in the pudding. Israel, EU, both PR systems, both susceptible to far-right coalition politics. The UK on the other hand will soon have a center-left government while the rest of Europe will be under the far-right influence of the EU parliament. A hard Brexit was a mistake, but what's going on now only has the EU proving idiots like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to be right. I mean Nigel Farage ever being a MEP only proved what a clown show a PR parliament is.

SpaceCowboy , vor 26 Tagen

I kinda like ranked choice, but there are downsides to it. It's more complicated to count votes but that's manageable. But there is something to be said for having vote counting be simple enough that there is no doubt about the winner.

Many people may have difficulty with thinking in any kind of abstract way. Yeah it seems relatively trivial just to number candidates from most favoured to least favoured, but a lot of people will struggle with this.

A system like France's run-off system for president seems ideal to me. It's simple and having some time between the first vote and the second vote to discuss and debate (and just think about) which of the final two candidates is the best is valuable. No need for abstract thought and counting the votes is simple and less likely to be disputed (though that can happen even in a simple system a la Trump).

But it's expensive to have two rounds of voting for every election on every level. So ranked choice works well enough when having two rounds of voting isn't feasible. I mean no system is ever going to be ideal, but gotta pick the best of the imperfect options.

SpaceCowboy , vor einem Monat

Yeah, it's in the third sentence of Richard Nixon's wiki page where it's stated he's the only President to resign from office. First sentence was political positions he held, second sentence about events while he was President, third sentence about him resigning.

So maybe the wikipedia page should follow that pattern and the first sentence be about positions he's held. The second sentence should be about his record as president... so something about Trump being President at the start of the Covid Pandemic (that killed over a million Americans), passed legislation to cut taxes for the wealthy, assassinated an Iranian General, tried to weaken NATO, was impeached for withholding military aid from Ukraine for personal gain, and was impeached again for trying to overthrow the government after losing the election. Then in the third sentence it would say he was later convicted on falsifying documents while covering up a scandal so he could be elected.

I feel like this would be fair.

SpaceCowboy , vor einem Monat

It's kinda weird that soon there will be only white people on products and on the jerseys of sports teams.

Are we sure that we're happy about this outcome?

SpaceCowboy , vor einem Monat

The Guardians statues in Cleveland that their baseball team is now named after look Caucasian to me. So he could be pointing at a Cleveland Guardians Jersey and it's essentially the same things.

There's also the Cavaliers, Celtics, the Fighting Irish, Canadiens, and many others in sports. The Fighting Irish seems to be perpetuating a negative stereotype. But none of these will be changed.

Then there's also names of groups like Pirates which could include other ethnicities but the logo shows a white person. There are many ethnicities that were pirates throughout history, but the Pittsburgh Pirate log shows a white guy.

So that photo may not be as shocking or offensive as you think it would be. If there were a team called the Caucasians it wouldn't actually offend anyone. Well I could foresee white supremacists taking a liking to a logo like that and that would be offensive. But not because of the logo itself but white supremacists ruining everything they associate themselves with. Kinda like Swastika was ruined as symbol.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against renaming sports teams and changing the labels on products and things like that. Just pointing out that the ultimate outcome is going to be a distinct lack diversity in these logos because the things that have white people representing it aren't changed but things that have non-white people are changed. People will still be cheering for the Celtics in the future. People in Cleveland will cheer for the Guardians (white people) and the Cavaliers (also white people) but they won't be cheering for Indians (because that's disrespectful). I guess if that's what we want it to be it's fine, but seems a little weird that sports fans will only ever be cheering for white people in the future.

SpaceCowboy , vor einem Monat

I went with XFCE for similar reasons. I played with various DEs at one point but after a while I realized I mostly just need an icon to click on to start the application I want to use.

SpaceCowboy , vor einem Monat

Your USB switcher is the work of the devil.

SpaceCowboy , vor einem Monat

We should always remember the words of Boudica:

"Blah blah blah... I'm saying whatever the patron of whatever Roman historian tells him to write down! These words will be warped again and again by future historians to serve their interests and nothing I actually said was ever actually written down. But apparently there will someday be archaeological evidence that someone in the time period I might have lived in went on a genocidal rampage and burned several cites to the ground, so that's inspirational, right? Fill in whatever you want for this quote (it's what everyone throughout history has done) and remember that civilization is bad and genocide is good! But rephrase that to sound good, ok?" - Boudica

SpaceCowboy , vor 3 Monaten

Good old Poe's law.

SpaceCowboy , vor 3 Monaten

Everyone is well aware of Erdogan (also Orban). If we went to war or put sanctions on countries at the first sign of a country being slightly fashy, that's all the world would ever be and there would be no progress. In the interests of peace we do negoitiate we some dispicable people at times in the hopes that it will change in the future. And yes, we even negotiate with terrorists... there's currently a huge amounts of negotiations with Hamas happening right now. Because you have to take a balanced view between destroying evil bastards and the cost associated with destroying the evil bastards.

It's not always clear when we should stop negotiating and start isolating a country for being a little too fashy. And sanctions are a sliding scale, and there were indeed targeted sanctions on Russia before the current war in Ukraine. Obviously this didn't dissuade Russia from taking things forward.

So what's the red line where if a country crosses it we should give them the "fuck you" treatment rather than trying to encourage them to do better through diplomatic means? Hungary and Turkey are very very far from that line. Russia? They unilaterally invaded a neighbouring democratic country unprovoked. Yeah they took a big shit on that red line while crossing it. The get the "fuck you" treatment.

SpaceCowboy , vor 3 Monaten

Netanyahu is an asshole. Israel is a democracy, but it has a proportional representation system which opens up scenarios where there's coalitions with extremists and since all power is in the parties it's more difficult to remove someone from power. So if Netanyahu's coalition with the extremists holds, he'll remain in power... until the next election. Not a good leader, but until the next election the world will need to negotiate with him.

Hamas is an overtly genocidal organization. They are fascist that took power the classic fascist way, win a plurality of the votes then permanently "suspend elections". They seek to restore ethnicity in the region to the way they were in the history books and are very willing to use violence to accomplish this. So Israel used the strategy of isolate them and wait for their movement to die off in time. In hindsight they should have affected a regime change immediately, but chose the less invasive approach for fascist regimes. So there was a blockade and a fence to contain them until the Palestinian people got tired of their shit and removed them from power. After 17 years of authoritarian rule, Hamas knew their support was fading and with an eminent deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia a big chunk of their funding would likely to get cut off. So on October 7, 2023 they sent their most zealous fighters into villages to murder as many people as they could to start a war, and took hostages to ensure it would be a ground war. Since they are fascists they are good at propaganda, they have used the suffering in the war they started to create international support for them. Given the success of their propaganda campaign and the international support they've gotten, the death in destruction will carry over into the next generation and the violence will persist for the foreseeable future.

There will be a ceasefire, and sooner or later Netanyahu will be removed from power. Israel will heal from the events of October 7. Though right of return is a dead issue now, Israelis won't want Palestinians moving in from Gaza for at least a generation, but in another generation any Palestinians that actually lost land in the conflicts of the past will be long gone. Of course Palestinians can get back some land in the West Bank, but it's not going to be much.

Given that movements based in hatred always result in destruction there's no good future for Palestine, whether it becomes a state or not. A very bleak future for Palestinians, but the TikTok crowd doesn't care, they got their likes and clout by using the suffering of Palestinians for their own profit the same way Hamas does. They'll move on to the next outrage within days of a ceasefire and forget all about Palestinians. Palestinians will continue to suffer under corrupt and authoritarian leaders. There's a significant probability that the kind of conflict we're seeing right now will happen again sometime in the future.

But hey you got to feel self righteous for a few months, that's what really matters, right?

SpaceCowboy , vor 3 Monaten

Even in a civilization someone has to produce food so you'll survive. Civilization doesn't mean no one has to work.

If you do no work but because of civilization you still have food to eat, it means someone else is working to earn your living for you.

This bizarre meme implies work has no value, and was likely made by a wealthy university socialist that had everything paid for by their parents so doesn't understand the value of work.

SpaceCowboy , vor 3 Monaten

You can't eat higher ideals.

Even Marie Antoinette wasn't so disconnected from the peasants to say "let them eat higher ideals."

Someone has to work so you can survive. If you don't want to work, society will take care of you. You'll still be living, but you aren't earning it, someone else is earning it for you.

SpaceCowboy , vor 3 Monaten

Sure there are people that want to farm. But are there people that want to want to deal with sewage? Why do you think plumbers earn more money than other trades?

I want to run a cafe instead of what I'm doing right now. I don't want to be a waiter of wash dishes or anything like that. I just want to design the menus and decide on how it's decorated. Is that the job I'll have in a socialist utopia, or will I have to do a job I don't want to do? What if there's already too many cafes, or not enough people that want to be waiters or was dishes? I won't have to do anything but I'll still be provided for?

In the end there will always be people doing jobs they don't particularly want to do. Someone's gotta unclog the sewage when the elite of the socialist society plug the pipes with the overabundance of shit they spew out.

SpaceCowboy , vor 9 Monaten

I wouldn't say it's leftist, though there's a lot of leftists here. Lemmy is more like how internet discussion boards used to be. There's a lot of people with weird opinions on things, and there's no Reddit Karma pushing people to conform to the consensus. So people are going to have weird takes on things, and there's not 1000 comments upvoted above the weird ones, so you're going to see comments like that. So reply to with you your weird opinions on those weird comments.

Welcome to the version internet that's not pre-packaged and filtered to be bland!