BrotherL0v3

Publicly traded companies blow my mind a little bit.

It's not enough to make steady, consistent profits. Give out reliable quarterly dividends and make it so your investors make their money back plus a little extra over time. Free money is not enough for the ownership class.

Growth isn't enough either. Buying something for X and selling it for 1.1X so you make money even without a dividend isn't enough for the investor class.

You have to grow infinitely. You have to grow faster than everyone else. You have to beat the projections. Make your product smaller and shittier & sell it for the same price. Lay off 10% of your workforce after record profits to cut costs. Force ads and subscriptions and data mining into every possible space. Undercut your smaller competitors until they fold, then jack up your prices. Break the law, fuck over your workers, buy out politicians, move your production lines to countries with no labor laws.

Being publicly traded actively rewards evil and anti-human behavior.

The RPD pointed out that an attorney for the Abbouds had released home security footage of the raid online, which the police said made releasing the body camera footage redundant. At the same time, the RPD claimed that releasing the body camera footage might expose confidential information about search warrant execution or damage officers’ reputations.

You busted in a door and pointed an AR-15 at a baby. Your reputation should be fucking damaged.

Raleigh police “wrongfully executed a ‘Quick Knock’ warrant”—meaning they kicked in the door before the Abbouds had a chance to open it[...]

This is just a no-knock raid. Let's not pretend knocking on a door a half second before pulling out the battering ram is some magical third category of warrant: no-knock raids should be banned, and whatever the fuck these cops did should be considered a no-knock.

Something you hear a lot from EMTs is that they take a lot of care not to make a medical emergency worse by adding to the number of victims. "Scene safety" is a big thing, the logic being that if you try to help someone in an unsafe way, you may end up just adding to the problem.

You'd think the same would apply to cops? Doing 75 in a 25 seems like the same kind of thing, especially in an area with pedestrians around. Doing 50 over to get to someone that needs help and hitting someone along the way isn't actually helping.

Oh, also:

Kandula’s death ignited outrage, especially after a recording from another officer’s body-worn camera surfaced last September, in which that officer laughed and suggested that Kandula’s life had “limited value” and the city should “just write a check”.

Jesus Christ, fuck the police.

Carries a gun

Violently terrified of others carrying guns

This guy was never not going to murder someone.

The search warrant was for the Parmely Avenue residence, but it was issued for a person who hasn’t lived there in more than a year, Price said, sharing the search warrant left by police at the home.

[...]

Price said she learned police had visited the home at least five times within the past year. "The landlord even told [police] she had new tenants," she said.

This is after the article mentions that they only waited six seconds between knocking on the door and busting in.

If your police department shows this degree of incompetence executing a raid, it should have all its toys taken away. No more flashbangs, no more SWAT gear, no fancy guns. You get the wrong address, you hurt an innocent person, you fail to identify yourselves, you lose privileges. Hell, I seriously question whether they need most of that shit in the first place.

I legitimately believe that a disturbingly high number of these raids that go wrong happen because the cops want to play with with their shiny new equipment.

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person's autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There's a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.

Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I'm making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I'm amazed at how simple it all is.

A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.

The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it's a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.

So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I'm not just saying "muh mental health" either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.

I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.

I mean historically, when you see a busload of undocumented immigrants it's a pretty safe bet a Republican is behind it.

I was a weird 16 year old, staying up too late on summer vacation of 2011. I had decided that asking people their favorite dinosaur was the ultimate conversation starter, and had a working theory that the more unusual their answer was, the more interesting the conversation would be. People who said "T-Rex" were lame, but "Iguanadon" would be cool, something like that.

Well, she said "Pachycephalosaurus", which was the first one of the night I had to look up. Naturally, I was enthralled.

We talked into the wee hours of the morning, where she (being a fellow dumb teenager) sent me her Facebook profile. Before clicking, I had decided that I would look but ultimately not accept her friend request, because stranger danger and all. But when I checked out her page, it turned out we had a mutual friend! A guy we both knew had started high school with her, and moved up the coast halfway through and was currently going to my high school.

That was good enough for me, and I accepted her friend request. July 7th, 2011, around 3am.

From there, we quickly turned flirty and started talking all the time. We weren't anything official, but I told her I loved her within a couple weeks. One problem though: she was over 400 miles away, and I was still in school with no license.

To make a long story short, we were flirty on and off for the next three years until 2014, where we both decided "fuck it" and jumped into the special hell that is long distance dating together. I got to see her in person December 14th of that year after working at a grocery store while finishing up my associate's degree to make enough money for a train ticket, and she was my first kiss.

Anyway, college sucked and long distance dating sucks even when it's the right person. Fast-forward to 2020 when I finally have a car & some degree of financial stability, I moved 400 miles away to live with her & haven't looked back. Put a ring on her finger March of 2021, and married her on the beach last weekend after knowing her for twelve years. She is currently snoring gracefully in bed next to me. 🥰

End of an era. I met my wife on Omegle.

They’re a part of the rapidly expanding world of so-called less lethal weapons, named such as they are because they are ostensibly less likely to send you to the ancestors when used against you. These weapons come in many different varieties, ranging from “smaller” 9 mm rounds designed to be fired at a person’s legs or torso, to the much bigger, pop-can-sized 40 mm rounds that are designed to be “skip fired” by ricocheting off pavement or other hard surfaces towards their target (police historically do not do this, and simply fire at the target).

I do not for one second buy that they were "designed" to be bounced off the ground. It's an idiotic concept from the get-go: it's hard enough to aim a conventional firearm. Expecting any kind of accuracy from a ricochet fired by an untrained and easily frightened moron is a fever dream. Fucking no one expected rubber bullets to be bounced into people's legs; it was always an excuse for pigs to shoot into crowds. The casualties are a feature, not a bug.

Because, goddammit, a better world is possible! A lot of the time shit sucks and everything is expensive and I wanna just go to bed and never wake up.

But most of my problems are problems millions or even billions of other people struggle with, and those don't get solved by opting out of life.

What's more, those problems are man-made. They're the result of systems designed by mortal men just like me.

So, I stay alive. Because the only way to out-vote, out-number, overpower, and / or annihilate those bastards is to be alive.

I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

Earth's diameter is 41.804 million feet. I'm not sure if you meant that or Earth's circumference when you said "Earth's surface", but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you'd only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

EDIT:

Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.

Sounds like a good reason radically restructure (if not entirely dismantle) those companies.

We should make medicine to treat sick people. We should build houses to shelter the unhoused. We should grow food to feed the hungry.

The fact that most companies currently responsible for food and housing and medicine are primarily motivated by shareholder value instead of effective community service represents a structural conflict of interest.

They are mortal. They do what they do because they do not fear consequences.

This has been two statements of fact, with no implied conclusions or sub-text.

Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It's madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.

Least thorough leftist video essayist:

“One of the problems of the two party system is what Margaret Thatcher used to call ‘Tina’ – there is no alternative,” he said, referring to a phrase the former British prime minister used to defend her government’s stringent economic policies in the early 1980s.

“The Democratic party has this crypto-fascist element when it comes to mass incarceration, when it comes to dropping bombs … when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to violation of individual liberties vis-a-vis the national security state.”

I mean, he has a point. However, I don't know that acknowledging the flaws in a two-party system, then running in such a way that'll likely invoke those very same flaws is a winning strategy.

It seems to me like someone in his shoes would be more effective running for congress / rallying people around reworking our current first-past-the-post voting system & electoral college.

Motherfucker takes all your surplus value and doesn't even enjoy it! It's like someone robbing your house and taking your shit straight to the dump.

There are plenty of gun laws out there that a reasonable person could see merit in challenging: rules about short-barrel rifles / braces & pot smokers not being able to own guns probably aren't saving any lives.

The fact that this is the one they go after is just such a demonstration of malintent. There's good evidence for a relationship between domestic violence and mass shooters.

This should be a bi-partisan slam-dunk. Minimally invasive to law-abiding gun owners, gets guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals. What public good is served in challenging it?

Or just laser death ray at least two transphobes before you get caught.

In the US, there is a history of white performers using blackface to play caricatures of black people, leaning hard on racist ethnic stereotypes. From Wikipedia:

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century.[1] The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of comically portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows stereotyped blacks as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.[2][3] Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent.

Fifty-three percent of respondents hold a “very or somewhat” unfavorable view of the system, while 40 percent hold a “very or somewhat” favorable view.

I swear to God, you could ask "Do you enjoy being hit in the face with a hammer?" in a poll and 30% - 50% of my countrymen would answer "yes". At least one third of this country lives in a completely different reality.

Stellaris! Very cool sci-fi strategy game.

Just to add onto what others are saying: to what extent do you think cops prevent crime? Most of what they do is catch people after the fact, and even then many (if not most) cases go unsolved.

I don't have the statistics in front of me at the moment, but the comparison that should be made is crime prevented by cops vs. crime that only exists because of cops, including things that cops just never get prosecuted for. I understand the impulse to think that cops are at least better than nothing, but I don't honestly know if that's true.

Relevant XKCD

I mean, good on her for being anti-war and wanting to release political prisoners I guess? I have no clue what she was expecting though. Trying to run against a dictator in a sham election seems like maybe not the best way to effect political change, not to mention dangerous.

The estimates for the number of pistol braces out there ranged from 3 million on the low end, to 40 million on the high end. During the grace period to register braced firearms as SBRs without having to pay the tax stamp, the ATF received 255,162 applications to do so.

Even if we take the low number & account for folks destroying or converting their firearms, we can reasonably estimate a rate of non-compliance in the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. There is a very real possibility that arresting all those people would literally double the already ludicrous US prison population overnight. In a country that already has a worryingly militarized police force, I cannot imagine the mass arrest of millions of armed people will reduce gun violence.

Abstaining does less than nothing for the actual victims of the genocide in question. You think the dems are going to change their stance on Palestine because a bunch of leftists are withholding their votes? Most of their corporate donors are most likely either pro-Israel or don't care. They're going to decide it's a safer play for them to pivot right to try and scoop up lukewarm centrist dipshits, guaranteed. Things get worse for women, immigrants, LGBT people, and the working class in general but hey! At least your hands are clean!

The way to effect electoral change that may actually have a snowballs chance in hell of helping Palestinians is to support anti-genocide reps in primaries and local elections. Get your city to pass ordinances boycotting Israeli products, accepting Palestinian refugees, and supporting international aid organizations. Even if your good local reps can't make any of that happen, you're getting more anti-genocide policy makers in the system who may run for higher offices next cycle.

Leftist organizing has always been from the ground up. If you want an anti-genocide president (which I fucking do too!), then work on creating the infrastructure to produce one instead of stomping your feet and insisting the Overton Window move your way ex nihilo.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with that criticism. I enjoyed the first game so much more because of that.

Java. It's familiar, it's the one I use most at my job, and I'm not in love with any other language enough to choose something less pragmatic.

Here is a head on view:

The drawing has a little bit of his halo behind his head.

The Conquest of Bread was a breath of fresh air! I cannot believe I read a book about politics / economics that was actually optimistic and left me feeling good about fundamental human nature.

Yep. Prisoners and homeless people are there to remind you what happens if you stop making money for the boss man. Plenty of horrible, exhausting, unsafe jobs get away with paying dogshit wages because it's either that or being thrown into the maelstrom of human misery that is being incarcerated / unhoused. How many people would die of heat exhaustion in an Amazon warehouse if they knew their basic needs would still be met if they quit?

I would love to only be accountable to "guidelines" instead of "rules" or "laws".

I would guess the logic behind going harder on repeat offenders is that they've already been punished once and didn't stop breaking the law, so we should punish them harder this time. Not sure that's super effective reasoning, but w/e.

Maybe "impulses" for short term, immediate gratification & "ambitions" for long-term, fulfillment-type goals?

You bring up something I hadn't thought about before with "want" kinda meaning a couple different things. I like the idea of separating the different types out in your head.

The big divide in the US is not so much between Republicans and Democrats as between people who invest and people who don’t. For a man of his means who is running for America’s second-highest office, Tim Walz is on the wrong side.

God forbid a leadership position go to someone not in the ownership class!

In 2022, 58 per cent of Americans owned stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds. Based on his 2019 financial disclosures and his 2022 tax filings, the Democratic vice presidential nominee is not one of them.

So? The average American, who has maybe a 401k and some options thru their company, still has more shared class interests with someone who owns no stocks whatsoever than with someone who doesn't have to work for a living.

The rest of the article fails to load, but looking at the author's other pieces, we see she thinks price gouging is a myth and that another recession might actually be a good thing. She's either so out of touch she may as well be from outer space, a soulless corporate sellout, or intentionally writing ragebait with an economic coat of paint.

Tuscan looks like the bottom of a chess piece.