• 3 Posts
  • 161 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • Die antwoord also adopted, abused and abandoned an albino (Edit: my mistake, he has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia) child, Tokkie, who spoke out a few years ago. They’re truly awful and Tokkie’s documentary is worth watching.

    Also Marilyn Manson has been evicted from my music library for sexual abuse. I have no interest in supporting known exploiters, and I can’t listen to their music without thinking about how awful they are as people. No regrets, there’s plenty more musicians out there worth my time.


  • so they could be edited out of the episode and then the user could also download said episode where ads are cut out of the final audio file.

    This is the part that might be problematic and I can see being part of a civil suit (I am not a lawyer). Depending on how you collect and store the episodes (which you may not actually have to do to achieve your goal, but is the easiest solution) you would likely run afoul of “distribution” precedents in the US that may result in a judgement against you.

    But even if you didn’t actually break the law, the media lobbies globally are well known for filing huge numbers of lawsuits over anything that even looks a little like it might be costing them money. Defending yourself at all is hard time-consuming and often expensive. It’s not something I would recommend going into casually.

    https://torrentfreak.com/category/lawsuits/ is a great site for learning about the current lawsuits from a tech perspective, and has helped me out many times over the last decade. It’s one of the gems of the internet, in my opinion.


  • I channel the despair, anger and misery into working on solutions to help marginalized peoples. I don’t have all the answers to the world’s problems, and I can’t solve it all, but I can show the people who might have the answers that there is someone in their corner who supports them in their efforts. Even if those people haven’t been born yet, demonstrating the power of empathy and collaboration sets them up to choose constructive paths. If I give up on them, then it becomes much easier and more likely that they will choose the same anti-social self-interested motives that are destroying us all. But, if they are going to be able to make that choice at all, they need to be in a position where they aren’t in survival mode all the time.

    We’re all just organisms who exist for a brief flash of time on a galactic scale, ultimately this is all meaningless. But as someone who identifies as a bit of an existentialist, I make my meaning. You can too.

    It also enables me to leave the weed for wind-down time, mostly. Depends on how badly my health is doing, and it’s pretty variable.


  • No documented leadership hierarchy or organisation structure when there’s more than maybe 10 people working there. If you have to waste your time fighting out who everyone is and you can’t do it in a single meeting where everyone can introduce themselves, then the place is too big to not document roles and responsibilities officially. It leads to closed circles of people who hold the necessary historical knowledge to get anything done.



  • Oh it’s less a fixation and more an interest in scale of impact. There’s a lot of people out there who talk a big game but when you look at the results, they’re clearly underwhelming. Edit: or worse, they’re self-serving publicity not designed at all to do good. The blood donor in this thread is a great example of oversized impact, but that’s difficult to replicate. It does give good food for thought in terms of things to look for that could use more support.

    The multidimensionality is why I didn’t provide any opening suggestions; I didn’t want to guide the answers. This was so that I might find some dimensions I had not previously considered, and I was curious about what metrics others use to measure “good” in the first place. Unfortunately Elon Musk as always proved to be a topic that generates more opinions.

    Thanks for the support though. Honestly, there are a huge number of good choices already, more than I could ever dedicate enough to. I’m hopeful there are some gems out there that have potential to really offset some the vast quantity of suffering the world has to offer, this was just a small experiment in looking outside my own bubble of experience for them.


  • It wasn’t actually to help me feel better, I was hoping to offset some of the doom that is very widely covered by providing some much-needed attention for the people who are putting in real effort. I also hoped to learn about new people who I could support, because they don’t receive coverage from their public relations spokespeople putting out media releases that are pasted into articles by journalists.

    Criticism of your suggestion is not an attack on you. I’m sorry that you felt it necessary to try to insult me for expressing a difference of opinion, and I hope your day improves.


  • Ehhhh, I’m going to have to disagree on this. She’s obviously better than her ex-husband, but when you have that much money, the amount of interest/dividends it generates would likely offset her tax-deductible donations.

    Also, if she has US$36.2 billion and has donated US$3.8 billion in 9 months, that would be like someone who has $100,000 donating $10500. Except you can’t generate much money from interest on $100,000. The average person donating 10.5% of their assets is praise-worthy, but there are millions of people who do that without CNN articles praising their philanthropy.

    I’m looking for the people who are really helping, not dodging taxes and generating publicity for themselves.








  • It’s a reference to one of the most culturally important stories in Buddhist countries. Not knowing about it is like consuming English media without knowing anything about Shakespeare’s plays.

    The English name is Journey to the West and the monkey is Sun Wukong in Chinese or Son Goku in Japanese. You might notice the main character in Dragon Ball Z has the same name, but the monkey king is referenced constantly in all sorts of Eastern media. The synopsis and main characters sections in that Wikipedia link will give you the general idea, but I would recommend reading or watching any of the versions to get a better understanding of the vibe.

    Your metaphor is basically just calling them arrogant and reckless, lacking a good strategy and rushing in to things.



  • Yes, I’m very aware of my statistical insignificance that causes everyone to assume I did something to deserve long term consequences of covid. Between the antivaxxers who scowl at me for wearing a mask the rare times i dare be in public, the extreme pro-vaxxers who ask increasingly invasive medical questions to find a reason that I must have done this to myself, society leaving me to rot now they’ve all moved on because the vaccines solved everything, and the doctors telling me they have no strategies for me because there isn’t enough research… I promise that I haven’t forgotten that I’m the tiny and easily dismissable minority, despite my covid-triggered amnesia.

    People always remind me of it when I don’t fit their narrative of the irresponsible or gullible fool who bought into the anti-science grift or flouted restrictions. Perhaps it’s because it’s more comforting to remind themselves that it’s improbable that they will also end up as one of the forgotten. At least, for now, until the ridiculously contagious and quickly mutating virus happens to not play nicely with their own latent medical issues and unknown genetic errors.

    I’m sorry your friend was deceived by the propaganda that the vaccine was worse than the disease. And I’m sorry that you blame them for being deceived instead of understanding that fear causes people to make poor choices.



  • You can’t just cover things back up. Archaeological digs have been slowly buried over time in environmental conditions that allowed for their preservation, or in Pompeii’s case, initially very quickly and then slowly. Covering it back up would not only ruin the discovery potential of future investigation that relies on identification by context (for example, dating a pot by the chemical composition of the surrounding and previously contained materials, but it would also endanger anything we’ve found by introducing an uncontrolled and entirely new environment. It’s not like we can layer on the ash and other stuff in the same order it was deposited and in the exact same location with the same chemical composition.

    Conservation is a necessary and very active effort as soon as something is found, because the act of studying it aleays causes at least some initial destruction.