Is it?

Researchers discovered the skeleton of a young Neanderthal man who was about six years old when he died. Although researchers were not sure what the child’s gender was, she was named Tina.

I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here. In one sentence they call a six year old a man and gender them male, then in the next they gender them female and call them Tina. The pronouns keep switching back and forth.

Scientists noted that Tina’s survival to the age of six indicates that her team provided the necessary care for the child and her mother throughout this period.

Her team? Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?

That all reads like bad AI writing to me.

Because you literally act like a mouthpiece with your constant apologetics for the aggression and war crimes of a tinpot dictator.

How much does Putin pay you?

The measures they use to say the economy is ‘good’ have one thing in common: they fail to account for value whatsoever.

They account for value in dollars, that’s true. But they fail to account for value in any sense that matters: the usefulness of a product or service on the one hand and the labor that produces it on the other. Instead, we look at wages, employment rates, profits, and prices. Those are admittedly easy to quantify and play around with, but they aren’t really anchored to anything meaningful.

For example, let’s say your company makes on-the-go smoothies, sold in grocery stores and convenience stores. You’ve got a quality product: a relatively thick smoothy with quality ingredients and a good variety of purees and juices. You product isn’t cheap, but that’s because you use quality ingredients, pay your employees a fair wage, and use reasonable labor practices in your bottling plant. As a result, people love your product and enjoy working for your company. Soon you come to take up a prominent position on shelves, because your regular customers will reliably buy up your stock.

Now let’s say you do an IPO. Once the board members have sway, they want to iron out some of these ‘inefficiencies’ in your company to increase their profits. First, they come for the ingredients. You wind up with fewer purees in smaller proportions, a greater proportion of inexpensive juices, and the most expensive ingredients dropping off the list entirely. Your loyal customers are annoyed that their smoothies aren’t as thick, but it’s still better than the other options, so they keep coming.

At your bottling plant, wages start to stagnate. Benefits aren’t eliminated, but a new management technique is introduced in which hours are spread out to make it difficult to meet the minimum to qualify. Shifts begin increasingly running on skeleton crews as hours are spread thinner. Of course, the same amount of work still needs to be done, so the employees are doing two to three times as much work as they used to.

Long-term employees who once made the company what it was start to see the change and look for other options before things get worse, leading to a fresh generation of new employees with no clue how much better the company used to be.

At the end your profits are up, employment is up, and you’re selling just as much or nearly as much of your product as you were before. If you only look at the numbers, it seems like this whole endeavor was a fantastic win for your company.

Except you’ve just made the world a little worse. The market presence you earned with your high-quality product no longer has an equivalent product taking it up, degrading the real value of the market itself. Employees are running themselves ragged making a perhaps flat or slightly rising wage per hour, but a wage that’s actively diminishing in terms of the labor required to earn it and the purchasing power it comes with.

Now what happens when you take this model and project it to the entire economy?

All the numbers say record profits, low unemployment, stocked shelves full of high-demand products. And yet the reality is that we have to work more to pay for less of shittier and shittier products. Even the people who win don’t really win, because they make a worse world for themselves where they can’t get a good smoothy.

The whole thing is a mirage that we’ve been killing our society chasing.

I’d love to see someone figure out how to up the player limit or link games. Baldur’s Gate would be such a great medium for a D&D roleplay server if it could be set up to handle it.

The way to fix it is for developers not to sell out. When your small studio’s game blows up, you’re left with a choice. Do you care about art and making quality games, or do you care about making money and appeasing corporations in exchange for empty promises?

Are you going to leave you work in the hands of its creators, or are you going to hand it off to someone whose entire path in life is centered around squeezing as much money as possible out of every product with no concern for its quality or integrity?

That’s definitely a component, but part of it is also people’s reactions to women asserting themselves. Like, when I presented as male, men were far less likely to perceive me as interrupting if I speak up than they are now. Guys will talk over one another for hours, but the moment a woman tries to interject it’s a whole thing.

I’m if anything more confident and self-actualized now, as well as being a bit more self-aware, but guys are way faster to react as though I’m some kind of threat to their social standing. These aren’t just conservatives either, a lot of the time they’re ostensibly leftists, or at least claiming support of women and trans folks, but it doesn’t always change how they view that dynamic.

The Sega game was pretty cool. You could be a dinosaur!

Nah, it’s a subscription service, but it’s got a few notable YouTubers and they tend to drop extra content there. PhilosophyTube is on there, 12Tone, a bunch of people. As a platform it’s a lot less bullshit, but it’s also obviously less content.

Though now I realize you actually have to get referred by one of the other members in order to start posting, so I’m not really sure they stand to benefit that much. It kind of explains why the content has been lacking. It certainly won’t ever have the diversity of content that YouTube has with that approach.

Honestly learning that it’s more of a market stall than a garden makes me less enthusiastic. It’s there to curate what’s already on YouTube without YouTube’s limitations, not to create a better alternative that’s actually sustainable.

uBlock Origin works fine for me on youtube. Just make sure you keep it updated and don’t run multiple blockers.

This could honestly be really good for Nebula.

You have literally no idea who I am or what I do.

I used GIMP to make a mock-up of a sign for a restaurant just yesterday. Is it going to be the tool I use for the final product? No, because that’ll be in vector, but it’s a lot easier to slap something together in than Inkscape or Krita.

‘Killer apps’ are meaningless in comparison to useful apps. I’m an artist who needs usable tools for her work. GIMP qualifies. Personally, I find it way easier and more intuitive to navigate than Krita, Inkscape, or any of Adobe’s suite. It may not be for you, that’s cool.

But what isn’t cool is to pretend you know about other people’s lives and what they need. Speak for yourself, you are perfectly capable of doing that. If you don’t like GIMP’s UI, that’s great. If you think GIMP’s UI is absolutely horrible for every user and nobody would ever use it for professional work… you’re literally just completely wrong.

It’s crazy that people believe this shit. They just run with it, and don’t even do cursory research on what they’re going after. Trans minors literally receive medical care to prevent unalterable changes. Hormones triggering changes in the body is the whole damn point!

When I tell people I lost 3 inches to the shifting of my pelvis and spinal curvature, they’re mystified. Like, maybe they knew that estrogen could cause breast growth or changes to your body hair or your skin, but I don’t think I’ve met a cis person yet who was aware of the spinal curvature changes.

I think if people realized just how much hormones change, they might not only see that there are a lot of changes someone might want to avoid during puberty if they’re trans, but it might help them see that the most substantial changes to a person’s body that may happen as part of transitioning may have nothing at all to do with surgery.

It seems as though a lot of the thinking around trans bodies is focused on surgery, to the point that they don’t really necessarily know what else might even be involved. Which I suppose is why it’s so easy to lie about it for political gain.

This is a repost. Also, like, do we need to keep spamming Beehaw’s tech section with headlines that reference rape as like, a casual way to say that a company did something dishonest? Cause I’m not really into it.

Like, seriously, is there a creepier version of this headline?

Do you subscribe to a worldview that includes compassion? This may disqualify you from joining our capitalist shit show.

I’m not sure I’d call buying up and burning other companies like furniture in a fireplace ‘sustainable’.

It really seems like humanity’s feelings about who constitutes ‘us’ has been expanding significantly in the past century or so. It makes sense. Global communication went from being non-existent to a few bits of broadcast media and specialist communication to a massive information network spanning the entire planet, capable of instant communication with negligible latency inside of, what, three generations?

When I was born none of this stuff existed. You had like, dial-up networks like Genie and Prodigy and that was about it until I was like 8 or 9 or something. I think the first time I got on the Internet i was like 10 or 11. By the time I graduated high school, literally everyone was online. By the time I was 30, most people had a device in their pocket connected to the Internet with a speed and power (if not versatility) that beat out anything we had in high school. Now pretty much everyone has it. It’s literally easier to get an Internet connection than it is to have somewhere to live.

That has a lot of implications. It’s hard to hide injustice and bullshit when everyone has a video camera in their pocket and can connect to the Internet instantly. We know what factory farming looks like, we know that exploitation looks like, and we know the scale of our destruction of the environment in a way we didn’t before.

Probably most importantly, we’re learning, gradually, that what divides our interest is less and less national borders, physical appearance, or our different ways of living, but the hoarding of wealth and power. There’s some push back, to be sure, but the Overton window has shifted substantially from where it was at the beginning of this global communication phenomenon and it’s continuing to move that way a little at a time.

When we learn compassion for ourselves and the people around us, especially the people we were once taught were so different, it makes sense that we’d begin to generally become more practiced at compassion, empathy, and careful observation that is less and less rooted in our starting biases.

It makes sense that as that happens, the people controlling the purse strings and authorizing studies that might show that ‘us’ can extend further than we imagined might also gain more insight and be less defensive.

Yeah, that’s the bit that gave me the bro-y vibe, honestly. That and Brave. Also like, not that it’s necessarily a bad thing that I can see his muscle veins through his shirt, but that’s often a component of that particular corner of Joe Rogan-NFT-Bitcoin-Tesla.

But yeah, that makes sense. It definitely feels very sudden and artificial, which makes me wary.

Why are y’all spamming this Rossman guy suddenly? I had never heard of him before two days ago, and now I’ve seen posts about him every single day.

Seems like a bro-y tech dude. He promotes Brave and references sexual assault when talking about the behavior of software vendors with their customers. Honestly he gives me kind of a shady vibe on top of that.

So like, why is Lemmy suddenly full of his fans? What’s going on?

No, because they mixed up “parties’” and “party’s” and didn’t catch it, along with a couple of other weird writing quirks and clunky usages. Also it’s a pretty messy headline. There’s also a lot more descriptive and poetic language than is actually helpful for getting their point across. Like to the point that it’s wandering into New York Times levels of fluffing the length with flowery language. The writer could have used a couple of notes that they clearly didn’t get.

I agree with the writer’s position on the DNC’s failure to find their compassion and humanity on immigration. It’s the editing that needs work.