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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Also so many sites that haven’t given in to the ad content farm / have found it to not be worth it are now just putting up paywalls… which I’m okay with in principle, but in reality I can’t afford to subscribe to 20 different sites I only read occasionally

    There’s going to need to be a new model of revenue sharing somehow at some point. I wouldn’t mind paying for one subscription that gave me broad access, but the problem then is the control that gives whoever collects the money (e.g. YouTube Premium)



  • It’s true in a capitalist system for sure. Automation causes fewer people to be responsible for more profit, so fewer people see the benefit of it. Capitalists argue it will just cause prices to fall, but a) to what, if many people can’t find a stable job, and b) prices are quick to rise but slow to fall, nobody wants to take a loss on what they paid for/forecast, and businesses implementing this tech certainly aren’t expecting to have to lower prices. Less money getting you more value increases the value of money - also known as deflation, and something economists avoid as it’s quite painful.

    Automation itself can be good for humans though. I don’t think people should be stuck doing a bullshit job nobody really needs just because we don’t want to eliminate a job. Our goal as human society should be for people to have more and more choice over how they spend their own time. Even if we eliminate basically all necessary work from human existence, creative works have intrinsic value to the people who create them at the very least, and often value to many other people as well - AI will never eliminate that even if AI becomes very creative itself.

    Mandatory work should be something we try to eliminate, and replaced by people generally being able to choose to do whatever they want within reason. This is not something that makes any sense in a capitalist system, so rather than attacking automation and keeping capitalism just because that creates a more equal income distribution, we should be working toward replacing capitalism with something better, and automation is a part of getting there.



  • The typical English name for that is Canaan. There’s a lot of history surrounding that name in the Bible (OT, so shared by Jews, Christians, and somewhat accepted by Muslims too) and a lot of it not positive. I don’t think a lot of people would appreciate that association even though it’s likely based on myth.

    Personally I don’t really see that Palestine is a bad name as it’s really just a name for the region and the only baggage it has is quite modern; Zionist Jews might prefer some acknowledgement of the land as Israel and so it would be tough to get them to accept something that doesn’t include that IMO


  • It’s still something you can argue should be done even if it’s not currently politically feasible. Things don’t always stay politically unfeasible, but they usually don’t get pushed in that direction by people not making that argument in public.

    My utopian take would be that Israel should become fundamentally secular, remove references to being a ‘Jewish state’, grant all Palestineans citizenship and full rights, and perhaps change the name - a lot of people would say that should just be called Palestine, but frankly I think a compromise of Israel-Palestine or some other completely new name would be fine too. End the colonialism & apartheid, everyone who’s there lives in peace, people who had to flee during previous wars get to come back.

    I don’t know that we’ll ever see that, but it probably is much more unlikely if we don’t try to convince people that it’s a good idea.




  • Hamas doesn’t exist in a vacuum though. Most people don’t just wake up one day and think “hmm, terrorism sounds good to me today!” There’s always going to be a minority of people who end up having extremist views and committing violence, but a functioning state is able to keep those people under control. The fact that Netanyahu has no motivation to make the situation better is directly what causes this situation where people help Hamas out of desperation. They can’t wait for Israelis to get their act together and elect someone who is strongly motivated to make life better for Palestineans, they see that they have to live on the other side of a wall where only they have to deal with that level of poverty and violence on a regular basis and it’s unfair. If you put yourself in their shoes you’d get it too. That’s not a justification at all, it’s just empathy for their situation.

    I can also empathize with Israelis who want revenge. People in Israel expect safety and don’t think of their country as a war-zone. It’s easy to think of the problem as entirely one-sided when you don’t have to deal with it, but it’s just not the case.


  • So which is it, are they being allowed freedom of movement into Israel to work with identification, or you don’t want them in because they’re terrorists who threaten to kill civilians?

    All I’ve seen is that some people were allowed in and out, but it isn’t exactly a porous border, identification requirements are strict, getting the necessary approval and documentation is difficult in a place without a functioning state. And you can’t just make rules and distance yourself from the consequences of them just because people are unable to meet the requirements of those rules, you have to actually look at what the effect is.


  • Israel’s strikes are the most targeted fucking strikes you’ve ever seen a military do, and they actively warn the people in those buildings with everything from roof knocking to a phone call.

    That doesn’t even make sense. If the point is to destroy Hamas assets and people, there’s no sense in tipping them off about it. So either they’re doing that and destroying people’s homes for no reason, or they’re not actually doing that.

    It’s not actually possible to take out military targets like that in civilian neighborhoods with air strikes in a “clean” way. Obviously the only reason they don’t go in on the ground with IDF soldiers if they actually have legitimate targets instead is because the lives of Palestinean civilians are less important than the lives of Israeli soldiers, and they know that air strikes don’t lead to any casualties on their side.


  • The idea that the atomic bombs directly caused the surrender of Japan is contested, actually. It’s more likely that they created an urgency in what was already looking like a losing battle. The difference in that situation is that Japan wasn’t fighting a war of resistance at any cost against the US, they were fighting as part of an alliance on one front of a world war. In that case it is very real that troops lose morale, civilian casualties become too great, and loss of military assets make victory look unlikely, and then surrender looks attractive by comparison. But I think in the case of popularly supported resistance to colonizers, that threshold is quite high - people feel quite strongly about revenge and are convinced of the justice of their cause in that situation, so the brutality of their colonizers isn’t likely to do anything other than strengthen their resolve.

    Frankly, I actually think the atomic bombing and firebombing campaigns would be considered war crimes if they happened today. It’s really weird that people justify it so much by how horrible the Japanese state was at the time - tons of innocent civilians, including lots of children, died horribly, and it was 100% anticipated, and in the case of the atomic bombing, they did it twice, knowing that. You can’t justify your own actions by the crimes of your enemy.