volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Here's the voting roll. *8* Republicans voted for the motion to vacate, not 90, along with 208 Democrats who actually gave the extremists actual voice.
Without the Democrats' backing the extremists would have been rightly laughed off the stage.
This wasn't about saving McCarthy. He's fine either way. This is about whether those 208 Democrats should have worked with MAGA extremists to support their effort to shut down the House and make them a significant force going forward.
See how your own representative voted and judge them accordingly.
@manton the problem is that by magnifying the influence of the GOP extremists like this, the Democrats have set the stage for a speaker significantly worse for them than McCarthy.
Maybe Democrats expect to spin the situation in their political favor in the country, but they're really making it harder to get decent legislation going in the House.
McCarthy's removal was set in motion when he DID reach across the aisle instead of groveling to MAGA wingnuts.
Here's that fateful rollcall vote:
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023513?Page=2
The article misleads on the legalities when it says "state Republicans repeatedly drew maps so that just one of the state's seven congressional seats would be majority-Black"
According to court documents they had ignored race, and the courts ordered them to instead draw maps with racial components.
@andyp@mas.to
Well, it goes the other way in this case.
AL tried to use a map that DIDN'T engage in racial gerrymandering, and the courts said no, it had to gerrymander this district into being.
Policing speech is tricky business.
You say these things are useless, but the people with actual skin in the game disagree, finding that they have so much use that they're willing to spend that energy in exchange for them.
The amount of energy put into Bitcoin mining is a direct measure of the value of Bitcoin to the people trading that energy for the currency.
I get it that you personally don't value it. Great! It's not useful to you personally. Great! So don't spend energy to get any since it's not valuable to you.
But it IS valuable to so many other people, so valuable that it's worth spending a lot of energy on it.
@mnutty you're still misunderstanding the situation.
It's not that I'm blaming the minority party for GOP failure but rather recognizing a bipartisan coalition of 216 representatives who worked across the aisle to successfully shut down the chamber.
It was a success, not a failure.
They moved to shut down the House and they worked together to do it.
Yay.
Drat, still waiting on one!
People value mining.
The miners mine.
Just because you personally don't value mining, which is entirely fair, doesn't mean it's a scam.
I mean, I have no interest at all in the Super Bowl, but I'm not going to call Super Bowl tickets a scam just because I don't value the experience a person gets from them.
This whole storyline is based on people projecting their own personal preferences on others and crowing about results that they don't personally care for.
It's silly.
Right, so that's a matter of personal valuation.
For a person who values privacy highly, they should not use Bitcoin. But for a person who's not so interested in privacy, Bitcoin is fine.
These are matters of personal valuation, so the tradeoffs will or won't outweigh based on the individual's personal priorities.
Exactly, so my point is that when we're talking about energy use by computing, this is a huge factor in that issue.
Or in other words, computer time is cheap if you don't count the cost of emissions the paper was trying to raise awareness of.
@lightninhopkins @Brendanjones
Computer hardware has gotten much much more efficient.
But software has responded by becoming less efficient with use of the more efficient computers.
For a vague analogy, think of it like cars becoming more fuel efficient, so people spend less per gallon on fuel, so they can afford to and get used to driving more, and they may use more fuel in the end.
As software became less efficient it consumed the hardware increases in efficiency, and in my cases we ended up using more resources to do the same thing.
Wow, you really threw some bombs with that criticism there. I don't know where that came from.
Anyway, it seems to me that you're changing your claims faster than I can address them. It's not that I'm sidestepping, rather I'm having trouble following your points.
At one point it was leisure, another it was equity, or equality, or winners and losers, or the workers being displaced, or workers in general... I think you're all over the place here, and it's hard to follow.
So, when you claim productivity gains are not equally distributed I say YES I COMPLETELY AGREE. Of course they aren't. Why would they be? Different people want different things and value different things differently.
Just as additional production and accessibility of iPhones will favor iPhone users and not Android users... but why would that metric matter?
But this is a brand new front, as far as I can remember in this thread.
Fortunately, we're in agreement there so I guess it's resolved.
@kwheaton again, just factually, mathematically it doesn't.
Both Delaware and Texas have two representatives. They have equal representation.
I really don't think there is room to disagree on this simple fact that two equals two.
@mnutty nothing in your latest comment made my statement untrue.
Yes, it's true that Republicans might have overcome Democrats' decision to actively oppose progress, but that highlights what I said: Democrats actively opposed progress, setting up the opposition that needed to be overcome.
You might even support the Democrats' position. Great! But for better or worse we need to judge them for what they did instead of letting them shift responsibility to others.
We were using an idiom to talk about human relations :)
But one that was particularly relevant considering the historical developments that it referenced.
But no, not everything new is good. There are plenty of new things that fail. You had narrowed in on advancements that increased productivity and had implications for leisure, which I'd say focuses on the new things that work, not the ones that don't.
After all, a failed program--a bad new thing--is likely to harm productivity and intrude into leisure, unlike the ones you seemed to have in mind.
Well I think it often is, as it provides an option that can really help folks without better options.
Like a person who unfairly doesn't have access to banking: being able to pay in cash is pretty important for such a person.
If for whatever reason a person is blocked from traditional forms of electronic money transaction, Bitcoin may provide them a much needed alternative, just like paper notes for the unbanked.
So, growing up I always heard them referred to as I described above, backwards people clinging to the past over fears of the future.
You'd refer to someone as a Luddite because they refused to change to newer things, like a person refusing to get a smartphone even though they'd like it better because they were just used to an old flip phone.
That's the use of the idiom that I've so commonly heard.
volkris
boosted
There is no law stating that the Speaker of the House has to be human. Scientists estimate that 20 quadrillion ants live on Earth. One of them has to have the right stuff.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
volkris's choices:
