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sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

Good to know, actually. The way it took out all those branches it'd just as easily take out a finger!

Thanks, it's been a while since I played with ubuntu mobile.

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/05/nx-s1-5063345/misinformation-online-fueled-all-out-race-riots-in-the-united-kingdom

The headline of this article is misinformation online.

As far as I can tell, the story of a bunch of schoolchildren getting stabbed by a migrant is absolutely true. So where's the misinformation? 3 kids are dead. That's true. Where's the misinformation?

Cordless thankfully.

I gave left wing economic media (specifically NPR's planet money and apm marketplace) a chance earlier this year, but they failed catastrophically. One was going on and on about making everything a federal regulation, the other was cheerleading over the employment numbers never once mentioning that almost every employment report for the past year has been revised downward. Contrast with guys like Peter Schiff or Maverick of Wall Street who were calling their shots whether it was an R or a D in office.

Absolutely no debate that whatever your thoughts on trump, a lot of his decisions weren't very good. It was extremely politically popular sending out all that money, but racked up the debt and further cemented stagflation as inevitable.

Electric hedge trimmer is now officially one of my most fun lawn tools.

It's like swinging around a light saber, the little branches just fall like friction isn't that even a thing.

Especially nice on the sort of branches that are pokey and nasty to snap off by hand.

Anyone with a yard and trees should look into one.

I have to start taking a look then. One of my metrics for news sources is whether I find out about things that are happening before they become major news, and unfortunately a lot of the mainstream news outlets fail miserably in this regard. It often leaves me having to follow somewhat Fringe outlets not because I necessarily agree with everything that they have to say but because at the very least I seem to be getting a taste of what's going on in the world for real.

Color me shocked. Is the world service less broken than the rest of the BBC then?

Anyone know if Ubuntu touch is still based on ubuntu 16.04?

The leader of Bangladesh has fled to India.

It took me a while to figure out why there were protests, it seemed like the media really wasn't interested in talking much about it.

Turns out 55% of government jobs were held in a "quota system" that set aside jobs for the descendants of "freedom fighters", women, and minorities. Only a tiny portion of jobs are judged by merit. In 2018 there was a big movement to dramatically reduce these quotas and they won, but recently the changes were rolled back leading to the current protests.

It seems crystal clear why the establishment media isn't taking about the motives behind the riots in detail, it's a riot against something they're all fundamentally in favor of implementing here.

The end of Moore's law has been catastrophic for processor makers, whatever they pretend.

I think all the numbers are heavily gamed, we've been in a bad recession for a while hidden by the fact that prices are way higher than they're saying but wages are totally stagnant, and employment doesn't matter because whom cares if everyone's employed if they can't afford to not eat stray rats under an overpass?

I think it's a good example of politicians doing something that's less effective and more politically acceptable.

It isn't like anyone disagrees information asymmetry (the landlord knowing more about local prices than the tenants) can help drive up prices, but what's going on here is like someone who is a habitual drunk driver promising to put a speed limiter on their car so they won't exceed the speed limit. That's great, but it's not the problem.

The problem being that they're attracting lots of people to the region but there just aren't that many places to live. This is the fundamental market imbalance that leads to higher rents in the bay area. Their options are to take measures to make the city less attractive to live in, do things to help improve supply such as rezoning, or try to push some of the WFH folks who don't even live in the city to release their empty apartments back into the market.

Most of those will piss off someone or other, so they won't do any of that and instead do the thing that won't break anyone's heart and appears to be "something" but also won't really change anything.

She can use the non-achievements she ascribed to Biden. "I was in meetings, with people! Important people!"

Uh... good for you?

Can't complain there's no culture being produced if we aren't willing to support the people who put the work in. I picked up a copy (thankfully a good number of people on the fediverse bought my book too, though it's not going to set any sales records)

lmfao you can always count on the times to say the stupidest fuckin shit you've ever seen in your life.

Businessmen have so far catastrophically failed to stop the state socialist project that has ultimately led to the government making up as much of the economy as the market.

One reason is that the nature of businesses is to try to provide more goods and services all the time especially if you can provide them for a lower cost. They only tend to cut if signals are telling them that product or service can't make a profit.

The result is typically that a business conservative will take a look at proposal from the left, and we'll just try to underbid them like a good businessman. It makes sense for a business standpoint, and so you end up with the left offering one set of proposals, and the business right proposing a more efficient version of the same proposals. In reality, the only way to stop the ever encroaching state socialism is to be willing to entirely stop paying for superfluous stuff (if you wonder if there's superfluous things we're paying for, when half the economy is government the answer is just yes)

Of course, the superfluous stuff also usually represents a bloc of voters, and so one of the weaknesses of democracy is revealed, that it's extremely hard to stop spending government money, as Ronald Reagan likes to say but never really did anything about (he quadrupled the national debt), there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.

What really needs to happen to improve Liberty is a completely new culture of government with on government is not the answer to every problem. If government was actually able to solve a problem then it would have already, and instead we just get more and more government, eventually more and more taxes, and contrary to the expected outcome more and more problems.

The right answer to most questions of "how can the government fix this?" Is government should not be the center of our worlds and should not be trying to solve every problem. In that sense, the anti-gun control folks are on the right path, but they're failing to properly Express a worldview, perhaps because they intuitively understand it but they can't express it because the force of government for the past century has been a great job of explaining why it needs to take over everything.

When you consider it, one of the purposes of the first amendment of the Constitution was that the government didn't have ultimate control over everything and everyone's lives in 1776 in the US. Instead, the church was a social institution which helped regulate people's morality. Now you might disagree with the specific morality of the church, but it's important to see that one of the reasons that all layers of government could be a lot lighter a century ago as they were is that other cultural institutions took care of some of the functions that we now rely on an omnipresent government to supply.

So in the past, there was capitalism, government, the church, and besides the church just community. And as we've seen all of these forces up besides one the massively eroded, all that's left is state socialism, and it's therefore no surprise that we are a miserable civilization.

One criticism of individuals is that it is often said that people can never have enough and so there can never be enough. Personally, I don't really think that this is the case. From an economic standpoint, the personal cost to you of another hour at time ends up becoming worth less than the benefit of another hours pay.

In my view, while I certainly don't oppose anyone working if they want to, I don't think that nearly as many people need to be working as do, and in the past they didn't have to. Not to an extent it can definitely appear that I'm shaping the data to fit my hypothesis here, but I think one of the reasons that everyone needs to work so damn much is the overwhelming level of taxation from the state. Not only direct taxation such as income taxes and then on top of that property taxes if you own a home, and then sales taxes when you buy something, import taxes and tariffs, and then indirect taxes at you only end up seeing in an increased cost of living such as taxes which directly affect the cost of electricity or fuel, taxes are directly affects the cost of food or things like alcohol. With the overwhelming amount of taxes that we end up paying to support the massive government, we need to be working basically all the time and everyone in a family to make ends meet, and in the meantime capitalism (shrinking as it is) becomes the scapegoat, and Community suffers whether directly or through religion because people who make community are busy being conventionally economically productive.

(You might want to fight me on the prevalence of the state, but consider this: we aren't having this discussion on AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, or some BBS network, we're having it on the Internet, originally developed as darpanet, a government program)

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