• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 25th, 2024

help-circle



  • The key difference is that these goods and services wouldn’t exist if you were not paid to do the job.

    If landlords didn’t exist, then all housing would either be government-distributed, socially-owned, or obtained through mortgages.

    If the workers building those houses didn’t exist, then the house wouldn’t either.

    The only difference between a system for housing with a landlord, and one without a landlord, is that the landlord is an intermediary that shaves some money off the top any time money is used to pay for housing, even when the building is already fully paid off, or they aren’t there, and your money just covers the cost of construction and maintenance directly.



  • you’ve just raised all boats by the same amount. There’s no relative difference, it won’t have any impact on the economy

    Technically, that’s not exactly true, specifically because of wealth disparities. If you give everyone $100, someone who only had $100 before will get a 100% increase to their net worth, whereas a billionaire will get a 0.00001% increase to their net worth. It’s effectively a wealth redistribution. If you gave everyone a billion dollars, assuming everyone had nothing to start with before, they’d now have 50% of what a billionaire (now with $2B after gaining $1B from this change) would have, whereas before they’d only have a tiny fraction.

    The problem is that it’s just not a very effective method at doing such wealth redistribution. The much more effective one is to print new currency and issue it like you would UBI, but tax billionaires a similar amount to offset the inflation caused. Releasing all this gold would just devalue gold similarly, and a lot of gold is already owned directly or by proxy, by the wealthy, but also poorer members of society, so it would effectively be like taxing billionaires, but also adding a little tax on top of specific working people for the hell of it, which isn’t ideal.


  • It would have a similar effect to printing new USD and issuing it evenly to members of the population, since our gold reserve is largely a stockpile not expected to be sold on the market.

    Gold gets released into circulation, the value of gold decreases, the value people individually receive is similar to the amount lost by those holding gold.

    That effectively means it would likely be a transfer of value from gold hoarders, some of which are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the population, to everyone else, rather than some magical new source of value to give to people. (not exactly, obviously, but this is generally what I’d expect based on how the currency dynamic works with our existing USD reserves/printing capabilities, and how the supply rush would be similar with gold compared to USD)

    Should we do it? I don’t know, it could be beneficial, but I’d rather we simply issued new currency and taxed the billionaires more to compensate for any inflation caused, rather than the government having to spend all the money on manpower and negotiation for the sale of all the gold we have, so that individuals could receive actually functional currency in the form of USD.


  • . In absolutely no way did I even mention black people.

    How did you not underatand that it was an analogy? I was testing your logic, by demonstrating that your exact argument can identically be applied to racist arguments, yet you would probably not see it as valid in that context, thus your own logic in this situation falls short.

    People can have differences in opinion, but sometimes, those opinions are harmful, and there’s a reason why people are so angry at you past just simply disagreeing on logic.


  • I must thank you for proving my point.

    In what way? You just dismissed everything i said by not responding to it then acted like I’d proved you correct.

    But you simply can’t accept that people disagree with gender ideology and must try and push your beliefs onto others, in this case, me.

    “But you simply can’t accept that black people are inherently less intelligent, and must try to push your beliefs on others”

    Do you see how this argument fails? Sometimes, people are just wrong, and hold opinions that cause societal harm. You haven’t been capable of refuting the evidence I provide, instead choosing to ignore it, then continue perpetuating the exact justification used every time trans people are oppressed in any way.


  • Anything else is a birth defect

    Any exception disproves your rule. If you say there are only 1 and 2, and I show you 3, then the statement that only 1 and 2 exist is false, because it’s only true if no other numbers ever exist. Show me a binary, I show you numbers outside that binary, it’s not a binary.

    Sex and gender are fundamentally the same thing

    What genetic code determines things like:

    1. Women wearing skirts (…while not being socially accepted for men. Except in Ireland, with Kilts, where it is, because this is cultural, not biological)
    2. Men being louder and more aggressive (on average)
    3. Women being better cooks (on average)
    4. Socially accepted hobbies/personality traits of men/women
    5. Your preference for “pink”/“blue” toys (e.g. toys usually promoted to only girls/boys, like dolls, which we have no evidence kids naturally pick along a binary line unless taught to by parents/guardians)

    Oh wait, what’s that? None of that is biological, but it’s all traditionally gendered traits? Interesting, maybe biological characteristics and social ones aren’t the same.

    What about someone with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), where someone can have XY (usually male) chromosomes, but goes through female sexual development? Or someone with Mosaicism, who has a split of XX and XY chromosomes in their body, could have the genitalia of either group, or ambiguous genitalia, and who’s split of chromosomes across their cells could be as high as 50%, or shift in one direction or the other over time. Or someone who has chromosome patterns that don’t fit into XX or XY, like XXXXX. (yes, that’s a real combination of chromosomes that humans can have.)

    You cannot easily classify these people into sex categories, and no definition you make for sex and gender being the same thing will be capable of properly resolving which group these people fall into. You’ll end up putting ambiguous people into categories that don’t align with how they internally feel about themselves, you’ll find ways to accidentally lump cis people into categories they don’t fit in by trying to define these people into male or female categories, and that means it’s impossible to make a definition that covers every single one of these people and neatly fits them into the categories you think only exist in a rigid binary, and by extension, any attempt to assign them to man/woman categories will only demonstrate how subjective the entire thing is in the first place.

    Even just the fact that various traits traditionally assigned to men/women (e.g. high heels originally being worn by men) have shifted over time to being in different categories, and that different ways of self-expression, and experience, have developed over time, disproves the notion that there is this simplistic binary of human experience that cannot be un-aligned from your sex, or that certain traits are tied to sex as opposed to entirely social expectations.

    And they absolutely do not have the right to start throwing abuse and words like transphobe around simply because beliefs don’t match.

    Your position is categorically hostile to their existence. The definition of transphobia includes “fear or dislike of transgender and non-binary people” If you dislike what they believe, and by extension, what they are, then you are categorically transphobic. You can agree and say that you believe being transphobic is correct, but you still definitionally dislike trans people, and thus fit the definition.


  • If I were to say “there are two genders (male and female) and you can not change what you were born as” the red mist descends and because my views don’t align I get called a phobe or ist or a bigot. They simply can’t accept that not everyone shares their ideology.

    Because that statement is not just fundamentally wrong, (male and female aren’t genders, they’re sexes, even sex is a spectrum of characteristics that can’t be cleanly defined in 100% of cases, so a blanket statement that only 1 and 2 exist when 3, 4, 5, etc do as well fundamentally fails even when it comes to sex, let alone social identity characteristics and expression) but it is used to justify erasing trans people from existence, and is the core statement that allows for anti-trans policies to exist.

    That statement is directly used to justify and further policies that directly harm trans people, and thus it isn’t just a difference in opinion, but a clear and obvious case of intolerance that we know leads to real harm.

    If you’d like any further explanation of why exactly that statement is incorrect, I’d be happy to provide it.

    As for the right starting the abuse just look at the Reform member conference in Cornwall last week.

    Apologies, but considering I’m American, I don’t have much of a personal social context for the events, so do take my opinions here with the understanding I don’t follow UK politics much. I agree that any violence there was likely extreme, at least based on my very limited understanding of the party’s politics, but that is, of course, what seems to be an isolated incident.

    As I don’t think we share as much direct societal context, I’m fine with dropping this point against your argument if you don’t wish to continue it, especially considering it’s a little subjective in terms of, say, statistically determining which group is more likely to be aggressive, since I haven’t seen many actual studies or meta-analyses on that particular topic in specific.


  • they preach tolerance but are ALWAYS the ones to start the abuse, insults, name calling and threats when they are disagreed with.

    First off, the group that I’ve always experienced starting with outright hate and name calling has been the right. Look at two protests, one by leftists, one by the right wing, on the same issue, and you will almost always find the most aggressive, slur using, name calling people on the right making themselves known far before anyone on the left will actually start doing anything even remotely similar.

    And secondly, tolerance doesn’t work when dealing with the intolerant. Consider this: Hitler is a brand new figure, comes into the public square, and starts preaching his views. Do we tolerate him, or do we not tolerate him? We should tolerate him, because after all, tolerance is good, right? Well, of course not, because his ideology is intolerant, and directly attacks the tolerant, extinguishing them from society.

    The only way you maintain tolerance is by being intolerant of intolerance.

    If a conservative states that trans people shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public spaces, and the left shuns that person and ostracizes them, the left is being intolerant, but so is the conservative, who if they had their way, would have then eliminated far more presumably tolerant trans people from public life, if given the chance.

    However, conservatives will then frame this as the left being intolerant, and act as if it’s some kind of hypocrisy to try and preserve tolerance by being intolerant of intolerant ideologies.

    On a place light Reddit most subs will just ban you for showing any right leaning opinions.

    Because many subs have moderators that respect marginalized groups that are often the ones attacked by conservatives.

    If someone comes into your community, and begins spouting off an ideology that’s explicitly harmful to members of that group, the most tolerant thing a moderator can do when given two choices:

    1. Tolerate the conservative and let them spout hate
    2. Don’t tolerate the conservative and prevent them from spouting hate

    is the second, because otherwise your community is now persistently allowing in someone who is intolerant of the others in the community.




  • Ask the lawmakers who wrote the laws with vague language, because according to them, that kind of activity could be considered a sale.

    As a more specific example that is more one-sided, but still not technically a “sale,” Mozilla has sponsored links on the New Tab page. (they can be disabled of course)

    These links are provided by a third-party, relatively privacy protecting ad marketplace. Your browser downloads a list of links from them if you have sponsored links turned on, and no data is actually sent to their service about you. If you click a sponsored link, a request is sent using a protocol that anonymizes your identity, that tells them the link was clicked. That’s it, no other data about your identity, browser, etc.

    This generates revenue for Mozilla that isn’t reliant on Google’s subsidies, that doesn’t actually sell user data. Under these laws, that would be classified as a sale of user data, since Mozilla technically transferred data from your device (that you clicked the sponsored link) for a benefit. (financial compensation)

    However, I doubt anyone would call that feature “selling user data.” But, because the law could do so, they have to clarify that in their terms, otherwise someone could sue them saying “you sold my data” when all they did was send a small packet to a server saying that some user, somewhere clicked the sponsored link.



  • ArchRecord@lemm.eetoComic Strips@lemmy.world"Politics"
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    8 days ago

    I’m genuinely not sure if I’m being too sensitive or if this is genuinely behavior that shouldn’t be supported.

    There’s nothing inherently wrong with that content existing, and being something people can pay for, but you’re also not being too sensitive for not personally wanting to pay that artist, if your surrounding circumstances would make the access to explicit content then seem a little unsavory in your particular case.

    Ideally, that artist would let you pay for just the non-NSFW content, or simply send a tip/donation directly, instead of requiring the NSFW content to be bundled with any attempt at payment, but that doesn’t mean that offering NSFW content itself “shouldn’t be supported,” even if it’s not desirable in your case.


  • Hasbro said they’d make it “genderless” naming it “Potato Head” and just provide parts so the kids playing with the toys can choose what attachments to put on in order to make it look more like a “Mr,” “Ms,” or just some mix of both.

    Apparently it would only be an addition to the existing Mr and Ms line, so it wouldn’t even be replacing them.

    Conservatives then went on a tirade online complaining that the left was trying to destroy traditional family roles and indoctrinate the children by preventing them from learning the valuable lesson of family from the Potato Head toys.

    No, this isn’t satire, they actually got mad over this.


  • If nukes didn’t exist, there would potentially be more wars, and thus more death.

    Nukes enable larger amounts of death. They increase the possible death, while also increasing the incentive to do a war, to prevent that death. In a world with no nukes, the threat and preventative force of less deadly weapons would simply match each other, just as they currently do with nukes, and have the same effect on disincentivizing war.

    We have already automated essentially everything else, and yet people work more than ever.

    Oh no we have not. See:

    • Every single service job that relies on human experience/interaction (robotic replacements are still only ever used as gimmicks that attract customers for that fact, but not as a continual experience in broader society, precisely because we value human connection)
    • Any work environment with arbitrary non-planned variables too far outside the scope of a robot’s capabilities
    • Most creative works related jobs (AI generated works are often shunned by the masses because they feel inhuman and more sterile than human made works, at least on average)

    Not to mention that when we automate something, and a job goes away because of that, that doesn’t mean there’s no new work that gets created as a result. Sure, when a machine replaces a human worker in a factory, that job goes away, but then who repairs and maintains the machine, checks that it’s doing what’s required of it, etc? Thus, more jobs shift to management style roles.

    Your defensiveness speaks volumes.

    You’re defensive over believing AI will actually make humans obsolete, that must mean you’re actually unable to stomach the reality that you’ll have to keep working the rest of your life. Your defensiveness speaks volumes. /s

    Seriously, I welcome automation and the reduction in the amount of labor human beings have to engage in so that people are free to engage in their own interests outside of producing material goods for society. A future where work is entirely optional because we’ve simply eliminated the need to work to survive is great to me.

    An ever more powerful nucleus of mechanization that has resulted in the most devastating wars and the most widespread suffering in all of human history. Genocides, chattel slavery, famine, biochemical and nuclear weapons; mass extinction and the imminent destruction of the very planet on which we live.

    Ah yes, the printing press, car, and computer, the cause of all genocides. /s

    Seriously man, do you not understand that people will just do bad things regardless of if a given job/task is automated?

    By the way, your logic literally has no end here. The printing press, car, etc, is just an arbitrary starting point. There’s nothing about these inventions that’s inherently the starting point for any other consequences. This argument quite literally goes all the way back to the development of fire.

    Fire brought the ability to burn people to death. Guess we should never have used fire for anything because it could possibly lead to something bad on a broader societal scale, maybe, in some minute way, that in no way outweighs the benefits!

    Sweet summer child. Making human work obsolete makes human beings obsolete. I envy your naivety.

    Were you ever a kid? Y’know, the people across nearly every society on this planet that don’t get jobs for years, and have little to no responsibilities, yet are provided for entirely outside of their own will and work ethic? Yet I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t believe that children are obsolete because they don’t do work.

    The assumption that work is what gives humans their value is a complete and utter myth that only serves capitalists who want to convince you that it’s good to spend most of your time doing labor, actually.


  • But nuclear weapons have only been used twice in 80 years for military purposes. They have arguably prevented more deaths than they have caused.

    Nukes only “prevent” deaths by saying they’ll cause drastically large numbers of deaths otherwise. If the nukes didn’t exist, there wouldn’t then be the threat of death from the nukes, which is being prevented by more people having the nukes.

    If anything, your reaction is a defense mechanism because you can’t bear to stomach the potential consequences of AI.

    “AI” is just more modern machine learning techniques that we’ve had for decades. Most implementations of it today are things that nobody actually wants, producing worse quality outputs than that of a human. Maybe it will automate some jobs, sure, that can happen. Just like how tons of automation historically has just pushed people from direct labor to management of machine labor.

    Heck, if “AI” automated most of the work people did and put us out of a job, that would just accelerate our progress towards pushing for UBI/or an era of superabundance, which I’d welcome with open arms. It’s a lot easier to convince people that centralized ownership of wealth and resources makes no sense if goods can be produced automatically by machines for free.

    But sure, seeing matrix multiplication causing statistically probable sentences to be formed really has me unable to stomach the potential consequences. /s

    One could have easily reacted the same way to the invention of the printing press, or the automobile, or the analog computer. They all wasted a lot of energy for limited benefit, at first. But if the technology develops enough, it can destroy everything that we hold dear.

    And what did the printing press, automobile, and analog computer bring?

    A rapid advancement in the spread of information and local news, faster individualized transport that later contributed to additional developments to rail and bus transit solutions, and software solutions that can massively reduce workloads while accelerating human progress.

    And all of those things either raised the standard of living without causing equivalent harm from job loss, or actively created substantially more jobs.

    Human beings engineering their own obsolescence while cavalierly disregarding the potential consequences. A tale as old as time

    Make human work obsolete so we can do what we care about and hang out with people we like instead of spending our days doing labor to produce goods we rely on? Sign me up.