Mine is retail work. Yeah I get it. You hate it. There isn’t anything that I hadn’t heard before about it by now that hasn’t already been said. Yup, people suck.
But on the same token, I don’t really appreciate the level people go to, to dissuade people from getting into retail work. Job is a job and income is income. You’ll need both of these things. I’ve learned that a lot of the time, people just happen to be employed by shitty stores that are managed by power-tripping people or maybe the team they work with are annoyingly incompetent.
Yet if you manage to find a store that’s worth working in, it’s worth it for however long you want to be there for. I chose to work for retail. I don’t mind the labor. I don’t want a sit-down desk job.
And yeah I work for a big company that has questionable values and has destroyed communities. But that’s really out of my control and because that I work for said company, does not necessarily mean that I agree with it or side with the corporate standards. If I wanted to, I’d go back to school and find something else to do.
And that’s what I advise people to do if they’re so tired of their retail job. Go back to school, it’s really all you can do other than go to trade school to get skills and branch into different careers. Just removed about it all day is not going to do a thing. I used to be like that but all it does was just make me hate everything and there were a couple points where I could’ve gotten fired over it. It’s not worth getting fired over something you don’t really have an investment in.
I think prohibition is a massive failure of a policy and bullshit moral war and that everything about drugs would be safer and better if they were easily available to whoever seeks them.
However, I know from experience when you’re desperate and not well that you’ll reach for anything and this can often have severe, predictable collateral consequences for those around someone with maladaptive drug use.
Also people are generally dumb as fuck with drugs and we’ve all been there. Like, the stakes can be much higher with them involved and life is already basicaly a meat-grinder so I worry about people’s abillity to learn to use responsibly and persevere or operate functionally in often deeply problematic home and work environments when its infinitely complicated by various random substances that can become lighter fuel for massive self-destruction and harm to others
I oppose violence. There are some people who cause so much harm that I wish they’d die. I don’t wish for violence to occur, but I wouldn’t be sad if it happened and I had nothing to do with it.
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
- Clarence Darrow
(I thought it was Mark Twain before I looked it up for the wording)
Death penalty
On one hand, I don’t believe capital punishment has any place in civilized society.
On the other, there are some in-human people (serial killers mainly, but including e.g. CEOs who have caused thousands of deaths to increase profits), where it just seems a waste of everyone’s time, to lock them away in a cell for decades. Some people are just completely beyond rehabilitation, and if they are proven guilty with 99.9+% certainty, what’s the point of locking then up and waiting for old age to do the job?The problem with the death penalty is largely down to potential miscarriages of justice.
What if they get the wrong person and some innocent is put to death? Do you really want the state to have that sort of power over its citizens?
There’s been two cases of this happening very recently that’s been making the rounds on Lemmy. Two dudes on death row, new evidence comes up that puts their guilty judgement into question and their execution proceeds anyway.
Didn’t only one of the executions proceed? I thought one was stayed (but maybe it still happened later, idk)
Possible. I haven’t been following them that closely.
It is significantly cheaper to keep someone in prison for life than the death sentence process.
Doesn’t have to be.
Do you have a source for that? I’m genuinely curious. Because I thought about that a lot too and I would have assumed that it costs way more to keep someone alive, fed, and supervised for 50 years vs. a death penalty.
Here is amnesty international
It basically comes down to trials being far more expensive , the required solitary confinement being more expensive, more appeals. Lawyers cost much more than prison meals.
Thanks! Yea that’s super important information and this changes my opinion on that because I was thinking about cost.
I like life imprisonment for heinous people specifically because it seems like the less merciful option. Look at how many mass shooters and terrorists also take their own lives during the act - suicide is one of their objectives. If we can capture them alive and make them live in a small room, eating unexciting food and sleeping on thin mattresses for decades still to come - that’s the ultimate rebuke to their ideologies of death. Execution, on the other hand, is giving them what they seek.
Same, I don’t necessarily think it prevents any crimes from happening, but there are some individuals who will provide nothing back to society that could possibly make up for what they’ve done, and their continued existence is a threat to those around them that have to deal with them on a daily basis.
BUT until the criminal justice system can be reformed or provide more equatable justice, I don’t know that we can 100% say everyone on death penalty deserves it. I don’t know how we fix it, but it shouldn’t be left to private individuals or groups to have to exonerate people on death row.
Plus the amount of money that gets sunk into looking after their old murdering asses.
Good luck getting that CEO in a court room
In order to get 99.9% certainty, 1) you are saying you are willing to have one in a thousand death penalties against innocents, and 2) that requires a system made of people to do their job correctly 99.9% of the time. I dont think there is a job on earth that people in a large group can do that well.
Proprietary products.
I am a big fan of free & open source, and I believe as much as possible should be open source, especially the essential ones, but at the same time, people need to get paid.
I know this is said a lot, but it clearly needs to be said again. The “Free” in FOSS means “Freedom” not “Gratis”. You can sell FOSS. You can make money off of FOSS. People do it all the time.
But it is more difficult - by definition, anyone can just fork what you are selling and sell it themselves cheaper or free. Of course there is value in customer service, maintenance, hosting, etc. and those can be sold, but the actual code is tougher. Some projects bypass it by having proprietary add-ons or versions, since the open part itself is hard to monetize.
Very much. Especially if paying means not a subscription & it was never ad-support + inundated with malicious trackers. Too often the proprietary tools I am required to use are clearly tracking me & are by companies with horrible reputations, but this doesn’t have to always be the case.
I’m a very big fan.
My two-sided opinion is that as a defence for veganism/vegetarianism, animal suffering is inconsequential. I used to use the example of flies. Would you hurt a fly? If you would, then what gives you grounds to claim that the lives of any “higher-order functioning” animal is more valuable.
My opinion on this became two sided when i learnt that most insects don’t experience pain the same way most mammals do.
Regardless of pain perception: Assuming someone is okay with killing a fruit fly but not a human, they have to draw the line somewhere. And a pig for example is WAY closer to human than to a fruit fly. It’s a sentient being with a brain that’s not really so far from human, compared to the fruit fly which is essentially a tiny biological robot.
In fact, it’s kinda weird to draw the line at humans, especially when there’s such a big overlap between other animals and human children in terms of cognitive capabilities.
I think it’s very reasonable to draw the line after insects, where we can be reasonably certain that there’s no complex thought or sentience. The value and subjective experience of an insect versus a farm animal are hardly comparable.
This, and if you eat vegan, it will also limit the damage done to bugs as a result of smaller land use. I’m vegan with no exceptions, but I don’t really give a fuck about being vegan in some weird absolute way like “can I sit on leather chair at my friends”. Instead of that, veganism is just an attempt to reduce suffering, with full understanding that it is never going to remove it, and that there are other ways to to reduce suffering in the world without being vegan, which I also try to implement in my life.
That’s a fine way of viewing it. I feel like the entire argument is just an attempt at rationalizing one’s indifference to animal suffering (particularly those of farm animals), so iterations of this argument don’t even matter as i doubt many who use this argument would convert if it were proven to be false.
The truth is many meat eaters don’t really care for the suffering of animals that much to stop eating meat which in and of itself could be considered an argument, but that usually results in ad hominem attacks from vegans. I don’t see myself or any other meat eater as actively trying to bring about suffering. It’s just people trying to have a good meal, and killing animals is an unfortunate consequence of that goal.
This is something I think about from time to time and essentially get nowhere.
I try and live-capture and release bugs from my house (the only things I actively kill in this regard is mosquitos).I also hunt/fish.
If I saw a deer trapped on a frozen lake I’d go out and rescue it, yet I’d shoot that same deer in a different place under a different context. It’s not really consistent, except in intentionality I suppose.
I do place a higher value on the life of animals that are more “intelligent” (in a way that feels more human) compared to other animals. For example, I’m not upset at all when I use hand sanitizer and presumably wipe out a whole swath of life, but I’m sad if a bird hits a window and dies. Part of that is the intentionality again maybe? The bacteria “had” to die, and the bird didn’t; I’d feel less bad about the bird if I saw a natural predator take it down but it’s still more upsetting than even unintentionally killing an insect.
I recruit spiders as mercenaries. Don’t want mosquitoes in the shop
I’m not vegan, I’m just trying to eat less meat, but I see this discourse pop up from time to time in vegan communities.
A similar argument is often made regarding what would happen to vegetarians if they learned that plants can feel pain. This is often posed as a hypothetical, but I’ve heard that some studies suggests plants and fungi especially may be aware of when they’re being eaten. Whether or not that equates to pain, I don’t think a consensus has been reached.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say that plants do feel pain while you eat them. If your ethos is to reduce overall suffering in the food chain, then it’s still logical to abstain from meat. Livestock living a vegetarian life eat a lot of plants.
You might alternatively come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as ethical consumption. An extreme position you might take is that the best way to reduce suffering is to remove yourself from the food chain. If you starve yourself, you’ll be consuming less, your greenhouse emissions become zero, and you lessen your impact on social services and infrastructure that is often strained to the breaking point.
Obviously, the solution is not to just kill yourself. But advocating for more ethical consumption seems like a noble cause.
What does ethical consumption look like?
Gosh, that’s actually a big question and not one that I’m sure anybody could come to a definitive, absolute answer.
Ultimately, I think it depends on an individual’s ethics. Some people believe there’s nothing wrong with hunting because it’s just predation happening in the ecosystem. Some people avoid certain ingredients or produce like palm oil or avocados because of the ecological harm. For some people, it’s eating only locally sourced food to minimize the impact of emissions from the global supply chain.
For many people, it’s a murky line between doing what’s right and doing what’s achievable. And as people get pushed to their limits they might not be able to afford the luxury of choosing what’s good.
For my part, I’m trying to do the best I can. Our grocery budget is quite frugal and we’re getting squeezed. Eating vegetarian is often a financial necessity. My wife craves meat, and I’m not going to argue with her body’s natural impulse. So if there’s a bargain or leftovers, we won’t pass up an opportunity.
The sad thing is, I live in a first world country and I know people who are way less food secure than I am.
Another one that kills me is eggs. I pay a little more for the free-range eggs from a factory farm, but I’m still buying from a factory farm. I have no illusions that the conditions of a factory chicken are good, but at the least they’re not battery-caged, so they must be suffering less. But if we were buying from a local farmer, they’d either be too expensive or not able to keep up with demand. We’d be kind of hard pressed to meet our nutritional needs without eggs, so I have to live with the fact that I’m supporting a factory farm
For that matter while just walking around you will be killing bugs like ants and spiders by stepping on them. Just by taking a shower you will kill microorganisms that live on your body.
Housing needs to be less commodimized, but tons of normal families have their entire network tied up in a home.
Any act that raises home prices hurts though without and any act that lowers home prices hurts those with. How can we untangle homes being family’s largest asset without screwing older people.
Without homes and apartments being a commodity, how do we determine who gets to live where fairly? Isn’t there like 10x as many vacancies than homeless people? So it’s not a supply issue, it’s a location issue. The open market is great for sorting that out, but the open market has abused housing and is squeezing too hard.
I don’t like that home prices are as high as they are, and we need to change our mindset about how home pricing should work. It needs both government oversight and market forces.
In every policy change there will be losers and winners, lowering the cost of housing has been a long time coming. So long in fact people assume it’s a great way to invest and raise money.
The housing crisis has literally nothing to do with families owning a single home. There is far more than enough housing for everyone in the country. We need to outlaw AirBnB everywhere, and outlaw corporate ownership of residences.
I don’t even care about the people who have multiple homes, they’re just small fries in comparison. We can do them after the corporations all switch to that business model.
I’m a practicing Christian that goes to church every Sunday, and yet I believe in abortion and birth control like I invented them. I love babies and hold one most Sundays during the sermon and think they’re a miracle, but also if you don’t want to be pregnant don’t for one second hesitate to have the abortion. Your life matters way way more than some cells.
Most Christians in Europe are like this too, tbh
Everything has pros and cons.
Most people tend to see only the pros of the things that favour them and downplay the cons that affect others. Which is why we come to hate each other so often.
For example, life and death are a cycle. Can’t have one without the other. People may have different goalposts on what deaths they think they’re willing to cause in order to survive, but whether it’s animals, plants or even microbial organisms, some living beings have to die in order for others to live. (But it’s fine because there’s so many of them and they can’t think or feel pain, probably. Eh, who cares anyway, gotta eat something!)
Due to the limitations of operating at a loss, a demerit is unavoidable. The problem is having to constantly fine tune the balance in order to do the least harm. And yet even that is a self-appointed right and responsibility in lack of anything else.
Theres no such thing as “too much privacy” but at same time too much privacy can make it near impossible to catch pedos and shit like that :/
Equally related to work, I’m someone who has been quiet quitting for a while, and generally have rather “Graeberistic” view about work.
But I simultaneously want to be very competent at what I do, and get easily annoyed by incompetence. I slack of as much as I can if my employer treats me badly, but when I actually do something I want to do it well.
My line of work is IT / Audio, but in a job which I hopefully quit really soon for new one.
You make plenty of sense here. It’s all about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation right?
For some reason whenever I tried to excel and take pride in my work or invent small improvements to things, I was either rewarded with nothing but higher expectations without higher compensation, or more often, I was just shut down entirely and told to shut up and get back to grinding.
None of that romanticized “I like your style, kid howabout a raise?” hollywood crap happened to me!
I think people more often than not want to do well, they want to be good at something, get better at it, take pride in their work. Being a complete layabout is exhausting!
But just like you, I got to the point of saving my passion for my own projects, and just doing what’s most visible in the job description to not get fired, because I got real tired of being actively punished for making an effort.
Yeah I have been shut down so often it has made me apathetic towards my job, as usually within few months we have a problem because we didn’t do what I told to do.
Even without intrinsic motivation, I think in certain tasks it’s unethical to be careless.
I used to work in kitchens. Hated it. But still be extra careful with allergies and special diets and hygiene, because not doing so might affect people negatively, people who don’t have anything to do with why I hate my job.
It can be same in more abstract ways in somewhere like IT or audio, like taking care of cyber security.
But when that doesn’t apply, slack off as hard as I can.
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Like obviously we need to make people know things exist, it makes financial and logical sense, etc.
On the other hand, this is bullshit. It’s an ever increasing blight on the senses in both online and offline spaces. It’s at the point where massive companies cannot function without plastering ads over everything. Fuck that. If we can’t function without some garish assault of a cacophony to our psyche every few minutes, maybe we need to rethink what we’re doing with our existence.
“Like obviously we need to make people know things exist, it makes financial and logical sense, etc.“
Why is this obvious? I know it’s so normal that me asking seems weird but, is this really how the world has to work? Can we not imagine a world without ads? I’d like to at least try.
I feel the same way. I understand why people do it they do currently, but I would like to at the very least dial it back and see what happens.
Gun control in the US.
Gun control would normally work in any other country, but guns are so ingrained in American culture and history that it is infeasible to simply just implement gun control and expect everything to work.
Couple that gun culture with a whole lot of systemic issues (capitalism, remnants of racist laws, wealth inequality, healthcare, police brutality, education system, firearms safety) and you get the gun violence rampant across the US.
Gun control won’t work on its own. If you want to get rid of guns, you gotta fix everything at the same time, which won’t happen because half the country would vote against progress and their own interests in the name of “owning the libs”.
Maybe we should encourage people to keep their guns as police get more and more militerized
Abortion should be legal in all cases, but a fetus becomes a unique individual when there is clear, identifiable, brainwave activity.
If there’s no brainwave activity, it’s not a life, no matter how many weeks old pre-birth or how many years old after birth.
Abortion should be legal in all cases
The thread replying to the parent comment is a good example of how restricting abortion access requires people to arbitrarily decide definitions of when a fetus “becomes human.”
It’s best to leave that decision up to the pregnant person in consultation with their medical providers.
but a fetus becomes a unique individual when there is clear, identifiable, brainwave activity.
If there’s no brainwave activity, it’s not a life, no matter how many weeks old pre-birth or how many years old after birth.
This is another arbitrary definition of personhood. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But there are other (equally arbitrary) definitions that are reasonable too. (And there are a bunch of unreasonable definitions, but we don’t need to go into those.)
The one that chaps my ass is the whole “abortion stops a beating heart”.
Yeah, and with the appropriate chemicals and electricity, you can make a heart beat in a petrie dish, that doesn’t make it “life”.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/02/stem-cell-research-heart-disease-long-qt
On the flip side, I personally had an incident back in January where my heart stopped for 8 seconds. There have been a few other smaller pauses since then, 4 seconds here, 5 seconds there.
So clearly a heartbeat isn’t entirely what makes you, you.
At what point would you consider it to be sufficiently brain so that its activity is brainwave activity?
When the activity can be actively measured. Terry Schiavo, for example, stopped being a person when her brain stopped.
You can measure electromagnetic activity in an unfertilized egg. The question is when does this activity become brainwave activity.
We have ways of measuring brainwaves, it’s not a mystery.
I never implied that we didn’t. I’m telling you that we can always measure something and asking you to clarify which of these measurements constitute brainwave activity. Is the activity in the ovum a brainwave? Is it after the first signs of a notochord? After the notochord disappears completely? First cell to differentiate to eventually become part of the neural tube? When the neural tube starts bulging out? When there’s enough bulging to see three district vesicles? Or five? Appearance of the first neuron? Or when neurogenesis stops? Or when the nervous system is sufficiently developed to take control of certain bodily functions? Or the activity when the nervous system is “fully developed” as an adult? Or something else?
Abortion should be legal in all cases
Respectfully I disagree. If one grants that abortion should be legal for rape/incest/LOTM (~1%) then it comes down to the other 99% which is what both sides actually care about. At this point the conversation shifts to personal liberty, bodily autonomy, stage-of-development or, in the case of Roe v. Wade, privacy. While there is some clever pilpul regarding ethics and/or the “dilemma” an unexpected pregnancy creates, in the overwhelming majority of cases the abortion decision comes down to convenience. Convenience meaning the prevention of struggle. Having to alter ones life or career to acommodate the needs of a(nother) child. It’s no secret that sex causes pregnancy however many people feel they shouldnt have to deal with the consequences (women AND men). Human life is the most precious thing on earth which means it needs to be treated with the utmost care from conception to repose.
Abortion creates a culture of death. Assisted suicides would almost certainly not be a thing if abortion wasn’t normalized first. It’s no surprise that abortion traces its modern roots to the eugenics movement.
Furthermore something that is rarely discussed is the psychological fallout from abortion. It can be devastating for both women and men.
There can also be devastating psychological fallout from not getting an abortion, which would be why many people believe it should be a choice that the people involved get to make about themselves, rather than forcing it on them.
About the rest of your argument, it hinges entirely on a detail that it doesn’t mention: when does an egg become a human? If sex caused literal newborns to be delivered by storks the next day, of course no one would be arguing to kill the child, even if that was by far the most “convenient”. However in reality there is a transition from a mere collection of cells no more special than any other collection of cells in the body (besides their potential for further development), all the way to a fully developed baby. The egg and sperm cells alone are clearly not human, while a baby clearly is. So then where along this gradual process can we first say that it is a human?
And this is the real crux of the debate. There is no point convincing people that it’s bad to kill their unborn baby via abortion, because they don’t believe there is a baby to kill at all yet, but rather a collection of cells which will eventually form a baby. By removing these cells, you stop any potential for a baby to be formed, just like wearing a condom stops the potential for a baby to be eventually formed, by keeping the egg and sperm separate.
“Stage-of-development” is a flawed argument because it presupposes that some qualifications must be met before an embryo or fetus reaches a status of personhoood when in reality the "clump of cells " has all the genetic instructions it requires to proceed through all stages of development at conception. Entertaining the idea that it somehow matters less because it is smaller, less developed, dependent on the mother etc is the pilpul I was talking about. If it wasn’t a human then an abortion wouldn’t be necessary because a dog, bird or fish embryo would die immediately.
It is not like contraception (e.g. a condom). A gamete on it’s own will never develop into a human under any circumstances.
There can also be devastating psychological fallout from not getting an abortion, which would be why many people believe it should be a choice that the people involved get to make about themselves, rather than forcing it on them.
We are talking about people (man and woman) who decide to have sex and don’t want to deal with the logical, predictable outcome. No one is forcing them to do anything. They have created this situation for themselves. It’s that simple. The rest is just mental gymnastics for them not taking responsibility for their actions.
The only intellectually and morally honest argument for abortion is “I don’t care”.
Of course some qualifications must be met to qualify for a specific term, that’s exactly what definitions are. You yourself are presupposing your own qualifications (“having all genetic instructions”) which you are thrusting upon everyone and assuming it must be the one true definition. But your definition is also deeply flawed. If I have some stem cells harvested from my bone marrow, are those stem cells also a human? If I let those cells die, am I killing someone?
Or to take a step further into hypotheticals, if I store an egg and a sperm separately in a device built to automatically mix them together in a year from now, is this device now a human? Because it matches your definition of containing all genetic instructions, and if left alone then it would eventually produce a fertiliser egg, which you claim is already a human.
A human individual is an incredibly intricate thing, and to try reduce its definition to something as mundane as “contains human genetic information” is the actual mental gymnastics here.
If it wasn’t a human then an abortion wouldn’t be necessary because a dog, bird or fish embryo would die immediately.
This is blatant false equivalence. Trying to claim that if the embryo is not of some other animal, then it must be a human, as in an individual life. It is obviously a “human embryo” but that does not necessarily mean it is “a human”, just like a “human fingernail” is different from a “chimp fingernail” and yet is still not “a human”
We are talking about people who have sex and don’t want to deal with the outcome.
This is honestly a frighteningly cruel outlook. If a rock climber has a fall and is dangling with a broken arm from his rope, should we just leave him there to deal with it himself, since it was his choice to take the risk of climbing? Of course not! Despite his own actions causing his predicament, we as a society still provide care where we can. Hospitals tend to the wounds of idiots who play with fireworks, governments (in many countries) provide care to homeless people who lost all their money gambling. Just because a couple takes a risk which goes badly, does not justify revoking their access to care.
Again, this whole debate comes down to a definition of when a fertilised egg becomes a live human. And if you want to have any actual impact in this debate, then you are going to have to do better than pre-assuming some definition and dismissing anyone who disagrees with it.
I worked at Canadian Tire for approximately 5 years out of high-school and I had pretty well your opinion happen. I was tool knowledgeable as I grew up with a machine shop in my front “yard” (420’ driveway). Yet I got thrown into sports, my manager was fantastic to work with and be around in general. Then there was the assisnt manager who messed with schedules just to get us in trouble. Barely knew anything and was just a terrible person. She was a smoker and so were the majority of the managers, who all were decent people except the power tripping seasonal manager (who got me fired for being good at my job, got a bonus the first week I worked at that store)
Other than a few dicks for customers, it was a decent job, paid $4 hr more than minimum wage (8.50 at the time)
Cycling on the road.
On the one hand, biking is great and they should be able to bike on any road! And we should be careful when driving near them, it’s super scary being so unprotected and so close to metal speed bombs hurling around them.
On the other hand, road bikers are fucking annoying, stay in your goddamn lane and stop slowing down traffic. I’m not reading your dumb hand signals, either!
On the other hand, road bikers are fucking annoying, stay in your goddamn lane and stop slowing down traffic. I’m not reading your dumb hand signals, either!
I sometimes road bike. If there’s a bike lane I’ll stay in it. But I am entitled to a lane if there isn’t a bike lane, so on a four-lane road with no bike lane I will not go to the shoulder, I will ride in the center of the right lane to maximize my visibility. It’s infuriating how many dickhole drivers give me like a quarter of the lane when they pass me unless I take the center of the lane.
(It is legal for me to ride on the sidewalk in my county, but I cannot maintain my preferred 40kph (25mph) on a sidewalk. Too bumpy, and too many pedestrians. It is also legal for me to ride on the road.)
Hand signals aren’t hard. There are, as far as I know, three important ones. Arm straight out means I’m turning that direction. Arm bent up means I’m turning the opposite direction. Arm bent down means I’m stopping, though my bike has brake lights so I don’t usually use this one.
Sidewalk riding is dangerous here. I ride sometimes on the sidewalk but that’s awful for pedestrians and so treacherous at intersections. Better to be in the road, I just try to find routes on smaller less busy roads.
You’re right, but also you’re a perfect example that makes me continue to hold fast to my bikers-are-annoying-get-out-of-the-way mindset
