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EarthIsHome

1,274 karma · joined November 13, 2015

Location: 1 AU
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EarthIsHome··on Hidden Pentagon records reveal patterns of failure in deadly airstrikes
> Are we the baddies?

Yes, we are the baddies. This is where a large portion of our tax dollars go instead of providing the people in the US with universal healthcare, public housing, high-speed rail, etc.

Instead of building a better life for all the people, the US destroys the lives of others for some very small amount of people to become filthy rich.

Now on to the next manufactured conflict with China [0][1] and repeat what we have been doing for decades and well through the 20th century [2].

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/wearytolove/status/14309595626521...

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...

[2]: https://monthlyreview.org/product/washington-bullets/

EarthIsHome··on Evergrande has defaulted on its debt, Fitch Ratings says
I think it's pretty clear that China isn't going to bail them out like how the US bailed out our failed companies back in 2008.

China cares more about protecting the homebuyers and contractors who are building the homes more than protecting the investors [0][1]:

> Evergrande has almost 800 projects across China, many of them funded by advance payments from homebuyers.

> Local governments have ringfenced homebuyer deposits and other funds to ensure that Evergrande projects in their jurisdiction are completed and contractors paid on time.

So this is a much different reaction than the US government who protected the investors and banks.

[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/6d6b1f79-52b3-49e5-aa8a-7068adec7...

[1]: archive.is link of [0] https://archive.ph/GKWmv

EarthIsHome··on YouTube had censored North Korean defector Yeonmi Park
Hakim did a very good short introduction [0] on defectors in general and how this term is used in our media. In the video, he also briefly brings up Yeonmi Pak's story and how it's changed over time as well as the conflicts of interest of speaking income. The video is more about defectors in general and how defectors are portrayed and presented to us, so he doesn't spend a lot of time on Yeonmi Pak's story.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBwZjBMbsK0

EarthIsHome··on Aaron Swartz Rememberance Day This Monday
> I also think of him as an example of how activism can consume people and ruin their lives

The feds and those in power ruined his life. Our legal system ruined his life. Our society ruined his life.

This line of thinking is like "don't even attempt to change the status quo."

EarthIsHome··on Are daily standups hurting your team?
> I've seen non-shitty standups where the effort people put into to make stuff work was valued both by team mates and management

Agreed, but those people must truly believe that their work matters.

EarthIsHome··on Are daily standups hurting your team?
> team members do not believe in their core that their work is valued

Yes, that's the reason. If you know the work you do doesn't matter, you're going to get subpar results.

I won't speak for everyone, but the work I do doesn't matter. I do the work to get paid. The alternative is not get paid. I don't really have a choice. Something that I would consider matters more: building something with my hands like construction, electrician, trades, grocery workers, social services, train workers, factory workers, agricultural workers, bus drivers, etc. That stuff matters in my mind more than whatever widget I'm being paid to make. Those jobs are what keep society moving.

I suspect that for most people in tech, most of the work people do isn't benefiting society and the masses in a good way, it's just a way to make more money for other people. So, it's natural to not believe that their work matters. You have to convince yourself that it matters.

With that said, the solution is a restructure of society that encourages and reinforces work that people find meaningful. No little scrum standups will change any of that. If you truly believe that what you do is meaningful, then you'll get better results. Along those lines, you often hear the question, "What would you do if you didn't need a paycheck?"

EarthIsHome··on Fedora 35
I switched from Arch to Fedora in 2015. I don't miss anything from AUR. When I was on Arch, I used a bunch of stuff from AUR, but I honestly can't remember what I used.

So, it seems like it's worked out okay. I honestly got tired of using Arch and configuring everything. Things would break, and I'd have to figure out how to fix it. What broke the camel's back was when my window manager, awesome, broke. Don't get me started on the name 'awesome' for a window manager and how difficult it was to search for solutions to problems. By that time, I had grown older, and I just wanted something to work, and Fedora works fine for me.

EarthIsHome··on U.S. telecoms are going to start physically removing Huawei gear
https://archive.md/F5FUk

> All over the country, hardware from Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. keeps American telecom networks humming. In the coming months, many of those networks are going to start ripping it all out.

I'm curious how this is going to affect the end user. Are some users going to have slower speeds?

EarthIsHome··on Internet Freedom Around the World Declines for 11th Consecutive Year
I'm very skeptical about anything coming out of Freedom House when its chair was the co-author of the Patriot Act... like come on. There is quite an obvious conflict of interest in what this organization puts out.

More often than not, these types of organizations are used to justify support for western action in what they call "non-free" countries. It works.

Instead, I think we should focus more on improving the majority of lives of the people in the US than focusing on countries abroad.

EarthIsHome··on Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores
Wage theft reported in Iowa using unpaid overtime as an example: http://www.iowapolicyproject.org/images/150818-wagetheft-Fig...

EPI has some good articles as well: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

EarthIsHome··on The Battle of Blair Mountain
One difference between then and now is that more people then thought of themselves as workers, which gave a sense of connection and common struggle to build solidarity. They also worked closer together, lived closer together, etc. We're more atomized now.

Maybe a similar sense of connection will happen with the housing crisis, but I don't think labor is the same as it was. People don't think of themselves as workers in a class; we have been divided more and think of ourselves as subgroups like entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, scientists, etc., which I think changes how you feel about solidarity.

To build solid and sustained mass movements, you have to struggle together. [0]

[0]: Theory of class struggle

EarthIsHome··on Soviet Moon Images (2004)
It's crazy how much better the US manned photos are on the Hasselblad. There's absolutely no imperfections.

I wonder how the US managed to get such crystal clear photos.

EarthIsHome··on Afghanistan: Taliban to reap $1T mineral wealth
Better than getting bombed if you ask me.
EarthIsHome··on Afghan women forced from banking jobs as Taliban take control
A US company wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan in the 90s. Since the Taliban was in control of the area, the US tried to work with them to build the pipeline, but the Taliban didn't didn't agree with having a pipeline through their territory.

So, the US went to war for the pipeline, and now, in the past couple of years, the pipeline is being built under the Taliban.

EarthIsHome··on China unveils 600 kph maglev train
Incredible.

I would love to have a good high-speed intercity train network in the United States connecting the major cities in each State.

I just looked up an Amtrak from Atlanta to Dallas: 3 legs around 64 hours. Cries in American. (there's no connection in New Orleans, so the trip planner routes to Chicago)

EarthIsHome··on Cuba jamming ham radio frequencies [video]
Events don't happen in a vacuum. The US placed missiles at the border of the USSR and pointed them at the USSR [0], and in response, the USSR placed missiles in Cuba. It was the US that provoked those missiles. These are responses to US aggression. Look at it from a historical perspective.

> In response to the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles on the island to deter a future invasion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

EarthIsHome··on Cuba jamming ham radio frequencies [video]
If communism and socialism is so bad, why is there even a need for an embargo? Surely these socialist countries will collapse under their own poor economic policies and not need a 60-year embargo to help tip the scales, which prevents them with interfacing with the rest of the world at the same level as other countries. This embargo that actively stifles their economy and is punitive to the people there is making things worse. If we wanted better for the Cuban people, the US would lift the embargo. After all, every year, the UN votes almost unanimously to lift the embargo (with the US only voting against).

This is somewhat related, but for those here who are interested in how local elections work in Cuba (they have 90+% participation!!!!), this is an excellent video on Cuban elections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aMsi-A56ds

EarthIsHome··on Fed’s Powell expects inflation to stay hot for months
You can see how much the Fed has been propping up the economy in the M1 money stock chart [0].

They've been injecting so much cash... that's a lot of fucking money. I think when they slow down, the market will crash. Money needs to be in circulation, and this is the only way they can get it to circulate (although, tbh, if it were in the pockets of the people, it'll probably circulate better).

You can also check the velocity of money in the M2 velocity chart [1], which shows the ratio of transactions to the M2 supply. The M2 supply is the M1 supply plus some other forms of money. What the M2 velocity chart shows is that people are holding on to their money in some form and not transacting with it as much as they have before (i.e. a slow down in the velocity of money). Like, it's getting close 1!!!!

So all that cash that the Fed's been injecting hasn't been able to speed up the M2 velocity back to pre-COVID times let alone pre '08 recession times.

The velocity chart doesn't look too good IMO.

[0]: M1 money supply https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

[1]: M2 money velocity https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

EarthIsHome··on Efficiency eludes the construction industry (2017)
Anecdotal, but when our local government does a project, they only look at the price tag. If they can afford it, it gets approved.

Building something is very labor intensive (the way we do it here in the US; the article talks about China and other ways of building) and the actual proposed budgets should be higher and timelines longer based on how we build.

But in order to win a contract, the builder must lie and say "we can do it for this much and in this time frame," which tends to be lower than what we can actually realize.

EarthIsHome··on Gmail is blocking emails with links to Tutanota
I've been having a lot of trouble sending mail to Gmail recently.

It seems that recently the IP block that my mail server's IP address is in got listed in a Spamhaus database. I checked neighboring IPs, and they're all listed in Spamhaus. Spamhaus has a very easy easy procedure for getting off the list, and I was able to get my IP address removed from their list, and https://www.mail-tester.com/ reported 10/10 score again (meaning SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all kosher).

As others have mentioned in the comments of this answer [0], removing from the Spamhaus database still doesn't fix the issue. So this indicates that Gmail doesn't update their Spamhaus database too frequently?? Or, once you're on their block list, it's very hard to get off of it.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20235665/2561579

EarthIsHome··on Walmart unveils low-price analog insulin amid rising diabetes drug costs
> An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure.

We have the technology. The cure is cheap. It's criminally insane that the US doesn't make life-saving or life-bettering drugs more available for free.

EarthIsHome··on How TV dramas informed and misinformed perceptions of the war on drugs
> I always have mixed feelings on if art influences society ... or it is just a representation of it.

It's a little bit of both. There is a model of society called the "base and superstructure" [0]. The base comprises of the means of production as well as everyone's relationship to the means of production. Superstructures, like art and culture, are built on top of the base and are both shaped by the base as well as re-enforce the base.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure

EarthIsHome··on Employees are quitting instead of giving up working from home
A 2-hour round trip commute is insane.

Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.

EarthIsHome··on LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month
I'm all for building more housing for people. Ending homelessness, by definition, would mean to provide housing.

But the thing is, we don't even need to build more housing. There are more than 30 times more vacant homes [0] than there are homeless. It makes the most sense to redistribute resources more effectively and efficiently. We should be looking at our system as a whole when it clearly doesn't distribute necessary resources effectively (e.g. food insecurity, wealth inequality, homelessness when there are 30 times more vacant homes than there are homeless, etc.)

[0]: https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m...

EarthIsHome··on Statement: AP 'horrified' by Israeli attack on its office
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force
EarthIsHome··on Out-of-control Chinese rocket expected to fall to Earth in the coming days
There seems to be a difference on how space junk is described based on who the source of the space junk is. e.g. see these headlines: https://imgur.com/a/FwzuMVK
EarthIsHome··on How Big Tech got so big: hundreds of acquisitions
Yes, capital has a tendency to concentrate and centralize.

A 19th century philosopher summed [0] this phenomenon of the concentration and centralization of capital:

Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many.... The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages.... It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation#Marxist_c...

EarthIsHome··on Linux Foundation’s demands to the University of Minnesota
While I agree with you that ethics is important and that it's not taught sufficiently in STEM, it needs to be taught from a systemic point of view. It's a lie to teach we can be ethical in our current system where the profit motive is a principal factor in our decisions.

From my experience in STEM, the one ethics course I took was taught divorced from the political economy, which makes it sound like you can be ethical while trying to make profit. I think this is a fundamental inaccuracy.

EarthIsHome··on Gnome 40
Not only are they GUI themes, some desktop environments come packaged with different utility software. (e.g. Gnome comes with GTK-based utility software like Gedit, and KDE comes with KDE-based utility software like Kwrite.
EarthIsHome··on Non–line-of-sight imaging over 1.43km [pdf]
[0]: https://atlasofsurveillance.org/

[1]: https://www.eff.org/issues/street-level-surveillance

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