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China bans export of rare earths processing tech over national security
  • No one is attacking your "factual and informative" comment.

    No one is disputing the difficulties you've highlighted. What is being disputed is your assertion that those difficulties are relevant to your assertion that China won't be able to achieve this.

    And the subject of the conversation is a technology that humans have already developed and is in use. So what is it about China/the PRC that would cause you to assert they are incapable of building/employing this technology?

    Your argument is that "Hard science doesn't care about politics," so I assume you don't want to imply that you're critiquing the capabilities of China's political system. So what's left? Is it racism? The removed can't achieve what other humans have already proven is possible because the removed is subhuman?

    You are making a political statement whether you intend to or not, you don't just get to whine about how you were only talking about the science and why is everyone being so mean when you only started a discussion about the science to reinforce (or deflect from) your original assertion.

  • A story in 4 parts...
  • You've fallen prey to one of the oldest laws of the internet, which states that the quickest way to get an answer to something is to post the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you.

    It's called Murphy's Law.

  • "If trains were first invented today, they would never be built. No rail-less nations are building rail networks. No, China doesn't count because they're the Paragon of poor economic choices."
  • This is good context, and I typically avoid the profit conversation on topics like this altogether.

    Not everything can be or should be designed and operated around profit. Providing a service costs money. When something is a public service, the benefit that the public receives from operating that service isn't profit, the benefit they receive is the service.

    The whole point of transitioning towards socialism is that we want to be able to organize our labor and put the resources that we generate as a society towards projects that give some kind of benefit to us, not just towards projects that can turn a profit for people who privately own the economy.

  • I can’t believe I’m siding with the South Park guys here
  • Adding on to the chorus telling you that legally speaking, tips are required to be reported as income and taxed.

    Now of course, many people don't report their tips in spite of this requirement, and because of the nature of cash tips it is very rare that this requirement is ever enforced. So it is very unlikely that you will face any legal repercussions for not reporting your tips. However, choosing not to report can have other effects besides legal action. For example, if you lose your job and try to claim unemployment, the unemployment benefits you receive is usually calculated as a percentage of your average income from your most recent period of employment. So if you under-report your tips, that can have a significant impact on the unemployment benefits you are entitled to.

  • I can’t believe I’m siding with the South Park guys here
  • "the workers want it and therefor it is good and you are reactionary if you don't support them!"

    We also don't even know if it's the workers that want this. All we are being shown is a petition that has ~5k signatures on it, despite the restaurant only having 256 employees according to the article. And in the second to last line of the article, we are told this:

    Of 256 employees, 93 were a part of the shift and only two said they were unhappy about it, management said at the time.

    If we can only find 2 people that are upset with the policy despite having a petition with thousands of signatures, then I think it's safe to conclude that the people supporting the petition and the people working at the restaurant don't overlap very much.

    Which makes sense, because if the workers were united on this issue and were serious about forcing their boss to make a change to employment policy, then they would be passing around union election cards instead of sharing a petition and getting signatures of people who don't even work at the restaurant. A union has real leverage to force a business to make policy changes, a petition doesn't.

    It doesn't make sense for workers to try to change a policy like this through a petition, so the only likely reason for a petition like this to exist is so that media outlets like this can have a pretext to write an article about how seemingly unpopular this policy is in order to manufacture consent against demands for similar policies in the wider industry. A petition is great for this kind of hit job, because it focuses solely on the apparent disapproval of whoever they could find that was willing to sign. A petition doesn't give you any data on how many people approve of the new policy relative to the disapproval rate, a petition doesn't give you any information on how many people declined to sign, a petition doesn't give you information where this disapproval is coming from (such as from the workers themselves or some outside source), and as such writing an article about a petition doesn't present you with any contradicting data that might undermine the narrative you're trying to sell.

    I am under no impression that this petition represents genuine grievances and demands from the workers themselves, and rather that it is likely the product of some astroturfing effort from other business owners and executives in the industry who have a vested interest in discouraging this policy from becoming commonplace/industry standard.

  • I can’t believe I’m siding with the South Park guys here
  • Also, if the staff was united on this issue, they would be passing around union election cards and not a petition.

    A petition doesn't have any real leverage to force a change in policy, whereas a union does.

  • Dragging Civilization Backwards One Emoji At A Time
  • Defending language and human expression by arbitrarily limiting the scope of what should be considered valid language and expression.

    The linguistic niche that emojis fill is the same niche that is filled by emblems, which are a powerful tool for communicating specific ideas very concisely and have existed long before the internet. If pictures are too childish and regressive for this guy, then I suppose they want a world without bright red hexagonal stop signs and railroad crossing markers and would instead prefer traffic control markers be replaced with plain text billboards containing the relevant legal codes written in plain text.

  • Locked
    If you couldn't stomach eating meat if you had to butcher it yourself you shouldn't get to eat meat
  • Personally, I think this point is obvious and hexbear is continuing to show its ass and internalized liberalism. I'm convinced that most people here don't even do anything irl,

    How does this post encourage any kind of political organizing? Making the focus of your political messaging on the hyper-individualist concept of personal choice, voting with your wallet, and consumer behavior is about as liberal as you can get. Consumer spending habits will never be a solution to the abuses of industrial food processing because those abuses are not a function of consumer demand. And if your proposed plan of action has no viable theory of change attached to it, then it is not a political position. It is virtue signaling, and nothing more.

  • A Ceasefire has majority support even when you frame the question in the most leading way possible
  • The other half of that equation is that the people who didn't "get theirs" and who belong to disproportionately impoverished demographics also don't tend to live into old age as frequently as people who have more privilege and who can afford the medical care that is associated with aging.

    So at least some portion of this trend is due to survivorship bias.

  • Locked
    If you couldn't stomach eating meat if you had to butcher it yourself you shouldn't get to eat meat
  • More like OP is saying "If you're okay with eating meat then you're okay with animal slaughter."

    Which, sure.

    And then goes on to say, "You're only allowed to be okay with slaughter if you do it yourself."

    lol y tho. If we're just doing the debatelord formal logicgame, then the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

  • blahaj not beating the va*shist allegations
  • I know this comment is a few days old at this point and the conversation is dead, but is it really true that reddit users skew younger?

    Like, I was a teen when I made a reddit account over a decade ago, but I feel like reddit isn't the cool thing for high schoolers to sign up for anymore. If feels more like legacy social media with very outdated design sensibilities even if you're using new reddit.

    I think reddit's userbase is certainly more immature in the way that being a semi-anonymous user in an endless sea of throw-away accounts tends to foster. That kind of design creates an environment where people feel comfortable putting less care and thought into the views that they share because whatever bullshit they wrote will get buried when the thread dies, and most communities aren't small enough for individual users to develop a persistent reputation in a community based on their previous comments, so every interaction starts off as a fresh slate with little/no stakes. And people are less likely to mature if they never have any accountability to the things they say/believe.

    I don't think the quality/maturity of posters on Hexbear vs reddit and the "reddit diaspora" on Lemmy can be explained by the age demographics of those groups. I think it has more to do with the quality of moderation here filtering out people with "reddit-brain," as well as simply having a more well defined community where you can somewhat expect other people to recognize your username and therefore care about the impression you leave on people as a result.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FE
    ferristriangle [he/him] @hexbear.net

    For legal reasons this is a parody account

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