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Rich People Are the Big Barrier to Stabilizing the Climate
  • It's worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn't much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.

    Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.

  • Buying a new car is not better than keeping an old one
  • What's far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I'm from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.

    In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you're walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can't possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.

  • Buying a new car is not better than keeping an old one
  • Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it's normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They're oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.

  • Buying a new car is not better than keeping an old one
  • I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate "the free market", this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It's not that some of these companies aren't bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it's that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.

    The example I like to give is that companies' race to the bottom on quality. They're responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and the lowest possible profit margin.

  • Ex-Americans are suing America to get back some of the money they paid to renounce their citizenship
  • I certainly agree based on my previous statement that income is not wealth, but I was trying to make two points and mixed the messages.

    One is that amounts of money that were once considered an unbelievable amount for income or wealth - say $100k and $1m - have now been eroded by inflation to fairly modest money. In the 70s or 80s, having a million meant never working again. Earning 100k a year when a house cost $50k was huge money, and might lead to wealth quickly, if one bought several houses with it.

    Another point I'd like to sneak in is that there's almost no modern equivalent to that kind of employed income. On paper, inflation puts it at 400k - so maybe today's equivalent of a surgeon - but the 50k house now costs $500k-1m. Notional inflation being 4x, while the critically important things have gone up 10-20x means that something harder to quantify is broken, and upward mobility isn't working the way we expect. The same opportunities don't exist. We are less likely to turn income into wealth over time than at points in the past, and so the tendency of people to erroneously think high income = wealth may have a reasonable basis in history that has never been less true today.

    Edit: and it's not just houses, it's the stock market. The advent of the internet and e-commerce resulting in tech stock growth 1995-today is a phenomenon not likely to be replicated in any other area. We may be running out of growth to be had. The ability to get 10-20x your money over 30-40 years of investments is probably gone, and with it the prospect of comfortable retirement for even relatively high earners.

  • Ex-Americans are suing America to get back some of the money they paid to renounce their citizenship
  • I've seen this on Reddit before: Six figures means you're rich, because that was true in the 80s, right? Obviously people don't have a clue that 40 years of inflation has made that middle class.

    Also: income is not wealth, and the willful lack of understanding on that point blows my mind. A person who is wealthy can live an upper middle class lifestyle or better without ever having to work again. A person who has respectable income may have minimal wealth, or even mountains of debt (student loans, mortgage, etc). A person who makes 100k could be a few months unemployment away from losing their house or lease, while a person with "wealth" may not have to work at all.

    People don't become filthy rich working full time for six figures. The wealthy (~$20-50m net worth and up IMO) are people who made their money with something other than labor - through investments and things that the government doesn't really classify as normal income.

    Edit: It's like the saying goes: nobody makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars. If you tax the wealthy on income, you collect very little tax, because it's not classified as income. Meanwhile you're going to tax an engineer or physician who probably have hefty student loans and work their asses off full time, at the highest marginal rates because we don't or can't tax wealth.

    Edit2: we've got minimum wage internet trolls who think an employee software engineer is basically a cigar chomping capitalist because they make over the median wage. The middle class has shrunk and maybe you're not in it. Get a clue, dumbasses.

  • Ex-Americans are suing America to get back some of the money they paid to renounce their citizenship
  • Totally agree. Income isn't wealth and people are clinging onto 1970s implications of "millionaire" when in 2023 having a million net worth doesn't even allow you to retire and might just mean you own a house and have little other savings. Similarly "six figures" income meant a lot 30-40 years ago, but inflation eroded that to middle class in the 21st century.

  • A Lab Test That Experts Liken to a Witch Trial Is Helping Send Women to Prison for Murder
  • That's what I'm talking about also. Experts who are being paid to express an opinion, but in a circumstance where their peers would hold a consensus opinion that opposes what they are stating in court. Those experts are mercenaries.

  • A Lab Test That Experts Liken to a Witch Trial Is Helping Send Women to Prison for Murder
  • That's a good way to put it - it's laziness. Maybe it's laziness though the burden of history where the structure of the system is cobbled together from hundreds of years of increasingly irrelevant procedures and precedent that can't be modernized with society. I'm not a legal scholar by any stretch, but the whole thing looks suspect to me.

    I've heard from medical experts that appear not to be mercenaries, but my issue is that there's no way for the legal system to distinguish between a person who takes the job only when they're on the right side of an issue, and a person who will craft an argument to make their side seem right regardless of the facts. The process all seems very corrupt from the outside. It incentivizes financial conflict of interest.

  • A Lab Test That Experts Liken to a Witch Trial Is Helping Send Women to Prison for Murder
  • That's the issue I have with the justice system - it's much too loose with facts because it's designed around persuading non experts (and arguably jury selection is designed to reject people with high education or relevant background knowledge). The adversarial process gives each side an equal go at persuasion even if one side doesn't have a leg to stand on scientifically. The judge isn't in a position to disallow something that would be considered bullshit to an expert, and any qualified expert is allowed to sell out and present a biased interpretation of facts, even if 99% of their peers would disagree. More often than not, your resources determine whether or not you're right in the eyes of the law. It's bullshit.

    Edit: if you're a physician on trial for malpractice, "A jury of your peers" would consist entirely of physicians in your area of practice, as they are the only people with the relevant understanding and background knowledge to evaluate whether your actions followed the standard of care or constitute malpractice. The fact that courts don't operate this way means that findings of guilt or innocence are basically a popularity/debate contest with a veneer of authenticity.

  • Canada’s birth rate has dropped off a cliff (and it’s likely because nobody can afford housing)
  • Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn't have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can't.

  • Canada’s birth rate has dropped off a cliff (and it’s likely because nobody can afford housing)
  • Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn't be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying "how do we prevent population contraction" - that's insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.

    If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we're all fucked.

  • Senator Calls for DOJ Action Against Philips for Keeping CPAP Machine Complaints Secret
  • Believe me when I say I'm not on corporations' side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.

    PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it's not my field and I haven't looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I've seen firsthand the family's emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.

  • Senator Calls for DOJ Action Against Philips for Keeping CPAP Machine Complaints Secret
  • I don't mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?

    It's not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who "just know" that that MMR vaccine caused their son's autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage "must have" caused his cancer - because it's less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn't do anything to cause it.

    Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.

  • I've got 99 problems but urban planning is all of them
  • Doesn't that all seem a bit silly?

    For sure. All of this is pretty silly.

    Also, it seems you are willing to discount discussion out of hand because of your perception of the person on the other side instead of based on the merits of the argument.

    Well, I mean, yes, but I'm basically trying to say that social media in it's various forms is full of armchair experts who have massive blind spots but argue passionately, and the pro-urban, "fuck cars" crowd comes off as particularly cranky in this way.

    It's basically people who didn't get a driver's license, or couldn't afford a car, or lived in an urban traffic nightmare like LA trying to invalidate the personal freedom others experienced as a result of car ownership - and I'm certain it's a generational thing because boomers, Gen X and the older millennials grew up at a time when anyone could own a car, gas was cheap, and it was woven into the independence of early adulthood. You'll never convince me that it's not empowering to get 50-100 miles out of your small city and explore an unpopulated place that public transit could not service. It annoys me to no end that people on socal media hate on this without the lived experience to understand it.

  • I've got 99 problems but urban planning is all of them
  • 20 years ago, Japan's population was basically flat. It has the same population today as it did in 1995, having gone up and then down by only a couple million people in between.

    Land prices in the US were also low 20 years ago, before we added another 45 million people to the demand side of the equation.

  • Why do apps reload constantly?

    Android user for several years, many versions, now on 13 with a Pixel 5.

    I've never been able to understand why when switching between apps, sometimes returning to an earlier app causes a full reload of the app - like it forgets where you were, what you were doing, and completely reloads an interface, webpage, or whatever. I get the sense it's purging every app from RAM as soon as it thinks it can get away with that, and the result is a noticeable time and continuity penalty. What gives?!? Is there a way to fix this behavior?

    Edit: It happens with literally every app. System apps like messages or settings, lemmy apps, Reddit apps, Firefox, chrome - it's fucking annoying.

    5
    YouTube videos opening in browser?

    I'm glad liftoff is opening web links in Firefox now, but I want YouTube videos to open in revanced so as to avoid ads. Slide used to have a built in YouTube viewer, which was great (no idea how it worked but it played zero ads too). YouTube broke it recently before Reddit broke the API, but there's always Vanced/Revanced... Any chance we can get that working?

    11
    Lemmy apps open external links with ads?

    On Android, several apps I've tried open links in an internal browser, which defaults to Chrome. Any external news/whatever link is ad-riddled and I have no way to redirect them to Firefox.

    In addition, video links open in the official YouTube app instead of revanced, and imgur links open the website instead of an internal image viewer that views the direct image (or something like imgurviewer). Slide used to have it's own internal YouTube viewer which broke only recently, probably because of changes to YouTube.

    At the moment, using Lemmy though these apps is much worse than using slide for Reddit was. I almost forgot how terrible the web is for mobile use prior to getting on Lemmy - it's unusable! Are any app developers working on this problem?

    8
    Wouldn't the fediverse work better if it was like a drive array rather than independent communities on independent servers?

    I get the impression that we're headed for the same issues that pop up when we put all our eggs in one basket with Reddit/FB/whatever. People flock to the largest instance, and someday that instance could go down due to cost or the host losing interest.

    I'm wondering whether it would be technically achievable to have servers/instances and federation where the communities are essentially mirrored or have broadly distributed existence - maybe even with user storage a la torrents.

    If there's a large blargh@lemmy.here community and a small blargh@lemmy.there community, all of the discussion, images, contributions to lemmy.here die if the server goes down for good. Yes, the users can relocate to lemmmy.there - even under the same community name - but it's not the same as having full continuity of a completely mirrored community.

    I realize this concept has technical hurdles and would involve a reimagining of how the fediverse works, but I worry we're just setting up for another blowup at some TBD date when individual sysadmins decide they've had enough. If it's not truly distributed and just functions as a series of interconnected fiefdoms, communities and their information won't survive outages, deaths, and power struggles.

    21
    What is causing this pattern in the first layer?

    Flashforge creator pro 2 with PLA, standard quality preset, textured removable magnetic bed on the build plate.

    The first lines are straight, but as it makes more parallel lines to build the layer, it starts to develop a scalloped pattern. This creates issues with smoothness when it fills back to join it from the other side later. I've leveled the build plate, although I suspect it's not perfectly flat and maybe slightly higher in the middle. Is this my problem? It appears to have the pattern even away from the middle if that makes sense.

    0
    open in desired app?

    Thunder is working well for me so far, but one of the consistent issues is that it uses an internal chrome-based browser to open links and may not be using Android's settings. Chrome for Android has no plugin support and links are ad riddled compared to Firefox with uBlock origin. Other apps that skip the bloat of loading a web page like imgurviewer aren't used. Is there a chance this will get changed anytime soon?

    1
    FAA passenger night currency and safety pilots?

    Asking here because I no longer have a Reddit account: if a safety pilot is a required crew member and one or both pilots are not night current, is it legal to fly after the end of civil twilight?

    I could argue it isn't because there are phases of flight where no safety pilot is required (taking off and landing) and therefore they are a passenger. Is that a correct interpretation of the regs?

    0
    Is this intended to be a replacement for r/flying?

    The r/flying subreddit is moderated to be for pilots to discuss actual participation in flying and flight training subjects, moreso than any airplane themed content. At the moment the content being posted here is more similar to r/aviation. It seems to take a significant community and moderator effort to keep out general aviation themed and even general travel-themed posts, but the result has been a high quality pilot (and future pilot) community. What's the intention here?

    0
    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/)RE
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