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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • That’s not what we were talking about here. We were talking about building enough housing to be able to guarantee it for everyone. That’s not rent control, that’s just investing in our housing supply.

    The topic of this conversation follows from your statement:

    Which is bad for landlords (including the ones that work in legislation)

    i.e. landowners and people in power hold sway over the decision making process and are keeping us away from legislation that houses people. Unless I misread you. That’s why I brought up another example.

    Rent control doesn’t work, the economists are correct (Who woulda thunk it, but studying the way prices are determined is a valid field of academic study). Or rather it does work for some people but makes life harder for others, and isn’t nearly as good of an approach as people think.

    You clearly did not read the link, the person who wrote it is a PhD economist. Also, using one solution as a way to fix housing is naive, when we could (and should be, it’s horribly unaffordable for average people in urban areas, where most people in western countries live, already) be using many, including rent control.





  • I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.

    The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you’re under. If you have UBI, the “support artists” argument is far less strong, because we’re all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.

    But that’s just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We’re paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else ‘owns’ these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.




  • Ah yes, learning moves from porn. Like, we all know women love the finger fish hook in the mouth thing, the violent rubbing of the clit (until she has to physically move your hand away), the slapping of the face, the cock down the throat until she gags and phlegm comes out her nose etc etc.

    Are you assuming all women dislike the things you’ve mentioned? Because that’s not true, and you can take a trip to sex friendly commnunities for women and quickly find someone who “likes it rough” or whatever. You can say most people might not like that, and that could be true, but there are still people who do.

    If you want to teach sex ed with a better focus on sexual pleasure, then you can do that in the last year of high school or college (when everyone has already reached the age where they can legally have sex), whichever is preferable. We don’t expect to learn maths from a sci-fi movie, but it certainly can inspire smart people to try for new scientific advancements - just like porn can inspire people to try new positions and techniques, if we actually educate people alongside so they’re aware of what is or isn’t necessarily pleasurable to everyone and that you should ask and talk to your partners to get to know what they’re into. Instead of just assuming what they’re into.


  • It’s definitely a coordinated, global effort. This doesn’t just happen in multiple states and countries all at once by chance, it really feels like some group is conspiring to make it happen. We already got this passed in the UK by a de-facto unelected leadership who whips their party into voting their way.

    I have to wonder if it’s linked to how many women saw success with OnlyFans and the like, so they could avoid working in horrible conditions like at an Amazon factory that pretends to have rules on how long you can do work that probably damages your body, and then just conveniently lets it slip that they ended up making you do what was supposed to be 30 minutes, for several hours. Some capital owners are already trying for child labour, so their desire to abuse workers more than usual is already established. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all connected, but I’m not sure if there’s solid evidence, so this is just a fun theory I have.


  • This is a benefit to the worker. They’re leaving because they got a better paying gig or less work/fewer hours for the same amount of money.

    Yes, because there’s no union there to bargain for better pay, bonuses, more time off work, and so forth. Tech is a new industry where workers have more bargaining power on an individual level because expertise is so sought after. Now imagine combining that with unions and we’d probably all be doing 4 day work weeks already, like unions are currently bargaining for in various countries. We’d likely also have more time for tech debt, as unions increase certain types of innovation.

    Like, if unions can do this for McDonalds workers after a sympathy strike in Nordic countries:

    Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

    Why would we assume tech workers in a very profitable industry wouldn’t be able to get away with even more?


  • By “IT” do you mean tech? Because as a software engineer, I’ve seen turnover rates of 1-2 years for some of my favorite people I’ve worked with. If they actually had bargaining power, we know via studies done on unions and turnover rates that these engineers likely wouldn’t dip as quickly and take institutional knowledge and their smart brains with them. Tech is so allergic to unions that it is literally inflicting damage onto itself - managers will tell you how expensive it is to hire new people because it takes months for them to catch up to your codebase, but the higher-up leadership is completely unwilling to listen to the data on how to actually retain people. They don’t care if unions increase productivity or that the elasticity between productivity and salary is >1.0 as the unionisation rate grows (per studies done in Norway), because they don’t want to lose their complete control over companies to collective bargaining.



  • You don’t have to support Epic’s ultimate goal of increasing their profit, to understand that the monopoly power this lawsuit is fighting is even worse. Apple and Google should not be able to gatekeep what kind of apps we get to use - any argument in favour of them basically boils down to “they let us avoid malicious apps” but you can have democratic orgs decide that instead of oligarchical cartels. And I don’t necessarily mean the government, although government regulation would be a welcome move, I mean even more democratic:

    In Finland, some of the largest grocery chains (think Walmart) are collectively, democratically owned - in other words, they operate in the same boring, stable, functional, and efficient manner as other grocery shops without being undemocratic(!). The average Finnish person has say in what products are being stocked, can be elected managers of stores, and the coop gives members 5% of their spending back (i.e. revenue sharing), among other things. [1] For reference, in the UK, we get a measly 1% back from grocery shop purchases, or from Amex with their cashback.

    Sure, Epic won’t give us this democratic org, but they do help us challenge the gatekeepers that are way more invested in working against giving us anything like this.

    [1] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland/




  • $9 x 12 = $108 increase per year. Also, you chose that sentence probably because it was the lower one despite the first paragraph being:

    Short-term rentals via apps such as Airbnb contribute to housing shortages and rent increases, according to research published last week by Felix Mindl and Dr. Oliver Arentz, researchers at University of Cologne in Germany. They attributed 14.2% of overall rent increases to short-term rentals or 320 euros ($385) per year for new tenants.