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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhats your advantage in life?
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    24 hours ago

    20-something English-speaking cis hetero white American male, stable supportive family I keep strong ties with, four-year university STEM degree, gainfully employed at a low-stress job full of people I like that affords a comfortable, reasonably above modest lifestyle, no outstanding debts, no severe health issues or crippling disibilities.

    I’ve certainly won more than my fair share of cosmic lotteries, all things considered.

    Only thing I guess I’m missing is a partner, which is entirely due to my own lack of effort. So far sailing solo hasn’t bothered me any. But I do occasionally daydream about what I might be missing out on…



  • It’s even worse than that. Paying private insurance pays for other peoples’ healthcare and the paychecks of MBAs and C-suite execs on top.

    I genuinely don’t understand how some people can’t seem to grasp the business model here. For anyone to get any net value out of insurance, by definition, there has to be at minimum an equivalent number of people who pay in more than they would than if they didn’t have insurance at all.

    This doesn’t change whether it’s a government-funded single-payer system or a private corporation. The only thing that significantly changes when it is made a private corporation is it (theoretically) permits it to be nimbler to adapt to change by slicing out all the red tape a government-run entity would have, at the cost of shifting the focus from maximizing benefit to the public to profit-seeking that may incidentally also benefit the public from time to time as an occasional side effect.

    Insurance isn’t a magic subscription that pulls money out of thin air to pay for everyone’s whatever as long as one is a member, it fundamentally comes from other people getting short-sticked. That is the whole point. You throw money into the abyss when you’re doing well, in exchange the abyss won’t swallow you whole when you’re not doing well. That’s the contract. If everyone who joined was entitled to more than they paid in, we’d call it a Ponzi scheme.

    I’m sure you know all this, just venting a rant to no one in particular…


  • I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.

    If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

    There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

    If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.




  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlDo you use Gnome or KDE Plasma?
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    4 days ago

    Five years of Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2 on life support) replaced by a couple years of KDE Plasma.

    Mate treated me well enough, it was mostly stable, capable, and competent. But it was a bit crusty around the edges, and being so niche meant search-engine-visible help resources for anything than went wrong were virtually nonexistent. In hindsight, using it as a beginner’s DE was probably a mistake. I suppose in being so austere and devoid of resources it taught me to develop more of a “get to the bottom of it yourself” attitude to debugging and have humbler expectations about form versus function, but that’s a pretty rough sell to most people. Mate is definitely better as a drink than a desktop environment.

    I don’t need to talk about KDE Plasma at all because the rest of the thread already has. I have nothing new to add beyond the comment that I like their mascot character.

    I have no informed opinion on Gnome 3. All I’ve gleaned about it is that it’s supposedly “my way or the highway” by design, and the “my way” in question is controversially counter-grain to a lot of established expectations (e.g. it’s literally why Mate exists). Which is neither here nor there to me, objectively. But I will say I have no interest learning a new way of doing things, even if it’s theoretically superior, when a conventional system still exists, is viable, is highly polished, and is kept sharp-edged. Hence, KDE Plasma.


  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzdefinitely
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    8 days ago

    It’s not like this superficially either. That’s literally what the word is.

    finite - to have a limit, be bounded

    The de- part is acting like it does in words like defraud. It’s not a negative, like you might see in detox, where it means to remove something or undo something. Instead, it simply insists something has been done, not unlike the suffix -ify. You’ve been defrauded. In a manner of speaking, you could say you’ve been “fraud-ified”.

    You could say something that has been defined has been “finite-ified”. The possibilities of what it could be were limitless, but you restricted them to something specific. You’ve made it finite. You’ve defined it. It is definite.


  • I took up enough precious space on this bitch of an Earth in life, so my only wish is to take up as little of it as possible in death.

    No giant overpriced wooden box in a concrete case on a dedicated plot of land, filled with fanciful linens to wrap my lifeless husk specifically treated to rot away as slowly as possible. Not if I get a say. Burn my dead ass to ashes and preferably scatter them to the wind, I don’t care where. Or, as a wise Danny DeVito said, throw me in the trash. Nature will have its way with what’s left. I’m crumbling to entropy anyway, might as well get it over with as efficiently as I can.

    I will not ““become”” a tree, or ““return to”” anyplace. I want to be gone. My lease on this world is over. I explicitly want that lease returned, to the fullest extent it matters.

    Not like I’d necessarily get a say, though. Funerals and their rituals are for the living. The ultimate conclusion of my wish to command nothing of the world after I’m gone is that I also can’t command what happens to my remains after I’m gone. I can express my wishes, but if no one agrees to honor them, so be it.

    If my loved ones want to stuff my corpse in a monkey suit and bury it in an expensive box on a dedicated plot of land for 100 years because that’s how they want to greive my passing, who am I to stop them? I’m dead.