Asklemmy

health insurance != healthcare

health insurance profits only exist at the expense of human suffering.

but lets make sure everyone has insurance but not care

Copyright is far too long and should only last at most 20 years.

Actually, George Washington would agree with me if he was still alive. He and the other founding fathers created the notion of copyright, which was to last 14 years. Then big corporations changed the laws in their favor.

Myers Briggs is posh astrology.

People are crazy when they promote closed-source AI (okay, okay, generative model) projects like ChatGPT, Bard etc.

This is literally one of the most important technologies of the future, and after all the times technology companies screwed them (us) up big time and monopolized the Internet, they go into the same trap again and again.

First they surrendered the free Internet, now they surrender the new frontiers.

Wake up, people. Go HuggingFace, advocate for free AI, and ideally - for a GPL one. We cannot afford for this part of our future to be taken away from us.

Religions are mostly just popularized conspiracy theories. Believing in God is about as realistic as believing the world is flat.

Any comment that gets more than one upvote fails the subject.

TikTok and YouTube shorts are brain-rotting garbage, and if you use them regularly you need to stop now. Yes, even if you claim you only watch educational stuff.

Also giving a child under the age of 8 or 9 a personal internet-connected device should be seen on a similar level as neglect if not full-on abuse.

Pitbulls are not more genetically predisposed towards biting or mauling than other breeds and the supposed "statistical data" on the subject is based around a confluence of inaccurate metrics caused by 1) people not being very good at accurately identifying dog breeds, 2) existing groups that hate pitbulls pushing bad statistics for political purposes, and 3) a self-fulfilling prophecy of pitbulls having a bad reputation and actively being sought out by people who want vicious dogs and who will treat their dogs in such a way as to encourage that behavior. And I say all of this as someone who does not own a pitbull and probably never will.

Teachers should be paid 50% more. If you want good teachers to stay, you have to walk the walk, otherwise you'll get a perpetual cycle of overwhelmed grads being bossed around by rusted-on bottom teer heads.

Piracy equals culture preservation in an age of subscription services.

Copyright should have stayed the original initial 14 years with possible renewal to 28 years. But like in France back then, also include the original authors (last one alive, if several) lifespan. Hence, a copyright would last either the authors lifespans or 28 years, whichever is longer.

Moreover, the patent system is being abused and does not serve the original goal of "any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement there on not before known or used." It granted the applicant the "sole and exclusive right and liberty of making, constructing, using and vending to others to be used" of his invention.. It needs major changes, including the requirement to have the "invention" be under examination by reputable third-party laboratories (such as Intertek, SGI, Underwriters Laboratories, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Technischer Überwachungsverein, SGS - Société Générale de Surveillance, etc…) before being granted a patent. Nowadays, patents are given almost willy-nilly to anyone no matter how vague or obvious the supposed invention.

Nowadays, patents are being misused in Patent Ambush mechanisms and scenarios, meanwhile Patent Trolls and Hoarders whole existence is are to impede/obstruct legally and impose exorbitant levies/fees onto organization and companies actually innovating and developing useful art/process/devices. Even more incredible, there are Submarine Patents being hidden away to suddenly take hostage existing products and process of various companies by imposing extortionate royalties.

What we're currently calling AI isn't AI but just a language processing system that takes its best guess at a response from it's database of information they pilfered from the internet like a more sophisticated Google.

It can't really think for itself and it's answers can be completely wrong. There's nothing intelligent about it.

We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don't realize how much they are missing.

The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.

This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.

This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don't actually deserve our collective attention.

And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.

There's no public debt crisis. People don't understand how government debt works. One casualty of this is the slow green transition which will cost us dearly in the future.

The vast majority of humans are actually nice, altruistic and not selfish if you treat them with respect. And hence anarchism would not resolve in everyone killing each other.

You don't need to get married or have kids to have a happy and fulfilling life

There's no such thing as unskilled labor. Labor is labor, specially if someone else has to do it even if you don't want to.

People overlook vegetarianism and semi-vegetarian lifestyles as an option too much and it is not helpful that real life examples of vegetarian cultures, get co-opted by Vegans purists as "Vegan cultures" in easily disproven claims- thus hurting the whole movement

Air fryers are only popular because Americans have been using microwaves to cook for decades, which are possibly the worst cooking devices ever created.

If they had decent fan ovens during that time, they wouldn't be anywhere near as popular

Conversely, air fryers are seen to be popular in the UK, because nobody will admit they fell for the advertising, and now only use them for chips

Leadership has the capacity and capability to change things for the better and continue to fail to do so because true leadership means making decisions that at times may hurt and may not be universally liked.

This is as true in politics as it is in business.

In short our leaders are not leading out of the fear of repercussions of leading.

Not a single one of the Marvel movies are good. They just use dopaminergic techniques to teach brains to enjoy them.

Those math questions that rely on purposeful ambiguity in order to drive engagement are annoying as fuck. It's like "congratulations, you just proved that in math (and questions in general) if you're not clear with what you're asking, people will get different answers". What fantastic value! What a novel hypothesis! Now fucking knock it off. I'm tired of literally everyone screaming about how their way is right when it doesn't fucking matter, the question was asked in a bullshit way in order to piss everyone off.

Bonus, PEMDAS, BEMDAS, PE-MD-AS. It's a goddamn terrible mnemonic that twists itself in knots to make the acronym work, rather than to make the order of operations clear. Screaming it doesn't make your shit any clearer anyways.

Humanity cannot and will not change its practices fast enough to avoid running out of resources we keep ourselves dependent on because it's "profitable." We are a doomed species and won't be around for very much longer. We are likely living in the flash of bright before the long dark. I don't think the world my grandchildren live in will be remotely like the one we have now.

I'm perfectly fine hedging my bets and living life normally, but I think our longevity is an uncomfortable truth most people don't want to face.

The metric system should be redone in base 12, and RPN should be the norm for teaching arithmetic.

"Andor" is the best Star Wars series.