Check your communities, and what instances they’re on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko unless you’re of their particular ideological alignment, lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads compared to other instances. On the other hand, beehaw.org is intentionally and pathologically positive. I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly, though I might be biased.

In case anyone is misunderstanding, they explicitly say this is not a new phone or piece of hardware at all, it is simply a project (and for now, more of an investigation than a project creating actual deliverables) into the scale and scope of closed source binary blobs being used on phones, so they can start work to address them.

It’s an important and necessary project, and I support the FSF in most of the things they do, but if you’re picturing them riding heroically to the rescue by Christmas with a new phone-of-freedom they’re going to sell to you, it’s a very very VERY long way from that.

Librewolf. You’re welcome.

We’re only 286 days into the year though, so we’re already well above once a day average so far, as long as people keep the violence up we’re basically guaranteed to hit it by end of year. I’m so deeply tired of this world I can’t even muster up any particular sarcasm for this milestone.

Benevolent dictators can happen by accident, but never by design. A system designed to govern fairly will inevitably be abused by people who have no intention of fairness. You can place as many obstacles in their path as you wish, you can’t stop them forever and eventually they will get around them all.

I certainly might not be those things, or I might not be American either. Hard to say for sure, it’s fun to speculate though isn’t it?

Ahh I see we are officially transitioning into the “papers, please” stage of fascism already. Buckle up folks, the road only gets rougher from here on out. The witch hunts don’t stop here.

There is nothing serious on Quora, it is a troll zoo. There are only trolls and idiots feeding the trolls. Does it matter which is which?

Especially since last time he tried to launch a large piece of military hardware like this, it went a bit… limp.

I block freely. My time and attention and mental and emotional bandwidth are limited resources, and to the extent possible I intend to spend them carefully.

People have been protesting this company for decades. “The Walrus and the Whistleblower” is a great documentary on Marineland, following the story of a local activist who spent years in legal battles against Marineland. Nobody is going to stop fighting while there is still any opportunity to pursue justice for those animals.

It’s too bad you feel like the battle is already lost, but I don’t think that’s any reason to stop fighting and surrender to something you know is wrong.

He got one side to agree to peace, I think that should get him HALF a nobel peace prize.

Then later, when he gets the OTHER side to agree to whichever peace deal THEY prefer, he can get the OTHER half of his nobel peace prize, and he can put them together into a whole nobel peace prize. Cover up the seam with some gold paint, and pretty soon people will be telling him it’s really beautiful, that it’s the best looking nobel peace prize that they’ve ever seen, it’s probably actually better than the original kind. Other people have never gotten one like this. And it’s more meaningful too, he had to do twice as much work to get it. That’s what people are saying. It’s probably the most important nobel peace prize of all time, actually.

from the perspective of the law they’re just livestock.

Yeah that’s a problem. That’s why I make an effort to let people know how unacceptable the situation is. Because we need better laws. It is our government’s responsibility to write better laws, and maybe if we continue highlighting and criticizing the issues being raised here, they will.

I don’t know anything at all about this company

Well there’s your problem. I do. There’s an awful lot of speculation in your post for someone who doesn’t know anything at all about this company. They own a thousand acres of prime land in the tourist area of Niagara Falls, within sight of a world-renowned natural tourist attraction that is basically a license to print money and they’ve been operating on the backs of their animals for many profitable decades.

They have only recently started subdividing and mortgaging this incredible piece of land as they move towards the inevitable shutdown and sale. This is what I refer to as “letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die”. The original and former owner of Marineland, John Holer, was a real uniquely offensive piece of work and if you don’t know anything about him you don’t know anything about the context of this park. He only died less than a decade ago, and in the care of the family, the park’s business has been (thankfully) winding down since then. One of the most important tricks businessmen love to use is to cry poor and talk about their debts. When they do that, you have to remember that their single largest and most important debt a business always has, is to their owners. This is a family owned business. It is usually the owner themselves crying about their “debt” but most of that debt is inevitably to themselves. What they really mean is that they want to squeeze out every last drop of “equity” they feel entitled to. They take on new debt specifically to do that, to keep the lights on and the doors open while they’re hauling away bags of money. Then for a huge suitcase of cash, they sell the ownership forward to someone willing to dismantle things further and the cycle of looting accelerates.

Finally, when there is nothing left to take they tell us a sad story about how the business was not successful (ignoring the chain of owners who walked away with millions upon millions for their brief efforts) and maybe they’ll grudgingly admit that one or more of those looting owners “mismanaged” some things, and they’ll tell you that’s why they simply won’t be able to follow through on all their debts and obligations and responsibilities at this point. And they’ll leave people they don’t give a shit about holding the largest amounts of debt they are suddenly unable to repay. Sometimes it’s some foolish lenders they were sneaky enough to con into funding the ends of their adventure who were told they had a healthy operating business that was going to be ongoing for years. More often, it is the employees who are intended to be left holding the bag. Suddenly “discovering” you are bankrupt allows you to avoid paying employees what they are owed in wages and severance and benefits and pensions, which can add up to many millions of dollars. But that’s only the easiest option. The highest and most cherished possibility though, is to arrange the finances in such a way that it’s the government who is left with the responsibility, so the cleanup is left to all the people of the regional tax base, or the provincial one, or if possible even the national one. That’s the holy grail. Make society pay what the market won’t so they can make sure they get every last cent they possibly can out of their business now that they don’t want to do it anymore. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits.

Doing these things can be risky, if they do it wrong, they can get accused of fraud and even may end up in jail. Do you think that will stop them from trying to do it though, if they think they can cover their ass and have plausible deniability about what they’ve done and why they’ve done it? Shutting down a large and profitable business before it actually becomes unprofitable, by making it unprofitable, is an art form and is a process executed with calculated expertise. Don’t let them convince you they haven’t thought of or planned for this.

Successful businessmen are really great at pretending to be failing businessmen whenever it suits them, and it always suits them to do so when somebody wants money out of them. In the words of Bill Gates on the Simpsons, “You don’t think I got rich by writing checks, do you?”

Nice choice, but personally I always found Terra a bit hard to relate to, very fey and even sort of creepy in her half-Esper form.

Celes, on the other hand, is a bonafide badass, and her storyline was among the better developed ones and more humanizing than most of the other characters in the game. Although romantically I think she could probably do better than Locke. That boy needs some help.

What would you want a VSCode fork to do that can’t be easily done with extensions? (which Codium can run)

It’s more about not reinventing the wheel. A fork needs to have a reason to exist, because it takes significant effort to maintain and develop, and there is significant opportunity cost when that level of development activity is committed to that purpose. If there’s no reason to have a fork, then it’s more efficient to keep all the development energy and momentum focused in one place. And for Codium, that place is the extension repository.

If Microsoft starts actively making the core software worse, restricting or stopping updates to the open source code, tying telemetry into features in ways difficult to remove, or otherwise sabotaging the functionality or features of the non-Microsoft parts of the code, there may eventually be a need for more, harder forks taking things in potentially different directions to get around Microsoft’s interference. But since that hasn’t happened, the non-Microsoft build process remains quite trivial and VSCode remains a perfectly cromulent editor when building it without the Microsoft crap, there’s really no need for any other forks. Codium does everything it would be reasonably expected to do.

Vague corporate apologism and casual implications of edibility don’t do anything to convince me Marineland did, or do, or ever will have any particular interest in finding better facilities for any of their animals.

Yeah people get nasty about it without any concern whether it makes them look like exactly the kind of dogmatic zealots they think they are fighting against. I am not religious in any way, but I always found it funny how certain vocal athiests will insist only fools would choose to believe in something they cannot see, and claim they know there is no god or anything beyond the natural world they see, because nobody can possibly prove otherwise, while also being unable or unwilling to stand their ground in any philosophical conversations about the nature of our senses and perceptions, or of reality or consciousness itself.

I am of the opinion that such absolute certainty in something fundamentally unknowable represents a form of faith and belief no more valid or less valid than any religious belief. I’ll also assert there’s absolutely nothing wrong with holding such a belief, it’s even a belief I personally share, but you if you are being intellectually honest you need to admit it is a belief, based on no particular conclusive facts. It’s a belief in a thing that is beyond the reach of any kind of evidence that might be found in our present context, not an automatic default position everyone must assume unless proven otherwise. It’s as much of an assumption as anything else. I fail to see why anyone wouldn’t consider agnosticism is not a more “natural” default position than athiesm.

If on the other hand they want athiesm to be a religion itself, where potentially unwilling people are told what (not) to believe by people of authority who have written impressive and stern books about it which must not be questioned whether they provide any actually reliable evidence that it is so, instead of just letting people see the (lack of) potential evidence and then make up their own minds to believe whatever they want to believe, then I would be pleased to welcome the Church of Evangelical Athiesm to the already rich and extensive tapestry of various religious organizations convincing themselves they’re trying to do good in the world.

Beliefs are a choice. You can pick and choose. Most reasonable people, including “athiests” and “Christians” do that already, and I think this is the point that many militant athiests refuse to understand. They immediately assume the worst of every “Christian” based on a predetermined idea of what they believe without ever asking. That’s yet another form of belief.

You can still believe in a “Christian God” when you understand that the organization of the Church is a system created by humans and the Bible is a book written and interpreted and translated by humans. The whole point of belief is that you still get to believe what you want, and you don’t have to believe what you don’t want. It’s not a monolith, even if the Church tells you it is. It’s personal, and other people don’t get to decide whether a person gets to call themselves a Christian or not. Other Christians might decide you’re not. They might disagree. But there’s nothing in particular that makes them any more right about that, than they are about stoning gays.

I recommend athiests and Christians alike judge people by their beliefs, actions and attitudes, and how much those align with your own, not by whether they call themselves athiests or Christian or not. Sorry, I know it’s so much more convenient to just judge people by a label. Simple, easy, clean. But you have to look deeper than that, life not a simple thing, and if you think it is, you’re probably oversimplifying it.

Marineland should declare bankruptcy if they have legal obligations for animal care that they no longer have the funding to satisfy. Then the government can liquidate the (substantial) remaining assets and use that to find the animals a good home, instead of letting the company tell us what it decides it can and can’t afford to do for the animals because they’d rather put that money in their own pockets and let the animals die.

But we never hold companies to such standards. We let them get away with literal murder when they later cry about how they had to, until we shrug it off as just “companies being companies”.

I think we need better standards. Don’t give them an inch. Hold them responsible. Hold their feet to the fucking fire. They bought these animals. They used them. They monetized them. They made their owners rich. Their (intentional) lack of planning for what to do when the animals were no longer profitable anymore should not be rewarded by letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die.

Once they are removed from power, we will need to arrange some rehabilitation for the people currently running the government. As a bonus, we won’t need taxes anymore, we can fund the whole federal budget with pay-per-view.

They are terrorists. The public displays of violence are not an accident or a misstep, it’s an intentional and critical part of the plan. Their intent is to scare you into surrendering to their authority. The more people they can scare into submission, the stronger they will get. Reject their authority, resist their threats. Figure out a method of opposition or resistance that works for you, no matter how small, speak to people, identify and find like-minded people, be part of them if they’re organizing, or help them organize, but don’t give in to fear and surrender. They can be beaten, and they will be beaten. America is the land of the free. And it will be again. Even if you once again have to fight for freedom.