Barbarian

joined 2 years ago
[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works -2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Could not agree more. I'm a democratic socialist. I firmly believe that the ideas of that ideology, properly implemented, can drastically improve the standard of living for a huge percentage of the population.

I live in a country where our democratic socialist party is fantastically corrupt, lazy and completely bereft of any motivation to do anything that doesn't directly benefit themselves. Consequently, I don't support them. Results over ideology is an important mantra no matter what you believe.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Europe is primarily white people

Hah, that's telling. Just FYI, there's been generations upon generations of racism and ethnic hatred here in Eastern Europe. I guess we have the advanced racists: the ones who don't hate you for your skin colour, but who your parents were, religion and primary language.

I'll bet that if your dad grew up here in Romania, he'd be complaining about those sneaky Szeklers trying to steal Transylvania and Roma people being subhuman.

Also, he seems the type to pine for Europe because "We're all Christian!". Trust me, you haven't seen "Christian love" like state religions persecuting people of the wrong sect. Orthodox Christianity is the state religion here, and Protestants of all stripes get treated like heathens.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

Best of luck. Whatever else happens, I hope you manage to make it through to the other side.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Stay strong, talk to your neighbours if feasible where you live, work together locally. Every major catastrophe in my area of the world, even ones which totally upended my country (Romania) for a generation, my family survived via community and friend groups.

In a collapsed or collapsing state, mutual aid is mandatory for survival.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Hi, Eastern European here. We begged to join NATO. We kicked and screamed, wheeled and dealed, anything we could to get that coveted NATO membership.

You know why? Because we've been dealing with expansionist Russian imperialism for our entire histories. Different coats of paint in different time periods, but it's all the same shit. The US is an empire, but at least here it's preferable to Russia's imperial ambitions.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That'll last all of 1 week before a large percentage of new homeowners run out of money and start using the house as collateral with no hope of paying back loans.

The most effective solution I've ever heard of is the Norwegian housing first model, where the house itself remains under state control (at least at the start). As the occupant goes through rehab if necessary, retraining if necessary, is helped to find a job, etc, they can start paying towards the house and eventually fully buy it from the state. Meanwhile, the state can use that money to buy/build more social housing to help more people.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert but that's how it works as far as I've read.

Edit: Oh, fun fact, this is similar to how the rich made so much money during COVID. Throw money at the poor, they have to spend that money, money goes to companies, then the owners.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I too saw Jimmy Carter. Him and his secret service detail had formed a heist crew called the "Cartwheelers". I know because they hired me to be the getaway driver, which was interesting because I don't have a driving license. They went to the bank with Jimmy Carter face masks to throw everyone off the scent, the ultimate double bluff.

The cashier, told to fill the bag with non-sequential bills at gunpoint, said "Mr. President? You sound an awful lot like Mr. Carter", to which he replied "I told you to fill the bag, not speculate on who I might be!", then pistol-whipped her. Anyways, long story short, we made it out of there ok. He left his calling card just outside the bank: a single peanut.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 27 points 2 weeks ago

I appreciate his response to criticism of his city-run grocery store initiative. I can't recall the exact wording, but it was something like "If it doesn't work, we'll cancel it". I don't mind an experiment like this as long as the people involved are results-oriented and willing to pivot if evidence shows it's not working.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 42 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This reminds me of a story from "They thought they were free". A Jew was accused of raping a woman. The judge heard the case and determined he was innocent. However, the gestapo were waiting outside the court to nab the accused as soon as the trial ended.

The judge decided to stick to his verdict instead of ruling guilty to put him in a normal prison instead of a concentration camp. After all, how could he justify ruling an innocent man guilty, even if that was objectively a better result for the man?

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 weeks ago

I think you misunderstood the commenter you replied to. The issue is he's blaming Thor as if Thor singlehandedly killed the initiative, when in reality it's a wider societal issue.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The article makes it sound like the issue wasn't the connection to slaves: that was expected. It sounds like the original plan was to offer reparations to the descendants, but there turned out to be so many the finance department of Harvard completely freaked out.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

And then the rest of society has to pay for the healthcare. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy to subsidize or completely pay for the healthcare of those less fortunate than me via taxation, but that necessarily has to be combined with a protectionist attitude towards food standards to keep costs manageable.

1
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Barbarian@sh.itjust.works to c/lemmyinstances@lemmy.world
 

Join-Lemmy.org instance list - Official instance list.

Lemmy Explorer - Nice list of all instances with sorting and filters.

Fedidb instance list - Much faster to load & browse than Lemmy Explorer, but less options for sorting and filtering. Great if you just wanna check the top few instances quickly

Fediverse Observer map - Shows where all the Lemmy servers are physically located

Fediverse Observer list - Probably my least favourite of the options I know about, but it does exist. Fedidb and Lemmy Explorer are better.

 

If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.

You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.

I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they're turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they're activated.

 

Just so people are aware, Kbin users will not see your comments or get your votes.

If you comment on a Kbin post, only other users on sh.itjust.works will see it. We are effectively defederated due to this bug. This affects all instances on 0.18.0, as far as I understand it.

 

There doesn't seem to be a general-purpose atheist community yet, so here is the closest thing. I hope this link fits in with your community! If not, fully understand if it's deleted.

 

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

We've been defederated. Were there that many trolls/assholes on our server? What on earth happened while I was asleep?

hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:

  • these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
  • the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
  • our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
  • and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.

 

It looks like kbin.social is in the final stages of migrating their site, and merging a whole bunch of improvements. Having their ~5k users federating with us again will be nice

 

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/21515

Some surprising, but valid, python syntax examples.

 

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/21515

Some surprising, but valid, python syntax examples.

19
Shredded Account (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Barbarian@sh.itjust.works to c/reddit@lemmy.ml
 

Currently shredding my 11 year account with 32k comment karma. It feels pretty good, to be honest.

I have shreddit running, and I'm refreshing my profile on RiF. I'm watching the most recent comment getting further and further in the past, and deleting manually any post I see.

As soon as that's all done, deleting the account.

view more: next ›