• 1 Post
  • 596 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 14th, 2023

help-circle
  • White straight able bodied men age 25-64

    25-36 is still “young” by their definition.

    and a union doesn’t exist in their industry (as far as they know)

    It doesn’t matter what industry you’re working in if you’re interested in that industry having a union. Making unions more commonplace was part of the point. The second sentence in the Union Members and Families section reads “Democrats will make it easier for workers, public and private, to exercise their right to organize and join unions.”

    But sure, if you don’t believe unions have value, this wouldn’t include you.

    Fuck 'em lol. Wait are they religious, rural, a business owner, or a veteran? No? Ok yeah fuck 'em!

    You and I must have different definitions of “fuck ‘em,” because I clearly said:

    Economically, Democratic policies favor poor and middle class people, which statistically makes up the majority of all white men. And there aren’t any policies that oppress white people or men the way that Republican policies oppress women or reduce support for all of the groups that Democratic policies help support.

    So sure, if you’re a white man with wealth that puts you in the top 1%, the Republican’s economic policies will be better for you. For the other 99% of white men - no. And for the specific issues called out in the original post linked (on Reddit):

    1. Men account for 75% of suicides in the US
    2. 70% of opioid overdose deaths are men
    3. Men are 8 times more likely to be incarcerated than women
    4. Young men are struggling in schools and are increasingly the minority at universities, opting out of higher education
    • 1 is addressed under “Investing in Mental Health” in the Party Platform as well as indirectly by gun safety policies (since 50% of suicides are by gun, 60% of gun deaths are suicides, and 87% of gun suicides are committed by men)
    • 2 is explicitly addressed under “Faith Community (“respond to the opioid crisis”) and under “Beating the Opioid Epidemic” in the Party Platform.
    • 3 is addressed under “Criminal Justice” in the Party Platform
    • 4 is addressed in multiple ways, under “Good Jobs” (“you shouldn’t have to go to a four-year college to live a good, middle-class life.”) and under “Education” (investing in K-12 education, providing free, universal preschool, investing in other forms of secondary education - e.g., trade schools, community college, registered apprenticeships)

    Democrats need to work on their messaging, obviously (and the comments on the Reddit post touch on that), but the problem isn’t that their policies don’t help white men, because they obviously do.


    • Young white men are included under “Young People and Students.”
    • Old white men are included under “Seniors and Retirees.”
    • Many white men have disabilities and are covered under “Americans with Disabilities.”
    • Many white men are covered under “LGBTQ+” - trans men, gay and queer men. Heck, some even include allies under the umbrella.
    • Many white men who are neither young nor old (or members of their family) are members of unions, or would like to be, and thus covered under “Union Members and Families.”
    • Likewise, many white men are covered under:
      • Faith Community
      • Rural Americans
      • Small Business Community
      • Veterans and Military Families

    Economically, Democratic policies favor poor and middle class people, which statistically makes up the majority of all white men. And there aren’t any policies that oppress white people or men the way that Republican policies oppress women or reduce support for all of the groups that Democratic policies help support.

    In other words, unless you get off on the oppression of those groups, almost all white men are served by the Democratic party, even if they can’t find themselves on the list you shared.

    “Black Lives Matter” was a response to black men and women being murdered by police at higher rates, of the news stories of those deaths being under-reported by comparison, and of the victims being blamed more than people of other races, particularly white people.

    “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter” missed the point. It’s “Black Lives Matter, too.” If all lives mattered, people wouldn’t have needed to protest the killings of black people in the first place.

    Imagine if you were at a restaurant and everyone around you got their order but you, so you said “Hey, I need my order.” If the server responded with “Yes, everyone needs their order” and walked off, that would be about the equivalent to saying “All Lives Matter.”

    So, is there a parallel between thinking that white men should be pandered to and saying “White Lives Matter?” Absolutely.



  • 500 grams of what, though? Folgers?

    The current average price per pound (454 grams) of ground coffee beans in the US was double that just a couple months ago, so spending $3.00 per pound would necessitate getting cheaper than average - and therefore, likely lower quality than average, or at least lower perceived quality than average - beans.

    The sorts of beans that companies tend to stock (IME) that are perceived as higher quality aren’t the same brands that I tend to buy (generally from local roasters), but they’re comparably priced. For a 5 pound (2267 grams) bag of one of their blends (which are roughly half the price of their higher end beans), it’s similar to what you’d pay for 5 pounds of Starbucks beans - about $50-$60.

    Often when a company says “free coffee,” they don’t mean “free batch-brewed drip coffee,” but rather, free espresso beverages, potentially in a machine (located in the break room) that automates the whole process. I assume that’s what Intel is doing.

    At $10 per pound (16 ounces) and roughly 1 ounce (28 grams) of beans per two ounce pour of espresso, that means that if each person on average drinks two per day, then that’s $1.25 for coffee per person per day.

    However, logistics costs (delivering coffee to all the company’s break rooms) and operational costs (the cost of the automatic machine and repairs, at minimum; or the cost of baristas, or adding the responsibility to someone’s existing job (and thus needing more people or more hours) if just batch brewing) have to be added on top of that. Then add in the cost of milk, milk alternatives, sweeteners, cups, lids, stir sticks, etc…

    Obviously if they just had free coffee grounds and let people handle the actual brewing of coffee in the break room, it would be much cheaper. But if the goal is to improve morale, having higher quality coffee that people don’t have to make themselves is going to do that better.




  • You can use yt-dlp to download Tiktok videos, and you can use it on both iOS (e.g., via aShell or Pythonista) and Android (e.g., via Termux).

    Once yt-dlp is installed, you can run this command in the terminal app. It’ll be downloaded into your current directory:

    yt-dlp https://www.tiktok.com/@r_o_b__b_a_r_b_e_r/video/7392630187063627040
    

    Just replace the URL with the one for your desired video. The video URL should like the one I have below, though you don’t need to remove the query parameters - if it doesn’t you may need to Share, Copy Link, and use the copied link instead of the URL bar. This is especially true if navigating among tabs on the web or something.

    You may need to wrap the url in double quotes. IME it varies by device.

    On iOS there are Shortcuts that integrate with yt-dlp, and on Android you can do the same with Tasker and the Tasker - Termux plugin. Make sure to install the F-Droid versions.

    You can also save many Tiktok videos through the app’s Share dialog, though creators can disallow that content wide.






  • If you have normal darkness everywhere, there isn’t a reason to use it, but you don’t always have darkness everywhere. In fact, you generally don’t.

    Not all monsters with darkvision have access to light sources. Even if they do, they may need an action to use it or may be out of range. A torch or the light cantrip only has a 40’ range. If you collaborate on positioning with the caster, you can basically set yourself up to have advantage every turn thanks to the darkness, since as a ranged attacker you don’t have to stay within 40’ of your enemies.

    Also, Gloom Stalkers can’t see through Darkness like Warlocks can, so this effect is useful to them in a way that the Darkness spell isn’t.

    That all said, Tricksy wouldn’t do anything if it didn’t block nonmagical illumination, so it’s reasonable to run it as though it does. Sure, it still wouldn’t block even a cantrip, but it would block torches, lanterns, the sun, etc…

    And running it as though it doesn’t block nonmagical darkness results in nonsensical behavior. You’re in a torchlit chamber and use the ability - now there’s a cube of darkness, blocking the light of all four nonmagical torches. If you move one of those torches away and back, why would it suddenly pierce the magical darkness? If it wouldn’t, why would a new nonmagical light source?


  • Thanks for clarifying! I’ve heard nothing but praise for Kagi from its users so that’s what I was assuming, but Searxng has also been great so I wouldn’t have been too surprised if you’d compared them and found its results to be on par or better.

    By the way, if you’re self hosting Searxng, you can use add your own index. Searxng supports YaCy, which is an actively developed, open source search index and crawler that can be operated standalone or as part of a decentralized (P2P) network. Here are the Searxng docs for that engine. I can’t speak to its quality as I still haven’t set it up, though.




  • Understandably frustrating, especially if you’re new to investing. But it’s expected that the market will have both ups and downs.

    The best advice I can give is to choose a good investment allocation and then stick to it. Contribute as much as you can each pay period or month and avoid looking at your balance as much as possible. You should figure out a rebalancing strategy, and you’ll probably need to look at your account to do that. Also, see The Best Order of Operations For Saving For Retirement.

    Right now you have unrealized losses, but you haven’t actually lost any money (i.e., you have no “realized losses”) until you withdraw it. As it’s a retirement account and you just started it, I assume you aren’t planning to retire in the next decade, much less the next three years.

    Is this your only retirement account? If so, why have you not been continuing to add money to it? If you wait to do that until the market recovers, you’ll lose out on all the gains between now and then.

    I know you haven’t said you’re considering selling, but I recommend you check out the “Maintain Discipline” section of the Bogleheads investment philosophy, just in case that’s on your mind. I also recommend that you read up on dollar cost averaging (if you’re investing in a retirement plan every pay period, you’re already doing this).

    You pointed out that the entire market has been impacted. I haven’t personally been paying attention in enough detail to confirm that (and my accounts that I just checked have gone up about 10% over the past three years, not down), but if so, that means you could change your asset allocation without selling low and buying high. I’m not saying you should change it, but if you take the time to learn about different investment strategies and decide a different one works for you, it’s nice to not have to sell your current investments while they’re underperforming relative to your new investments. (On the other hand, you can always change the allocation for your future investments without worrying about that.)



  • the law has already made it clear you cannot copyright the output of an LLM.

    That’s true in this context and often true generally, but it’s not completely true. The Copyright Office has made it clear that the use of AI tools has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, to determine if a work is the result of human creativity. Refer to https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf for more details.

    For example, they state that the selection and arrangement of AI outputs may be sufficient for a work to be copyrightable. And that’s without doing any post-processing of the AI’s outputs.

    They don’t talk about situations like this, but I suspect that, if given a prompt like “Rewrite this paragraph from third person to first person,” where the paragraph in question is copyrighted, the output would maintain the same copyright as the input (particularly if performed faithfully and without hallucinations). Such a revision could be made with non-LLM technology, after all.