cabbage

The point Dylan makes, that I think there is truth to, is that these people don’t see the difference between the two. If they struggle to put food on the table it’s not because of rich elites hogging the resources for themselves, or for our economic system failing to provide for everyone; it’s because the immigrants are taking their jobs, women are taking over their positions in society and depriving them of the opportunities their fathers had, etc.

Then again, I struggle to fit hatred of LGBTQ+ into this framework. So for sure there’s also more other mechanisms at play.

Dylan’s Only a Pawn in Their Game is a song about identity politics that holds up pretty well I find.

Funny. As a European political scientist, when I think of identity politics the first thing that comes to mind is nativism, right wing populists, and all those people crying out in public about outgroups who are not like themselves.

We always had trans people. They didn’t politicize themselves - there’s not many enough of them that they could have even if they wanted to. They became politicized by a group of people who chose to identify themselves in opposition to them. The same goes for immigrants, gays, whatever. We vote less according to economy, and more according to identity.

The only way the Republican party is allowed to exist in it’s current form is through identity politics. Women not wanting to go thorough with unwanted pregnancies is *not* identity politics. It’s more a matter of fucking survival. A bunch of conservative couch fucking male shitheads who want to limit women’s ability to decide over their own bodies on the basis of their own hypocritical set of beliefs, however, very much is about identity politics.

And then trans people wanting to simply be allowed to live their lives in peace has also become a matter of identity politics, as their very existence has become politicized. But that’s a development driven by right wing nut jobs, not by the left who (at its best, at least) wants to focus on economic issues while guaranteeing human rights as a mattet of common sense and decency.

Pretending that the political left are the ones pushing squishy identity politics while the right are focusing on hard economics and traditional politics is just plain wrong, and portraying it this way is yet another failure of the American media.

/rant

Very cool—it didn’t strike me first that all three hands could be yours.

Check out OP’s post history: There’s at least a brief description in one old post:

I opened up an old Canon flatbed scanner and more or less removed anything that wasn’t the sensor or the mechanical assembly pulling it along. The optical assembly is hacked together with black foam board, an acrylic magnifying glass and too much gaffers tape.

Think of it as a pinhole shoebox camera with a scanner at the back, instead of photo paper or film.

So it’s a scanner, but it’s highly modified into a camera.

Also worth checking out OP’s other posts. It’s all pretty neat.

I love this one! And the title (dual meaning: “weather” and “to be”) works great. Works equally well whether you see three hands gripping each other or a tree struggling to stay upright, presumably torn by the elements.

Edit: Here’s a comment containing a picture of the camera and some information about the process!

Yeah, I think you’re right, and I think that’s exactly why it’s a blind spot for me.

On several occasions I’ve also lent an old laptop to friends when theirs broke, and all of them ended up using Linux for months no questions asked. They later went back to Windows because of the Word grammar check, but other than that it just worked for them.

But of course, if you can’t get your drivers to work it’ll be a completely different experience.

If you’re ok Arch I guess it at least signals a willingness to learn! I would never dare to go there haha.

Yeah. I’ve double checked that my last few laptops worked well with Linux before buying them. But I don’t buy very flashy technology, so it was never really any question.

My printer is from Brother, and it’s just plug and play. At work it’s all web print and has been since I started working for pay, really.

A test could be to start by using Libre software on Windows.

Switch to LibbreOffice or some other alternative instead of Word. Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita for graphical stuff. Whatever proprietary software you use, check if it exists for Linux; if not, see if you can find an alternative you’re happy with.

For the people I know, Word is the biggest deal breaker.

Dumb user here. I completely disagree with this.

I was using Ubuntu for a few years, now I’m on Fedora. I don’t really know how to do anything. For my needs it’s just very easy.

Maybe my needs just aren’t sophisticated enough for me to encounter all those problems I’m supposed to be having. But I’ve been using it for years and my experience is that it really just works.

Well, it’s expensive technology to develop, and there’s no other business model behind it than surveillance. So I think it’s fair to expect the surveillance part of it to be difficult to neutralise.

A Fairphone with /e/OS would do.

I don’t currently run /e/OS on mine - for now I’ve just disabled the Google app instead. But it’s a solid option, and last time I used it my banking apps and everything worked with no problem.

Yup, I was tired

Buying one of these things proves you’re mentally unfit.

I guess this is grazelands, and the tree grows the one place animals don’t manage to graze. Pretty neat.

It’s also a big problem many places - grazing can be a huge problem for biodiversity, as it does not threaten old forest, but it keeps new forest from ever getting a chance to grow. So once the old trees die off there will be nothing left unless farming ends.

At least he seems to be enjoying it, embracing the creative process and developing whatever he’s interested in. Seems like a pretty healthy approach.

Nothing is found when searching for their names. There’s not a thing out there about “Chief Scientist” Mark Linneaus, although he claims to have had an academic career. If he in fact “dedicated more than 20 years to investigating how diet and environment shape mammalian milk production”, it is surprising that his name is nowhere to be found on Google Scholar.

Not to get started on the pictures of their alleged cheeses. There’s red flags all over the website. At least they don’t accept orders, so it looks more like a joke than a scam.

It’s a shame though, I would love to try sustainably produced whale cheese.

If anything the George Carlin-imitating AI serves to highlight that the brilliance of Carlin was in his thinking, not in his shtick of delivering cynical jokes in his signature fashion. The AI captures the cynicism and the voice and at least in part the delivery, yet it just left me bored. Carlin on the other hand I can listen to again and again.

I guess it’s like training a moral philosophy bot. Sure, you could train an AI on everything Immanuel Kant has ever written and it would be capable of delivering an endless series of platitudes that sound like something Kant could have written, but it’s not going to become a Kantian philosopher, and you’ll be better off just reading Kant.