And this is why the advertisers own the Internet now

I cannot tell whether this is being asked in an aggressive or derisive tone. Out of curiosity, how would you respond to:

What the heck is a greenback? Slang for the American dollar?

if it was asked in c/USA on lemmy.us?

Why would he think that nonbinary people exist? What about anything he’s ever said, done, or dog-whistled about ever suggested that he was the kind of person who believed in or gave a shit about anything but the simplest wrong answer to any question?

Business people will do almost anything to eliminate wages

Waited a week to see if he actually signed with the Dodgers. Glad they finally added a bat!

Now, to Vladdy…

But muh rural internet is not as good as muh urban internet! So, forgiven!

The stockmarket crashes, stunting millennial economic agency, and ushering in the last 16 years of radicalization and fascist acceptance.

EKOS is the only polling group showing momentum for the Liberals, and I’m really scratching my head over why that might be. They don’t traditionally have an overwhelming bias like this. They also are showing an exceptionally clear, almost linear rise in the polls from the point of Trudeau’s resignation, while no one else is showing any kind of pattern other than “dismal holding pattern”.

I want to believe that EKOS knows something that nobody else does, but because of that I need to guard myself from getting excited.

Numbers may rebound, but users having kicked the tires on other options means they’re less tightly bound than they were before. It’s up to us to create a welcoming and interesting environment in the spaces that they’ve looked at to get them to shift their usage.

As much as I enjoy Wilhoit’s Law, it always gets leveraged in a way that pointed at supporters of particular political parties.

The thing is, Wilhoit uses a fundamentally different definition of “conservstive” from what most people mean. He’s not pointing out the MO of a given political party in that quote. He’s criticising the very nature of the state, and of a stratified society.

Which is fair. It’s just not the kind of thing you pull out to thumb your nose at political opponents.

The whole comment, for reference:

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Imagine going to a public class on… let’s say playing the electric guitar, and the instructor just keeps going on and on about tuning forks, gear maintenance, and music theory. You were just hoping to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven, despite never having touched a guitar in your life.

The telescope is actually a hurdle to most people who will ever look through one. Introducing people to amateur astronomy by talking about making the sausage doesn’t whet the appetite. It’s dry, it’s small, and it’s boring. And it’s not relevant to 90% of people who will ever show up – they’re not going to race out and spend hundreds of dollars on a worthwhile telescope. It’s the kind of thing you talk about once people are hooked, want to view things independently, and are actually ready to invest their time, energy, and money into the hobby.

Amateur astronomy happens first in the mind. The imagination is accessible; the nitty gritty of operating a manual telescope is actually quite exclusionary, and fails to meet people where they actually are.

I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope.

About 20 years or so, yup. Star parties, observatories, planetaria, etc.

My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc.

Don’t do this. The people who are going to show up to look through a telescope at the park do not GAF about how to use a telescope. They want to look through it and be awed by what they see. The work it takes to get to that point is of zero interest to 99.999% of them. Very often, the actual visual image you see is not awe inspiring, though, so you want to spend the time while people are looking through the lens explaining to them what they are seeing, and doing so in very awe-inspiring tones and terms.

Lead them to the feelings that they want to feel. Weave the story that reflects those desires back to them. Do everything you can to make them feel the scope of what they’re seeing. Use the fact that it’s an unimpressive smudge to hammer home just how god damn far away it is they are seeing. Trot out the big numbers. Tell them how far away it is in in light years, and then switch to miles. Reference what was taking place on Earth at the time the light first left its source. Relate it all to the things they relate to or care about.

And treat the telescope like it’s the least important thing of the night until someone asks about it.

You think the Conservatives have any interest in mounting a credible response to Trump? Milhouse is way more Danielle Smith than he is Doug Ford. He’s just itching lick Trump’s boots.

I’ve been using Wonderdraft. It’s resource heavy for my little laptop, but it’s easy to use.

“internet thing from 20 years ago was smaller than big, VC backed social media giant from today. Therefore, thing that was defacto standard 20 years ago was never relevant” is a hell of a take

There are those out there that just auto-downvote the Examiner because Tim Bousquet has the gal to talk back to political leaders.

I did this a few months ago. I haven’t found replacements for everything, but I’ve found that it’s really come down to my not actually using those things very much in the first place, so I haven’t had to do the work.

When I look, I find something that works. What are you still looking for?

I find the array of installation options a little overwhelming or intimidating sometimes. If I can just do the equivalent of apt-get, that’s, of course, easy enough. But sometimes things are just realeased as tar balls, and I have to go and look up WTF I’m supposed to do each time. Nothing comes up often enough for me to internalize it.

I do find myself chafing against just the fundamental differences of the *nix environment from the DOS-based heritage of Windows. And I find it difficult to get help with certain things sometimes because the installed user/developer base isn’t super interested in supporting different modes of interaction (“just use the terminal, it’s so much faster [for me]” is a common refrain that makes me want to get stabby). But 99% of the time, it’s been smooth sailing.

At this stage, if you have drivers for everything, and there’s nothing mission critical that’s still tied to Windows, the best advice I can give you is to copy your important files over from your Windows partition, and then dump it. If you have a 2nd computer, leave that one running Windows for now. The duel booting can make it tempting to just reboot into Windows “just for this one thing”, and stay there until you next have to restart.

What we really need is for people to put up topic focused sites and promote them as their own thing, not jusy “lemmy”. So many specific interests still have very active forums dedicated to them, populated by the kind of people who want to ask queations aboht and discuss the things they have interest or expertise in, but who aren’t into things like Reddit.

The fediverse is perfect for places like that. Places where you can focus on your primary interest, but also look over the fence. But all anyone wants to do is put up general interest sites and whine about there being more than one “gaming” forum.

Phones have web browsers. You can view websites easily from your phone.

Apps give them access to everything. You can request access to contact lists, even, and most people won’t even think twice to allowing access.

What the fuck.

He’s a Liberal. It’s what the Liberals have done since at least the late 80s. It’s their whole thing.