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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies call for IAEA chief Rafael Grossi's resignation for letting the agency be used by Israel and the U.S. to manufacture a pretext for attacking Iran.
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S.
as a child I thought it was wildly unrealistic that Sims would immediately give up on all their goals and dreams if a single dirty plate was left on the ground but now that Iâm an adult I understand that that was the most realistic part of the game
I feel like this is the world's nichest tip, but I've recently realized that I much prefer writing the markdown files for my static site in Joplin vs. in a coding editor.
Historically, I've loved writing in a coding editor, but Joplin is a friendly enough interface and so much easier to sync these posts across multiple computers... I can work on a blog post on my personal laptop at night and my work laptop by day and never touch git!!!
[do not reply to tell me to use another version control]
as much as I love stained glass and gothic cathedrals.... I also love churches with windows where one looks outside to see sky, trees and sometimes birds...
This video is an in-depth discussion of the biblical and symbolic inspiration for Christian architecture.Support us at http://www.thesymbolicworld.com for mo...
@MountainJay yes me too. One of the hardest classes I ever took though was Gothic architecture - some of them look so similar - thankfully some, like the scissor arches @ Wells Cathedral really stood out
â I love all the windows in our parishâs new multi-purpose building (which weâre using for services while we save up for a larger stone church). Especially the ones above the iconostasis. Hoping to see a bird in the trees up there. đ
Sacred Projects Holy Ascension, Mount Pleasant, SC Saint John of the Ladder, Greenville, SC Saint Gregory Palamas Monastery, Perrysville, OH Holy Cross Hermitage, Wayne, WV Saint John the Baptist, Beaverton, OR Saint James, Beaufort, SC Saint MaximusâŠ
@MountainJay okay this is AMAZING. He designed our local Orthodox church - which I thought had been closed down a few years ago. Turns out it is still there. Been wanting to check out Orthodox service in person. Very exciting. If you hadn't sent that I'd not known!
-- while looking for more recent pictures of the exterior of that church (to see if the copper roof has turned green yet đ), I found this recent Yelp review.
Hamilton perfectly describes my experience with our parish here in Missouri. And also how it's very unlikely I would now be a Christian if not for Orthodoxy. đ
@MountainJay it's an odd place for a church - in a planned elite community. Charleston is known as the "Holy City" - it's said you can't swing a cat without hitting a church. Many are very old and have lovely grave yards - my fav is the Unitarian Church - the church w/o Jesus - their last pastor was a "former" CIA spook female
The only place I've ever lived with any density of churches was in Utah, with one every 20 square blocks or so. But those buildings are so plain and utilitarian. đ
I attended a Unitarian Church off and on in Nebraska in the late nineties, during my "metaphysical spiritual" phase. Whiffs of the coming woke madness were definitely there already. I can totally see a spook running one of those congregations. đ
If you're passionate about enjoying the great outdoors without sacrificing comfort, then âHow to Camp and Stay Comfortableâ by Andy Reven is an absolute must-have addition to your collection.
If you're passionate about enjoying the great outdoors without sacrificing comfort, then âHow to Camp and Stay Comfortableâ by Andy Reven is an absolute must-have addition to your collection.
This outstanding book redefines what it means to experience nature while maintaining a sense of homey ease. From beginners just starting out to seasoned outdoor enthusiasts, this work offers invaluable insights that will transform your approach to camping into an enjoyable, hassle-free adventure.
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The writing style is engaging and approachable, making complex concepts easy to grasp. You will find yourself eagerly turning each section, eager to uncover new tips and tricks that will make your adventures more pleasurable. The book's practical approach ensures that every suggestion is realistic and attainable, regardless of your experience level. Itâs a rare find in outdoor literatureâa guide that is as inspiring as it is highly useful.
Considering all its qualities, âHow to Camp and Stay Comfortableâ is undeniably a standout publication. Many readers will undoubtedly call it the book of the year for outdoor enthusiasts. Its blend of comprehensive advice, compelling storytelling, and actionable insights sets it apart from other guides. This book will quickly become your go-to resource for all things camping, transforming your outdoor experiences into moments of genuine relaxation and joy.
Don't miss out on this exceptional work. Pick up a copy today and discover how enjoyable camping can truly be when you have the right guidance. You will learn how to turn roughing it into an art form, all while creating memories that last a lifetime. This is more than just a book; it's your new best friend for outdoor adventures. Get ready to be inspired by the expert advice and engaging narration that make this work a true standout.
Europe said will hand Ukraine out to Russia, kick out US bases, break up NATO in exchange for cheap oil and gas, IOW the middle east can go screw itself
Immediately all became friends again, Islamists, Zionists, Oily-garchs and war-mongers
"The @EUCommission has set out its plans to give #police access to digital information, including by cracking down on ânon-cooperativeâ messaging services [like @signalapp and #Telegram] and helping build technologies to break #encryption."
Third Rate Congressman Thomas Massie, of the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky, a phenomenal State that I won all three times (by a lot!), keeps talking about how he is going to protect the Constitution, but he is actually very bad for the Constitution, and will probably vote against âTHE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,â that grants the Biggest Tax Cuts in History, secures our Southern Border from Criminal Invasion, funds the Golden Dome, our Great Military and Veterans, protects our Second Amendment, grants NO TAX ON TIPS, NO TAX ON OVERTIME, and NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY (for our Great Seniors!), and so much more. He is against all of the above, and many other incredible things. Why would anyone want to vote for a so-called âCongressman,â a RINO, at best, who wants to raise your Taxes by 68%, which is what will happen if, âTHE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILLâ doesnât pass. He votes, âNO!â on everything, because he thinks it makes him cool, but heâs not cool, heâs a LOSER!
VSA
La surveillancebĂątit son empire
tout sur laVSA
kitaffiches et flyers
Pas de VSA dans ma ville
Pas de VSA dans ma ville !
Marseille, Montpellier, Paris...
**The case for a Canadian wealth tax** By @pluralistic
A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is
Pakistan is the 5th most populated country on the planet, and they have nuclear weapons. India has the largest population, and hey have nuclear weapons.
Trump negotiated a peace deal in a hot war between 2 nuclear powers who hate each other along ancient cultural lines.
Heading to NATO where, at worst, it will be a much calmer period than what I just went through with Israel and Iran. I look forward to seeing all of my very good European friends, and others. Hopefully, much will be accomplished!
China can now continue to purchase Oil from Iran. Hopefully, they will be purchasing plenty from the U.S., also. It was my Great Honor to make this happen!
learning a language is so fun. when i was a teen i had too much shame and too many extracurriculars to do much other than the spanish classes in high school, but linguistics in general has been a special interest that i kinda-sorta let go unloved? sorta. for me, tech and linguistics are one single larger interest. i like both for the same reasons. i wanna learn more languages!!!!
this leads me to what i hate most about LLMs. not the lies or the ecological evil, but the personal hatred of the field's utter disregard for any actual science of linguistics and languages. techniques of refining models do not represent advancements in processing language or generating useful responses. it's fancy guesswork that lies about being language.
i maintain that the responses generated by LLMs does not qualify as "language".
Couldn't resist so I gave Rachael's arguments to ChatGPT and I asked it for a rebuttal. It only seemed fair. đ ---------- Thatâs a strong critique, and it deserves a thoughtful response. Hereâs a structured rebuttal that addresses the core concerns without dismissing the legitimate points behind them: --- **1. âLLMs arenât language, theyâre fancy guesswork.â** Yes, LLMs are fundamentally statistical pattern matchers. They donât "understand" language in the way humans doâthey model *form*, not *meaning*, by predicting likely word sequences. But this doesn't disqualify them from producing *language*. Language is, at its core, a structured signal system governed by patterns, and LLMs are very good at modeling those patterns. **Counterpoint:** Language as humans use it has always relied on prediction, pattern, and statistical regularity. Children donât learn language by studying formal grammarsâthey internalize usage patterns. LLMs mimic this, albeit in a different (and much shallower) way. If a system produces coherent sentences that people interpret meaningfully, denying that itâs âlanguageâ becomes a philosophical stance rather than an empirical one. --- **2. âLLMs ignore linguistic science.â** This is partly true. Many LLM architectures, especially early ones, were developed without deep engagement with linguistic theory. They're engineering-first tools. However, recent research increasingly connects LLM behavior with linguistic phenomenaâsyntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc. **Counterpoint:** While they didnât emerge *from* linguistics, LLMs now serve as testbeds *for* linguistic hypotheses. They show surprising emergent behaviors (like understanding long-distance dependencies or discourse structure) that align with linguistic theoryâeven if not perfectly. Thatâs not to say they're replacements for theory, but they're tools with real utility. --- **3. âRefining LLMs isnât progress in language processing.â** If your definition of progress is rooted in theoretical understanding of language, you might be disappointed. But if itâs about building tools that produce useful language outputs across translation, summarization, Q\&A, education, etc., then LLMs represent a giant leap forward. **Counterpoint:** Just because LLMs donât solve *fundamental* questions in linguistics doesnât mean they arenât progress. Theyâre like early planes: they didnât explain gravity, but they flew. Thatâs still remarkable engineering. --- **4. âLLMs lie about being language.â** They donât lie. People doâby overhyping them or anthropomorphizing them. LLMs are tools. They simulate language use without consciousness or intent. The criticism should be aimed at those misusing them or misrepresenting their capabilities, not the models themselves. --- **In summary:** LLMs arenât replacements for linguistic theory, but they *do* generate language, as defined by usage and comprehension. Theyâre flawed, impressive, limited, and powerfulâsometimes all at once. Dismissing them entirely risks ignoring the genuinely novel linguistic behavior they exhibit, even if that behavior arises from "fancy guesswork." If you're open to it, this isn't a war between real linguistics and AIâitâs a potential collaboration.
this leads me to what i hate most about LLMs. not the lies or the ecological evil, but the personal hatred of the field's utter disregard for any actual science of linguistics and languages. techniques of refining models do not represent advancements in processing language or generating useful responses. it's fancy guesswork that lies about being language.
i maintain that the responses generated by LLMs does not qualify as "language".
Arye Dery, chairman of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, said in an interview on the right-wing Channel 14 that the massacre of October 7, Trump's election, were 'great miracles' that led to Israel's war with Iran
Let's assume that the Axis winning the war means they keep all territory they've had at the height of their expansion in our timeline but don't expand much more, at least not immediately.
The EU does not exist but as most of Europe is either occupied by Germany or allied with it, there might be a similar organization with a way stronger Germany at its center.
If a NATO-like alliance forms, it excludes most of Europe, mainly consisting of the USA, Canada and UK, maybe Spain and Portugal
The Soviet Union is way weaker than in our timeline with most of Eastern Europe being under German control. They still have control over Central Asia, probably more than in our timeline.
The Allies still control Gibraltar and are able to intercept ships passing through the English Channel, making the west of France the only safe access to the Atlantic for the Axis.
Wernher von Braun and other rocket scientists stay in Germany, giving the USA and Soviet Union a massive disadvantage in the development of ICBMs. The USA may have nuclear bombs but their only way to threaten Germany with them would be UK-based bombers which are way slower and easier to defend against. On the other hand, a failure of the Manhattan Project might be the whole reason why the Axis wins the war. Everyone will figure it out eventually but as we see from real life, it might take decades.
No proper cold war as there are no two super powers exercising mutually assured destruction with ICBMs but probably ongoing tensions along the German-Soviet border. The USA probably stays out of it to avoid becoming a target for either side.
Italian East Africa (Somalia) becomes the most important rocket launch site in the world, as it is the only Axis-controlled territory that is close to the equator and has open ocean to the east. Some smaller rockets may launch from Japan. French Guiana might be under Axis control but shipping rockets over the Atlantic is dangerous when they could get intercepted by foreign ships. Without competition, manned spaceflight develops a lot slower, maybe not at all.
Without manned spaceflight and the threat of a nuclear war, there is less incentive to develop computers and the internet.
Great answer, do you see any internal tensions within the Axis that could foreseeably have caused collapse comparable to say Soviet communism's collapse in the real world? How dependant were they on Hitler and Mussolini as individuals?
Hard to say. I'm not a historian, so I can only speculate. I would assume that Hitler would eventually select a successor and there is no way of telling how good that person would be at keeping the Reich in order.
comparable to say Soviet communismâs collapse in the real world
As far as I understand it, the fall of the Soviet Union was preceded by at least a decade of economic struggle that was caused by a multitude of factors. Basically the only thing they had to export was oil and weapons and the only nations they could trade with were relatively poor. When their oil production cost kept rising, they just couldn't keep their exports high enough to import enough food and luxury goods to keep their population happy. This was a prime driver for unrest in regions that bordered the west, especially East Germany who of course got news of what life in West Germany was like. The Soviets were eventually forced to open the Berlin Wall and from there, there was nothing they could do to keep people from just leaving and fully collapsing the economy in the process. To this day, 35 years after the reunion, former East Germany is way behind the rest of the country even though on paper they have the same chances as everyone else, just because there has been a massive brain drain.
So overall, the collapse of the Soviet Union was less a failure of communism itself and more a failure to counteract their economic weaknesses as well as a result of their isolationism. The USA didn't win the Cold War because of the inherent superiority of capitalism but because the world drinks Coca Cola, wears jeans, watches Hollywood movies and works with IBM-compatible PCs. If the Soviet Union had pivoted their economy to those kinds of goods and had managed to export them to the west, they might have become what China is today.
So it all comes down to the question if alternate-history Germany manages to do that. With technology advancing slower overall and therefore becoming less of a factor in global markets, and at the same time keeping a lot of top scientists who in the real world left for the other superpowers, they could probably do it.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o⊠Lots of gases work as refrigerants. CO2 requires a much higher pressure so you can't just put it in your old truck. They have different operating temperatures and pressures .. CO2 also has that ugly solid phase in its diagram.
R290 propane ust works like good old R22. They pass rules againt it not for your safety or the environment but to force you to buy their products. Many of which have nasty "forever" compounds.
I wish there was a way in #Sharkey to either automatically #hide #posts I've #seen before or manually hide/ dismiss posts I've seen before. My #timeline is full of people #reboosting the same posts over and over and over again. Which is fine! I get that! And I'm not complaining about that. But it results in me seeing the same damn posts over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.......
"Absolute horror show as FL gets started bldg its own IMM detn cen.đšđ ALCATRAZ to hold human beings in an area surrounded by alligators & snakes in horrific heat & w NO oversight." -N Gupta
"They'll send ppl to horrific situations with no #dueprocess *direct violation of promises the SG made to the Ct in previous cases.
Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges customers different sums based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a firm sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're valuing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free blog:
That's not how economists see it, of course. When a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that's efficient, *provided* that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in. The empty room makes them nothing, and $50 is more than nothing.
There's a kind of metaphysics at work here, in which the room that is for sale at $500 is "a hotel room you book two weeks in advance and are sure will be waiting for you when you check in" while the $50 room is "a hotel room you can only get at the last minute, and if it's not available, you're sleeping in a chair at the Greyhound station."
But what if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you're in chemotherapy, so you don't have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now?
What if they charge you more because they can see that your kids are exhausted and cranky and the hotel infers that you'll pay more to get the kids tucked into bed? What if they charge you more because there's a wildfire and there are plenty of other people who want the room?
The metaphysics of "room you booked two weeks ago" as a different product from "room you're trying to book right now" break down pretty quickly once you factor in the ability of sellers to figure out how desperate you are - or merely how distracted you are - and charge accordingly.
"Surveillance pricing" is the practice of spying on you to figure out how much you're willing to spend - because you're wealthy, because you're desperate, because you're distracted, because it's payday - and charging you more:
For example, a McDonald's ventures portfolio company called Plexure offers drive-through restaurants the ability to raise the price of your regular order based on whether you've recently received your paycheck. They're just one of many "personalized pricing" companies that have attracted investor capital to figure out how to charge you more for the things you need, or merely for the small pleasures of life.
Personalized pricing (that is, "surveillance pricing") is part of the "pricing revolution" that is underway in the US and the world today. Another major element of this revolution are the "price clearinghouses" that charge firms within a sector to submit their prices to them, then "offer advice" on the optimum pricing. This advice - given to all the suppliers of a good or service - inevitably boils down to "everyone should raise their prices in unison."
These companies pretend that when all the meat-packers in America send their pricing data to a "neutral" body like Agri-Stats, which then tells them all to jack up the price of meat, that this isn't a price-fixing conspiracy, since the actual conspiracy takes the form of strongly worded suggestions from an entity that isn't formally part of the industry:
Same goes for when all the landlords in town send their rental data to a company like Realpage, which then offers "advice" about the optimum price, along with stern warnings not to rent below that price: apparently *that's* not price-fixing either:
Take contract nursing, where a cartel of three staffing apps have displaced the many small regional staffing agencies that historically served the sector. These companies buy nurses' credit history from the unregulated, Wild West data-brokerage sector.
They're checking to see whether a nurse who's looking for a shift has a lot of credit-card debt, especially delinquent debt, because these nurses are facing economic hardship and will accept a lower wage than their better-off compatriots:
This is surveillance pricing for *buyers*, and as with the sell-side pricing revolution, buyers also make use of a third party as an accountability sink (a term coined by Dan Davies): the apps that they use to buy nursing labor are a convenient way for hospitals to pretend that they're not engaged in price-fixing for labor.
Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination." Algorithmic wage discrimination doesn't need to use third-party surveillance data: Uber, who invented the tactic, use their own in-house data as a way to make inferences about drivers' desperation and thus their willingness to accept a lower wage. Drivers who are less picky about which rides they accept are treated as more desperate, and offered lower wages than their pickier colleagues:
This is one of the real labor consequences of AI: not the hypothetical millions of people who will become technologically unemployed, numbers that AI bosses pull out of their asses and hand to dutiful stenographers in the tech press who help them extol the power of their products; but rather the millions of people whose wages are suppressed by algorithms that continuously recalculate how desperate a worker is apt to be and lower their wages accordingly.
This is as good a candidate for AI regulation as any, but it's also a *very* good reason to regulate data brokers, who operate with total impunity. Thankfully, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule that made data brokers effectively illegal:
But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that rule, giving data brokers carte blanche to spy on you and sell your data, effectively without restriction:
Also, Biden's FTC was in the middle of an antitrust investigation into surveillance pricing on the eve of the election, a prelude to banning the practice in America:
But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that investigation and instead created a snitch line where FTC employees could complain about colleagues who were "woke":
Naomi Klein's *Doppelganger* proposes a "mirror world" that the fever-swamp right lives in - a world where concern for kids takes the form of Pizzagate conspiracies, while ignoring the starving babies in Gaza and the kids whose parents are being kidnapped by ICE:
The pricing revolution is a kind of mirror-world Marxism, grounded in "From each according to their ability to pay; to each according to their economic desperation":
A recent episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast featured an interview with Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer who is on the front lines of the pricing revolution (on the side of workers and buyers) (not bosses):
Hepner is the one who proposed the formulation that personalized pricing is a way for corporations to decide that your dollars are worth less than your neighbors' dollars - a form of economic discrimination that treats the poorest, most desperate, and most precarious among us as the people who should pay the most, because we are the people whose dollars are worth the least.
Now, this isn't always true. Earlier this month, the Delta, United and American were caught charging more for single travelers than they charged pairs of groups:
That's a way to charge business travelers extra - for valuing their dollars less than the dollars of families, not because business travelers are desperate, but because they are, on average, richer than holidaymakers (because their bosses are presumed to be buying their tickets). Sometimes, price discrimination really *does* charge richer people more to subsidize everyone else.
But here's the difference: when the news about the business-traveler's premium broke, its victims - powerful people with social capital and also regular capital - rose up in outrage, and the airlines reversed the policy:
If the airlines are still pursuing this kind of price discrimination, they'll do something sneakier, like buying our credit histories before showing us a price.
This is something British Airways is already teeing up, offering essentially *zero* reward miles to frequent fliers for partner airline tickets unless they're purchased from BA's own website:
But BA operates in the UK, where most of the pre-Brexit, EU-based privacy regime is still intact, despite the best efforts of Kier Starmer to destroy it, something that neither Boris Johnson, nor Theresa May, nor Liz Truss could manage:
So for now, BA travleers might be safe from surveillance pricing, at least in the UK and EU. And that's the thing, America is pretty much cooked. It might be generations - centuries - before the USA emerges from its Trumpian decline and becomes a civilized democracy again. Americans have little hope of a future in which their government protects them from corporate predators, rather than serving them up on a toothpick, along with a little cocktail napkin.
The future of the fight against corporate power and oligarchy is something for the rest of the world to carry on, as the American hermit kingdom sinks into ever-deeper collapse:
And as it happens, Canada's Competition Bureau, newly equipped with muscular enforcement powers thanks to a 2024 law, is seeking public comment on surveillance pricing and whether Canada should do something about it:
Algorithmic pricing is on the rise worldwide. In sectors ranging from hospitality to concert tickets to ridesharing, businesses are using algorithms to guide pricing strategies for their products or services.
I'm writing comments for this one. If you're in Canada, or a Canadian abroad (like me), perhaps you could, too. If you're looking for an excellent Canadian perspective to crib from, check out this episode of *The Globe and Mail's* Lately podcast on the subject:
Lately, we arenât all getting the same price for the same product. Is the rise of data-driven âpersonalized pricingâ corporate innovation or just next-gen gouging?
@scurvy_duck "womp womp" is the sound of a sad trombone. "Eh?" is the canonical Canadian interrogative used as an end-of-sentence marker, akin to "right?" or "you know what I mean?"
âWhen a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that's efficient, *provided* that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in.â
@EndicottAuthor That's different. Gas stations don't change the price on the pump based on scanning your license plate or doing facial recognition â mainly because they have a large display outside that everyone can see, showing the price of their gasoline.
@madeingermany My wife and I were once both looking at my brother's wish list on Amazon at the same time, and the price I saw for one item was 33% higher than the price she saw for the same item
@chrisbrand one common reason for that is also that when somebody has Prime the algorithm favors Prime offers even if the price is higher than a non-Prime offer...
@CppGuy @siobhan @EndicottAuthor That's different, though. If you have a loyalty card you know the price of an item, and you know what the discount will be. Anyone with a loyalty card will get that discount.
What some supermarkets in the US seem to be talking about is tracking people with facial ID and combining that with data from data brokers in order to gauge how much to charge you. Buying tampons and you're on your period? Price goes up, b/c they know you really need them now.
The big UK supermarkets have used personal pricing for years. But they don't call it that: they call it "offers chosen for you." Anyone who doesn't opt into the loyalty scheme pays full price for everything.
About the only defence a customer has is to carry a physical loyalty card rather than installing the store's creepy app. Unsurprisingly, when you apply for the card, stores push you really hard to install the app instead, and, for at least one store (Marks and Spencer), it's the app or nothing. The app, of course, needs an outrageous set of permissions and contains no fewer than ten trackers:
@siobhan @bodhipaksa @EndicottAuthor They can't. The law in all states that I know of is that they can't charge more than the price on the main sign (the advertised price). They can charge less, so the order things are changed in depends on whether the price is going up (sign first) or down (pump first).
I understand the distinction, but the UK is already closer than that to personalised pricing. Some discounts are available to everyone with a loyalty card, but others, offered online, are personalised. Tesco seems to use them to tempt me to buy
More than I need of products that I've already stocked up on, and
Products that are a bit more expensive than I usually buy, and which I don't want to get into the habit of buying because I know the offer is temporary.
Sainsbury has a big sign, touting personalised offers, at the entrance to our nearest branch. And the checkout usually prints vouchers of the form "spend twice as much as usual within a week and get ÂŁ15 off the bill".
@jackwilliambell @simon_brooke with the "first rule of business" typically being a variation of "never leave money on the table" means any seller will try to maximize profits, regardless of who they're selling to, or at what price point.
there are are also pricing strategies to drive consumers to "pick" a desired option. eg 3 similar things for sale: one cheap in all regards, one overpriced, and one "Goldilocks" in between option that has the best profit margin of them all.
Amazon has been doing this for a while. Last year me and my two sisters decided we would buy mom one of those hard hearing land line phones. I found on on amazon, then pointed each of my two sisters at it. We got three different prices! My eldest sister had the cheapest quote so she ordered it.
uff, at the start of the article I thought: yes, I'm fine if the swimming pool charges me more than families (kids are expensive AF), more than students who don't have an income, etc. I'm fine to buy the social espresso in Italy and have a free espresso go to the next in need. I like fighting food waste by have the store lower the price of things that go bad soon (large choice for me. Low loss for the store for overstocking). (Not overly happy about small choice for the needy)
Clearly Amazon knows who would pay more than others and clearly it is in their interest to charge accordingly. They control the market and when you can control the market, you can extract more profits from it than an efficient market would allow any trader to extract.
For the producer and the buyer, an efficient market would be the best as then, the middle man would extract the least.
In the case of Tesco, the biggest loyalty card pushers, it's not discounted price and real price. It's real price and profiteering price. This was obvious when they rolled out this in a big way, a few years ago, where in my local Tesco Express I saw price increases of 50% and above in the "non-loyalty" prices, almost overnight. It worked, I got a card. (That shop is trivial walking distance, anything better is a bus ride.)
Except Jaffa cakes. Pricing there is nuts. Always check all sizes for which is cheaper today. But don't buy any size unless at least one has an offer. And if you can afford it, if something you want but not need does not have an offer, wait until it does.
@dnkboston @simon_brooke > "⊠a lot of people don't have options, and the people who run them know that."
I suspect it's more complicated than that. If you only have a dollar you don't have an option â unless you don't actually NEED the good on hand, in which case you have the option of not buying cosmetics or a stickerbook or whatever.
And yet people with little money buy those things. I'm not condemning them, but I am saying there are no simple answers for complex problems.
@jackwilliambell The not-poor can afford a better value because they're not poor.
When Jack Monroe created the index, they were writing as they were going in and out of poverty. Other poor people knew they were being hustled but literally couldn't afford to do anything about it.
Dollar stores don't exist because people are thinking they can get a better value. They exist because a lot of people don't have options, and the people who run them know that.
@dnkboston @simon_brooke Yup. See, "⊠there are a lot of people who do not properly differentiate between 'price' and 'value'."
If everyone was good at determining actual value dollar stores would not exist and 'reducing the size of government' would be a process of determining cost-benefit ratios.
The (old) American tradition (which is also a legal one versus more powerful near-monopoly firms) of public pricing for all customers is a boon to market efficiency! It reduces exploitation of market power against the commonwealth.
I know this is due to a limitation in Mastodon, but please consider not posting entire articles in small pieces on fedi. A summary (even in 2 or 3 parts) with a link to your blog would suffice. Or you could put the entire thing in one post.
That way my TL would not get that "overrun with replies" look if I followed you. (I used to follow you...)
See pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how⊠in which I explain my choice of servers, etc, as well as how to filter threads in your timeline.
My threads are CC BY, and available in fulltext RSS. You can remix that feed however you'd like including publishing it on Fediverse in a format you prefer.
I publish in multiple formats and you are more than welcome to unfollow here and get them some other way.
@Gargron Thanks, but I decided to switch to using RSS for your feed. The issue is that I still want to see "Long threads" emerge in my TL, but only the first 1 or 2 parts.
Mastodon has remained assiduously non-algorithmic in its TL presentation. So in rejecting complex, blackbox algorithms it also rejects ones that could be less than 4 lines of open code yet very beneficial to the users' pursuit of "effective communication" to use Eugen's term.
@tasket @Gargron This is what I do and it actually works wonders for me. I think the chopping up and posting is automated though? But youâve touched on another reason why I just donât read threads on here very often. If thereâs a thread with like five or six post? I simply wonât read it. Give me a blog post with a three hour estimated reading time and day of the week though and I will sit down and read that whole post in one go!
No, it's entirely manual, it is very labor intensive, and it is deliberate. It may not be right for you, and that is fine, and that is why I make the same text available in so many formats, so you can choose one that works better for you.
Ah! Gotcha! I thought it was automated, so thanks for clearing that up! I wish more instances had giant character limits like mine. It makes posting things like this far easier and with 1 simple CW I don't clog up people's timelines !but to the other person, he usually posts his link in his first post at the top of the thread, so if you see a chunk, go to the first post. For example, this one is pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/pri⊠@pluralistic @tasket @Gargron
Ghassan Kanafaniâs 'The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine' examines the mass uprisings against Zionism and for independence from British colonialism. A new English translation of the book offer news insights into the pivotal text. mondoweiss.net/2025/05/interviâŠ
Ghassan Kanafaniâs âThe Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestineâ examines the mass uprisings against Zionism and for independence from British colonialism. A new English translation of the book offer news insights into the pivotal text.
Russia is making efforts to assist the Iranian people amid escalation in the Middle East, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arakchi.
So, the way we're going to solve climate change and save the Amazon is by auctioning off oil sites in the Amazon.
Also, we're having a big conference on saving the Amazon in the Amazon and we're building a huge road, an airport for private jets and some luxury hotels for some very specials VIPs. All in the Amazon! Wow hee!!
Brazil auctions off several Amazon oil sites despite environmentalists and Indigenous protests
The attack on Pearl Harbor and Trumpâs bombing of a few places in Iran arenât really the same.
The emperor (Japanese people almost never use the emperorâs name) didnât tell the world that he was seriously considering an attack on Pearl Harbor. It really was a sneak attack. Thereâs a great account of the involvement of cryptographers and intelligence agencies in the hours leading up to the attack in David Kahnâs The Codebreakers.
Also, during the TaishĆ era (before the ShĆwa era) emperors became figurehead rulers much as in Europe. The US military always talked about Tojo, the prime minister, and not the emperor when they talked about military policy.
Did Tojo really think that the US wouldnât go to war against Japan after Perl Harbor? I think he just thought that sinking those battleships would delay the USAâs entry into what Japan calls the Pacific War.
US President Donald Trump, however, said he did not expect further retaliation and thanked Iran 'for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost.'
The final blow will be that they send a nuclear bomb in a cargo container on a cargo ship to New York.
Interesting. Before the Manhattan Project during WWII, many thought that, probably, a critical mass would be so heavy that nuclear weapons would have to be delivered to ports in ships as you describe.
Manhattan Project research suggested that a critical mass could actually be quite small. The Trinity test proved it. Nuclear weapons can be small enough to be delivered as bombs, torpedo warheads, or missile warheads.
Fortunately, only two nuclear weapons have been used to deliberately kill people, so far.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov addressed global policymakers, diplomats, and academics at the XI Primakov Readings in Moscow, warning that the intern...
"Men dressed in tactical gear, operating unmarked vehicles without displaying credentials or agency affiliation, have infiltrated our neighborhoods," said Huntington Park Mayor Arturo Flores.
I've been working on it with Grok. Since sex is immutable and 'gender' is a contrived attempt to sidestep this truth, we need better, more precise terms.
@Java Yes. Many doctors trained in western medicine are schooled to follow authority and always submit to higher authorities. It's protocol to appeal to authority, to greater *experts*
Being "schooled" is indoctrination. Not the same thing as being "educated". Being educated allows one to leave the reservation via critical thinking and challenging the status quo of what has simply been told to them.
@JackONeill Good points. My family discusses it a lot. I find that people in my circle have gotten more vocal & learned how to say, "No" to certain medicines, esp statins, will bring up new developments, and aren't afraid to mention alternatives. The doctor of a friend of mine who refused the shot during Covid said to her, "You must be one of those MAGA people." đ She said, "I am, and proud of it." @Andre
You are so right about reclaiming language, it sounds good to me. I'd have to write them down 25 times to remember. Some medical terms have been removed in journals. Imo, dems do it to destroy lives.
Cultural Marxism and the "long march through trusted institutions."
You're describing the symptom of an active campaign to gut trusted institutions (education, family, church, doctors, etc) and wear the skin of those institutions as a suit.
You can't fix it without addressing the source of the problem.
Simply use the tag #joborun to post here and have your text seen by the joborun community, otherwise it will be in the chaos of fediverse/diaspora
@alostfella@diasporasocial.net
Anyway, how the heck do you switch languages? I mean, I've tried, fcitx and uim. Both work fine on joborun, but I've some issues, uim is hard af to manage and idk how to get it running on the terminal, any terminal though I use st--and therefore vim. For fcitx, I have made it work. But both kill the system somehow if I press the F keys, as in F5, F6, or XK keys, as in to lower audio or whatever. Maybe you're not the guy I should be sending this to and I'm wasting your time, but idk, any recommendations?
In X the best place for keyboards and languages is /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf Overall system language settings is best set at /etc/locale.conf /etc/locale.gen then run locale-gen to pass the settings On labwc ~/.config/labwc/environment
What you describe with the F keys is some program remapping key combinations for different power functions, but what you mean about "kill the system" is not very clear. Shutdown, reboot, loose graphical environment and exiting to console? Runit only allows system going down with the 4 functions in /usr/bin/run/{poweroff,reboot,shutdown,halt} where it is best to only use /usr/bin/run/reboot and /usr/bin/run/reboot -f as root
Not all software are translated to all languages, so it is best to have a 2nd language you are semi-comfortable with as backup when your 1st choice doesn't work.
Also, to keep the installation image small all language and documentation is removed, you may have to reinstall a specific program to get manuals and language specific labels ..etc.
Oh, sorry, I'm kind of new to the fediverse/diaspora. What I meant is that, whenever I pressed one of those keys, the X environment would keep working, technically, but it would just freeze. So, I couldn't do anything, not even switch between switch to any other TTY. The cause: A deprecated command inside my .xinitrc file:
exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session
Used it as a temporary fix for some program to work, but it's deprecated to have such thing inside xinit.
Still, regarding /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf, it's a great solution for Latin languages such as Deutsch, Portuguese, etc. Though, it's, perhaps just easier to use "setxkbmap" on the run or making a script, but falls short when dealing with languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Extremely annoying, but it seems that the only viable way to make them work is using fcitx, ibus or whatever bloated IME :/. The best solution I've found so far, is getting 'uim', removing all the bloat and then compiling it using musl-gcc or tcc by yourself (possible, but a pain in the ass, plus it may bring a lot of compatibility issues with some programs).
I have used setxkbmap in menu of a wm to switch instead of shortcut/keybinds before, but I don\t know/understand why it wouldn't work with some valid system languages.
I made this kbd-tapper program that may help in identifying language/kbd settings in your X, it claims to work on wayland, gnome/kde is disabled but the --xkb "layouter " is still needed to be specified See the manual here kbd-tapper.sourceforge.io/tappâŠ
I accept total ignorance of E.Asian language keyboards and difficulties, I assume they exist on english dominated computer environment. EN is not our native language either .. but is common and popular among unix/linux users so we have to live with it.
Symbols and symbolism should be seen as what they are, confusing crap coming from a subjective theistic culture of primitive people. We can assign visual and audio symbols to refer to a tree, different in every corner of the world, but the tree in front of us remains the same one tree whatever we call it. Keyboard keys and their combinations send a unique signal by opening closing circuits to a system that wouldn't understand any human language but only its own.
So if I say un, uno, one, ena, uahad, ein, 1 is still a symbol of the concept of 1
I think comrades Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Yong Un, would agree with me up to this point ... we can disagree on many others đ
If we were in Hollywood land I would have said "god help you" and avoid further investigation ... luckily we are not.
% tapper --xkb --list-layouts
shows which and if defined lang/kbd sets are defined in X, and I believe come from that /etc/x11/...conf file you mention They must be set right so you can set key combinations to switch between them So if the above command doesn't show any or only one switching is not possible.
That's always been precisely the point of our "representative" government: for the nation's elite (first the American plutocracy, now the globalist/Zionist international Cabal) to be able to rule over the people THROUGH their bought and paid for FLUNKIES, whom the citizens are generously allowed to "vote" for.
But it wouldn't be a very good marketing strategy to call it exactly what it really is--ELECTIVE OLIGARCHY--now would it?
The US military will "very likely" fight a three-way war on Iran, Russia, and China, predicted Palantir CEO Alex Karp in 2024. American imperial strategist Z...
"This is only the latest failure by the #BBC to provide accurate, impartial and independent reporting on Israelâs siege in #Gaza and the appalling humanitarian crisis it has created"
Whatever regime will lead Iranian state will be an enemy of the West, until a regime chosen by US take over the state. #imperialism rules and hates anyone who doesn't bend knees.
If Iranians choose democratically a socialist atheist regime, the next day collectively the Western establishment will start to blame new leaders for being too anachronistic and not modern enough to cooperate with the rest of the world. The regime will respond "you block us from basic global things". The next day the whole West will start the fairytale "Iran's barbaric regime should not have nuclear energy" and they will bomb again. It's not an issue of regime.
#Iran Foreign Minister Araqchi: "The military operations of our powerful Armed Forces to punish #Israel for its aggression continued until the very last minute, at 4am."
#Israel military said it detected launch of 2 #Iran missiles around 2 1/2 hours after purported start of ceasefire --- 3:30 a.m. in Israel and 4 a.m. in Iran
Which would have been *before* #Netanyahu Government's confirmation of its acceptance of a halt
Defense Minister Katz: I instructed #Israel Defense Forces to carry out attacks on #Iran, following interception of 2 Iranian ballistic missiles on northern Israel this AM
We will ârespond forcefully to Iranâs violation of ceasefire with intense strikes against regime targets in heart of #Tehran"
Trump: âAll planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly âPlane Waveâ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect!"
AOC: "They have released chaos in LA by violently raiding & ripping apart peaceful public spaces, and now they are tackling & arresting US sitting members of Congress, while going on the record & lying about what happened. bsky.app/profile/iwillnotbesilâŠ
.svg#/media/File:World_War_II_in_Europe,_1942.svg "File:World War II in Europe, 1942 (no labels).svg - Wikimedia Commons")
casey is remote
in reply to Jazzilla • • •Nope just twice
Pretty surprised the #AI put a topless woman poolside at the #Olympics though.
zeph
in reply to Jazzilla • • •