count_dongulus

u/count_dongulus@lemmy.world
7 posts · 669 comments

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I actually think this level of control over notifications is a GOOD thing. Trash apps will mix spam and useful notifications without a way to filter out the spam ones. Nextdoor is garbage for a lot of reasons, but granular notifications controls are not one of them. Arguably, defaulting all of them to "On" is scummy, but if they didn't, most users would probably never know they existed in the first place without UX handholding.

What's the point of collecting money at the state level just to hope it's allocated as if it were collected locally? State level money should be used for state level concerns that benefit everyone in a non-geographically localized way - like, state healthcare programs, disaster relief savings, state college systems, etc. Spending 50% of the money on local things in the area that gave 50% of the taxes might sound ideal, but the problem is there's nothing to guarantee this is how the money is actually spent. And it's not, as we can see with this news. The House might be proportional to population, but the senate and governor are not. And population doesn't necessarily correlate to tax contribution either.

This is the same reason we get upset at the federal level when federal tax dollars are spent on "pork barrel projects" in a state whose senator happened to negotiate their way into that money after holding some actually important budget bill hostage. The pie was so big in the first place because we've normalized giving up our autonomy to send the overwhelming majority of our tax dollars off to people who don't care about using it to help us.

IMO the tax system is absolutely backwards. Instead of county/city government getting maybe 1% of your money, the state 10%, and federal 25%, it should be the complete opposite order. Because that's the order of influence on your day to day quality of life, and the order of how much influence your vote holds.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/asklemmy · 8 pts · 208d

You get more stuff, more status, etc. Or alternatively, penalized, threatened, etc. Whatever it takes to motivate people to do the job. Even if paper money isn't a thing in communist societies (which it still is), money's just a symbol for debt. You're going to get something, somehow, for a job people greatly desire to be done without enough doers and they'll become "indebted" to you disproportionately for doing it.

In Soviet society for instance, you might be provided a nice apartment in central Moscow if you were doing something "important". This assignment would be via your government-controlled employer and their agreements with some other government bureau that officially managed the buildings to dole them out to select people.

So, same deal as anywhere else, just a different mechanism. Higher ration, bigger dacha, jump to the front of the line to get a car, etc.

Compensation is usually not much about how dangerous a job is, though. It's more about how many people are willing to do it for any number of reasons. Some people are just not very risk-adverse, and figure they're going to be fine at a job that is more dangerous. And they'll be compensated at a normal level as long as there are enough such people to fill the need.

I think AI backlash is intersecting anti-intellectualism; LLMs often use somewhat formal language, and if your writing style is too close to the style bots use because of their training set, you're now caught in the crossfire by LLM haters. Sucks, and might have a chilling effect on real discourse as AI slop propagates.

Trimet serves a particular area. Why should they rely on money from government sources beyond that area? Super irresponsible.

Really souring lately on lower governments that bend the knee to higher layers of government to solicit money for things that are just specific to that lower level of governance. IMO you either have enough money for the geographically specific services your community wants, or you don't. Change your tax policy or rethink the initiative if your budget won't work. Creative financing means you are no longer in control; the governor, state congress, president, US Congress, or whoever else you begged for money from now gets to tell you what you can do in your own community.

Can only try to help unwilling people for so long that you have to consider that this kind of assistance is not limitless and has to be prioritized for people who are interested and willing to at least try to support themselves. Fill up shelters to use them, but when you're at capacity based on what the local government and its policies by extension of the voterbase's willingness to contribute financially can support, you have to make hard decisions.

Will these people end up on the street? Probably. If this feels unreasonable, support candidates pushing to increase/reallocate funding for the program, or volunteer your own time and money to contribute.

"Enthusiastic crystal meth users reportedly go back to smoking crystal meth after discontinuing crystal meth cessation medication."

Ya still have to change your lifestyle. If you're still raw-dogging peanut butter out of the jar at 2AM for a midnight snack on GLP meds, just less of it, you're gonna have a bad time when your stomach doesn't physically stop you from finishing that jar next time cause you quit the meds.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/asklemmy · 13 pts · 216d

The thing that feels hopeless here is that "dynamic pricing" is like...the natural way to sell stuff if that makes sense? Standardized non-negotiated pricetags evolved as part of the growth of industrialization and mass consumerism. It just wasn't feasible to have individual salespeople trying to milk each customer out of the most possible money for every transaction for small purchases, and big box stores eliminated the shopkeeper role as a quasi-salesperson who might do that from time to time. But that still IS how many, many sales work today. It's just that "negotiated prices" are reserved for big ticket items where salespeople get a big enough cut. Real estate, B2B deals, new cars, etc are sold by salespeople whose main job is moneymilking based on what they think they can con the particular buyer into handing over.

Technology, as the great optimizer, is merely making the job of a salesperson automated enough to be applied at the Taco Bell drivethru using your personal data.

Cache-like storage, private user-specific data, blobby or otherwise schemaless data. Stuff like that. But IMO it's a matter of time until you find a need to operate against this data relationally, and then you regret using document storage. I've made this mistake twice now and do not intend to make it again. I now consider document storage architecture to be a performance optimization with significant tradeoffs, and not a choice to be made by default for nearly any scenario.

I don't like tokens or cards. I like open play, just pay like $20 for all day access. I'm fortunate to have places like that around. The pay to play model penalizes you for being bad at or new to an arcade title or pinball machine, which mega blows and discourages people from trying out random games they might lose quickly at.