Automation that replaces the need for work can be a good thing, but only if it is used to ease the overall burden instead of making a bunch of people unemployed so that the capitalists who own the company can increase their profits. The idea of machines doing all the work sounds great, but if that means that the handful of people who own the machines have a great quality of life and everyone else suffers then that is not a good trade-off.
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023
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2·10 months agoIt is a very good book. I have some more by the same author on my shelf but haven’t got to them yet.
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming is a history of industrial use of fossil fuels; in particular I believe it discusses how fossil fuels became so prevalent because they are a method of power generation which can be privatised more easily than things like water power.
I also have White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Fascism by Malm and the Zetkin Collective but I don’t know much about that one yet, I mostly picked it up because of the Black Skin, White Masks reference in the title.
8·10 months agoWhile some limited ecotage does happen, non-permanent disruption is more popular than permanent damage. And the more public, less relevant showboating stuff is what gets the public eye. Just Stop Oil got a lot more attention when they started sitting in traffic and throwing stuff at paintings and whatever than when they were focusing more on things like blocking oil terminals.
I’d recommend Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline for more discussion about more radical approaches to protest, but bear in mind that there is a distinction between strategic sabotage which can get public on-side and the sort of adventurism that ecoterrorism implies. As /u/lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml mentions below this has the risk of driving more people away anyway.
I’d really recommend Marxism Today’s youtube video about the film pseudo-adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, discussing both the risks and bad examples in that film itself but also the broader context of trying to encourage this.
Disruption and sabotage of fossil fuel machinery might be effective from a public optics perspective, as well as on a large enough scale hopefully impacting capitalist profits/making polluting ventures seem riskier to investors. However, ecotage is distinct from eco-terrorism and the latter should be avoided.
However, not the question of subjective motives but that of objective expediency has for us the decisive significance. Are the given means really capable of leading to the goal? In relation to individual terror, both theory and experience bear witness that such is not the case. To the terrorist we say: it is impossible to replace the masses; only in the mass movement can you find expedient expression for your heroism.
- Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours
The [Earth Liberation Front] realises that the profit motive, caused and reinforced by the capitalist society, is destroying all life on this planet. The ELF therefore feels that the only way to stop the destruction of life is to take the profit motive out of killing.
91·11 months agoWhile stuff like Tomb Raider is the quintessential example, for a five year old you would probably be better with something more colourful and fun, even if you are the one playing it.
With that in mind my first thought was A Hat in Time although I’ve not played it through to verify end to end appropriateness.
You could also try Mirror’s Edge because bright colours and dynamic movement, I don’t remember it being that violent but maybe on second thoughts consider the safety aspect of introducing a child to the concept of jumping between buildings and maybe I’m talking myself out of this.
Celeste is colourful and fun and honestly at that age I don’t know that she would pick up that much on the heavier aspects of the story which are allegories for anxiety/depression/gender dysphoria. A five year old is basically going to see it as a story with an evil twin I think.
I haven’t played Child of Light but that might be appropriate?
The main character in Crypt of the Necrodancer is a girl called Cadence, although that is one you would really have to enjoy to make it worth it imo. I’m mostly thinking rhythm and bright colours are child friendly again to be honest, but you still have to play what is basically a roguelike mixed with a rhythm game and if that’s not your jam it will be a waste of money.
You can always play a game with selectable skins too, like Spelunky 2 has a few characters you could pick between which all play the same but has a variety of designs you can play as.
I don’t normally plan my reading much ahead of time but August is an exception on a few counts.
Firstly, Whalefall by Daniel Kraus comes out on August 8th. It’s such a goofy idea for a story (think Jonah and the Whale meets The Martian) and I have been so pumped, I’ve been talking people’s ear off about it for months. It’s like scientifically accurate Pinocchio.
Secondly, one of the bookclub picks for the Discord server affiliated with !bookclub@lemmy.world is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin
And then it’s Tropeical Readathon (a semiannual reading challenge thing) again so I have a couple dozen books picked out to cover that, but the only other sci-fi one apart from the above is Under This Forgetful Sky by Lauren Yero.
I made a kind of “if you like PHM you might like these other books” rec chart thing when I first read PHM; if you’ve finished reading it you might enjoy some of these (although it does mention a few key elements of the book so if you’re going in completely blind and aren’t far in yet then don’t look at this yet).
3·11 months agoThis mindset is why a lot of Blairite Labour policy is “be slightly less right wing than the Tories; the policies might suck but as long as everyone left of Thatcher and Farage feels we’re the lesser evil we don’t need to actually try and be good.” Not having anyone representing the left on the national stage is just going to result in more rightwards drift. I’ve commented elsewhere in this thread on not wanting to split the vote too much between dozens of tiny splinter parties, but also voting for Labour in their current state builds complacency about the voters they think they’ve banked because they used to stand for something, and just leads them to chase more of the Tory vote.
31·11 months agodeleted by creator
The strongest centre left candidates at the moment are the Greens. As far as electoralism goes, it would be better to stand behind a party that actually has a membership than split further into parties which frankly look the same as countless other “like the left flank of Labour but better” parties.
At least something like the Northern Independence Party could raise the priority of the North. I’m not sure what this offers that, say, the Breakthrough Party doesn’t apart from further vote splitting.
Feels like it will offer a similar level of political success and distinction as when you are trying to look up CPB vs CPB-ML vs CPGB-ML vs NCP vs RCPB-ML vs… except with everyone having platitudinal tech marketing guru’s branding like Transform, Change, Breakthrough etc.
3·11 months agoReading & Writing
Video Games
Comics
Board Games / Table top games
695·11 months agoIt’s a machine learning chat bot, not a calculator, and especially not “AI.”
Its primary focus is trying to look like something a human might say. It isn’t trying to actually learn maths at all. This is like complaining that your satnav has no grasp of the cinematic impact of Alfred Hitchcock.
It doesn’t need to understand the question, or give an accurate answer, it just needs to say a sentence that sounds like a human might say it.
3·1 year agoThe impacts of the environmental damage are not necessarily worse than the environmental damage from not sinking superyachts in the long term, if it becomes a common enough threat that rich people no longer feel secure in owning them.
The concern with anything too destructive is with the property and safety of workers on board imo, not the ships themselves.
I’d recommend Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline if you want to hear more about the reasoning for this sort of thing.
6·1 year agoScientists can just make stuff up, but in this case Paul’s complaint appears to be more to do with the article than any underlying research as he is trying to draw information that the article doesn’t pretend to intend to provide.
A lot of the problems with publicly visible scientific research are to do with media communication and the way that journalists will interpret or spice up results in their coverage.
There are also problems with the incentive to publish surprising results more than confirmation of existing information, as well as with the incentives for research funding, and scientists can bring their own biases into research consciously or unconsciously.
For things like company sponsored research, it is not uncommon for multiple trials to be run and only the ones with positive results to be published. I’d recommend Ben Goldacre’s pop sci industry journalism books Bad Science or the even better sequel Bad Pharma for more discussion of this.
Then there are journals which function more like vanity press, with insufficient peer review processes and that just charge people to publish their papers.
But there are also scientists who just wholesale make things up, whether for obvious financial gain like Andrew Wakefield making up the autism from vaccines MMR scare because he had competing vaccines he wanted to sell, or just for easy prestige like Jonathan Pruitt just copy and pasting underlying data samples to boost trends.
It is not unthinkable for researchers to invent information, although my gut will always be to trust the researchers not the international megacorporation with an obvious financial incentive and the idea of suing researchers like this without substantial proof of fraud could have devastating effects on scientific research should J&J manage to push it through.
Have you read any Robert Rankin? His Brentford trilogy might be your cup of tea too.
3·1 year agoSpace tourism is a hugely inefficient way for a handful of billionaires at a time to pop half way to orbit. There are much cheaper and less environmentally destructive ways of achieving a similar result.
6·1 year agoYou cannot do that with other social media.
Facebook likes, Twitter likes, Discord reacts, LinkedIn reacts, etc. are all publicly visible. The only possible slight difference with this is that in some cases people might not be aware, in which case the issue would be that it is less obvious to a casual browser than Facebook’s “AncientMariner and 23 others liked this post” rather than that the likes are visible at all.
2·1 year agoGuru Larry’s Fact Hunt videos can be fun, although he definitely uses an over-the-top personality. He often does listicle style videos but almost always forgets that any video game has been released since 1993. Lots of lists will contain like amiga ports of arcade games and stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/@Larry
For example in the video “Purposely Broken, Unbeatable Games by DICKISH Developers” the game selection is Smash TV, Gladiator/Great Gurianos for the ZX Spectrum, Robocop for the Commodore 64, Dennis the Menace for the Commodore Amiga, and then Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5 but it mentions how weird it is to mention something so modern
As well as the three you have mentioned, I would also recommend The Island of Dr Moreau.
Of the Wells fiction I’ve read, The Time Machine does have the most explicit class analysis/allegory though.
Unless you’re a raw milk TB-chaser type the milk you drink is probably processed too. Being processed doesn’t make something inherently worse, and “no nutritional value” is a daft claim. OK if you consume milk as your only source of protein or fat, you probably want to choose your milk substitute tailored to whichever the rest of your diet is deficient in, but better or worse for us is a fairly arbitrary concept.
Livestock for dairy production are unarguably bad for the planet though.