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Artisian

@ Artisian @lemmy.world

Posts
8
Comments
146
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • What are the best ways to be part of Open Source Community and the Movement To Grow It?

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  • Practice those tasks in a large, already functional open source project. Try to shadow people who already do them. Very relevant link for libreoffice contributors of all kinds

    Relevant more general guide (which doesn't look too out of date) here

    Lastly I'll mention joining organizations adjacent to what you are already excited about working in. I do research code and joined an organization for data scientists in academia. They do regular training and events in things like UI design and documentation.

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    Tax strike?

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  • For payroll tax you can pressure your employer and/or claim an election that's smaller than is real. For sales tax, you can replace some purchases with barter (and refuse to buy other things).

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    Tax strike?

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  • Online free textbook on tax strike practice, history, and philosophy: here

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    Do you think poor people will survive the US current economy?

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  • I would really appreciate a good source for cost of living (and someone more economically literate than me to interpret it). It would be a lot of work for me to do it correctly.

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    Do you think poor people will survive the US current economy?

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  • I think it's worth getting a bit of context; here's our world in data on extreme poverty. Most people on earth go day-to-day on about $10 per day per person. America, while definitely worse for the bottom quarter of the population than ever before, is relatively far from this. Here's a chart on what portion of people in the US are living on (order of magnitude) this amount of money over time.

    I think this gives a sense of what survivable looks like. For example, ~50% of the US population in 1970 lived on less than $40/day (inflation adjusted). Today we are probably somewhere around ~30%. Mortality was higher in 1970, but I don't think it was quite that drastically worse. There are new rent-controlled and monopolistic practices that make dollars worse than they used to be in hard-for-inflation-to-detect ways; it probably requires an expert to weed through that.

    You can look at other related data; we have built up quite a buffer compared to 50 years ago. This means a lot more systems have to fail/degrade than back then for massive deaths (at least due to economics). You can also look at the living conditions of exploited people historically and across the globe; they do tend to survive. Exploiters are incentivized to keep people around to exploit.

    Perhaps you are asking about thriving/living/having any semblance of quality of life. I don't know anyone really predicting these will improve, except perhaps AI-salvationists. Many many systems that kept life improving for so long are being degraded or destroyed, and it seems unlikely (at the moment) that we will rebuild them intelligently.

  • If snap benefits are paid for where are the funds going?

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  • Thank you! In that case I'm moderately certain that the government needs to go into debt to cover it, and is prevented from gaining more debt during the shutdown.

    I am not sure that's literally true for SNAP benefits, but I think this is true 'overall'; this is the reason for stopping most the things they stop.

    Edit: I do want to emphasize that I don't know for sure where the money in this case is.

  • If snap benefits are paid for where are the funds going?

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  • ...to SNAP recipients and services that run them?

    I think I'm failing to parse the question here.

  • What would you do with this power?

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  • I agree, morally speaking, you shouldn't test things you know are bad ideas, or even strongly suspect. But morally speaking you are a monster if you could test a change you think is a good idea, but don't. In the fictional worlds, you have a bunch of power to cancel stuff + use plot armor. You wont have that IRL.

    And I think you're also morally suspect if you just pursue escapism; never leaving one of your plot-armored pleasure crafts. You should do good stuff for the rest of us.

  • What would you do with this power?

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  • If it's only a little different, why not? Remember you can science this in every alt history book you like, so results that happen in 99.9% of timelines are probably safe. You could even step in a slightly fictional place, find an author, and write definitely fictional recreations of your original setting.

    I think you could get a lot of information and confidence from infinite high fidelity simulations, and it would be responsible to use.

  • What would you do with this power?

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  • Or the economic effects of importing billions of tons of gold and enough food to feed everyone.

    Or the technology and policy consequences of giving new zealand a very very big gun.

  • What would you do with this power?

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  • I don't immediately see time travel; so what you mess up IRL stays messed up?

  • What would you do with this power?

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  • No, but you can simulate the immediate future. This means you can test how to use the power, see results, practice, and then execute perfectly once you know what you want. Marathon speedrunning strats.

  • What would you do with this power?

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  • Good point. So you do need to find the most benign alternate history. What if there wasn't you (the character with the super powers)?

  • What would you do with this power?

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  • Looks like the power is trivially recursive; so I like the idea of buying a modern history book, entering the last page, and experimenting repeatedly with the potential applications. You've got forever (speed of thought per attempt), so you can basically groundhogs-day everything you do with it.

    To improve efficiency, I think you probably nest it a few dozen times. Enter the history book, then immediately enter the history book, repeat 12 times. Run the experiments there with substantially more control and time.

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    I'm the President. what's one thing you want me to change about the country?

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  • I'd like to note that the 'heavily' part is probably beyond the executive; you could get 1-2% more after a few years of legal battles I suspect. But to make the burden relevant would probably require congress.

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    I'm the President. what's one thing you want me to change about the country?

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  • yeah! that! as opposed to anti-trust like vaccine denial, or pretending to have found aliens.

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    I'm the President. what's one thing you want me to change about the country?

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  • Enforce anti-trust laws in a systematic and non-partisan way.

  • How do y'all feel joy without alcohol or weed?

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  • Brain normalizes pretty much everything. Keep the happy sources small, and sometimes really small things can give a big hit.

    My most recent hit? A rosary popped out of a treadmill.

  • We never stop being kids. Our playground just gets bigger.

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  • For the record, many playgrounds don't let you on after you get bigger.

    I feel my playground access has declined somewhat. Paying for a gym membership kinda helps.