Five

joined 1 year ago
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[–] Five@slrpnk.net 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, most laws have nothing to do with justice and are merely threats made by social elites to working people. I don't need that explained to me. I think you misunderstood my politics from my initial comment.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

I find it unclear what the relationship is between free speech and the UK using flawed but licensed proprietary software to wrongly convict innocent people of fraud.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 21 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Cracking, unlicensed MAME, jailbreaking - these should be free-speech fundamentals that are instead prosecuted as crimes.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Not recent, but I was privy to the latest advancements at the time. Perhaps there were a half-dozen overseers who lived near the fields and did labor management and crop observation, but there was always an army of latinx workers share-cropping less profitable crops during rotation seasons, driving pesticide sprayers, doing firewatch during dry days, maintaining the cesspool, and a number of other tasks that were either too person-intensive or beneath the white owners and their middle-class wage managers. 90% of the people on the industrial farm were people of color, and all the jobs they did were dangerous, underpaid, and essential. That percentage includes the white people working in the machine shop, and the contracted crop-dusting pilots.

Ironically, the automation in development was targeted at reducing the number of middle-class white people needed to run the farm, and would have little effect on the army of cheap labor that was ever-present.

I've seen a small portion of the beast that is large agribusiness, and I'll admit there may be other sides I haven't seen that may contradict my experience. But it is wise to doubt the rosy self-congratulatory picture taught in textbooks when confronted with the experiences of real life. Most of the people who bring you food for the prices you enjoy are invisible, and your education system is complicit in keeping things that way.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 1 points 7 months ago (4 children)

What is your experience with modern industrial farms? How recently have you been involved in the industry?

Also, what does "small team" mean to you?

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

Indoor/Vertical farming requires powering artificial light unlike traditional farming, but the energy use is a red herring.

Traditional farming typically requires more labor, not less. The key factor is that it is very easy to have most of that labor done by migrant temporary-visa and undocumented workers, for lower wages than would be legal in an industry where exploitation on that scale has not been normalized.

The primary cost, and the reason corporate vertical farms are failing to see profits is their professional labor force. If they could also be run by slaves, most would be competitive with traditional farming.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 2 points 8 months ago

That makes sense.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

A late pattern in Reddit was personal subreddits - communities named after the account that created them. They were infrequently used, but it provided a smoother pipeline for people who lurked or commented in existing communities to become comfortable making posts and moderating communities themselves.

Ideally these communities would be prevented from appearing in the "Trending Communities" list or local/global feeds unless someone other than the owner was subscribed to them, but wouldn't be private in the sense that no-one could see them. Just they wouldn't get wide distribution.

Another pattern is the "Country Club" post - where individual posts in a community could be limited to people verified to post in restricted threads. This comes from BlackPeopleTwitter. The individual verification method is likely not the only way to achieve this. People who comment or vote could be limited to only those who share the instance, are subscribed to the community before the post is made, or are members of instances whitelisted by the community.

Both of these patterns are interpretations of 'private' to mean 'restricted' and not 'secret'.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I've learned one thing over these last nine years, and I was glib at best and probably dismissive at worst about this. The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail shit job, day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart, and dedicated people bang on closed doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind away on issues till they get a positive result. And even then, have to stay on to make sure that result holds.

So the good news is I'm not saying you don't have to worry about who wins the election. I'm saying you have to worry about every day before it and every day after forever.

-- Jon Stewart Tackles The Biden-Trump Rematch That Nobody Wants - @19:20

This was incredibly validating for me.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've seen the hype about bamboo as a climate panacea, and there's a lot wrong with this line of thinking.

First, and this is a quibble, but bamboo is not a tree, it is a grass, in the same family as oats, wheat, rye, and bluegrass. Trees absorb more carbon than a bamboo plant; the bigger the tree, the more carbon it absorbs. Bamboo gets hype because a field of bamboo can absorb more carbon than a forest of trees in the same area of land. Bamboo's carbon absorption stats doesn't come from special biology, but the fact that it grows both tall and tightly packed, while other grasses don't grow as tall, and mature trees aren't tightly packed.

But trees are still extremely effective carbon sinks, and land with trees on it can have multiple uses, while land filled with bamboo is impassable. A large mature tree can absorb enormous amounts of carbon while also decreasing the cooling requirements of homes beneath its shade.

Bamboo has limited use besides being a carbon sink. It is an invasive species, so widespread adoption of bamboo farming outside its natural habitat can decimate biodiversity. In climates with long dry seasons, dried and dead bamboo is a fire hazard. The tightly packed stalks gives fire a continuous path, and the hollow sections explode when heated, spreading the fire even further. When bamboo is burned, its carbon is released back into the atmosphere.

The focus for building biological carbon sinks shouldn't be on min/maxxing short term carbon absorption, but on keeping that carbon from returning to the atmosphere at the end of a crop's lifecycle.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

You can see beehaw has a lot less activity now then it had last year.

Fediverse Observer and FediDB show a drop in active users, but the pattern of peak in July 2023 and then a slow regression isn't unique to Beehaw, and is a pattern seen across the Threadiverse.

You left, but Beehaw being willing to give teeth to the concept of defederation is the reason I joined. I don't think the decision hurt their user-count. It definitely helped distinguish their culture from the rest of the Fediverse.

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