alyaza [they/she]
internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
- 907 Posts
- 607 Comments
6·11 days agoadditional flavor text to this tense situation: Pakistan blamed a terrorist attack on India literally earlier today
12·12 days agoYou can post articles critical of the US, EU, Australian or any other government, but if you post a China-critical text you are whatabouted to death.
this will be a blunt comment. people would have no problem if you were doing this, but just in a quick scan, something like 10 of your last 15 submissions on our instance (Beehaw) are you obsessively posting about China–often from sources that are straight up fearmongering and/or guilty of doing literally the same thing they’re complaining China is doing. one of the most egregious submissions you’ve made in this vein is quite literally from the House Select Committee on China, as if the American government’s committee on “competition with the United States” doesn’t obviously have a vested interest in portraying things China does in the most uncharitable light possible (much as China would for America).
separately, and in a Beehaw context: at least from our userbase, you will largely not find disagreement that China is bad–nobody here really needs to be proselytized to the fact that China is an authoritarian capitalist country guilty of acts of imperialism against their neighbors, and probably of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Xinjiang. in fact, partially because of our political disagreements in that space, we do not federate with many of the Lemmy instances you might characterize as “pro-China.” this fact makes it incredibly conspicuous when someone like yourself obsessively posts every neurosis a Western country has about China on our instance. we’ve had a pattern of several users doing this in the past year or so–and at this point it’s blatantly propagandistic and Sinophobic bullshit we’re just not interested in letting people use our instance for.
even if you aren’t doing this for propagandistic reasons, though, and just think you need to push back against pro-China campists on Lemmy or whatever: this is also not your personal anti-China dumping ground, nor is it a place for you to shadowbox with campists who think China is cool. if you are genuinely posting in good faith: diversify your submissions and, if you don’t, at least drop the persecution complex when people push back on your voluminous China posting; if this is just using us as some middle-man in a bigger thing: going forward we’re going to aggressively prune these types of post.
1·15 days agodisagreement is fine, but both of you need to chill out a bit
you can find a May Day event here
11·19 days agothe website: https://onemillionchessboards.com/
this strikes me as a fascinating idea–with a couple of eyebrow-raising backers–that is probably going to flop spectacularly because it’s too minimalistic to the point of just being cheapskate
this is good because the guy was like 80, and he sucks. hopefully he’ll be replaced by someone more progressive and willing to actually recognize the situation we’re in
here’s your fun fact of the day: the hierarchy of how unchecked your law enforcement is basically goes something like federal police > city police departments > rural police departments > sheriffs of any kind. apparently, while regular police are at least nominally accountable to someone higher up than them, we basically let sheriffs do whatever the fuck they want
whatever recourse you think you have against a PD usually and very explicitly will not exist against a sheriff, even if your governor is sympathetic–most states devolve an incredible amount of power to sheriffs while demanding basically no qualifications or oversight of them. also, most outspoken police you will ever hear are probably sheriffs in specific–they are hugely over-represented in politics because there’s nothing stopping them from opining on politics even where ordinary police chiefs and the like are inhibited. (also their positions are usually elected and partisan, so they are politicians)
naturally, the mixture of election and targeting by the far-right over the past 50ish years means like 85% of these guys are just total cranks now too, because almost all of them represent Republican-leaning counties
FYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.
yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children
it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off
- Kazumi Watanabe – To Chi Ka
- Sahib Shihab – Sentiments
- Dr. Lonnie Smith - Boogaloo to Beck: A Tribute
- Takeo Moriyama - Smile
- Sevil - Sevil
- Collage - Kadriko
stuff that is basically jazz, even though it isn’t actually:
he assuredly won’t win as an independent given his appalling numbers in the primary so, lol, good riddance
What you mean? Have you seen all those articles publisher website just giving out 8-9 on every damn game they get early access to?
this has been an issue people have complained about in gaming journalism for–and i cannot stress this sufficiently–longer than i’ve been alive, and i’ve been alive for 25 years. so if we’re going by this metric video gaming has been “ruined” since at least the days of GTA2, Pokemon Gold & Silver, and Silent Hill. obviously, i don’t find that a very compelling argument.
if anything, the median game has gotten better and that explains the majority of review score inflation–most “bad” gaming experiences at this point are just “i didn’t enjoy my time with this game” rather than “this game is outright technically incompetent, broken, or incapable of being played to completion”.
no, obviously not; is this a serious question? because i have no idea how you could possibly sustain it
11·2 months agocurrently reading:
Then we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”
we don’t actually–the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:
Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.
Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.
and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:
North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.
So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?
It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.
UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”
In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.
According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”
i’m removing this because it’s a completely empty calorie comment with literally no relation to an extremely detailed, well done article. please don’t make comments like this, thanks.
Aside from the obvious stuff like promoting mutual aid, grassroots agitation efforts are probably your best bet. Organize in workplaces and other places where people meet, get them angry and suggest effective courses of action.
respectfully: this is just not a serious proposal. and the fact that you think nobody is doing these things—rather than what is actually the case, which is that people do them but they are simply not effective or easy-to-scale acts of political praxis in an American context—is indicative that you should stop making confidently bad tactical prescriptions.
and i’m not even going to address your fantastical idea of how to build a spontaneous general strike out of “mass protests” when it is evident you have bad tactical prescriptions. you’re not even treading new ground here, really. Peter Camejo’s speech “Liberalism, ultraleftism, or mass action” is the definitive dunk on your flavor of politically delusional theorycrafting, and that speech turns 55 this year:
This is the key thing to understand about the ultraleftists. The actions they propose are not aimed at the American people; they’re aimed at those who have already radicalized. They know beforehand that masses of people won’t respond to the tactics they propose.
They have not only given up on the masses but really have contempt for them. Because on top of all this do you know what else the ultralefts propose? They call for a general strike! They get up and say, “General Strike.” Only they don’t have the slightest hope whatsoever that it will come off.
Every last one of them who raises his hand to vote for a general strike knows it’s not going to happen. So what the hell do they raise their hands for? Because it’s part of the game. They play games, they play revolution, because they have no hope. Just during the month of May the New Mobe called not one but two general strikes. One for GIs and one for workers.
Being out for the count before anything actually happens doesn’t seem to be good strategy
you’re right, people have never martyred themselves (and, in a sense “been out for the count before anything happens”) for successful political change before. do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? you are the classic person who–even if they are legitimately radical, which i don’t think you are–upholds the status quo by, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, “lives by a mythical concept of time” and always wants to wait for a more convenient season to do something. but plainly, the more convenient season will never come if nobody does anything because they might be “out for the count”.
and the press release from Fandom, which previously owned them for some reason: