You literally just described American healthcare. I don’t know where people get this idea that you don’t have to wait to see a doctor here. I’ve had to book doctors appointments months out. And specialists can be 6+ months of waiting.

I think the Americans that say otherwise actually don’t try to go to the doctor on a regular basis. And if you press them on why, they’ll admit it is a fucking hassle and worried about the bill if they need to actually get something done.

The only reason I make the bed every morning is because we have dogs that like to lay on it when we aren’t home and there is nothing worse when you are crawling in bed at night and finding dirt or sand all in it.

I’ve wondered the same thing. Maybe a the Enquirer did a catch and kill payoff to the neighbors when it happened?

I don’t have V-Rising, and I’m sure a lot of this stuff is hardware dependent, but according to a couple of reports on ProtonDB, there might be a kernel bug causing issues with it.

https://www.protondb.com/app/1604030

I just installed bazzite on my LCD Steam Deck this week and it has been pretty solid so far, but obviously the hardware support for it is top notch thanks to Valve. I didn’t have really any issues with regular SteamOS either and just wanted to try something a bit more customizable.

And really Linux gaming on the Steam Deck feels like cheating, especially compared to trying to run games via wine before the proton days.

The claim was that billionaires shouldn’t exist and that to get that amount of money requires exploitation. You are the one taking that to mean that they are automatically morally bankrupt. I have broken down my more nuanced take that you seem to mostly agree on, so I guess I’m not sure why you are continuing to push on this one point. No one has called for actually punishing billionaires for this in this specific comment chain; I know that opinion is all over elsewhere, but that’s not relevant to what we have been discussing.

Personally speaking, I’m doing okay under the current system, I recognize where my labor is and has been exploited and am lucky enough myself to get by with what leverage I have. But I recognize that I’m just one bad accident from losing my livelihood and not being able to provide for me and my family. And if the wealth gap continues growing, then billionaires, or the owning capital class in general, should be worried about violence against them. And if that day comes, I for sure ain’t sticking my neck out for some fucking billionaire.

At the end of the day, we can disagree on messaging, but I’ll leave that to proper organizations to get the message right and try to support them when I see them to hopefully turn things around before it turns to violence. But we’re not going to convince anyone here by just getting the perfect message for the masses.

You are right that we seem to be talking in circles, so I’m done here. Going to GI back to enjoying the rest of my weekend and I hope you have a good one.

I’m not calling to break out the guillotine. Just the acknowledgment that the system is flawed and support initiatives to minimize exploitation and pay their labor fairly where they can. At the very least stop using their capital to support initiatives that only support growing their own capital at the expense of others.

Because a billionaire isn’t “just as guilty” in an exploitative system. They are more guilty because they benefit more and they have more power due to their capital. If you can’t see that, then I guess we won’t ever agree.

Do you have a job? If so, you should know how hard it is to earn money. The level of effort required to even get minimum wage is usually astounding. And maybe you went to school and learned to do more skilled jobs, so you don’t have to work as hard as a minimum wage laborer. Maybe you can justify it as being smarter or more skilled and that’s fine. But do you think someone that “earned” a billion dollars actually worked ten thousand times harder than someone who earns 100k. Or a thousand times harder than someone that earned a million dollars. Or are that much smarter or more skilled?

In your original example, you talk about how and individual could make a game that could get 300 million in sales while ignoring that vast amount of effort it realistically takes to do so. Way more effort than a single individual person can do. Getting to those kinds of sales would take the effort of many people, so if a single person benefits more than the others involved in that effort, then they did so by exploitation of their labor.

I think what we are getting to is the semantics of it. Theoretically, it should be possible to be a billionaire without stealing and exploitation. I think that in reality though, a billion dollars is so much money that’s its hard to see how a single person can amass that much wealth without being exploitative, intentionally or not. Even if you were given that much money, holding onto it would require investing into a system that is rife with exploitation.

I’ll admit that I’m by no means an expert on billionaires and there might exist some that made their fortune without exploitation. And I’m including indirect exploitation here. Maybe that’s another point of semantics, but its one that I feel very much matters in this context.

Every billionaire are where they are at by being at least somewhat lucky. In a lot of cases they are simply lucky enough to be born to the right family. Some have worked to get where they are, but its not just hard work or effort that got them there.

And I would argue that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and I would also argue that that is the case for just about any other societal system as well. After all, none of us can live without being a burden or hurting others at some point. That’s life. Its also more or less the concept of “original sin” that Christians go on about. Its fine to acknowledge that and only by doing so can society at large takes steps to reduce systematic harm where we can.

That being said, billionaires, by having more capital, have more power and influence under capitalism, so it can be argued that they get a larger part of the blame for systematic issues, especially as many of them do utilize their power to maintain the status quo or push for more harmful systematic policies. And the ones that aren’t actively pushing such policies are still benefiting from such policies. And they could donate their fortunes to charitable causes, but in my opinion that’s not something that we should have to rely on them doing and does nothing to solve the systematic issues at play.

At the end of the day, it’s its not as if its a black and white issue, but the statement that no one “earned” a billion dollars is largely true in the sense that if you work hard or put in the effort, you can make it. Even in Notch’s case, if he didn’t decide to sale to Microsoft, maybe he might still be a billionaire today, but would he have earned it himself? Its not like he was the only one working on the game even when he sold the company. I’m not sure what the compensation the others working at Mojang got, but if he continued to independently develop Minecraft, getting to 300 million sales requires significant development effort between porting the game to various platforms and ongoing content updates. If he ended up getting the majority of the payout, then he would have very likely did it at the disproportionately at the expense of other’s effort.

A billion dollars is a lot of money. Like a lot of money. I don’t necessary think its wrong to have the opinion that billionaires shouldn’t exist. At least in the system we have today. Now, I’d say that its the system that’s the problem, not necessary any individual billionaire, but if they get to wieild the power that comes with their fortune, then its fair to have more blame for it as well.

So really he made his money from selling his company, not just from the game sales itself. And I would argue that he more or less got lucky more than he “earned” it, which I think he has said as much in interviews before.

I can’t really speak to if he directly exploited labor, but I think we can pretty safely state that Microsoft has in fact done so repeatedly, and so indirectly at least, Notch benefited from that as well.

Now does that make him morally corrupt for taking that offer? Maybe. But I think any one of us would take the same offer if given the chance. But the reality of the situation is that getting rich from this kind of success is very slim, and even then the labor and effort involved is very much disproportionate to what others are earning for much more effort. And if he was taxed at a rate where is was no longer a billionaire, but just a millionaire, then his quality of life very likely won’t change too much while many other people would benefit, assuming that tax money is actually going to public services, that is.

You are talking about Minecraft level success and even that took many years of success and being bought by one of the largest companies in the world to reach that many sells.

If you are trying to mark something sensitive out, make sure that you are deleting the actual text or convert the PDF to a flat image after. PDFs can store information in text and images, so if you just draw over some text thinking you are marking it out, there is a chance that the mark out is just a image layer sitting on top of the sensitive text. A way to check this is opening the PDF in Firefox after and toggle Reader View (button in the address bar or F9) to see if you can still see to marked out information.

You can use Bitwarden to store passkeys. Not sure if the self hosted solution has support for it yet though.

I don’t think you actually do want an nuanced discussion, but here you go.

Let’s start by acknowledging that everyone has different morals which makes basing rules of law on morals a difficult proposal. But let’s say that rules for a fair and just society usually come down to that one’s rights ends where someone else’s begins. Maybe you disagree with this, but I’d say it is a pretty basic standard to make things fair.

So in the abortion debate, the opinion of whether or not the unborn have any rights in society. Some people will say no, that until you are a living breathing human, you are not a part of society and its rules. To theses people, the abortion debate ends there. The unborn have no rights so abortion is justified.

Some people believe that the unborn have just as many rights as anyone else, so then my proposed scenerio starts to come into play. If we can force women to give up bodily autonomy in favor another life, then why not enact similar rules to save others in society as well.

Now, you might say, “hold on a minute, I think that the unborn actually has more rights because they are among the most vulnerable in society and can’t live unless they have some rights over the mother’s body.” Well, in that case then my scenario does seem pretty silly, and to some extent that makes sense, as there are plenty of laws that center around the welfare of children, but none that force specific people to give up bodily autonomy in the same way that forced pregnancy does. I would also expect people in this camp to support laws to support children in need by providing food, housing, and other support they need. So in my opinion, if you support abortion bans but don’t support laws that help take of children in need, then you are a hypocrite, especially since social support comes in the form that doesn’t force any individual to not have control over their own body. Now a lot of GOP politicians seem to fall in this category, so my scenario is aimed directly at them.

Okay, so say you support the rights of the unborn as well as favor societal structures to also help children in need. This at least I can understand, but I would still say that abortion bans are misguided because they usually end up disproportionately affecting people without a lot of means in the first place and do nothing to address the reasons that women actually get abortions. I would say that if you can start by addressing those things with things like free and easy access to birth control, financial compensation, and fostering environments that teach consent so woman can feel safe turning down sex that can lead to pregnancy. But to try none of those and jump straight to punishing women seems like supporting cruelty in the face of better options.

I look forward to your nuanced response.

Its a probing question to find out where the moral line is. It is a ridiculous proposal for sure, but it is basically the same ask as forcing a woman to carry out an unwanted pregnancy.

Looks like your real enemy are all these strawmen that you keep building your arguments around.

You dismiss my views on bodily autonomy by saying that we who support that stance also support mandatory vaccines when you are the only one advocating for that here. BTW, I don’t support mandatory vaccines, but I do support getting vaccines and think by supporting better education among the general population, vaccine rates would stay in the range for heard immunity to kick in for those that can’t or just don’t want them for whatever reason.

In my view supporting abortion ban is the extreme position here. One that has caused a lot of very real hurt and pain. Way more pain than someone making comments that unborn babies are parasites. I’m sorry that made you uncomfortable, but swinging your support behind the crowd that has caused women to suffer in response seems like a weird reaction to me.

And when I bring up putting your support behind less extreme policies that would actually do more to address the reasons women seek abortions you go off on me about fighting political extremes? What a fucking laugh.

You didn’t “go one further” than me, it sounds like we both are advocating for free and easy access to contraception. Either way I’m glad you support that at least.

You say that most pro life people aren’t extremists, but the ones that write the abortion ban laws seem to lean into the extremes, so by supporting them you are supporting those extreme positions. And even when the laws still have exceptions, those with means can go get an abortion elsewhere for whatever reason they want. So the laws primarily effect those who probably didn’t have the means to get other types of birth control as well. And in some cases people who actually want to have babies but need to suffer because these laws can prevent care because of government intervention between health care providers and patients.

You say yourself that there are other methods of reducing abortion, so why advocate for the one that seems less effective and promotes cruelty?

So do you support abortion in cases of rape where the woman didn’t choose to have sex?

Not that it matters of course. As we see the reality of anti abortion laws generally push for few or no exceptions, so rape victims have to continue enduring trauma for something they have now control in.

If you asked me how to really reduce abortions, then I would suggest comprehensive sex education, along with free and easy access to contraception to everyone, as well fostering environments that respect consent so women can feel safe saying no. Again, after all of that I’d still draw my line that gives women over the rights to their bodies. But to support outlawing abortion before any of those things just seems like supporting cruelty in the face of more effective options.

But it is about bodily autonomy. You are advocating to force people to use their bodies against their will. And most people who support these policies don’t ever have to worry about it happening to them.

You are right that the real world needs exceptions or compromises. I’ll just never understand that why we need to compromise on the rights of the “unborn” vs enacting policies that would do a lot of good for those that are living and suffering instead that doesn’t force people into losing choices over their own bodies.

Question for you. When there are shortages on organ donor lists that will cause people to die, should the government be able to compel heathy individuals to donate organs they don’t need? What about for blood shortages?