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I’m shocked at the amount of people in the replies here whose response to this is basically “no, I won’t, because its convenient”.

It is widely known that this convenience comes at the price of poor working conditions for Amazon workers. Our consuming habits have a very real and tangible impact. The article linked covers this briefly:

Amazon warehouse workers spend their days picking and packing in million-square-foot warehouses where they face punishing productivity expectations, constant surveillance, high turnover, and serious injuries, for a starting wage of $15 an hour.

Of course there are many other negative impacts caused by this convenience which are also covered in the linked article.

I would rather inconvenience myself than buy something from Amazon at all if I can avoid it. I understand for a non-zero number of people, Amazon is their only option, but for those of us who have a choice I would encourage you to reconsider your consumption habits.

Edit: Adding clarity in some statements.

The problem of “AI” and all labor-saving technology in the last few centuries is not the technology itself but is actually Capitalism.

Yes, you are absolutely correct.

I have something to add to the arguments you have already presented in your post.

The problem with Capitalism is that in order to live you have to make an income. In order to make an income you have to be able to work.

AI, and in the future, robotics, presents an issue to people because it creates less jobs for people to work. And what are people meant to do if they cannot work and therefore cannot earn income? Capitalism requires jobs in order to be a successful system, at least for the common folk like us.

But, should this be the reason that we work? In order to live?

This is how it has always been done, we have to work in order to survive. Whether it was because we worked to procure food otherwise we would starve, or if it’s to work to earn an income to buy food otherwise we would starve.

As humans, we are seeing perhaps the first breaths of an era where we could no longer need to work in order to survive. AI and robotics is still in its infancy and it presents a great danger if it is handled incorrectly (which is currently is). Imagine a future where menial, repetitive tasks are automated and we can all live lives of comfort as in order to eat, we only need to exist. We can focus our time to working for the sake of working, because we find the work meaningful, because it enriches our lives, and because it helps others. A world where we can create art for the sake of creating art and not because we need to create art in order to eat.

I know I am speaking in ideals here, and the real world is different. Basically, what I am trying to say, is that the future I strive for cannot be a Capitalist one. The issue is not the technology, it’s Capitalism.

all while having hundreds of people make contradictory suggestions to me i have to make sense of, balance, and generally hear nonstop while being expected to act like a service worker

I believe you have already touched on this in previous PSAs but it’s important that everyone here holds Beehaw to a different standard to, say, the traditional social media we have gotten used to over the last decade.

I hold platforms like Twitter to a higher standard because they have hundreds of people who they are paying to run the website, are actively making a profit from it, and it is centralised. I am a lot more vocal about the criticisms I have about the way that site is being run.

However, with Beehaw, it just is not the same. Ultimately it is run by people like you: volunteers, where really this “job” for you needs to be fun first and foremost if this is work you’re doing in your spare time, otherwise we would not have Beehaw at all.

In that sense, I am happy for you to run Beehaw exactly as you see fit and for you to completely ignore any suggestions that are made to you. Hence, I suppose I’ve tried and will continue to try to not to add to the avalanche you describe in your post. Ultimately, I see myself as someone who is tagging along for the ride you are steering.

If it gets to a point where I am no longer comfortable here, or it gets to a point where I am no longer welcome here and I am banned, then so be it. I will move elsewhere on Lemmy. And this is the beauty of decentralisation and the Fediverse and, hopefully, with time, as the technology matures, we will have ever more instances for people to find spaces which suit them rather than hoping to force the admins of existing instances to bend to their will because of a lack of alternative options.

Anyway this is a long way of saying that I think you’re doing a great job and I hope with time the issues you are facing which are affecting your motivation are alleviated.

Customer service chatbots are useful for helping someone use natural language to find an answer that already exists in the documentation/FAQ. I imagine this must be useful for a non-zero number of people who find it difficult to troubleshoot issues using an FAQ.

Personally, my first port-of-call is always to go to the documentation/FAQ myself to look for the answer. I will only use a chat service if I cannot find the answer. So having a chatbot trying to suggest me solutions from the documentation is always very disruptive and annoying because it’s just forcing me to press “no this doesn’t answer my question” enough times until it actually connects me to a human… if I’m lucky.

I think there is value pursuing and researching the technology more. For the benefit of people who aren’t like me and struggle troubleshooting issues on their own. It can be useful for helping with routine queries and allows for existing customer service personnel focus on the more complex issues. As it stands at the moment almost every customer service chatbot I have encountered has been a negative experience for me.

Oh… I’m not sure but I had a really hard time beating him… maybe I just sucked.

Just before you fight Alduin there’s some dude you have to beat up if I remember correctly, I think Tsun guarding the bridge to the Hall of Valor? I remember him just one-shotting me so I had to crawl into some terrain he couldn’t hit me from and I just very slowly killed him with a bow and arrow when I had absolutely no proficiency in archery.

I heard that Skyrim had a story which was hundreds of hours long. Therefore, when I played it I only played the main story missions and ignored all the side quests and locations.

I was horribly underleveled for the final boss and had to cheese it and I only realised I had played the game completely wrong when the credits rolled and there were no more story quests to do…

Letting cats outdoors is risky, not cruel. Not the same thing.

I personally would not be comfortable subjecting any animal under my care to risks that I could prevent. But again, this argument comes from my belief that keeping cats indoors is not cruel… but if keeping cats indoors is in fact cruel then I wouldn’t want to have a pet cat at all in the first place. I would not be comfortable subjecting it to the risks that letting it roam outside unsupervised brought. Which I suppose is the point of my original post: if the only option to allow cats to roam around unsupervised then I believe we should not own cats at all.

Indeed. Letting them out appears to be the lesser evil, as it involves a mere chance of the cat suffering, instead of a complete certainty.

There’s a couple of factors to consider when weighing up the lesser evil in this hypothetical situation beyond the cats wellbeing, such as the impact on the local native wildlife. But this could start going into a wildly different argument because I would argue above all as an environmentalist that causing as little damage to nature as possible is of utmost importance. Can we calculate the risk of causing serious irreversible damage to local ecosystems by letting all domestic cats roam outdoors at once?

So, basically, the choice is between lettings cats suffer in the short term or letting prey animals suffer in the short term (and possibly the environment as a whole long term)? Honestly… this is not a question I feel comfortable answering, personally, because I do not want to support the idea of anything suffering.

Thank you for amending your comment.

When I am referring to misinformation, I am solely referring to your original reply to my post which was “Put a bell on your cat. Problem solved.” which I interpreted to mean “Putting a bell on your cat means it will no longer be successful when hunting”. Because for me, the problem is cats being successful at all when hunting. I am not referring to any other of your comments as I have honestly not read them yet.

That’s cruel, as you yourself have already mentioned.

I do not personally believe that it is. But let’s say that it is… if keeping cats indoors is cruel and keeping cats outdoors is cruel then I think we have no other option but to try and pick the lesser evil? I believe keeping cats indoors would be the lesser evil, but of course I’d believe that since I don’t think keeping cats indoors is cruel in the first place…

Since when were people intentionally breeding domestic cats?

… at catteries?

We keep all our current cats indoors and stop breeding domestic cats…

Cats that have bells are a reduced danger to their environment, but still present a danger nonetheless. Please stop spreading misinformation on my post.

Bells reduce the success of cats when hunting but it does not completely prevent them from being successful when hunting.

No, putting a bell on your cat does not solve the problem.

Bells reduce the success of cats when hunting but it does not completely prevent them from being successful when hunting. You can see my reply to another comment asking about bells and reflective collars on cats here where I have plenty of sources to back this up.

Personally, I would argue that reducing success when hunting is not good enough. If you do not agree with this, then there is no point in us debating this topic.

Your comment also does not address the other problems raised in this post. Putting a bell on your cat doesn’t stop it from being killed by cars and dangerous animals.

Domestic cats are decended from the African Wildcat so I suppose you could argue cats are native in these areas. They’re also closely related to the Sand Cat and European Wildcat.

So, prey animals in the mainland eurasia region may be better adapted for dealing with domestic cats since they will have evolved along very similar species. I don’t have any evidence to prove this though.

I do not live in the mainland eurasia region which may be why I have so many personal annecdotes of successful cat hunts on the native wildlife in my back garden.

There’s also this: https://www.pets4homes.co.uk/pet-advice/does-putting-a-bell-on-your-cats-collar-stop-them-from-hunting.html

Will a collar bell warn prey in time for them to get away? … When it comes to birds, cats are usually far less successful at catching them than they are with rodents. Exceptions to this are baby birds and fledglings that are unable to get away, for which a bell wouldn’t help.

This reminded me of an experience I had personally. TW: Animal Death

I had a very young Starling, it had only fledged the nest within the last day or two, soaking in a bird bath I had in my garden. A cat pounced out from behind one of my bushes and frightened it into taking flight. But it’s feathers were too heavy with water and it did not have the strength to surmount the fence of my garden and crashed into it. The cat promptly pounced on it. A bell or a reflective collar would certainly not have helped in this situation.

It also would not have helped with the anecdote from my original post regarding the pigeon eggs which were eaten by a cat this morning in my garden…

I’ve done a bit of reading on this and here’s some reading I’ve found:

From: https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/how-can-i-reduce-or-prevent-my-cat-from-hunting-prey/

The only effective way to completely prevent your cat from hunting prey is to keep them safely contained at home.

Research has found that bells on collars are relatively ineffective [2] but other research has shown that some specially designed cat predation devices may reduce predation [3, 4].

From: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/general-science/should-i-attach-bell-my-cats-collar

A number of studies have looked at whether or not bells help prey escape from cats [1] [2], and the general consensus is yes! Bells on collars seem to reduce the amount of prey caught by about half, which could be enough to no longer pose a threat to ecosystems.

Some owners worry that as well as alerting prey, a bell would also alert large predators to a cat’s presence. While this is possible, given most predator’s acute hearing, it’s unlikely that the relatively quiet noise of a bell would make the difference between your cat getting detected or not. If you live in an area where your cat is at risk of being attacked by large animals you should probably be keeping your cat indoors anyway, or at least supervise their outdoor activities.

TL;DR Bells and bright reflective collars at best reduce the success of cats when hunting but it certainly does not completely prevent them from being successful when hunting. However it may put them at greater risk of danger from large predators and if your cat is at risk of being attacked by large animals then it should be kept indoors or supervised.

This is very interesting to hear. Do you have any links regarding the efficiency of cats for rodent control? I’ll certainly be looking this up and reading up about this more later myself so no pressure if you do not have them to hand.

When you mention other rodent-controlling animals it does make me wonder if, say, a potential solution to this issue would be to create areas for native rodent-hunting predators to move in near farms. For example installing owl boxes in barns.

In Poland, to counter rising numbers of mosquitos, many communal buildings install large numbers of swift boxes on them to encourage swifts to nest there, as an alternative to using insecticide. This will not be a one-to-one comparison with owl boxes in barns but it does make me wonder…

Sorry this article is in Polish but it’s discussed here: https://www.whitemad.pl/budki-dla-jerzykow-na-zwyklym-bloku-w-warszawie-te-ptaki-to-najwiekszy-wrog-komarow/

Yes honestly I had forgotten of the danger that dogs on private property will pose to cats, as this is certainly an issue in my country and is probably a near universal danger to cats across the world. I’ve not heard of anyone who has had their dog kill a cat, or had a cat killed by a dog, but it will have certainly happened somewhere in my local neighbourhood.

Yes, I think so. But I’m not entirely sure of my opinion on this.

I’m sure there are many people out there who rely on their outdoor cats for survival to prevent their food harvests from being plundered by rodents, either because it’s their entire income or because it’s food they consume themselves.

I am in a position of privilege and do not have to worry about procuring food and my income which I use to survive is not affected by such issues. It certainly feels wrong for me to say that in these situations people should not have outdoor cats when it is not an area I understand very well nor are these problems I face myself.

But of course, cats kill indiscriminately and will not be able to distinguish between a common rodent and an endangered bird. My hope is that there could be an alternative solution which is less destructive to local ecosystems which anyone regardless of wealth could deploy. But I certainly don’t know of such a solution.

I imagine it probably depends on what is normalized in different countries, states, and possibly even on a more local level. Here, it is widely considered to be cruel to keep a cat indoors. I have 5 or 6 different cats who visit my garden. But there are many people with indoor cats too.