• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • I see you use capital letters in your post, so you presumably used a modifier key (shift) - unless you do modal caps with CapsLock all the time. I don’t know why people find that normal and easy, but as soon as it’s Ctrl or Alt they get in a tizzy and start talking about RSI.

    I know why: <Ctrl> and <Alt> are further from the home row than <Shift>. <Shift> is millimeters from the pinkie finger on either side. Your pinkie can reach that thing while the other three fingers stay put. <CapsLock> is in a similarly easy position, (and, in fact, another bit of Emacs advice I ran across is “switch <CapsLock> with <Ctrl>”, which feels like it wouldn’t be “often recommended” for Emacs users if default Emacs was conducive to the standard qwerty keyboard layout.)

    The bottom row of the keyboard is just too far from the home row. <Right Alt> strains my right hand so much that I rarely reach for it instinctively, and using my left? Gotta say, whoever chose (zap-to-char) and (scroll-down-command) as the punishments upon any failed attempt at reaching M-x really knew how to intimidate the newcomers and the slow-learners (like me) to these heavy-duty text editors.

    The same story goes for <Ctrl>. The Odyssey that stands between my right pinkie and <Right Ctrl> is so easily blown off-course that said pinkie never volunteers to embark when I think “<Ctrl>” for fear it will never see its wife Penelope again… which means I end up typing C-x (and all that follows) entirely with my left hand… which stretches my left hand off the home row and trashes my accuracy.

    But I feel like I should note at this point: I have large hands and unusually broad shoulders, and if one of my hands is resting on the home row in a comfortable position (75-80 degrees), the other one is reaching the home row at a stark diagonal (50-60 degrees). Maybe I’m the unusual one. Maybe I’m a rare kind of person who needs to be using a rare keyboard to accommodate my stature. And maybe everyone else can use Emacs just fine (… though, again, I note: there are a few too many ergonomic hacks for Emacs available online for that to be the case).

    Main point: for me – and apparently a decent number of forum users giving each other Emacs advice online – the bottom-row modifiers are hard to hit. And it should come as no surprise, considering how far those keys are from the home row.




  • I voted for Harris, but I feel like it’s pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.

    One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I’m not saying “is” here. I’m saying “should be”.

    We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there’s value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.

    And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu’s whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.

    For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It’s not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!

    Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that’s not something we can do everywhere. We can’t repeatedly choose the “least miserable option” and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It’s just not possible.

    Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, “on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is.”

    Some people’s hill is their ballot.




  • OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.oneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonesummary execution rule
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    19 days ago

    How did that go for the objectively non-bourgeoisie who got caught up in Stalin’s / Lenin’s / Mao’s anti-bourgeois campaigns?

    Even Mao acknowledged innocent people got executed during his “counter-revolutionary” and land reform campaigns. And the number of prisoners Kruschev released from the Gulags would have been impossible if most of them were actually as harmful to Russia as they were accused of being.

    Once the guillotines come out, everyone is calling everyone else bourgeois.


  • Having been on reddit too much the past few weeks, this is very refreshing.

    These days, all the Reddit moderation is performed by Russian and Chinese troll farms and alt-right recruiters. And anything goes as long as it erodes faith in western, multicultural democracy.

    So it’s nice to see someone say, “Democrats are puppets, BUT ALSO! Republicans are the threat we must currently fight.”


  • OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.oneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule Studis.
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    27 days ago

    A pile of sentient filth crawls out of a sewer somewhere, and first thing conservatives want to do is make it into a State Senator.

    How surprising.

    From his Idaho GOP page: his number one priority is to remove rape and incest exceptions.

    Issue 1 . The top issue for Idaho is to abolish the unnecessary, harmful and wasteful curse of abortion. I will introduce legislation that eliminates the current affirmative defense for having an abortion in accordance with state guidelines. The only exception to the prohibition on abortion is to save the life of the mother.



  • I see the question differently.

    Tl;Dr:

    I think OP is hoping to read the 21st century equivalent to Muck Rakers.

    Long version:

    A whole lot of improvement in American quality of life came about as a result of publications and journalists called Muck Rakers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

    They didn’t cover false stories. They simply covered stories that newspapers owned by capitalists tried to cover up. Things like, “physical abuse inside of Factory A” or, “employees at factory B reject union contract.”

    It’s similar with r/antiwork. Most of America never realized why PopTarts were shipped with serious defects for a few months in late 2021. To most people, the quality declined out of nowhere, with no explanation.

    And I don’t think most people realized the real reason California’s ports got congested. (It was a bill designed to protect gig workers – it required shipping companies to pay truck drivers for the time they spent waiting for their trucks to be loaded (instead of just the time they spent driving)).

    People didn’t know because, even if current events directly impact everyone’s lives, all it takes is a few corporations deciding, “you don’t need to know about that” and access to the information through mainstream channels is shut off.

    Everyone using r/antiwork knew though. They knew why there was a shipping crisis, and they knew why the glue that was supposed to seal the outside of the box of Cheez-its was now instead gluing the individual Cheez-its together.

    News that wasn’t considered, “newsworthy” outside of r/antiwork got intense coverage on that subreddit.

    And yeah, the subreddit was certainly biased against those corporations. But biased or not, its users were more up-to-date on those events than anyone outside of the sub.

    I don’t think OP is asking for a leftist perspective on the same current events everyone else is covering. I think OP is asking for true, well-investigated stories that capitalists simply won’t air on the major networks.

    You know: Muck raking.









  • OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.oneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    3 months ago

    A lot of people are offering explanations, but I think I’m going to give one too.

    Think of recoil in a gun. If you don’t have a mental image of it, watch a few youtube videos of people firing handguns. Look for videos of big, high-recoil handguns, like the Desert Eagle or the Magnum (or the Super Ruger Redhawk according to chat-GPT).

    You need to get a good look at handguns pushed backwards as they are fired.

    Now think about this: those bullets aren’t pushing against an atmosphere. They are pushing only against the inside of a gun.

    But when this tiny, tiny bullet pushes super-fast against the gun, using the gun to accelerate to incredibly high speeds very quickly… it pushes the gun really hard in the other direction.

    Get that mental image into your head. Small object can push large object with a lot of force by kicking off of large object with insane speed.

    Now: Take away the person holding the gun. Take away the planet. Take away the atmosphere. Put that gun in space and pull the trigger again. (Just make sure to use a gun that has modern ammunition that doesn’t require oxygen to fire).

    What happens to all that recoil? What does the recoil do to the gun now? The bullet still goes flying out of the chamber. Still does this by pushing against the gun.

    Hopefully it should now be easy to imagine that the gun will start moving.

    Rocket fuel is basically a tank full of bullets.

    The main function of rocket fuel is “heavy stuff that is shoved out of the spaceship to make it move.”

    The reason we use highly explosive fuel is because “shoving heavy stuff away from you at the speed of a bullet” is going to move you more than “shoving heavy stuff away from you at normal speed.”

    Does this make any sense?


  • I think the idea that billionaires are created by any kind of motive is the wrong lens.

    Their wealth doubles faster if they lack egalitarian values. So the millionaires who end up becoming billionaires are the ones who lack egalitarian values.

    The values they do hold could be anything from, “everyone wants to win; I’m just winning harder” to “God told me to” and it won’t matter as long as they keep reinvesting and growing their wealth faster than the economy or ecosystem can sustain.

    What we’re witnessing right now is not a set of ideas or beliefs, but an exponential growth equation – with all of the overwhelming speed and transformative power such an equation carries.

    Exponential growth is the reason for everything from the mammoths’ extinction to rotten food and the lethality of cancer. It transforms entire systems, outgrowing (and often destroying) its own host.

    If your society has currency but lacks any chemotherapy / surgery to remove concentrations of the aforementioned currency that start growing at a cancerous rate…

    Then it won’t matter what values are common or uncommon: your society is eventually doomed.

    It could take a hundred years or a thousand, but eventually, a pile of wealth will emerge that multiplies until it consumes everything.