Mossy Feathers

There is some federation, however most instances that I’ve seen are people’s personal instances because in the past you’ve still needed a bluesky invite to federate with the main instance. Now that you don’t need an invite anymore I’m sure that’ll change and you’ll see more public 3rd party instances popping up.

Sync and maybe some other apps already put ads next to posts. Ironically this post specifically had an ad next to it.

As for bargaining power, bargaining for what? Ad revenue? Are you serious? No thank you, you’re asking for reddit but worse. You’ll get ad farmers submitting garbage content overnight. I know Facebook is going to profit off my *waves hand* fucking everything. That’s the price I pay for participating in an open system. That’s the state of the internet right now. Everything gets monetized by everyone except you. If you don’t like it, disconnect. There are literally trillions of dollars against you, any action you take will only make it worse for everyone else, because these companies have the money to force judgements in their favor.

Welcome to life. It fucking sucks here.

Edit: an analogy I thought of would be this: you’re talking loudly in a small, private park that has no fence. The only thing that indicates that it’s privately owned is a little sign that says, “Property of Lemmy.world”. Anyone passing by on the street can overhear your conversation. Someone decides to set up a viewing platform on the street where they charge money for people to come and gawk at you from the viewing platform. There’s absolutely nothing illegal about doing that. There’s nothing illegal about someone taking notes on what they overheard. There’s nothing illegal about someone selling their notes either. Because they aren’t officially entering the park, there’s no TOS for them to sign, nor an Eula that binds them. Your trying to impose restrictions on someone outside of the park’s jurisdiction. Sometimes, people are successful at doing that, but generally it comes at the detriment of everyone else’s experience.

As a furry, the “litterboxes in the classrooms” thing would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that A) it’s not just a couple nutjobs, somehow people actually believed it, and B) they actually exist to a certain extent, but not because of “trans-animal” kids; some schools have them so kids have a place to piss during a lockdown (like a shooting).

It’s not uncommon for the community to have memes about furries showing up in textbooks, the furry illuminati, furries in high places, we’re taking over your schools and making them cringe, etc, because there are a number of us with “mystery money” and/or have odd jobs. Like, there are furries who are CEOs, furries who are scientists, tech furries, and furries who are just normal joes, working normal jobs as educators, accountants, etc. So “litterboxes in schools” would normally fuel that form of humor if it weren’t for the fact that the circumstances around it are so fucked up.

even contemplating leaving Canada for good.

Hello, yes, LGBT person stuck in Texas here. Can I have their house please? I don’t really like the cold, but if it means I don’t have to feel scared about coming out of the closet then I could deal with it.

I have a friend who’s been living in Finland for years who still has to pay taxes to the US. Granted, he may be fucking up his taxes and he is a freelancer, so that might make things different, but yeah. You have to pay a lot more in taxes as a freelancer than if you’re employed by a company (companies have to pay 50% of taxes, so if you’re a freelancer then you have to cover the amount that’d normally be covered by your employer).

It gets even worse if you’re from the US, which requires you to continue to pay taxes, even if you’re on the other side of the world. Then you have to pay US taxes and Canadian taxes, or, in the case of one of my friends, US and Finnish taxes.

The US is one of only two countries that attach taxes to citizenship and not current residence. The other is Eritrea, a country mainly known for its near-total lack of civil rights and freedom of the press; a country which regularly sits near or at the bottom of any list or study that attempts to score things like human rights and freedom of speech. Funny, because one of our parties seems to think Eritrea is a cool place to emulate.

It’s the assumption that if it’s possible to build a simulation in our reality, then it’s possible that our reality is in a simulation. However, if we can’t build a simulation in our reality, then we don’t live in a simulation. That binary assumes that whatever our parent reality is (assuming there is one), it must follow the same rules as our own. However, what I’m saying is that we can’t infer the nature of a possible parent reality by comparing it to our own, because that reality may be completely different.

My biggest issue with simulation theory is that original basis seems to be the assumption that whatever universe is simulating our own must follow the same rules as our own. However, that’s not true in the slightest.

We simulate worlds that operate under different rules than our own all the time. While they aren’t anywhere near as complex as our reality, we’re at least able to dream of worlds with magic or faster-than-light travel. In a few hundred (or maybe thousand) years, who knows, we might be able to simulate a reality that follows 90% of our physical laws while also allowing for magic.

For all we know, if our universe is a simulation, it could be a magical simulation of a mundane world, taking place in a scholarly wizard’s guild because they wanted to see what a mundane reality would look like.

Kinda. My understanding is that that they aren’t starting with, “this pattern can only be explained by a simulation” but instead, “we haven’t been able to figure out what’s causing this, so let’s try a screwdriver instead of a hammer”.

It’s like the universe is a massive, exquisitely crafted wood table; composed of many intricate, delicate pieces made of different types of wood and held together without a single screw, bolt, nail, peg, or drop of glue. A true work of master craftsmanship held together only with extremely precise wooden joints.

Science is trying to figure out how the table was made. Due to the complexity of the table, there’s no way a single human could learn enough to analyze and study the entire table, so it gets split up. Neurologists get one leg, chemists get another, astrophysics get a corner, and so on. They study their pieces along with a picture showing how their piece fits with the neighboring pieces; and once they think they have a good understanding of it, they make a new one. It’s a really good replica and it’s a near-perfect copy of the original; good enough that no one can tell there’s anything wrong with it based on the picture they were given.

However, when the scientists reconvene with their new pieces, they find they don’t fit together like the original table. Not only that, but there are pieces that just don’t seem to fit or are straight-up missing; they can’t figure out what the purpose, shape or material these pieces are, only that they seem to exist and keep the table together.

Simulation theory, if I understand correctly, basically says, “maybe this wasn’t a table at all; maybe it’s a chair or a desk, and that’s why some pieces don’t fit while others appear to be missing entirely”.

I think you are (or maybe I am) misunderstanding what they mean by work incentives. I think they might be referring to the kinda stuff normally referred to as benefits? That said, if the value of an incentive/benefit is being reduced by UBI, then that’s a pretty shit incentive and probably shouldn’t have been an incentive (as opposed to legally mandated) to begin with.

OTTAWA – Several Jewish advocacy organizations condemned members of Parliament on Sunday for giving a standing ovation to a man who fought for a Nazi unit during the Second World War.

During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Ottawa on Friday, MPs honoured 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka in the House of Commons.

Hunka was invited by Speaker Anthony Rota, who introduced him as a war hero who fought for the First Ukrainian Division.

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The First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies issued a statement Sunday saying the division “was responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians with a level of brutality and malice that is unimaginable.”

Why is this being downvoted? He was literally part of the SS. He was in a Ukrainian division that voluntarily worked with the Nazis. On the one hand, it’s understandable that you might get confused by the name because if you’re not aware of the connection then it sounds innocent. On the other hand, did no one do any screening of the event to ensure they wouldn’t be calling on a former member of the SS to be honored?

Christ, I’m actually frustrated that everyone’s stopped caring about COVID and that the US has started discouraging people from taking precautions (like COVID tests no longer being free). I know COVID will probably never fully leave at this point, and I’d be a bit more accepting if everyone had just come straight out and said, “there’s nothing more we can do right now” after making a real effort to fight it. However, I know they never actually made an effort to stop it, they just waited until enough people had become desensitized and then started pushing people back out into public spaces because fuck you.