Gentle nerd freak of the pacific northwest. All nation states are vermin.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2024

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  • Is it equivalent to burning the cross? The Swedish flag?

    No, it’s definitely not. You have to look at the social context of the act, not just the act itself.

    To use the most obvious examples, burning an american flag in protest of the vietnam war is clearly an expression of political speech, whereas burning a cross on the lawn of an african-american family’s house is an incitement to violence.

    A fascist burning the koran is clearly an incitement to violence and hatred, and not legitimate political speech worth protecting.




  • “Chinese” mummies is a bit misleading. The Tarim Basin has a long history of Chinese rule/influence, but not that far back.

    These mummies are from a unique population that descended largely from Ancient North Eurasians, a group who contributed smaller percentages of ancestry to Northern Chinese people, Europeans, Siberians and Native Americans.

    So these cheese enthusiasts are less Chinese and more like distant foreign relatives to the Chinese who adopted dairy-heavy pastoralism after it expanded through the steppe.











  • Right to disconnect laws were first introduced in France in 2017… One critic at the time said: " the French may quickly discover that their most productive workers are routine “lawbreakers” who stay connected during off-hours." … A 2023 Australia Institute study estimated Australian workers on average were doing an extra 5.4 hours of unpaid work per week. … equates to an extra 281 hours’ unpaid work per year. This is estimated to be costing workers an average of AU$11,055 annually.

    For employers, productive is just a polite synonym for exploited.


  • Public protest and unrest is a symptom, your society telling you something is wrong

    This is something that the Chinese government actually pays very close attention to. Specific issues - food safety and pollution for example - they allow some protest so they can gauge how strong public sentiment is on the matter. Even when they arrest protest leaders, they’ll often make policy changes in the relevant areas. I’ve heard china scholars talk about how interested the chinese government is in public opinion and the roundabout ways they assess it in a system where it can’t be regularly expressed in open elections.

    the appearance of a peaceful society without conflict is not the same thing as a peaceful society without conflict

    For sure. I feel like as far as an authoritarian government is concerned though, they are functionally the same. Until suddenly they are not, of course. But again, the resilience of the CCP is due in part to working out what is up for public comment and what is most definitely not.

    public unrest is a feature

    Again, super agree. But I don’t think of public unrest as political chaos, at least not in the US context. The inability of the government to perform it’s most basic functions without brutally pointless culture wars, the myriad ways to gum up the works and prevent action, the increasing politicization of the public service, the willingness of so many to act contrary to the government’s own interests - that’s the sort of stuff I think of as All American political chaos.


  • I could definitely believe that some weibo users are very interested in Biden’s stepping down. Xi’s decision to stay on passed the original term limit was quite controversial even among some of his supporters. Stepping aside when the moment requires it is the hallmark of that paragon of Confucian virtue, the Duke of Zhou.

    But no one in the world “envies” our political chaos. We’ve done real damage to the global reputation of democracy and given example after example for the world’s autocrats to point to when they argue that democracy is self defeating.




  • At my previous job their was a role where you just called insurance companies and asked them incredibly basic questions about what they planned to do for a patient with diagnosis X and plan Y. This information should be searchable in a document with a single correct answer, but insurance companies are too scummy for that to be reliable.

    In 2021 we started using a robot that sounded like a human to call instead. It could handle the ~80%+ of calls that don’t use any critical thinking. At a guess, that’s maybe 5-10% of our division’s workforce that wasn’t needed anymore.

    With the amount of jobs like this that are 100% bullshit, I’m sure there are plenty of other cases where businesses can save money by buying an automated bullshit generator, instead of hiring a breathing bullshit generator.