"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with" ~Richard Rorty should have been on the Supreme Court
new marketing firms should be described as “tart ups”.
the perfect christmas song for 2022. https://youtu.be/flA5ndOyZbI
it’s cool that there is a class of words for which the modifier “more” actually means less than what the word unmodified would imply.
more perfect is less perfect than perfect. more complete is less complete than complete. more comprehensive is less comprehensive than comprehensive. more exhaustive is less exhaustive than exhaustive. etc.
others?
Does anyone know of a good document describing how mastodon federation works? How do new instances become discovered, what determines whether other instances federate with them or not by default? Also (especially), what is the role of relays? I keep encountering references to relays, and lists of them, but I haven't found anything describing their function, their role in the network distinct from server instances. Any breadcrumbs would be greatly appreciated!
does the QT make the abuser, or does the abuser make the QT?
@akhilrao it’s the machines that are stupid.
to understand how badass the name “talia” is, consider what it means to “retaliate”.
does mastodon count as the “dark web”? do any of the major search engines routinely surface mastodon posts?
to do quote toots right, we’ll need to implement air quotes.
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the gas pump printed a receipt.
i saw it come out. then it sucked it back in, and it totally disappeared.
i swear. gone. not a trace.
it makes no sense but now i’m paranoid. it didn’t WANT me to have the receipt. this was no mere accident, out of paper, out of ink. it TOOK it from me.
well mr pump-and-dupe. i’m taking a photograph.
so there.
“For whatever reason, the old castles are crumbling. Let’s not run to new ones.” @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/why-would-anyone-use-another-centralized-social-media-service-after-this/
@MariNemo (I guess my pedantry was inspired by a radio news story in which interviewed advocates and officials described coyotes as human traffickers, as though that was unproblematically the case. However colloquial, I think coyote pretty straightforwardly means people hired to get migrants illegally across a border. From your perspective, or that of the denotation you are summarizing, they would only sometime be traffickers, no?)
@MariNemo So you propose we define as trafficking the exploitation of vulnerabilities that derive from a person's geographic displacement to coerce them to do what they did not and would not have consented to do. A coyote who strives to provide transportation as agreed is not a trafficker. One who shakes down his deeply vulnerable passengers is a trafficker. It's dishonesty and coercion that turns transportation into trafficking. Is that right?
@MariNemo The situation prospective migrants are in is often terrible, stripping them of real agency prior to hiring a coyote. Arguably, it's the hiring that's an expression of agency, a radical, expensive, step to find a better situation. Certainly once in the hands of a coyote, migrants lose agency. 1/
@MariNemo But is this so different from, say, hiring a sherpa at Everest? The situation you've signed up to is in fact dangerous, you agree to put yourself beneath someone's authority as a calculated choice. 2/
@MariNemo Of course, coyotes are an unregulated and relatedly often exploitative market. Obviously if you put yourself in the care of someone incompetent or with no interest in delivering you safely across the border, that's all kind of bad. But it's not the "trafficking" there that's the problem (from the perspective of the client), it's the failure to traffic as agreed. /fin
The word "trafficking" seems ill-defined to me. Between ordinary transportation (I travel to Italy to take a job I'm excited about) and coerced transportation into a condition of plain enslavement sits a very big spectrum. Are "coyotes" at the Mexican border "traffickers", if they are hired voluntarily (by people in great distress, for sure) and work to deliver the (illegal) service they have sold? What exactly renders transportation "trafficking"?
Will an end to the war in Ukraine, on whatever terms the active fighting will end, be disinflationary in the West as commodity markets are reintegrated, or inflationary due to the pressure on resources that reconstruction of the destroyed country will impose?
88.6%
disinflationary
(31 votes)
11.4%
inflationary
(4 votes)
it seems unfair that it’s the very wealthiest people who get to live rent-free in our heads. and quite extravagantly.