HarkMahlberg

HarkMahlberg , 3 months ago

Easiest block of my life.

HarkMahlberg , 2 months ago

The Problem With Jon Stewart had much more biting commentary, and you could see that he and his writers had much more creative control to speak their mind. The Daily Show just doesn't have the same bite, or the same wit, or the same strength of conviction.

HarkMahlberg , 4 months ago

I find the wording of that a little... strange? "The man chiefly responsible for [the myth's] acceptance" sure sounds like he was warning of all of the dangers that came with it. I wouldn't say he was promoting acceptance of such a culture.

Or am I misreading that? Are they saying Turner was wrong, that such an individualistic streak in American life (then and/or now) is fictional, not actually present?

HarkMahlberg , 5 months ago

Can't speak for OP, but I don't look at the 401k as a stable retirement vehicle. It's a vehicle to pump "dumb money" (read: casino chips) into the stock market. If the stock market downturns just before you retire, if the firm managing your 401k makes bad investments, if another 2008-style real estate collapse happens, your retirement fund suddenly has less money in it than you hoped, so you're gonna have to work longer.

HarkMahlberg , 5 months ago

Thanks for the informed take.

the money in your account is yours to allot and invest as you wish

While true, I'm not an investor, I'm a software engineer. I don't know good investments from bad, so if I tried to invest myself as an uninformed person, odds are good I will lose a lot of money very quickly. And becoming an informed investor is a lot of time and effort I don't have. I rely on the managed plan because I know there are professionals handling it.

based on the investment options your company chose or negotiating with them to administer your company’s plan.

My employer actually switched our 401k's from ML to John Hancock. I had no say in this, I don't know if JH is more or less competent as a firm than ML. So if I have fewer choices because I don't know how to invest and would prefer someone to manage it, I have even fewer choices because I don't even get to choose who manages it.

That said, 401ks are awful and a sham that were pushed on an uninformed public

This is where we most agree. Most people don't know how to invest, so they either let the retirement funds handle it, or they try it themselves. If they try it themselves, they either have to learn how to invest, or they have to get lucky. If the funds handle it, they can be lured in by "stable, lucrative" investments that turn out to be bad, like Mortgage-Backed Securities. Even informed investors can lose money. No matter which path we follow, it all becomes gambling in the end. It's unacceptable that retirement funds are treated as such.

HarkMahlberg , 5 months ago

This site seems to have a useful answer to your Indirect Object question:

https://www.japaneseprofessor.com/lessons/beginning/structure-japanese-sentence/

HarkMahlberg , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Reposting this discussion for posterity

Big takeaways, emphasis preserved from the original:

Threads is entering a space in the fediverse which is dominated by Mastodon, so it's Mastodon and other fediverse microblogging services (including, to some extent, /kbin) which will most heavily feel the impact of Threads.

Defederating another server means your instance will stop requesting content from that server. ... Defederation is about what data comes in, not what goes out. ... Defederation doesn't make you invisible, it doesn't block anybody else from seeing you, it doesn't protect your content, it only means you never have to see their content.

Firstly, the fediverse is a drop in the ocean compared to Threads (104 million registered users). Obviously, Meta wants everybody, but their specific goals in terms of user-poaching are far more likely to center around the ~350 million active Twitter users than the ~12 million fediverse users (~3.5 million active). The threadiverse [Lemmy, Kbin, et al] is smaller again, at something like 100,000 active users.

"Threads will overwhelm the fediverse with their inferior content and culture." Like the EEE fears, this one is legitimate but once again something that will primarily be felt by microblogging providers (/kbin included). Toxic users, advertisers, etc. can push garbage into feeds all day, but they will largely not be targeting the threadiverse because there's some 100 million sets of eyes to put that crap in front of on the microblogging side and it will be difficult-to-impossible for them to push that content into Lemmy/kbin threads from their interface that was never made to interact with the threadiverse.

Is there any chance Meta has good intentions? No. But it might have intentions that are both self-serving and fediverse-neutral. The absolute best intention I can possibly ascribe to Meta is that joining the fediverse is a CYA (cover your ass) mechanism to head off regulations, especially in the EU, [e.g.] the newly-applicable Digital Markets Act ...

HarkMahlberg , 6 months ago

If Threads puts out so much more content as to effectively make other federated entities irrelevant, the character of the Fediverse changes such that it is no longer what it is today.

A fun time to bring up the concept of Eternal September.

HarkMahlberg , 6 months ago

To put my own skin in the game, I quite like the microblogging side of kbin. I like that I can swap between the thread and blog sides, I like that I can combine them into one view if I choose, and I like that I don't need a separate account to use either service. Using kbin's microblog was the first time I ever blogged, period. I'd hate to see that stream be overwhelmed by Threads users.

HarkMahlberg , 6 months ago

I'm not clicking on your link.

My man, it's Wikipedia. It's where he copied the text from. You could afford to put in a little effort to engage in good faith.

Liberals are anti-war. Progressives are pro-status quo, which is pro military industrial complex

Progressives absolutely support cutting military spending to divert funding to single-payer healthcare.

HarkMahlberg OP , 7 months ago

The vote was 336-95, with 209 Democrats and 127 Republicans voting to support it. Ninety-three Republicans voted against it, more than voted against the last government funding bill in September; two Democrats opposed it: Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and Mike Quigley of Illinois.

Johnson's so-called laddered continuing resolution, or CR, would fund part of the government — including the Agriculture, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs departments — through Jan. 19 and fund the Defense Department and other remaining parts of the government through Feb. 2.

Part of me wishes that Dems would squeeze him harder for more concessions. The other part can't wait to see him get tossed by the MAGA.

HarkMahlberg OP , 7 months ago

It doesn't have to be not in shambles in order for their voters to continue voting for them. Trump being in prison by then - God willing - may even be considered a feature-not-bug for those zealots. I'm taking nothing for granted.

HarkMahlberg OP , 7 months ago

We can put all the other threads to bed guys, I promise. lol

Too bad Johnson's a hack in every conceivable sense.

HarkMahlberg , 7 months ago

At this rate, we're going to have a government shutdown in November when the temporary funding expires, but the GOP won't have anyone to blame but themselves. Now, if only their voters will see that...

HarkMahlberg , 8 months ago

They voted against Jordan, but wouldn't vote for Jeffries. That's not Team Normal, that's Team We Still Don't Have A Functioning Government And We're Going To Keep It That Way.

HarkMahlberg , 8 months ago

[Steve Scalise] is seen as a hero to some after surviving a mass shooting on lawmakers at a congressional baseball game practice few years ago.

Scalise, who was at second base when the shooting started, was shot in the hip and tried to drag himself off the field. While the shooting was still going on, Representative Mo Brooks used his belt as a tourniquet to help stop bleeding for a staffer who had been shot in the calf. After the shooting ended, Brooks and Representative Brad Wenstrup—a podiatrist and U.S. Army Reservist who served with the U.S. Army's 344th Combat Support Hospital—were able to assist Scalise.[29] Several witnesses said their lives were saved by the presence of the Capitol Police, who were there because of Scalise's position as the House Majority Whip. The Capitol Police immediately engaged Hodgkinson and kept him pinned down, preventing him from continuing to fire on the unarmed baseball players. Representative Davis and Senator Rand Paul separately said that if not for the presence of the officers, the incident "would have been a massacre".

I see several heroic acts here, but they show Scalise as a victim, not a hero. Either way, we can expect another imminent government shutdown before the holidays as the Republicans scramble to prove they are unable to govern.

HarkMahlberg , 8 months ago

I'm secretly hoping enough Republicans get so sick of the magas that they switch sides and make Jeffries Speaker. That would be the ultimate insult, both to the magas and the GOP as a whole. Alas, I can only dream.

HarkMahlberg , 9 months ago

Aren't searchability and discoverability two different things? I understood hashtags as a way to make your post discoverable, or more accurately, to comment on a topic that there's a consensus term for and so everyone can see your opinion. If I was looking for a specific opinion, some piece of news that I remembered a short sentence from, then I would search for the phrase I remember.

HarkMahlberg , 9 months ago

Weaponized government indeed.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

I even seen promising artists with interesting artstyles giving up on their craft, to jump onto "prompting", because some techbro on twitter bullied them for doing art "the old way".

This was certainly a problem in the NFT days. "Mint your art as an NFT, make a fortune! What, someone stole your art and minted an NFT of your art and now they're making money off it? You should have bought in sooner!" Techbros' whole raison d'etre is to bully people into giving them money with FOMO. It's a disgusting tactic.

It's a shame because the counterpoint is that generative AI has the potential to be actually useful unlike NFT's. Consider the argument made by Joel Haver at the end of this video. Hand rotoscoping is a painstaking process, but a Photoshop plugin that does it automatically? It allows him to make fun videos, good content, art. And it's definitely a style that he's embraced and made his own. But because generative AI is driven by techbros, style and substance alike go out the window in the name of churning through gristle, training an AI on other people's art so they can sell the AI for profit.

HarkMahlberg , 9 months ago

The key advantage of fediverse is that you can never be banned from a group and have it stick.

That characteristic is a double edged sword. It's a disadvantage if you want to keep trolls out.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

Gotta give the midwest credit - between Ohio rejecting the 60% ballot approval measure and Kansas voting directly to keep abortion legal, they've been bringing their A game to voter turnout.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

The answer to a dysfunctional government is not dismantling government, but replacing it with a functional government.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

Vote out the crusty relics, promote candidates that actually understand tech or are willing to listen to people who do. Even if you don't believe the crusty relics can be voted out, they cannot live forever. Eventually they must be replaced.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I probably wasn't being fair to Warren by using OP's words (crusty relics). I trust her far more than I trust most politicians, but I don't trust Lindsey Graham at all, or any other Republican for that matter. "Bipartisan" bills like this include the likes of SOPA, PIPA, COPPA, and I've mailed my senator to protest them all.

Around the world, people look at the US parties and don't see "left wing and right wing," they see "right wing and lunacy." Ultimately I want more regulation of big tech, I want to see the busting up of the AAAMM monopolies, but the political environment that would create that kind of effective, authoritative, savvy regulator... well, we don't live in that environment. So until our system and parties resemble the EU's, these kinds of bills are kneecapped by bribery disguised as political donations (a la Citizens United), regulatory capture, and the other Reagan-era failed policies that have brought us to our current position.

Like yeah, this part is great, especially considering Google's WEI proposal:

Specifically, the commission would ban the largest tech companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google from providing favorable treatment to their own products on their platforms to those of their competitors, otherwise called “self-preferencing.” Along with the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department, it would also be allowed to authorize merger proposals and review past ones retroactively.

I'll take what I can get for now, but the US has a very long way to go.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

Why did Calckey need to change their name at all? I mean we just saw Twitter change its name for literally no reason and I can already predict how that's going to go.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

You got the point of that movie all wrong. Mutually assured destruction is a game where the only winning moving is not to play, because it is mutual, meaning either choice is equally doomed to the same outcome. "Two undesirable outcomes" is not a good enough excuse to simply not participate. By definition, one of those outcomes must be preferable to the other, and that's what you should vote for, while you continue to work outside the ballot box to push better candidates and better policies.

"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

Real, structural change is needed to stop the fascism.

On that we agree.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

Meanwhile, on a conservative supermajority Supreme Court.

“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”

Up to this point, Smith had never designed any wedding website. (In fact, her website six months prior to the lawsuit being filed in 2016 does not include any of the Christian messaging that it did shortly afterward and today, archived versions of the site show.)

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

Oh he does, take a look at his comment history.

HarkMahlberg , 11 months ago

Catch you later.

HarkMahlberg , 11 months ago

He's about 3 years late but hey, better late than never.

HarkMahlberg OP , 11 months ago

I do have friends with wood burning stoves. 🔥