Musician, mechanic, writer, dreamer, techy, green thumb, emigrant, BP2, ADHD, Father, weirdo

https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

#DigitalRightsForLibraries

  • 10 Posts
  • 160 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • I looked into these so-called “responsible” indexes a few years back. It seems that whenever I dug into them, they invested in companies that didn’t seem to fit the description. These don’t change that assessment. You don’t have to look past the second page to see the primary holdings are not “socially responsible” companies at all.

    SRI holdings:

    NVIDIA
    TESLA
    HOME DEPOT
    COCA COLA
    ASML HLDG
    NOVO NORDISK
    INTUIT
    DISNEY (WALT)
    VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS
    BOOKING HOLDINGS

    Tesla? Come on. Coca Cola? Implicated in more environmental destruction than some oil companies, not to mention their irresponsible use of local water resources, including locking up a sole source of water away from local tribes and villages. Novo Nordisk? A socially responsible pharmaceutical company? Dream on. Intuit? They lobby to make the tax code impossible to understand without professional help, and also to ensure we can never file our taxes for free. Disney? Too many issues to list here. Verizon? Known for red-lining; being complicit in gov’t domestic surveillance; making empty promises to get gov’t subsidies, pocketing the money and not bothering to do the required work: stealing taxpayer money. All of the holdings are financial backers of Trump and the GOP, and most of them happily removed all mention of diversity or equality from their public facing materials to cozy up to this administration.

    If you really want social responsibility in a stock, you’re going to have to do the research yourself and find individual stocks that meet your definition. Any day, one of those companies could change their direction, could be exposed as participating in activities you wouldn’t have expected, or simply be bought and or taken over by a non-scrupulous competitor or parent company.

    Otherwise, you just have to accept that our money will be part of the problem, and sigh, hoping that your investments at least hold up long enough for you to retire, and hopefully you don’t feel too guilty.

    I know we want to invest in funds that aren’t evil, but I’m not convinced that social responsibility and trading publicly are compatible. At the very least, of not likely you’ll find these kinds of finds are anything more than ugly companies packaging the same ugly stocks and trying to appeal to your conscience.

    ETA: the climate change one is just as bad, full of Amazon, Google, Microsoft…

    Edit2: just invest in the total market, a la Bogleheads, and spend the proceeds responsibly. That’s the best you can do. Social responsibility is defined by the individual.

    Edit3: Consider a solar panel company. Green energy is good right? What if you find that they source their materials from a country known for human rights abuses, in the backs of exploited workers? Or they pollute? Or they simply post on ex-Twitter about their favorite fascist leaders? Does that change the SR value to you?


  • I completely agree. I thought Plex would be fast in the collective rearview mirror as soon as they started forcing connections to their servers, pay-walling, etc. I also had issues with the database corrupting and causing huge slowdowns. I spent days trying and failing to preserve my ratings, watch data, etc.

    In the end, I switched to a much simpler setup of an NFS/CIFS share accessed by Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV. If Kodi chokes (happened once since 2017), I can just wipe the app and/or reinstall and then import the local metadata (XML or NFO IIRC). That takes about five minutes. It just works. Kodi also gives me access to the IAGL, so that’s a huge plus.


  • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world[Deleted]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I’m not sure what’s extenuating (maybe you meant extraordinary, which I still disagree with) about being in -20°F by herself when just barely past kitten stage. All scientific papers and opinions I’ve ever read about cats puts them at the least domesticated of human companions, able to survive without us just fine.

    The domestic cat retains a behavioural repertoire that makes some individuals very successful when living independently of people, and all cat populations show a degree of genotypic and phenotypic flexibility that enables them to move between states within a few generations, or even within a lifetime (Bradshaw et al. 1999)

    The states being referred to here are states of domestication versus true wildness.

    The very recent history of ‘true’ domestication, beginning perhaps as little as ~200 years ago, means that domestic cats effectively remain genetically ‘wild’ (Tamazian et al. 2014). Few genomic alterations in domestic cats are attributable to domestica- tion, excepting genes affecting memory, fear-conditioning and reward learning (Montague et al. 2014). Domestic cats have retained the genetic basis for effective hunting (Bradshaw 2006), including sensory traits such as a broad hearing frequency range, high visual acuity and accentuated vomeronasal capacity (Montague et al. 2014).

    ETA: links and quotes



  • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world[Deleted]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    indoor cats really struggle a lot if they ever get lost outside.

    Curious by what you mean about struggling. Not trying to be simply contrary.

    My (then) 16 month old, seven pounds wet with rocks in her pockets indoor cat escaped in 2018 and lived wild in rural Maine for 18 months before being trapped and returned to us (thanks to microchipping). She was 9 miles from home and had a broken paw (something fell on it and crushed her toes), but was otherwise healthy and in good spirits.

    I tend to agree that a feral has an advantage based on common sense, but also that my tamed feral is a beast when he fights.

    Edit: wrong quoted text


  • Have been using TrueNAS for 13+ years since the FreeNAS 9.x days. Can attest to its bulletproof-ness in my case.

    Would second asking in the iX forums. I’ve managed to get replication help directly from iX staff before when using the forum. You shouldn’t have this issue, and you will find answers.

    I’ve moved my disks to a completely new machine with fresh install and then import my config, reboot and everything is as it was. I’ve also done the same without my config and imported the pool with no problems, just need to recreate shares, and any jails (a feature which I no longer use) would need to be reconfigured to be 100% functional.



  • windows phone was a joke

    No. It was leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else. They just sat on their hands and didn’t do anything with it, allowing Google, RiM and Apple to steamroll them.

    And to blame Microsoft (which – don’t get me wrong – is hugely evil and truly is the cause behind many of the problems you properly identify) for all of the tech problems without a hat tip to IBM is missing some important details. IBM showed the tech world that if you use your war chest to drag out a legal battle long enough, you will eventually get a president in power (Reagan) that you own enough to dismiss all claims. That’s how Microsoft got off without even a fine for all their antitrust violations. They played the long game and George W. waved a hand, making the enforcement effort go away.




  • This is the real answer I was looking for in the comments.

    Edit: it always goes back to Reagan.

    Why did unions lose their power? Reagan threatened striking ATC workers with firing if they didn’t return to work immediately. Suddenly striking workers could be fired.

    Why did weed become a life sentence drug? Reagan.

    Who demonized the poor on welfare, calling them welfare queens? Who is Ronald Reagan, Alex?

    Deregulated Wall street, banking and commerce sector, too.

    If there’s a glaring problem with the USA, there’s a very good chance it dates back to RR.




  • I think there’s a misconception about elected officials. Many people believe they work to improve the lives of American citizens, but they don’t.

    This. They want votes. They do what they think will get them votes. And yet, often – and in the last election – the democrats that help the people (like by walking a union picket line, supporting LGBTQ+ and basic human rights, legalizing cannabis, reducing penalties petty crimes, etc.) don’t get the votes that are part of the bargain.

    They vote for and enact legislation that helps the people, and the people don’t re-elect them. The incentive shifts to satisfying wealthy donors.





  • The Chinese owners seem to discourage all communication between writers. They did however just acknowledge the difficulties the writers face with this platform tool.

    This whole operation just smells to me like Chinese work ethic (work them till they jump out the windows, then put nets under the windows) to me. There have been two “supervisors” in the past 16 months that have come and gone. They used to buffer requests and pish to open submission on time, but then they resign without word.


  • Ty for the reply.

    Not comfortable sharing location info, and I know state laws vary. I do know that our state has a law on the books prohibiting withholding pay based on time entry, because my union rep pushed back when I kept not getting paid because a supervisor was forgetting to approve time.

    This is similar, because its the final approval process, but the work has been done, taken out of her hands and finalized. Not to mention, she waits weeks sometimes for them to get off their hands and allow her to upload.

    No known contacts in the field other than her coauthors. This is her second year doing this, which is her dream job, and its opening doors for her.

    Definitely, it could be automated. But part of the problem is the text box that handles the pasted data inserts characters that are not present in the final work. We’ve tried dumping to plaintext several different ways and looking for hidden characters, but it still occurs. Thus, it would still require human review. Double quotes could likely be filtered, but who gets paid to develop the automation? She wouldn’t know how to debug or validate the code, and she shouldn’t have to.

    She knows this isn’t her ultimate dream job, but she is getting paid to write, and getting your own stuff published is a lot of work, luck, and who you know. She’s meeting lots of insiders, but struggling with these constraints.



  • Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili has refused to sign into law a bill approved by parliament last month that rights groups and many opposition politicians say drastically curbs the rights of the country’s LGBT community.

    The so-called “family values” bill was pushed through parliament by the ruling Georgian Dream party on September 17 in an 84-0 vote, which was boycotted by the opposition while rallies were being held by protesters outside the parliament building.

    In line with the provisions of the Georgian Constitution, Zurabishvili refused to endorse the bill and returned it to parliament without written comments, the presidential administration **confirmed **to RFE/RL on October 2.

    The move highlights the dramatically polarized political landscape in the Caucasus nation ahead of national elections in October.

    Parliament speaker Shalva Papuashvili, a co-sponsor of the bill and member of the Georgian Dream is now expected to sign the bill into law and publish it within five days.