agrammatic

joined 2 years ago
[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 6 points 10 months ago

Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago

I think the idea is that the funding might come with conditions to reach a significant % of the audience. E.g. often public broadcasters have a remit of 99% of population coverage with their broadcast technology, while private stations have much lower or no legally obligatory reception target.

I don't think that's a big obstacle in this case though.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago

You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don't want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make "nature" arguments (like "evolutionary psychologists"). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I'd have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that "regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others". That's a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Humans are animals, and this shows non-human animals can be queer too.

I don't think it shows anything more than that the animals in question engage in same-sex intercourse. Claiming anything more than that is, to me, arbitrary anthropomorphism. I am not prepared to accept that whales can be "queer" until whales start writing sociological papers for us to find out how they understand homosexuality in their system of norms and values.

The fact animals have some behavior shouldn’t, alone, be a justification to punish or encourage some behavior.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but I've been in plenty of discussion already where animals engaging in same-sex intercourse was used as an argument to defend queer rights - e.g. my local queer association did hold such a panel discussion at the zoo last May.

To see this news article in /c/lgbtq_plus instead of /c/biology or /c/science does make me extrapolate that this is somehow understood as being relevant to human sexuality.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

I dunno, I'm still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

I don't want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Es liegt an einer Mischung aus wenigen Kassensitzen sowie hohen Aufnahmehürden.

Ich helfe grade einem Freund mit dem ganzen Prozess - hier ist meine bestmögliche Strategie.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago

We are back, baby.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago

I’d say for me it would depend what the monument stands for.

The problem with this is that there's often multiple interpretations. Is it a monument to the celebrate the defeat of Nazism, or to glorify the paternalist role of the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact countries? You can't really say it's only one or the other - you can only decide which one matters more to the society at a given point in time.

I think that when there's no consensus about an interpretation in a society, a good place to start is with contextualisation. A high-profile but contentious monument should come with a small open-air museum that provides the context of what the monument was intended to stand for, what where the motivations of those who built it, and how it came to be seen as the time passed.

Then, time will tell if the society decides to interpret it one way or the other. At some point it will be clear if it should stay or go.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

I probably didn't express myself well. What I meant to say is that with an area so spread-out, any placement of the bus stop would make it extremely unreachable from some other adjacent destination.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This kind of makes me feel that the problem starts one layer before: this are is so spread out. It really doesn't look like there's any visible reason for buildings to be so far apart.

There's so few buildings that yeah, I think one bus stop is enough to serve them as far as amount of users is concerned. But the green could have been around the built up area, not between the buildings. Parking could also be compacted, maybe multi-floor or underground to reduce the surface area.

[–] agrammatic@feddit.de 40 points 1 year ago

One can hope that the store operators will also be heavily fined for their apparent failure to protect their customers' information from infosec threats. Show them teeth, GDPR.

 

Where scrappy Berlin shines as the A+ example

 

Some interesting points:

That may mean that Amsterdam residents will have to “wait a little longer” during rush hour, motorists may spend longer at red lights, and locals may have to accept that same-day delivery is a thing of the past.

Cyclists will also have to adapt. Next year, the city will introduce streets where faster cyclists, often on e-bikes and fatbikes, can choose between the motorway or the bike path. Those who choose the bike path must adhere to a speed limit of 20 kilometers per hour.

For a city moving in the opposite direction: Change to the mobility law - Berlin CDU wants to abolish priority for cyclists

 

More of a classification question, but I'm really curious about what the metric would look like if we try to be systematic about it.

For context, there's several countries that are more or less famous for being geographically discontinuous. Top of the mind nowadays is Azerbaijan, whose sizeable territory of Nakhchivan has no land connections with the rest of the country. There's also Equatorial Guinea, whose capital city is on island which is smaller than the continental territory. That's the same for Denmark, although we seem to think of it less, because of the much smaller distances and significantly more connectivity. Then you have Indonesia which I currently think might be the most discontinuous country, with territory spanning across at least 4 major landmasses but which are shared with other countries.

But then you have countries such as Greece, Japan, or even Sweden, which are more or less archipelagic countries but do not stand out in the way Indonesia or Azerbaijan does.

How can we define a measure of geographic discontinuity that gives us a reasonable ranking? I would imagine we start with some measure that looks how much of the whole territory is in one contagious unit (less prominent main landmass = more discontinuity) but perhaps we also introduce average distance between units.

 

The cabinet approved the proposal for the creation of a digital platform, known as the e-kalathi (e-basket), that would list prices of 300 consumer goods in different supermarkets in April. The idea was to inform people during this period of high prices what was being charged for similar products in different shops, with the main emphasis being on food, baby items and household products.This would enable people to buy the most competitively priced goods.

 

It's no exaggeration that as someone raised on the island of Cyprus, I was astonished by how green the cities looked from above when I first travelled to Europe.

 

My first idea was to use the Gitea instance of the Free Software Foundation Europe, but T&Cs strongly encourage only projects with direct relation to the FSFE activities, so personal projects don't seem welcome.

The first-party Gitea platform seems to be in risk of becoming for-profit.

 

Edit: And in the end, it's back to good old Fedora with Xfce. I guess I'm an old man, fixed in my ways. Haiku was interesting, but not nearly as stable as needed. OpenSuSE with Xfce was rough, it requires more polish.

I've been a Fedora Linux user for a million years by now, and I haven't touched any other OS (outside of Windows 10 and 11 at work).

Lately I got a refurbished ThinkCentre from ca 2018 (7th generation Intel i5, 16GB RAM, Intel HD 630). The initial idea was to use it as a media PC but the small form factor ended up not being small enough for my living room.

Now I'm thinking of using it as a desktop PC for a while, to see if it can make my laptop be a portable machine again instead of always plugged, always on. If it doesn't work out, I'll use it as a home server.

Since this is all an experiment, I want to give a new OS a shot before I settle for the familiar Fedora.

OpenSuSE is the first on my list, but even from the LiveUSB I noticed that the software selection is more limited than I'm used to.

I'm thinking of giving HaikuOS a shot as well.

What else has been going on in the world of free OSes since 2007? What's one that you are excited about?

 

I have been living with depression since a teenager and after so many years, I recently finally started receiving psychotherapy (CBT). While I'm already seeing some modest changes in my thinking patterns, my therapist noted that in the last few weeks the severity of the condition is worsening and it might be a good time to talk with my primary care provider about antidepressants as a combination therapy.

This got a reaction out of me, specifically that I don't like the idea of chemically altering my mental state and losing access to what "I really feel" (as I perceive it).

I know that the logic behind this sentiment is not very solid, but we can't reason ourselves out of our feelings that easily. For me this is also challenging because I don't take any recreational substances that affect my mental state, so I can't tell to myself that it's like e.g. smoking weed only more targeted and supervised.

I'm curious if this sentiment is familiar to anyone else, and how you dealt with it (whether you decided for or against medication).

 

In support forums people naturally only share negative experiences because making a post to say "things worked out more or less as I expected them" is weird.

It does seem though that some people do not correct for that negativity bias, so I'll just share today's experience that left me thinking "boy, Deutsche Bahn definitely has a room to improve on this area but even if their processes are inefficient, they did offer us the solution we wanted!!11elf"


Me, a friend and a dog have a trip abroad coming up, and we have booked our two-way tickets through bahn.de but with paper tickets (because dog tickets were not normally available as eTickets when we first booked).

Very recently the situation changed so that we had to return to Germany on different dates and so we wanted to modify the booking so that one of the return Sparpreis fares and reservation are cancelled and refunded.

The bahn.de website would only allow us to cancel the entire journey (all individuals, both directions). That was somewhat inconvenient but taking a trip to the Central Station was also an opportunity to go out of the house a bit anyway.

At the Travel Centre, the worker initially told us that our request is possible, but then she noticed that the system wouldn't let her made the modification to the booking. At that point, after consulting with her more qualified co-workers, she let us know that we cannot modify the booking in such a targeted way because our booking through bahn.de was done through a different DB subsidiary than the subsidiary they work for. That is ridiculous.

The two workers then told us that what they can do for us is cancel the entire return leg of the journey (for all three) and they will post a refund request to the other subsidiary on our behalf. Then, we can on the spot re-book our new return tickets on our new desired dates. That works for us, but we did remark that someone without the financial buffer to wait for the refund while also buying new tickets would be under a lot of stress at that point.

During the rebooking process we did feel a bit left out of the loop because we expected that now we would be paying last-minute Flexpreis fares and there was a financial boundary we didn't want to cross, but at the end of the process we were offered Flexpreis fares at the price of our original Sparpreis tickets, so we did not suffer any financial consequences (although we expect that the refund will be reduced by 10 EUR for the administrative fee as the terms and conditions for Sparpreis tickets clearly mention). It appears that the Travel Centre had access to a contingent of cheaper Flexpreis tickets that aren't available on bahn.de - perhaps exactly for situations like ours.

The two workers were extremely patient with all our questions during the whole process since we wanted to get every detail correct during the destructive operation of cancelling the tickets and above all make sure that the dog doesn't end up "having" to take a different train if we couldn't rebook on the original connection. The main worker helping us even thanked us for our attention to details, because --I think-- she almost did make a mistake at one point during the rebooking but we caught it early (she didn't outright admit it though).


So, what's this pointless non-rant about? I guess it's that DB's corporate structure and processes are unnecessarily complicated and the people who are trying to help you have to jump through a lot of hoops to offer you the solution that they also recognise you should get.

We were lucky to come across two workers that took all the time necessary to get us to where we needed to be at the end and do so without directing their frustration at the utterly broken process towards us for asking them to carry out. Honestly, I don't think we'd have the patience for this if it was our job.

We still think that at every step of this non-ordeal, DB Corporate could have made very simple business decisions that could cut the effort required down.

And I still think that it's just weird to make posts to say how things are "mostly okay, but could be better".

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