Posts by drahardja@sfba.social
(DIR) Post #B0pVgEYJUFBAQWiAIS by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-02T06:33:20Z
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To me, a politician equivocating on LGBT or immigrant rights at this moment is literally morally equivalent to a politician equivocating on LGBT or immigrant rights as Hitler was consolidating his power.History isn’t even rhyming any more; it’s the same damn lyrics. Politicians have no excuse for hemming or hawing. Stand up for everyone’s rights—especially for LGBT folks and immigrants—or step down and let someone else do your job.
(DIR) Post #B10ITMpcETyHfqtk2a by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-07T10:15:43Z
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@kaia For actual photos I take, I use a system of labels and folders in Lightroom that I diligently apply on import. For everything else (memes, interesting images) I use a directory hierarchy. I sometimes add metadata to the file (xattrs on macOS) that help me find some files.
(DIR) Post #B12IOOn3uXZgcLFpjs by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-07T09:32:14Z
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One problem with #capitalism, especially around publicly-traded companies, is that there is really nothing that prevents a group of rich people from buying up a popular company, saddling it with debt to the purchaser’s company, then bleeding it dry of cash, slowly ruining its products, and then selling the corpse for parts. This often nets the buyer a tidy profit, but leaves employees without a job, and customers without a product they love.What possible countervailing force exists in a capitalist system to stop this? Absolutely nothing. Everything is above-the-table legal. All buyers need is enough money to purchase the company outright. Then squeeze, profit, discard.Capitalism assumes people will try to profit by providing goods and services that customers are willing to buy for a premium. This assumption is often used to justify the glorification of capitalism, but this assumption is obviously false. The greatest profiteers in capitalism are “financial engineers” that produce nothing of actual value.
(DIR) Post #B12IOTqn66WoJM2NkG by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-08T02:01:59Z
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The idea that #capitalism is a system beneficial to society is entirely predicated on the idea that people will primarily try to make a profit by offering products and services that others need. This premise is as bogus as the now-debunked school of Rational Economics, in which people were assumed to make only rational, self-preserving, long-term-beneficial choices. We now know that people make all kinds of irrational choices based on fashion, addiction, deception, convenience, and any number of other factors.It’s even more patently obvious that the profits-for-public-benefit assumption that undergirds Capitalism is equally false. The greatest profiteers in our capitalistic societies are pretty obviously people who can extract the most labor without paying, put up the tallest barriers, invent the trickiest financial sleights-of-hand, and most effectively destroy representative governments.The FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION of Capitalism is a lie. The system DOES NOT WORK.
(DIR) Post #B12IOYzpxtjeGrJB2W by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-08T02:10:06Z
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I think in the micro- to mid-scales, where competition is strong and barriers to market entry are low, the correlation between profits and benefits provided can often still hold. But it fades away quickly with scale and monopoly. Even small-scale companies in modestly-sized metro areas quickly become detached from this correlation when they become even slightly dominant, or when “financial engineering” comes into the picture. The shift from “honest business offering products and services for profit” to “extractive capitalist enterprise” happens quickly and at shockingly small scales. Anyone who has bought a second house in Silicon Valley as “investment property” has entered this game: they have taken an incredibly scarce resource that people need to live, and turned it into a barrier for passive extraction of the value of labor.#capitalism
(DIR) Post #B12IOde2gMGwgi9LGK by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-08T02:18:30Z
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I believe that every step we take farther from making a profit by selling desirable goods and services has an exponentially harmful effect on society, and requires exponentially more stringent regulations.One step removed may be something like lending money at an interest. Two steps may be raising capital by selling shares. Three steps may be options or futures trading, then purely gambling on markets, and so on. The further removed an activity is from actually offering goods and services, the more tightly regulated and discouraged it should be.To encourage this, we must guarantee a minimum standard of living for everyone. Universal basic income and universal healthcare will return tremendous power to workers to negotiate better work conditions (which is probably why we don’t have them in the US), which will lead to an ability for the masses to refuse to take part in extractive, capitalist enterprises.
(DIR) Post #B15COV8SIt0a2so3UW by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-09T01:10:04Z
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@blogdiva The funny thing is that I suspect a large number of USians will initially not believe that other countries do it this way, and then when they finally admit it’s true, they’ll find ways to rationalize why the US way is better, actually.
(DIR) Post #B18UZABEw4eAtBDq1A by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-11T07:41:39Z
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US Fascism, explained with puppetshttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/6Abt5Q3gXic
(DIR) Post #B1K1L3PwiWKx5QXXqi by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-16T22:04:44Z
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This guy made your RAM ridiculously expensive. Discuss among yourselves.(The guy on the left. The guy on the right is doing his best to normalize horrible people.)
(DIR) Post #B1PV7sFgt4Rp6mArSq by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-19T10:14:20Z
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@davidrevoy oh no Avian Intelligence
(DIR) Post #B1kkez9K6uOS9kM87U by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-29T21:24:33Z
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@stux I mean, he’s been impeached (the closest thing to an indictment by Congress) twice. But he’s never been tried or convicted.
(DIR) Post #B1kl3BfRDjM7viuxQe by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-29T21:28:57Z
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@stux Yeah, I blame Congress more than I blame Trump. They have abdicated their job to check the Executive branch (which in my head is basically Treason, a breach of their oath of office), and instead became his accomplice.
(DIR) Post #B1nWbelkbxakCAjDu4 by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-31T04:08:04Z
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#meme #trolleyProblem
(DIR) Post #B1ntl7L43ctSM1j5xw by drahardja@sfba.social
2025-12-30T22:57:27Z
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Prediction: In the near future, we will look at the OpenAI logo the way Gen X looks at the Enron logo from the early oughts.When? Your guess is as good as mine. If I had the skill to time when bubbles will pop, I’d be a very rich person. But I think it’s closer to 2026 than 2030.#ai #bubble #pop #openAI
(DIR) Post #B29W6jB77a0RQJHJ6O by drahardja@sfba.social
2026-01-10T19:43:40Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Getting tired of seeing posts on Mastodon by European men scolding people that they should be more polite, or that if someone categorizes some people as “bad guys” then that makes THEM the bad guys, etc.Maybe sit down and listen instead, huh? Your privilege is showing.I don’t know if you noticed, but some people don’t want others to exist, or to exist only in a state of misery and subservience. THESE ARE BAD GUYS. You can’t reason with them, because their position is not one built on logic, but dominance. They don’t deserve politeness, only PUBLIC SHUNNING and RESISTANCE. Being rude to them is good and proper, and healthy for the world.I swear if I have to read another Dutch man lecture me, a person born in Indonesia, a nation the Dutch colonized and exploited for centuries—about being polite…https://www.humancode.us/2025/09/25/the-politeness-trap.html
(DIR) Post #B2Mjg2V764PPwhHQOW by drahardja@sfba.social
2026-01-17T04:26:38Z
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@blogdiva Posting for reference for others on #Mastodon:To stop sharing your posts to Bluesky:1. Find the user bsky.brid.gy[at]bsky.brid.gy (Type the user in the search box and click the Profiles matching… button)2. Block the user bsky.brid.gy[at]bsky.brid.gy3. Click the Preferences button on the sidebar4. Go to Account/Authorized apps5. Revoke access for Bridgy, if it exists.To stop seeing posts from Bluesky:1. Find any user whose address ends with …[at]bsky.brid.gy (You can type bsky.brid.gy in the search box and click the Profiles matching… button)2. Click on the user name to reveal their profile page3. Click the ••• button4. Click Block domain bsky.brid.gy5. Click Block serverTo verify that you’ve done it, click the ••• More button on the right sidebar and click Blocked domains. You should see bsky.brid.gy there.#bluesky #defederate #block
(DIR) Post #B2MkYsPKKE06ZKioPg by drahardja@sfba.social
2026-01-17T05:22:17Z
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@wjmaggos “The internet” isn’t managed by one organization, with a more-or-less singular mission, incentive structure, and values system. Bluesky is.“The internet” is in fact a network of multitudes of such organizations, each of which has their own motivations and incentive structures, so I choose who I want to talk to and who I don’t, to the extent that that is possible.If a single entity ever commandeers “the internet” (as in, the entire network operations) and turns it into a tool to explicitly platform Nazis, then yes, we should stop using the internet.
(DIR) Post #B2NyMZbtyoYDJOaiKu by drahardja@sfba.social
2026-01-17T19:31:52Z
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@futurebird “Death to all, except the chosen (FYI: I am the chosen)”
(DIR) Post #B2UNbv3XueFRhvFHyy by drahardja@sfba.social
2026-01-20T18:44:04Z
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“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”Powerful and principled statement by Mark Carney, PM of Canada at Davos.Well done, #Canada. #ElbowsUp and lead the coalition.https://globalnews.ca/news/11620877/carney-davos-wef-speech-transcript/
(DIR) Post #B2o85grdFOeXagaj4K by drahardja@sfba.social
2026-01-30T08:51:26Z
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Another reason not to buy a #Tesla #Cybertruck: they are poorly made.As videos in this story show, the door strikers were not fastened properly to the car, causing one of this car’s rear doors to swing open on a highway on-ramp. The door happened to be the one next to their baby in a car seat.The bolts on the striker were very obviously not torqued correctly. How this level of obvious error escaped the manufacturing/quality control floor is unknown, but I suspect it’s because the Cybertruck was poorly designed to begin with, and also because Tesla cut corners everywhere during their manufacturing process to save money.Tesla knew that this defect was quite damning, so they offered to buy back the #Wankpanzer, in return for the owner promising not to sue.#carshttps://oaklandside.org/2026/01/23/tesla-cybertruck-door-latch-safety-hazard-baby/